Chapter 65 #2
He frowns, and I sense the energy welling beneath his skin. The hotblooded rage barely contained.
“Leave it. Please.”
He pulls me so close there’s no space between us.
I melt against him. Clay softening from the deep knead of his mighty presence, like he has some invisible power over my muscles.
My spine.
My fucking fortitude.
“Why, Moonbeam?” He searches my eyes, back and forth as his other hand splays between my shoulder blades, making my breath hitch. “Why won’t you give me a name?”
Because I wasn’t reborn fearless. It was burnt from me in bits now caught in the clenched fists of a male who stalks my slumber-terrors.
Because that mountain does nothing but snuff life.
“He’s a monster. And—” I break beneath Kaan’s steady stare, until there’s nothing left of my self-composure.
Nothing but the cold, dead truth.
“I can’t lose you too,” I force out. “I won’t. And that’s what he does, Kaan. Arkyn takes and takes and fucking takes until there’s nothing left.”
Time stretches.
He stares at me like he’s hewn from stone—breathless. Unblinking. A heavy swallow is the first sign he’s still alive.
He drops my wrist and grips both sides of my face, exuding such tenderness that I almost don’t notice the slight tremble in his hands as he tips my head and plants a warm kiss between my brows.
Lips still brushing my skin, he says, “We will find a way to shed the blood bind.” The steady calm of his tone is at odds with the volcanic heat radiating off him.
Something that only seems to happen when he’s barely containing Rygun’s fire.
“Then I’m going to hunt this Arkyn down.
I will break him or serve him up for you to slit his throat. That’s an oath.”
No—
He releases me and spins, stalking toward the trapdoor while I stand—frozen. Lashed with wild panic. Coming to the horrific realization that I let Arkyn’s name slip.
Kaan’s entirely out of sight before my body finally remembers how to move.
I sprint down the stairs, leaping over the final few to see Kaan stuffing his bags full.
“I can undo the blood bind,” Ahvi says from where he’s still cross-legged on the ground.
I slam to a halt, his words marinating in a swirl of silence as Roan, Pyrok, Kaan, and I look between each other, brows raised.
There’s only one way to break a bind such as mine. Rid the offending jar of its bloody contents and hope it wasn’t diluted at some stage—half dumped into a different jar.
Unfortunately, given the fucker I met in the village was able to torture me using one I’ve never seen before, I believe my bind has been diluted.
Probably numerous times.
Sereme’s not the type to forget to construct a multitude of backup plans. Especially when it comes to maintaining control over the one she seems to despise more than anything.
Me.
“Are you sure about that, Ahvi?” Roan asks from where he’s crouched by the table, his half-mixed tinctures scattered across it. “Dissolving a blood bind … It’s considered one of the world’s great impossibilities. It’s why the practice is so frowned upon.”
Ahvi repeats himself, louder this time. And notably slower. “I can undo the blood bind.”
Well … shit.
Kaan dumps his bag on the ground and strides closer. “How?”
Ahvi pinches another sliver of bloody meat off the table, dangling it over his dragon’s gaping maw. “A bit like untangling a knot, I guess.”
I’d garner it’s a lot more complicated than that, but sure.
“Time is more stretchy than folk realize.” A shiver climbs my spine as Ahvi drops the meat down his dragon’s gob, wipes his hands on a cloth, then looks at me; that bold silver stare like an anchor plunging deep. “But to remove the bind, we have to be in the place where it was sewn.”
Understanding slaps me so hard my heart skips a beat.
“No. Not happening.”
Zero.
Chance.
Ahvi frowns. “But you saved me,” he counters with an impressive amount of grit. “Now I repay the life debt. That’s how honorable folk are supposed to behave.”
This hero shit is exhausting.
“Sure, you can repay the life debt”—he’s rolling his eyes before I even finish my sentence—“by going north with your etching stick and protecting as many villages and towns as you can before the fall with your world-saving runes. Simple.”
“I’ll give Roan instructions. He can etch just as well as me.”
Roan puffs his chest, looking the proudest fucker in the world.
“Faster, actually.” Ahvi shrugs. “I get tired. And I’m a parent now.”
I look down at the hatchling now struggling to keep his head lifted. It flops to the side, like his neck just gave out.
“I’ll tell you what’s tiring; two daes walking through underground tunnels trying to find said spot where the bind was sewn, because there’s no way I can spot it from above. There’s thousands of other collapses that look exactly the same.” I shake my head. “Forget it, Ahvi. I’ll find another way.”
His voice turns panic-pitched. “But it almost got you killed twice in the past cycle alone!”
Dammit, Ahvi.
Everyone glares at me. Even Pyrok, perched forward in the seater with his flask paused halfway to his mouth. As though watching me argue with a nine-phase-old is the most entertaining shit he’s ever seen.
“Twice?” Kaan breathes.
I ignore him, though he’s now staring so hard I feel like Rygun himself has me pinned beneath his claw, snuffing all the truths from my scent.
Arms crossed, I glare at Ahvi. “If you’re going to keep rooting through my head, you and I need to set some ground rules.”
“And if we wait until after the fall, the area might be smashed up,” he busts on. “I won’t be able to do it then. We’ll have lost our one chance to fix things.”
Things?
How many more things is he intending to fix?
Before I have a chance to respond, Kaan’s in front of me with his hands on either side of my face, cutting off my view of anything else. “Raeve …”
Held by his sturdy grip, I realize how much I’m shaking, the backs of my eyes stinging so much it’s hard to blink the feeling away.
“Do not ask me to put myself before him, Kaan. Do not.”
His eyes soften, thumbs brushing over my cheekbones as my lungs heave, accepting deep punches of breath that make my head spin.
“I have four daes to deliver—” … bits of him to Sereme … “No. It’s not happening. He’s not going near that drop-off point. I refuse.”
Kaan opens his mouth—
Ahvi’s the one who interrupts this time. “It’s the only place I’ll allow you to take me.”
Silence sinks its claws deep.
Slowly, I cast my gaze toward the kid, meeting stark silver eyes. Ahvi looking up at me like he’s boasting the key to my mind, dangling it between us with a cheeky smile on his face.
Except he’s not smiling, and neither am I; trumped by a youngling barely taller than my ribs. A youngling who’s obviously dug through my mind enough that he knows I won’t force him to go anywhere against his will. That I won’t take away his liberties in the way mine have been—time and time again.
If there’s only one place he’ll allow me to take him … that’s where we’re going, whether I want to or not.
Which means we’re going to fucking Gore.
“Besides, don’t worry about me. I have my shield. That’s how I convinced the Tri-Council to let me get Gruffin.”
Cute name choice.
Now, Ahvi does smile—so big and wide it cracks a fissure through my cold, aching heart. “Nobody can hurt me through my shield.”
Nausea surges so thick and fast I pull from Kaan’s grip, move toward the windows, dragging clawed fingers through my hair as I work through slow, steady breaths that do nothing to tamp the rapid beat of my heart.
I don’t like this. Any of it.
Can’t seem to shake the feeling that something’s not right.
“Where did it happen?” Kaan asks, and I shove down images of blood and broken bones. Of bits of brain burst across the snow-speckled floor.
Memories of how it felt as my heart began to beat so slow I knew it was ticking toward its final thump—
“An abandoned mineshaft.”
“Which one?”
Pyrok’s voice is hitched in a way I haven’t heard before.
Ahvi answers for me, perhaps knowing my mind is somewhere cold and quiet. A place I’d hoped never to see again, where I almost fell down the dark pit into which I’d stuffed the memories of everything I’d lost during my escape across The Ergor Plains.
“South of Gore,” he says gently. “The bind was made on the outskirts of the Undercity.”