9. Eirene
NINE
EIRENE
The Veil screams.
Not the gradual building of pressure I’ve learned to recognize. Not the slow crescendo that warns me a breach is forming. This is sudden, violent, a shriek of alarm that tears through my skull and makes my knees buckle.
A breach is forming.
I spin toward the stones. The tear I just closed is holding—barely—but a new disturbance ripples near the eastern edge of the circle. A fresh breach, smaller but angrier, spitting darkness into the perpetual twilight.
And through it, a creature emerges.
It’s the size of a wolf, if wolves were made of shadow and wrong angles. It moves with a fluid wrongness—solidifying and dissolving with each step, bleeding darkness from wounds that have no source. Its eyes are empty pits that somehow still see, fixed on me with hungry intent.
A Veilspawn. Shadow-twisted. Hungry for blood.
I raise my knife, knowing it won’t be enough. Black iron can hurt shadow-creatures, but I’m exhausted, bleeding, in no condition to fight a beast this size. My twilight magic is drained to dregs. My body is running on nothing but will and desperation.
The creature lunges.
I don’t have time to react. Don’t have time to dodge, to ward, to do anything but watch death coming at me with teeth that shouldn’t exist and hunger that will never be satisfied.
Then the executioner moves.
He’s between us in an instant—a wall of armor and muscle and controlled violence, his blade clearing its sheath in a single fluid motion. The Veilspawn slams into him instead of me, and he takes the impact without staggering. Plants his feet. Swings.
The blade catches the creature across its shadowy flank. It screams—a sound that echoes wrong, that comes from inside my head and outside it all at once. Dark blood sprays, hissing where it hits the ground, and the Veilspawn recoils.
But it doesn’t fall. Shadow-creatures don’t die easy.
The thing circles, reforming where the blade cut through, its empty eyes fixed on the orc who wounded it. Then its gaze shifts. Back to me. To the blood still dripping from my palm.
My blood. It can smell my blood.
It wants my blood. I can feel the hunger radiating off it, the desperate need for the power in my veins. Boundary witch blood is a feast to creatures of the shadow. It would consume me whole if it could, drink me down to the marrow and use my essence to tear the Veil apart.
The executioner positions himself between us again. His blade gleams with dark ichor, ready for another strike. His breathing is steady, controlled, the rhythm of someone who has faced worse than this and won.
“Stay behind me.” The command is rough, absolute. No room for argument.
I should argue anyway. Should insist I can help, can fight, can contribute more than cowering behind the man who came here to kill me.
But the Veilspawn coils to strike again, and the executioner sets his stance, and I realize a truth that makes my chest clench with an emotion I refuse to name.
He’s protecting me.
The man who came to end my life is standing between me and death, ready to bleed for someone he barely knows. Someone he’s been ordered to execute. His body is a barrier, his blade is a promise, and every line of his massive frame says you will not touch her.
Why?
The creature attacks. The executioner meets it with steel and violence and the brutal efficiency of someone who was built to end things. His blade sings through the air, catching moonlight, trailing dark ichor. The Veilspawn twists away, reforms, comes at him again.
I should help. Should add my knife to his blade, my magic to his strength. But I can barely stand, and the blood dripping from my palm is a beacon calling every shadow-creature in the vicinity. If I step into that fight, I’ll make it worse.
So I watch. Watch the executioner dance with death, watch him trade blows with a creature of nightmare, watch him fight for a woman he’s supposed to kill.
And I stand in his shadow, bleeding and bewildered and more confused than I’ve ever been in my life.