Chapter 6 #2
He stood there with me, a strange quiet falling over the four of us. A dead sagryl lay only a few feet away, and a new life was born within moments of its death.
Death and life.
This world held both on a razor’s edge.
The foal latched and drew a few deep gulps, its tiny body shivering, tail flicking contentedly.
“There you are,” I took a step back as the mare turned her head, ears flattening, lips peeling back. I grabbed the arm of the cloaked man. It was time to go, no matter that it hurt something deep in me to see this mare not trust us, after we saved her. “Very slowly, back up.”
He grunted. “Temperamental, ungrateful zebra.”
I didn’t dare look away from the mare, as she pawed at the ground, but I really wanted to punch him square in the nose for being so dense as to speak like that in front of her.
Funny enough, the mare didn’t take well to his assessment. She charged him, horn down. His sword came up and I shouted and leapt for him, tackling him away from her. Cutting off her horn was a death sentence.
We hit the ground, me on top of him. His hands went to shove me off, he grabbed me by the hips and I pushed off his chest, only the mare was coming back for another go.
“Roll!” I grabbed him and pulled him with me, rolling across the grass, falling into a hollow in the ground, the cloaked man on top of me, the long grass well above us, hiding us for the moment.
Neither of us had to tell the other to be quiet.
His cloak darkened the space around us and the urge to push him away, to get him off me…struck a strange chord in me because…I lifted a hand to his hood, feeling as if we’d been here before.
Did I know him?
The only thing I could see was the edge of his jaw, shape of his lips, the tip of his nose…
I looked down his throat to the top of his collarbones, the scars littered across the deeply tanned skin.
My fingers itched to trace those scars, as if they were familiar to me.
How? He hadn’t seemed to recognize me when he’d seen me, so how could I feel like this?
Warmth flooded my body as I realized I had a leg over one of his hips which put his body intimately tight to my own. He seemed to be paying more attention to the fact that the veilrunner might in fact still be trying to kill us than I was.
Which was stupid of me.
He looked down finally and all I could do was stare.
His hood shadowed the rest of his face, but his eyes were the same—pale, wolf-blue, ringed in night. The breath locked in my chest. I know you.
They were the same ice-blue eyes from my dreams. I reached up and touched his face, feeling the line of his jaw, the stubble, the curve of his bottom lip under my thumb, the connection between his body and mine…familiar. The moment paused, the world stopping as I stared up at him.
Shock dragged three words from my mouth. “I know you.”
“Fuck.”
He grabbed me and pulled me clear as the veilrunner dropped both hooves right where my head had been.
We scrambled to get out of her way as she tried to trample us.
“Run!” He snapped as if I didn’t know, but running from a veilrunner was not a race we’d win.
Zigging and zagging across the open field we did a fair bit of dodging, pulling one another out of the way of the pissed off mare, and finally she gave up when Sorrow dropped from the sky near her foal.
“Baby!” He cawed and flapped his wings, brushing them against the newborn.
She spun and charged back to her foal, forgetting us for the moment, pissed instead at Sorrow for being close to her foal. The sorrowbird leapt for the sky, dragging his talons through the mare’s mane, before circling up out of her reach.
Her herd approached slowly, and she whinnied to them, truly ignoring us finally. All of that gave us long enough to get into the shelter of the trees.
Out of sight, out of mind for now.
We slid to a stop at the willows where I’d first seen him. I spit out a bit of dirt, and brushed off the front of my pants.
Dirtier than I’d started the day, but no major injuries—a few bruises, sure, but that wasn’t bad, all and all considering.
He glanced at me, reached toward my left ear and I tensed, part of me wanting to lean into his touch the other part wanting to pull a weapon.
But that didn’t seem right. He lowered his hand. “You have a clump of thorns in your hair.”
A swift bite of heat raced through me as I reached up and tugged the tangled prickles out of my hair as we stood there, watching the herd of veilrunners reunite.
I stared out across the field. My bag of stuff was on the far side. But…I could go back for it. I had something more pressing than a bag. “Who are you, and how do I know you?”
He didn’t answer me, just turned away and pushed through the brush as if I weren’t there, as if we’d not fought the sagryl together. I followed, I had nowhere else to go, no one else to ask the questions to. My bag would wait for me.
“I’ve seen your eyes,” I said. “I see them in my dreams, are you…who are you to me?”
That stopped his feet. “In your dreams?” He turned and pulled his hood back giving me my first full view of him.
He was all sharp lines and shadows; his silver hair braided back from a face that could have been carved from stone. Tattoos crawled over his skin in jagged scripts and symbols that looked more like warnings than decoration. He shouldn’t have been beautiful, but he was—terribly, dangerously so.
Those eyes caught me and held me, pale blue fire burning in a way that made me feel both pinned and stripped bare. A predator’s gaze. The kind that saw everything you tried to hide and didn’t give a damn if it hurt to drag it into the open.
I should have been afraid. Any sane woman would’ve been. But fear twisted into something else the longer I looked at him. Fascination. Heat. The awareness that this man wasn’t safe, and that some dark, reckless part of me didn’t want safe. And that I knew him.
More than that, he knew me.
He was a weapon forged into the shape of a man. And I had the sinking, breathless certainty that if he ever turned that weapon on me…I wouldn’t run.
I held my ground, not willing to give ground to him, to let him see how he affected me. “Who am I?”
His smile was slow, lazy, and it transformed him once again. “You? You’re no one. The cat lied to keep his life. Nothing more.”
The hurt that those words caused shocked me and I fought to keep it off my face.
Instead, I returned a smile and let every bit of darkness I had in me bubble up to the surface, every bit of training that had kept me alive, slide into my eyes and my voice.
There had been something that the sagryl had said that had stung him; I’d seen it in the tension his body had taken with that one word.
“Lying bastard.”
His eyebrows narrowed. “Be careful with your words…girl.”
“Woman.” The correction popped out of me instantly, and his nostrils flared before he shook his head.
“Why am I arguing with you? Go away, woman.”
He turned his back on me and strode away through the trees, his long cloak blending in as he went. As if he could just dismiss me. As if I wasn’t worth his time.
“You know me.” I grabbed at the bottom of his cloak and dragged him to a halt.
“Is this your idea of gratitude?” He glanced over his shoulder, just a flash of those ice filled eyes.
“Gratitude?”
“For saving you. There is no way you could have killed the sagryl on your own.”
The splutter was real, the shock instant. “Are you fucking kidding me? If I hadn’t warned you, you’d have been caught with the tail!”
“I saw the tail coming long before you said a word. And to be clear, I do not know you, and if I did, I wouldn’t bother to tell you on sheer principle.” Again, his eyes flicked over me, narrowing and then he shook his head and turned from me again.
For just a moment his words stung, no one, but the sagryl had called me ‘death’s daughter’. That wasn’t no one.
So, I think the fuck not you lying bastard.
I followed, knowing that this man did know me even if he didn’t want to admit to it.
I didn’t for one second think he was my husband, mate, whatever…
it hadn’t felt like that kind of connection.
The intimate moment had come and gone in a flash, and very easily was just because I’d been alone for days.
There was no way I’d choose someone like him no matter my initial reaction to his body. Visceral, hot, as if every part of me knew him, from the way he moved to the lines of his face. But if we knew each other like that, why wouldn’t he say something to me?
Why would he turn on me if he was in my life to the degree that I knew his scars?
Get a hold of yourself, Mallory. What the fuck was I even thinking about? I needed to survive and figure out who I was—not worry about where I placed in this man’s life.
I needed to know if the sagryl had been lying, like this man had said? Or was death’s daughter a moniker I should be hunting down?
“Stop following me,” He threw the words over his shoulder, low, quiet but still they reached me.
“You can’t make me. I know you know something about me.” I kept pace with him, never letting him get more than ten or so feet ahead. And like him I kept my voice low, even.
I knocked back some branches, holding them so they didn’t snap back and make a clatter. “Do you have a name?”
No response.
“How did the sagryl know you?”
Silence.
“Are you a warlock?”
More silence. Damn him for making me push this hard.
“I can make more noise and see what other beasties show up, or you can answer my questions.”
His shoulders tightened, but that was it. So be it. I would push this as hard as I needed to.
Coming up with a song to belt out was not as hard as I thought it would be. The words and tune of one came to me in a flash, and I grinned, genuinely, weirdly happy that he was being a dick, as I started singing it at the top of my lungs.
“You come on with it, come on
You don’t fight fair
But that’s okay, see if I care
Knock me down, it’s all in vain
I get right back on my feet again.”
He spun toward me, those icy blue eyes blazing as he lifted his sword, pointing it at my head. “Are you insane?”
“Answer me.”
His jaw ticked and he muttered more than one curse under his breath. “Veyyr.”
“Vay-er.” I rolled his name over my tongue, disappointed that it didn’t give me any sort of a memory. Nothing. “I’m Mallory.” He frowned and before he could ask how I knew my own name when I was asking who I was, I held up the ID. “Came with it, that’s the only reason I know.”
A crackle in the forest behind us, followed by a deep snuffle and growl, shut us both up.
I didn’t need to be told to get my ass in gear as he jogged away, ducking and sliding between the foliage as if he were a part of it.
High above the tree tops Sorrow let out a distinct caw.
No words, but I didn’t need words to know that my singing had in fact drawn attention.
Stupid, sure, but something about this man, this…Veyyr made me reckless in a way I didn’t understand. I was certain that he knew me—I just had to get him to admit it and tell me what he knew.
Ahead the forest thinned and I could see something that looked like it had crawled up out of the past and expired on the edge of the forest.
The thing squatting in front of me barely deserved to be called a vehicle anymore.
Once upon a time, maybe it was a sturdy little off-road beast, something that could eat up the miles.
Now? It looked like it lost a bar fight with an entire junkyard.
The windows were nothing but jagged gaps, the doors stripped down to skeleton frames.
Rust gnawed its way across the panels, leaving the paint a patchwork of gray, brown, and blood-red stains.
The tires didn’t look like they’d roll a mile without blowing.
Wires dangled where they shouldn’t. Numbers scrawled across the side look more like a grave marker than a license.
Veyyr strode toward it. “Good luck, Mallory. Behind you is a pair of gryphons who’ve lost their wings. It’s made them…cranky. I do believe they are going to eat you.”
He leapt through the side window and into the seat, never looking back at me. He jammed two wires, wove something with his left hand that looked like a spark of lightning, kicked the panel and only then did the engine turn over once.
All done without a second thought to me standing there, as if we hadn’t saved a veilrunner and colt together, as if we hadn’t dealt with the sagryl together.
As if I was inconsequential. Fuck him, that burned more than anything else. As if I were in his own words, no one. Because perhaps that was a fear even greater than forgetting my past again—of being someone that no one was missing.
And that somehow, he knew it.
The engine coughed again, then caught fully with a ragged roar that the forest answered with a deeper one behind me.
Sorrow swept past me and landed on the back bars of the jeep. Fair enough, I’d followed him this far and he’d not steered me wrong.
I sprinted toward the back of the vehicle as it turned away from me and began to pick up speed, grabbed the section that had once held a spare tire and pulled myself on. Like a bucket seat, I sat with my legs dangling out the back.
If Veyyr thought he’d get rid of me that easily, he had another thought coming straight through the fist that I was going to put through his nose when we got to…wherever he was going.