Chapter 86
Another shrill scream pitches into my holding cell, one of the many that fringe the arena.
I heave my chin from my chest, looking through messy streaks of sweat-laden hair. A dribble of blood seeps into my eye, distorting my already broken view of the blistered fight pit ahead.
My gaze snags on a razah—hunched and gnarled like a scorched, crusted fae bearing no ears, nose, or hair, as if it’s all been sizzled off.
It’s slit mouth gapes, full of more jagged teeth than a dragon, beady eyes homed in on its fleeing target: A female fae with blistering welts all up her legs, fear hot in her wide eyes.
Her long hair is a pale streak as she sprints across the arena, making me picture Kyzari.
Not my niece, like I’ve been led to believe, but my own flesh and blood.
My daughter.
The beautiful proof that the love her mah and I shared was fucking real.
It hasn’t sunk in yet, still floating on the surface like a gift I’m too afraid to pull within for fear it might fall apart in my hands. Because that’s exactly what it might do.
What she might still do.
The fleeing fae stumbles, the motion threatening to tip my guts.
“Get up,” I scream, muffled through my gag.
GET UP!
The razah lunges. Tackles her, quick to dip its head and rip a shred of meat from her leg.
Incapacitated, she howls. A sound that shreds me, hauling a whimper up my throat as she claws at the smoldering ground. Dragged backward across the jagged terrain, toward a volcanic boil that gulps them both to the clamor of my muffled screams.
Not Kyzari, I remind myself, over and over.
Not Kyzari—
But she’s someone else’s daughter. Perhaps someone else’s love, or their meaning for existence.
Someone else’s everything, now gone.
I yank the thick iron cuffs suspending me to the ceiling, activating their runes. Almost welcome the gnawing pain that flares in response, making the cold metal cuffs feel like toothy jaws sinking through my flesh and bone.
A cruelty, I guess. It pales to the masticating ache in my chest. Like those same shackles are clenched around my heart, chewing every time it beats.
I do my best to void the unquenchable agony; to compose myself as other victims get torn up.
Guts ripped free, slopping against the steaming ground.
Their dying screams are drowned out by the roar of a ravenous crowd I can’t see from down here.
Hoots and howls that linger well after most of the beasts have skulked back into their fiery wombs, fresh meals in tow.
I shiver despite the heat, still haunted by that cold seep numbing me from within. From that vial of liquid Sereme forced me to ingest, a second and third dose since fed to me against my will.
It’s entirely possible it’s having the same effect on Rygun, that he’s none the wiser of my suffering, but I’m not taking the risk, forging more of myself—of my essence—into a scale I pack upon the internal wall cutting him off.
A wall I’ve been reinforcing, now so thick it’s held even in the moments I’ve lost consciousness.
Rygun is mighty, but this far south, the cold would claim his life. A slow death, but it would prevail.
If he catches a single sense that I’m in danger, he’ll hunt me down. Turn this into an even bigger tragedy.
I set another solid scale in place—
Arkyn moves past with a fine-tipped crown hanging from his hand.
He pauses before the barred gate, his frayed cloak billowing in the hot, sulfuric exhaust wafting off the arena, making his hood flutter.
Pushing it off, exposing the back of his head—not unlike Pah’s was when I hacked it from his shoulders.
Patched with swatches of dark, stringy hair, the rest a gnarled swirl of flesh unmistakably scarred by the touch of flames.
Solid proof that Pah’s Sabersythe chased him across the plains and charred him from the outside in.
Silence weighs between us as Arkyn watches the final fae square off against a small razah that’s pawing the ground …
“Mah told me stories of these beasts when I was young,” he mutters, so quiet I imagine he’s mostly speaking to himself.
“Said they’re the rabid spirits of perished fae, minds mutilated by their bloodlust, bodies cast in fire.
Reforged by Ignos in a manner nobody truly understands.
They never tire of the battle. If they’re slaughtered, the embers swallow them, only to spit them out whole again. Or they feast. Grow.”
The razah lunges, manages to swipe the young fae to the ground, and rips out his trachea in a blur of motion—all to the crescendo of howls from the bloodthirsty crowd. Screams and hoots that echo well after the final beast has dug back into the molten boil that spawned it.
“This horde has grown bigger and much stronger since my Fire Lark fled me.”
I want to rip the name from his mouth; carve it into a weapon and flay him with it. Tear him apart, limb by limb, for what he’s done to my family.
I yank at my shackles, stilling as a grate on the far side of the arena begins to grind upward in jerking increments. Slowly, it reveals the shapely form of someone shrouded in the darkness beyond.
My heart lurches. Breath halts.
Up and up the gate grinds until it resembles a wide-open jaw.
She steps through the billows of smoke and steam that taunt me with only glimpses. First, her feet—strapped in leather footwear that lends itself to movement. Certainly not protection from the rugged terrain of near-molten rock blazing in the arena.
Another churn of smoke reveals almost everything from her neck down, clad in battered plates of silver armor that cover only bits of her body—her shoulders, breasts, and the curve of her hips.
Frayed white material hangs beneath it like a skirt that’s been ripped short, her hands clenched around twin daggers, all distorted by the ripples of heat and brume rising from the volcanic arena.
“Marvelous, isn’t she?”
I ignore Arkyn as I’m gifted with a view of her face, mostly covered by the streaks and swirls of an ornate silver helmet that cages all but her eyes, jaw, and lips.
Her pale skin is unblemished, bearing none of the burns that ate her to the bone in places, no doubt mended in the smear of time since she was carried from that table with a stare so blank I’m sure she’d tucked somewhere deep.
But I know it’s Raeve. Even though her movements are more animal than fae, a litheness befitting some elegant beast.
Even though her eyes are black.
I grind my teeth into my gag, desperate to scream her name and feel her gaze on me. For her to know that I’m here.
That I’m with her.
As she stalks toward the heart of the arena, the volcanic stone awakens, throbbing with luminous heat beneath her steps to the gasps and cries of a murmuring crowd.
My pulse pounds when flames stream up to gather between her shoulder blades, going from red to yellow to stark, flaming white—like tattered Moonplume wings streaming in her wake.
She steps over smoggy mounds of red and gray stone with the poise of an apex predator as the crowd falls into a heaving chant. For her.
“Fire Lark!”
“Fire Lark!”
“Fire Lark!”
“I always wondered why Ignos chose to honor her here,” Arkyn fawns, leering with obsessive intrigue, appearing enraptured by her presence in a way that makes me sick to my soul. “I guess I can begin to make sense of it now that I understand her heritage.”
I want to roar. Grind him into the ground and tell him he doesn’t understand.
He’ll never understand.
“I can see how much you love her. I, too, know how it feels to have something you love taken. But look at her,” he preens, watching Raeve stop on a knoll of smoldering rock, chin falling to her chest as those blazing wings envelop her like a wispy cocoon.
“She’s far too much for a soft-hearted fool like you. ”
The words gouge. Much deeper than I’ll ever let him know.
“Fire Lark!”
“Fire Lark!”
“Fire Lark!”
Arkyn lifts the toothy crown, sets it atop his head, and spins.
Breath strikes the back of my throat at the full sight of his melted face. Looking like some thin, gnarled version of Pah.
“She will learn to tolerate me in your absence.” His face twitches as I take him in, like he’s judging every sweep of my eyes. “But first, she must be properly broken, like any loyal beast.”
I snarl. Thrash.
Don’t see the thin pocket blade in his hand until it’s slitting across my chest, drawing a shallow wound that yawns with every flexed jerk.
By the feasting glee in his eyes as he watches my skin open, by the shuddered pull of his breath as he draws another slice, he believes I’m suffering in the wake of his blade—oblivious to how numb I am.
Physically.
How fucking hopeless it is for him to think any amount of pain can deter from the cystic wound in my heart.
From the knowledge that Raeve is in a fighting pit, prey to a monster who just flayed her past wide open, then stuffed its corpse down her throat for his own sadistic pleasure.
From the knowledge that my daughter is currently in a cell nearby, beaten up, perhaps wrestling to stay alive.
Kyzari should be in my arms. I should be crushing her so close she forgets the pain, making her feel safe.
Loved.
“I would’ve enjoyed ending you, brother …
but I’ve grown attached to the itch at the tips of my fingers.
” Arkyn lifts the blade and steps back, examines his handiwork, then sets it against my sternum and starts another grueling slice.
“Parting with my bloodlust simply for the satisfaction of stealing your final breath seems wasteful. Besides, I’d rather watch her do it. ”
My gaze snaps up, pulse roaring.
“Fire Lark!”
“Fire Lark!”
“Fire Lark!”