59. Eradin
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
ERADIN
“No.” The word ripped up my throat.
Fen launched Aristus between me and the shooter, magic coiling across his fingertips, his face cold. Lyndie’s dragon roared, the sound so loud my ears rang.
Peering around, I didn’t see who’d hurt Reece. They must be hiding. Or they’d run.
I slid off Selira. My body screamed, every muscle protesting, my ruined palms flaring white-hot when they dragged across her scales. I hit the ground running, my legs wobbling, threatening to give out.
Lyndie reached Reece first, dropping beside him, rolling him gently onto his back.
“No,” she moaned. “No. This wasn’t supposed to happen!”
The bolt had snapped off on impact, leaving a jagged piece of wood jutting from his chest, the point buried deep. Blood bubbled around the wound with each shallow breath, bright red. The smell of copper filled the air.
Reece coughed. Blood sprayed from his lips, spattering his chin, running into his beard.
He was dying.
We all knew it.
“My granddaughter…” His voice came out wet, gurgling. “My granddaughter, Willa. Watch out for her?”
I grabbed his hand with both of mine. “I promise. I swear it.”
“Reece, hold on.” Lyndie’s voice cracked. “Just hold on. Please.”
I hummed my mother’s tune, the low, wordless song that said I’m here, breathe, you’re not alone. I’d hummed it for injured animals and for Tolross in the night and for a wild dragon bleeding into forest mud.
I hummed it now for a man who deserved better than a canyon made of bones.
It didn’t help. It never helped the ones who were already going. But my mother had taught me to do it anyway, because the dying could still hear, and no one should leave the world in silence.
I laid my palms on his chest, calling my magic. It rose sluggishly, scraping the bottom of a well I’d already drained dry.
The red lines flared beneath my skin, burning me from the inside out.
Not enough.
I pulled harder, ignoring the way my vision blurred, how my hands cried out where the blisters tore open once more. The magic raked against bone-dry reserves, and I dragged it up anyway, pouring everything I had into the wound.
My magic hit tissue that wouldn’t knit. The bolt had shredded his lung and nicked his heart. Blood-filled spaces where air should be, drowning him from the inside while he was still conscious enough to feel it.
“No.” I pushed again, harder. “No, you’re not—”
The magic recoiled, slamming back into me so hard my teeth clacked together.
Reece’s hand squeezed mine.
“You tried,” he said, the words barely audible past the blood in his throat. “Tell my wife that I—”
His chest hitched. His eyes went distant, still looking at my face but not seeing anymore. The light behind them guttered, going dark.
His hand went limp, dropping away, and the last breath rattled out of him.
I sat there, still holding his hand, still feeling warmth in his skin that wouldn’t be there much longer.
“No.” The word came out broken. “No, Reece, you can’t—”
But he was already gone.
The pack bond fractured with a violent jolt, leaving a jagged void in my chest where Reece had been. Agony burst through me, a ripping sensation that started in my belly and spread outward. I gasped, doubling over, my hands flying to my face.
The space where Reece had existed went hollow.
Empty.
Fen and Lyndie staggered under the same blow, Fen’s horror and Lyndie’s rage sharpening into something murderous.
Only three of us remained.
I wanted to claw at my chest, dig out the broken pieces of the bond and force them back together.
Tears tracked down my face, hot on frozen skin.
“I’m sorry,” I said to his empty eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
My throat closed around the rest. The promises I’d made had turned into rocks in my gut.
I’d watch out for his granddaughter. I’d tell his wife he was thinking of her when he died. I’d carry his death for the rest of my life, and it still wouldn’t be enough.
I stroked the hair back from his forehead. His skin had started cooling beneath my fingertips. I closed his eyes, and the simple gesture of it cracked a brittle part of me wide open.
Lyndie snarled. She surged to her feet, her face twisting with rage. She mounted her dragon and launched him across the plateau.
I stayed with Reece. Fen stood between me and any threat, blue fire crawling up his forearms. His concentration surged through the bond. He held a magical shield with one hand and tracked movement with the other. His shoulders shook with the effort.
When the ground beneath Reece started to glow, we moved backward, our boots slipping on bone dust. Light bled up through the ground, spreading beneath Reece, outlining his body in stark relief.
The stone pulled him down.
“No. It can’t have him.”
Fen’s hand found mine, but his eyes remained on Reece’s face until the stone closed over it. Only then did he ease me away.
The surface solidified, leaving nothing but a faint outline of where Reece had been. Absorbed into the structure, his bones adding to the foundation.
“Reece is part of this place now,” I growled. “Part of the Scorching that killed him.”
Every bone in those canyon walls had been someone. They hadn’t been anonymous deaths. They were people with families. With names. Riders who’d made it this far and died and been consumed by a structure that fed on their remains.
The Oracle hadn’t been built on death.
It had crafted itself from it.
My belly heaved. We were told the Scorching was sacred, that winners were honored, that the trials tested worth. It was a lie wrapped around a machine that ground people and dragons into foundation stones.
And we’d just walked into its mouth.
I pulled away from Fen and bent over, gagging, but nothing came up. Just dry retching that made my ribs ache.
A roar split the air.
I spun in time to see Lyndie’s blade punch through Vella Severine’s belly. They stood on the opposite side of the clearing, near a cluster of trees.
Lyndie moved like someone who’d done this before. Her stance looked perfect, her grip solid, the angle of entry precise enough to avoid bone and find the soft spaces inside. She gouged the blade up under Vella’s ribs with a skill that only came from training.
Elite training.
Vella’s face slackened with shock. Her mouth opened, but if sound came out, she was too far away for me to hear it. Blood welled up and spilled over her lips in a thick crimson stream. She fell backward, pulling the blade free as she collapsed, dead before she’d hit the ground.
Blood pooled on the stone, spreading dark on the bone dust.
Lyndie stood over the body, her chest heaving, but she held the blade with a steady grip. She pivoted and staggered back toward us, leaving Vella where she’d fallen.
Blair’s magic had died with him in the canyon. Whoever put a bolt in Reece hadn’t used magic at all, and I’d never once seen a bow in Vella’s hands.
Reece was gone. Vella was dead. And I stood with Fen on a plateau made of crushed bone while blood soaked into stone that had already swallowed too many bodies to count.
The dragons roared and blasted fire into the air.
Selira’s distress crashed through our bond, making me flinch. She lowered herself to the ground, her belly pressed flat, her neck stretched toward me.
While Fen went to Aristus, I stumbled to Selira on legs that barely held me and pressed my forehead against her snout, the scales warm beneath my skin.
Her grief wrapped around mine. She’d felt Reece die.
She mourned with me, though it wasn’t mourning I recognized. This was older. Vaster. Something that didn’t come from her experience but from her bloodline. The accumulated grief of every wild dragon that had ever watched a collared dragon die and been unable to reach them.
Could not hear me. I tried in arena. During trials. I called to them in old way and they could not hear. The collar ate part that hears.
She’d been reaching toward them the whole time, through whatever language dragons used between themselves.
Metal hollows.
I stroked her face, leaning into her.
The building housing the Oracle loomed ahead, throbbing with light that made my eyes water. Its pull intensified, dragging at the magic in my veins, demanding I come closer.
I eased away from Selira, my hands sliding down her snout in a last caress.
When my gaze met Fen’s, he nodded.
“We have to go inside,” I said.
Be careful.
I mounted Selira, my body moving on instinct because conscious thought had deserted me.
Fen climbed onto Aristus’s back, and the dragon’s wings twitched outward.
Mouth waits, Selira said, her unease bleeding through the bond. Teeth hidden. Always teeth.
My voice came out flat. “We’re going anyway.”
You bite back.
“I will.”
She didn’t argue further. Just spread her wings and launched along with Aristus.
Lyndie waited near the structure’s entrance, blood-spattered and hollow-eyed. She still held the blade, Vella’s blood dripping slowly from the tip.
We climbed off our dragons and started toward her, bones crunching beneath our boots, each step shouting our position.
The vein-streaked, white stone building glowed with its own light, and its low thud echoed in a heartbeat.
Old magic saturated the air, thick enough I could taste it.
The structure wanted us. It pulled at my magic, demanding, insistent, not asking permission. If I let it, it would reach inside me and gobble down what it needed, the same way it had been taking from dragons and riders for centuries.
Horror rippled across my skin.
We reached the big doors carved with runes, and they swung open, revealing a foyer beyond.
I stepped inside and stopped breathing.
The space was too gorgeous to be true.
My eyes watered as I tried to track dimensions that refused to stay fixed. The exterior had been about thirty feet across, yet the interior stretched like a throat that had swallowed the entire world outside.