Chapter 14
Crag
Rage blurred my vision as I stared at the gargantuan troll that’d barged into our cabin. I didn’t know how he’d realized Quinn was here or what he wanted with her, but I didn’t care. I just wanted him destroyed for daring to threaten us.
I barreled toward him, shifting into my gargoyle form as I went. He wasn’t anticipating my speed—or perhaps my increased size either. I slammed into him with the full force of my hurtling body and sent both of us careening out of the cabin and across the deck.
The troll shoved out of the way just before I could propel him all the way into the swamp. He slammed his massive fist at my head, and I swung to the side, finding myself thinking of how I’d identified my ears to Quinn as a weak spot. One of those balled hands clocking me in the right spot wouldn’t stop me, but it would send my brains spinning around in my head, as much as I had of them.
“You can’t win this battle,” the troll snarled, lunging at me in an attempt to heave me away from the doorway. I whipped upward with a vast flap of my wings and raked my clawed feet across his face.
He couldn’t quite manage to jerk out of range. His head snapped to the side, smoky blood trickling from the rivulets I’d carved in his face.
A sinewy green body flashed past me. I didn’t need Lance’s backup in this fight—I was handling it just fine on my own. But before I could tell him to stay out of the way, my gaze followed his path and realized it wasn’t the troll he was heading toward.
More shadowkind creatures were charging out of the shadows amid the swamp’s nearby vegetation—more even than there’d been in the park the night we’d first saved Quinn. Most of them were clearly lesser shadowkind, springing toward the cabin with animalistic savagery, but I spotted a few other higher beings in their midst, approaching just as swiftly but with more wary alertness.
No, the three of us couldn’t hope to win a battle against an entire hordeof beasts at once.
Why were they so intent on having her?
I leapt back toward the cabin doorway, knowing our best chance of survival was escape. My distraction made me an easier target. Before I could reach the threshold, the troll landed a blow to my chest that sent me sprawling on the deck.
I rebounded right into his legs with a smack of my shoulder. Grunting, he stumbled backward and flashed his fangs.
I could understand how the strange energy Quinn gave off had incited the lesser shadowkind, but it hadn’t affected me or my colleagues the same way. Why was this brute giving in to the ridiculous urge?
“She isn’t any danger to us,” I growled at him. “Are you like a dumb beastie who can’t think past its impulses? There’s no reason to slaughter her.”
The troll let out a rumbling chuckle. “Oh, I’m not looking to slaughter her. The ones who sent me have much better uses for the girl.”
The ones who sent him? I hurtled myself at him again, determined to get the upper hand. “Who sent you? Why does anyone want her?”
Why did Rollick, even? He’d known something like this would happen before the other shadowkind had even homed in on Quinn. What did all these beings know that we hadn’t figured out in three months of observation?
How could I figure out how to win this fight when I wasn’t even sure what we were really fighting over?
The troll didn’t answer, pummeling me with his fists as he tried to fend me off. I rammed him into the cabin wall hard enough to dent the siding and then headbutted him so far down the deck that he crashed into the railing. The boards splintered under his weight, and this time he did crash into the water.
Feral shrieks and gnashes of teeth carried from all across the swamp. Lance was leaping across the clumps of vegetation, skewering every slavering beast he could. The slap of a tentacle into one of the higher shadowkind who’d nearly reached the deck told me Torrent had jumped into the fray as well.
Quinn was still in the cabin—Quinn was on her own. And all these creatures meant to… to tear her apart one way or another.
I moved to barge into the wider battle, but the troll was heaving to his feet. He launched himself at me with even more power than before.
All thought seared from my mind other than the knowledge that I had to stop him. Had to end any chance of him carrying out whatever foul purpose he’d come here with. He’d led all these creatures here. Let them see him fall.
I sprang to meet him, hurling my stone fists with all the strength contained in my hardened body. My wings swept around to batter him with their horned tips. His limbs battered my body, but I tuned out the momentary bursts of dull pain, not letting up my assault for an instant.
My fingers managed to clamp around his jaw. I threw him back, landing on top of him, and smashed his head against the boards of the deck hard enough to crack both them and his skull. Again and again, slamming it down harder each time, until the smoke of his blood was gushing up toward the sky in a plume and there was nothing but fleshy pulp and shards of bone beneath my hand.
Only then did a flicker of doubt penetrate my combat fury—he’d known things, things about Quinn’s attackers that might have helped us.
There was no time for regrets. If I’d toyed with him longer to avoid killing him, the other beasts would have gotten an opening to attack her.
I hurtled off him toward the mass of creatures descending on us.
Most of them were much easier to deal with than the troll had been. I crushed one small beast’s skull with a single blow and snapped another in two with a stomp of my heel. A rabid fox-like being with spines poking up along its spine lunged at me, and I flung it into a tree trunk before ripping its chest right open, eviscerating its heart.
The smoke of shadowkind essence was flooding the air all around me, and still there were more darting, snapping bodies racing toward the cabin. Lance was nothing but a greenish blur. Torrent’s tentacles lashed out in all directions, slapping aside creatures in physical form, wrenching others right out of the darkness they’d tried to remain cloaked in.
From inside the cabin, Quinn screamed.
Adrenaline surged through my body. I tore across the swamp toward the small building and landed on a skeletal creature that’d just reached the open doorway.
The bones visible through the thing’s taut, translucent skin fractured under my weight. More essence billowed up, obscuring my view. I sprang through the cloud into the cabin.
A taller, gaunt being with fingers that were little more than razors jutting from its palms was stalking toward Quinn. She’d ducked right beneath the table, pulling the chairs in closer as a flimsy barrier between her and the monstrous predator.
In the split-second before I charged, I could already see how she was bracing herself to throw a kick the second the thing got close enough. As I flung myself across the cabin at her attacker, an unexpected flare of pride lit in my chest.
She might be mortal, but she’d have done her best to defend herself against these creatures no matter how much they frightened her. That soft body contained more boldness and bravery than most beings could imagine. How could they want to savage something so… so astoundingly rare?
I heaved the gaunt creature into the wall. Its claws raked across my stony skin, only managing to scratch the surface.
The pinpricks of pain gave me an extra jolt of rage with which to propel it into the floor, one fist following the other. With a final roar, I tore its head right off its spindly neck and crushed its chest in for good measure.
A few more, smaller beings had managed to make it to the doorway despite my colleagues’ efforts. I raced toward them and crashed into their midst, pummeling and slashing until they were barely shreds of beasts.
A choked sound carried from beneath the table. Had something got past even me?
I leapt across the floorboards and thumped to a halt just a few feet shy of the table, fangs bared and breaths rough. Quinn was alone, unharmed other than a bruise blooming on her forearm.
She stared at me with wide eyes, and a chill rippled through my body. This was the first time she’d seen me clearly in my monstrous form. Her face had paled, her lips parted. I braced myself for her scream.
Instead, she blinked, and the fear faded from her expression. A smile curved her mouth, bright as a beam of sunlight.
“Crag,” she said, as if there was no one she’d have welcomed more happily.
A sensation unfurled deep inside me like a vast swath of fabric blanketing me with warmth from the inside out. She recognized me. She wasn’t frightened of me, as terrifying as I knew my gargoyle form was to humans, as many mortals as I’d sent fleeing before me in the past.
She was something even rarer than I’d realized earlier.
I couldn’t let one creature out there lay so much as a finger on her. The thought of even Rollick drawing her in with his pointed teeth gleaming in his smile…
I’d come here to protect her, and in that moment I’d have defended her from anything that threatened her, no matter what it required of me.
“Come out,” I said, wincing inwardly at the harsh rasp of my voice in this form. “I have to get you away from here.”
She scrambled forward without hesitation, courage and trust twined together in a combination that amplified the warmth in my chest even more. As she pushed past the nearest chair, her gaze darted to the hallway. Anguish tightened her pretty face.
“My bag,” she said. “It’s got my medicine, and…”
I didn’t force her to finish. Her medicine kept her safe even more than I could at times. Whatever else mattered to her that she was afraid of losing, I’d protect too.
“We’ll grab it,” I said, holding out my arm. She looked at me in surprise as she scooted the last few steps to me, but she didn’t release more than a brief gasp that was more relief than shock when I swept her off her feet.
I held her close against my shoulder as I took off down the hall. As I barged into Quinn’s bedroom, a scaled beast that looked like a distant, shrunken cousin of Lance’s shadowkind form leapt out of the shadows. I shouldered it aside, whipped my free arm through the strap on Quinn’s canvas bag, and spun toward the window.
The glass pane was nowhere near big enough to admit me. I burst through it and the wall around it back-first, sheltering Quinn from the flying shards and splinters. She tucked herself closer against me, one arm looping around my neck to keep her more secure. I bounded off the deck outside and cast off into the air.
A few flying beasties blinked out of the shadows in the swamp to careen after me, but none of them could match the flaps of my much larger wings. Below, a roar rose up that I recognized as Lance’s, tinged with triumph.
My colleagues could retreat now. We’d regroup. We’d shore up our defenses.
I slid my other arm around Quinn’s slim form, and she relaxed even more into my protective embrace. A slight tremor ran through her body. I held her firmly, soaring steadily through the air. We’d picked a spot far from any human habitation. When I was sure I’d left the battle far behind, I dropped lower to skim the treetops where no more distant mortals would be able to see me.
With Quinn’s soft form nestled against my stony skin, the tangy-sweet scent of her filled my nose. A different kind of warmth flickered through me. It came with images of stroking my hands over her softness the way I’d seen Lance tease her. Of drinking in that scent not just with my nose but my lips and tongue as well.
I’d never been with a human woman that way. I’d never been able to show myself around mortals at all in any capacity other than to terrorize and kill. But there’d been shadowkind women who’d valued me as a partner for my size. If she wasn’t afraid of me—if I could impress her, satisfy her the way I had during those occasional encounters of the past?—
Her wavering voice broke through the rush of longing that’d flooded me.
“They found me,” Quinn murmured. “Even with everything you were doing to hide me, they figured out where I was.”
Her comments washed away every trace of heat other than a faint burn of shame at my lust. How could I be imagining that when I’d nearly failed her? Just because she wasn’t terrified of me didn’t mean she’d desire me.
And she was right. The creatures had found her—multitudes of them. The knowledge made my teeth clench in frustration.
But feeling the fragility in her body where it pressed against mine, where my mind went next wasn’t to the question of how her attackers had found us. Instead, I found myself remembering the fierceness she’d shown less than an hour ago, staring down Torrent across the dining table as she’d demanded answers.
No matter what other feelings she harbored for me—or didn’t—she was counting on me. She needed me in a way no one else I’d fought for in the past ever had.
We couldn’t leave her in the dark anymore. She deserved the full truth, as much of it as we knew. I’d dare anyone to tell me she hadn’t proved herself worthy of it.
And if I couldn’t convince Torrent of that… I didn’t know what I’d do. I’d never questioned his leadership before.
But I wasn’t letting this woman down, whatever the consequences.