Chapter 8
VARIDIAN
Ilurched upright in the luxurious bed I’d been given in Chakir’s palatial home in Daurith, the slant of light through the arched window both unfamiliar and alarming.
A shadow stood in that beam of light, moving closer at a deadly rate, and as lightning flashed beyond the window, it illuminated the wicked curve of the blade the figure held.
Finally, the lightning soul snapped. You sleep like the dead. Any longer, and you would be dead.
I ignored that, settling immediately into the icy rage that had won Mak, the legion, and I nigh on every battle we’d flown into.
Paranoia made me sleep with a knife under my pillow, and it was the work of a moment to wrap my fingers around the cool handle and leap out of bed, putting the tall wooden posts between me and the intruder.
“Who are you?” I demanded, thunder raging across the city beyond Chakir’s home, my wrath given the form of a storm.
I pulled power from my core, striking a dagger of control magic into the figure’s mind and—nothing.
Like the ground warriors who lurked in the hills outside the sacred city, there was nothing in this man’s mind at all.
That was all the information I gathered—he was male—before he flung the curved blade at me.
I ducked aside and rolled along the floor, adrenaline coursing through me, so different to the lazy peace I’d felt in the dream with Ameirah. Air whipped past, but no pain followed so the knife had missed.
I allowed momentum to carry me back to my feet, narrowly avoiding a wooden cabinet as I flung my dagger at the shadow in my peripheral vision.
“Bastard,” I snarled as he jumped onto the window ledge. Keeping my eyes on the intruder, I grabbed the post of the bed and leapt over it, landing on the other side just to watch him jump through the window.
We were on the third story, a surely fatal landing. My heart thundered as I threw myself at the window, my knife nowhere to be seen, and only trees thrashing in the storm winds below.
Whoever the man who tried to kill me was, he was gone.