4. Tovian
TOVIAN
She sleeps like something holy.
That is the first thought that comes to me when I pull myself from the ground beside her, and I hate it immediately.
The ache in my joints, the way centuries of stone have pressed themselves into them and left their mark.
She is curled on her side against the cave wall with her dark braid loose across her face, one dirty glove still on, one missing, and she has stolen the only fur I found in the ruins and wrapped it completely around her small body like some kind of declaration.
She looks absurd, like something I should not touch. I leave before the thought can finish forming.
The moment I clear the fissure and the open sky swallows me whole, my wings catch the freezing dark and every joint in my body screams. Stone Sleep leaves its marks.
Centuries of stillness does not shake loose easily.
I feel it in the first beat, the crack and grinding stretch of muscle waking where there was only granite before.
And then the second beat, and the third, and then my inside remembers, and I stop thinking about pain entirely.
I climb.
The cold hits my skin like a blade. My wings slice through it.
The air tastes like iron and snowmelt and the particular emptiness of a sky that has not seen me in centuries, and I press higher and higher until the mountain peak is below me and the valley is nothing but a scatter of amber light in the dark.
I stop there. Suspended. And I look down.
Blackstone Valley.
My valley.
The sight is not what it used to be.
Flickering hearth fire bleeds through wooden shutters.
Smoke rises from chimneys too close together, too low to the ground, buildings crammed into the valley floor like frightened animals herded into a pen.
Humans built themselves right into the bones of my territory while I slept inside the mountain above them, entombed.
And now they live there, fat and oblivious, in the shadow of what they destroyed.
My grip on the air tightens.
Let them keep their lights. They will not keep the valley.
Then it hits me. A pressure behind my teeth, a vibration in the space between heartbeats. I know what it is before I have fully registered it. Every Alpha does. It moves through rock and air and the invisible current of old magic like a tremor through still water.
Other Alphas. Waking.
Distant. Scattered. But waking.
I count the pulses without thinking. The nearest is far enough that it carries no immediate threat, but it is there, jagged and hungry, and it carries a message. There is blood in the mountain. There is something to claim. Come.
The Blood Bond flares in my chest like a coal pressed against the inside of my ribs.
They sense her. They sense me and what I have become in the span of a single night. A newly woken Alpha chained to a human female is not strength. It is a wound. And predators smell wounds from across entire mountain ranges.
I spin toward the cave in a sharp turn before my next breath is finished.
Vorgrym is standing over her when I drop through the fissure. My oldest commander, gray-skinned and scarred, one eye sealed shut and ruined, his torn wings half-draped behind him like burial cloth, and he is standing over Sabine.
She is still asleep and doesn’t know he is there.
He does not hear me land.
"—pathetic," he is saying, low and to himself, studying her the way he once studied fallen enemies. "A human. He woke to a human."
I cross the chamber and put myself between him and the sleeping woman with every intention I have ever carried as an Alpha pressed into the line of my shoulders.
Vorgrym goes very still.
I know what he sees. He sees his Alpha fully awakened while he is barely standing — joints slow, magic thin, his body still more stone than flesh after years of Stone Sleep. And he sees his Alpha's eyes, and whatever lives behind them right now does not invite conversation.
"My lord." His voice has changed. "I did not mean—"
"Choose the next words carefully, Vorgrym."
He holds his ground. He is brave for a dead gargoyle. "She is human." He says it like it explains everything.
"They buried us. They sealed the exit and poisoned the air and trapped us in that cavern until we were too weak to claw through the rock. And you—" He stops. "You have claimed one of them."
"Yes."
"That is not—"
"I will not explain myself to you." I let the silence sit for a moment and then I let him feel the weight beneath it. His wings drop involuntarily and his head tilts. "You will not speak of her that way again. You will not move toward her without my word. Are we clear, Commander?"
Vorgrym says nothing for a long moment.
"Clear," he says finally. Rough. Wounded.
It is the right answer.
That is when I hear her.
The scramble of boots against stone — fast, careless, urgent — and my head turns toward the far chamber wall where a crack of pale gray light now bleeds through a fissure that was not open this morning. Cold air pours through it. She must have felt it while we were distracted.
Clever creature. Stupid creature.
I am already moving.
She is fast for something so breakable. I'll grant her that.
She's made it through the fissure and onto the slope outside before I've cleared the cave mouth, and the storm greets her with no kindness whatsoever — blinding white, screaming wind, snow driving horizontal across open stone with force that would knock a human straight off a mountain.
My predator's eye tracks her immediately. Small dark shape against gray rock, already sliding, gloves scrabbling at ice-slicked stone for purchase she will not find, and the slope drops sharply ten strides ahead of her into nothing.
I clear the fissure and snap my wings wide, and the storm tries to take me sideways. I let it. I angle into the gust and drop fast along the slope and she shrieks as her boots lose the slope entirely and she goes over.
I catch her before she drops two feet.
My arm wraps around her waist and my wings slam down and for one suspended, shrieking moment the storm tears at both of us. I drag her body hard against my chest and tuck her in, and then my wings are folded around her and the howling drops to almost nothing.
She is shaking violently. Small, warm, and shaking, pressed against my chest where the stone in me gives way to the heat underneath. I can feel every terrified breath she pulls in because she is so close and so incredibly fragile and she nearly—
She nearly—
"You are going to be the death of us both." I say, and my voice is thick with fury because it is the only emotion I can afford right now.
She is still gripping my arm with both hands and I can feel her pulse thundering against my skin, hummingbird-fast.
I turn back to the cave. She fits against my chest, stilling the restless ache behind my ribs, and that quiet is the most dangerous thing I have encountered in my entire existence.
I carry her back into the dark.