Chapter 1 #2
I had. My wyrm lashed out when Graysen approached, drawn to me like a moth unmindful of a flame. Reacting instinctively to protect me, my wyrm breathed flames of sunshine and moonlight to obliterate him. But… I’d saved Graysen’s life by casting a tempest of cool air to drive the fire aside.
“You would have been barbecue,” Caidan added with taunting amusement.
Less than barbecue. He would have been incinerated into nothing. Not a speck of cinder or ash would have remained.
I slid my gaze to Graysen. A muscle feathered in his jaw as he stared back at me.
Even now, with Zrenyth’s rope collaring me, I didn’t regret saving his life. But he couldn’t learn my weakness, so I bared my teeth at him.
And because I was watching for it, I saw a sharp glint of guilt flash through his eyes before he turned his gaze aside.
Caidan led Jett to a couch and eased him down. Jett stretched his long legs out and tipped his head against the headrest, wincing and turning away from the light. Sweat plastered loose strands of hair to his temples. Though his muscles were locked and tense, a faint shiver ran through his limbs.
Valarie crossed the room to a small table next to the couch.
She picked up a candelabra, its radiance casting a brief golden glow over Jett.
Fat molten wax dripped as she moved it away, allowing the gloom to settle around him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said to him as she set it on the fireplace mantel.
“Nothing better to do. Besides, I wouldn’t want to miss this,” he gritted out between clenched teeth as those eyes, shining bright in the darkness, met mine.
As Caidan turned—the breath whooshed from my lungs.
“You’re hurt…” Ferne cried, spinning around. How she knew, I didn’t know.
“I’m fine,” but his voice scraped out, raw and uneven, as he flopped onto the couch beside Jett. The side of his face I hadn’t seen when he entered the family room showed melted, puckered flesh pulled out of shape and his scalp exposed in scorched streaks.
In fascination, I watched the warped skin slowly heal, the vicious third-degree burns smoothing and becoming less angry and inflamed. He gingerly flexed his jaw and winced.
Ferne hurried toward the filing cabinet, her hands spread before her, guided by the awareness that came with her bloodline.
Metal clunked and grated as she dragged open the bottom drawer and pulled out a soft leather bag.
She moved to the couch, and the bag thumped softly at her feet as she knelt beside Caidan.
Tilting her head, she rummaged around inside, feeling the shape of the vials and roots and glass containers, I imagined, and fished out several syringes, offering them to her older brother.
Caidan picked a mossy-green potion, a mixture of medicine and magic melded together by House Simonis.
He half-shrugged out of his jacket, drawing a shoulder out far enough so that he could stab the needle into his upper arm and pump in the painkiller.
As the medication worked its way through his system, his eyelids lowered as he let out a sigh, his form relaxing and curving into the cushions behind him.
Ferne offered the same handful of syringes to Jett.
But he grunted out a no.
Ferne huffed out a breath, and her mouth was a bitter line as if she’d expected his answer and it still annoyed the hells out of her.
Fatigue limned my body, and my knees wobbled, threatening to buckle. I’d reached near-exhaustion fighting for freedom. I steadied a hand against a shelf. The leather-bound books pushed back against my fingertips as I dug deep, drawing on what little energy remained.
Graysen cast a swift glance at me, worry almost indiscernible, but it had flickered through his gaze.
Anger burned brightly. What right did he have!
The sudden sound of the door shoving open, unhurried footfall, and whispering leather sliced my thoughts apart and had all our attention swinging toward the room’s entrance.
Valarie’s twin brother, Varen, and the Crowthers’ father strode in.
Kenton was close behind him, a large hand clasped at the side of his neck as he rolled it from side to side.
Sweat, dirt, and soot covered each of them.
Ash coated their unruly black locks. And blood…
Blood was smeared all over their armor, into the dirty creases of their fingers and calloused palms, splattered along their cheeks.
They brought with them the stench of smoke and death. But hadn’t that been me? Wasn’t it me who had wielded that, inflicted it upon them?
It was deathly quiet.
Kenton leaned his thigh against the lip of the table, folding his arms across his massive chest, his chilling focus solely on me.
And my fingers inched for my adamere bracelet…
only to scrape against the naked flesh of my inner wrist. The beads that kept me in check and comforted me when I needed them the most were gone.
Lost somewhere in that nightmare I’d survived only yesterday.
Graysen paced back and forth in front of me. His footfall didn’t seem agitated, nor was the way he carried himself, but there was something territorial about his actions. I realized no one could get past him to me, and I wondered if he was aware of it.
I caught the perplexed look that passed between Jett and Kenton.
Varen, the Crowther family’s patriarch, was the tallest of them all, and there was a brutal beauty in his weathered features. He braced his hands on the back of a chair. His roughly hewn voice split the silence apart. “We lost good men and women today.”
And those eyes, those violet eyes, shifted my way. All of them. All the Crowthers stared at me with angered grief brimming right below the surface, but there was also an unease as if it were a rocky truce between us. As if they thought I might suddenly strike out and unleash the wyrm.
But of course, I couldn’t, because the magic encircling my neck cut me off from the power that resided within me.
“The wounded are in the infirmary. Some won’t make it through the night.” Varen dropped his gaze down to his fingers, clenched tightly around the wooden chair before pushing off to straighten. He wiped a hand down his face, shooting a decisive look at his sister. “We’ll bury the dead tonight.”
Caidan propped his elbows on his knees, bowed his head, and hid behind bloodied hands that kneaded his temples and hairline.
“Collens? Hollis?” Jett asked, his fingers balling into fists on his thighs.
Varen swallowed thickly, then nodded, and rattled off a series of names. My fractured mind took in only a few. Gretchen, Liam, Hollis. But the fallen were named. Named, they became people. People fatally harmed.
I’d killed them.
Me.
My stomach clenched, and the acidic taste of bile burned its way up my throat.
I may not have taken a life, punching back with dark power and wicked howling wind, but I hadn’t reigned the wyrm in.
I’d allowed it to maim and kill. It had torn through the Crowther ranks, slicing and dicing and crushing them beneath its might.
Incinerating them with its wyrmfire threaded with moonlight and sunlight, a mixture I’d never heard or read about in my quest to learn more about wyrms in my childhood.
Sickly abhorrence sluiced through my veins. My hands shook and my bottom lip quivered. I didn’t understand how I was still standing with the way my burning legs trembled. After everything that had happened this evening, it was too much, what I’d been part of, what I had done.
A wrathful gaze clashed with my own. Jett’s features twisted in fury. “Collens, Hollis… Cousins of mine,” he snarled, shoving to his feet, surging for me in a blur of flesh and rage.
I jerked back. Stumbling against the bookshelves.
Varen’s rough voice boomed. “Jett!”
Graysen lunged—
Grabbed Jett by the throat—
His momentum spun them both around, and he slammed his brother into a bookcase. The vicious move shook the pictures of Tabitha, and books thumped onto the floor.
Ferne cried out.
Kenton and Caidan moved fast to flank Graysen.
Graysen pitted his entire weight against Jett, letting go of his throat to cross a forearm over his chest. They were locked in a death glare, breathing hard, as Jett struggled to free himself. The other brothers hovered close, ready to intercede.
“She killed them! They’re dead because of her!” Jett roared.
“And if the roles were reversed?” A voice cut through the room. Varen surprised me by saying, “What would you do if you found yourself cornered?”
Graysen hadn’t said a thing, simply keeping those animal-bright eyes fixed on his younger brother.
Jett’s gaze snapped to his father, his nostrils flared, and then reluctantly slumped in defeat.
Graysen shoved himself off, placing himself between Jett and me.
Kenton and Caidan backed away, retaking their original positions, both now wary. Jett kneaded his throat where bruises bloomed and went to stand near his aunt while Graysen stepped closer to me.
The atmosphere in the room crackled with tension, and my heart pounded so loudly I was sure every single one of them could hear it.
Valarie approached slowly, and I steadied my frayed nerves. She parted her lips, and there was a slight pause before she spoke. “Danne Pellan.”
My body swayed at the sensation of the ground tilting beneath me.
That name, that insidious name, wrapped around me, splintering through my mind.
The feel of Danne’s greedy hands pawing at my skin, a phantom memory branded on my flesh.
Hatred and revulsion curdled in my gut and sweat broke out across my palms. I pushed hard at those memories that had my nerves twitching with the desire to slough the skin from my body like a snake.
For a brief moment, as my grays met Graysen’s stormy blacks, it was only him and me in the room. Surrounded, not by his family, but by the shared terror we’d both been under…
Until I reminded myself of Graysen’s betrayal had done. He’d spun deceit and lies. Hunted me. Captured me. And stolen me.