Chapter 31 #2
Blood erupted from his lips. Hot and dark, it splattered against my foreclaw in a pattern I would later store the memory of in a gem.
I beat my wings and climbed.
Twenty feet. Forty. Sixty. He dangled from my claw, his weight barely more significant than a rabbit’s, his blood painting the pale limestone below in a macabre masterpiece. His legs kicked once, twice, then hung still, the fight draining from him with his blood.
Brown eyes found mine. Glassy with shock, wide with a pain that went beyond the physical, they held an expression I refused to examine. Not hatred. Not fear.
Something worse.
Below, rifles cracked. Bullets sparked off my belly scales as the alpha and the older soldier fired without pause, heedless of the wolf impaled above them.
My treasure slammed back into my consciousness without warning, so violently that it nearly folded my wings.
Not the steady pull I had endured since the theft, this was a detonation—immediate, overwhelming, and so close that every scale on my body resonated with its frequency.
My wingbeat faltered. My gaze wrenched downward.
Ziara.
She was alive.
Covered from head to toe in the same bloody sap streaming down the Ancient, she stumbled forward. The alpha vaulted back onto the root where she had emerged, shifting his rifle to grab her.
No. Not her. He ripped something out of her hand, heedless of her safety.
Ziara reeled, nearly falling from the elevated position before she righted herself, swiping at the substance covering her eyes.
The alpha pocketed what he had taken and yelled for her to follow as he headed down the root without a second glance at his pack member.
Seemingly stunned, Ziara shook herself and looked around, turning back toward the tree.
The beat of my wings drew her attention upward, where she finally saw me hovering in the air.
Her jaw dropped, and her gaze dipped to the male dangling from my talons, and horror widened her eyes.
She swallowed, took a step back, and then stopped.
“Ziara! Come!” the alpha shouted from down the root, anger and annoyance sharpening his tone.
Where did he think they would go? They could not outrun a dragon.
And he was entirely too far away to stop her from doing what I knew she would.
Her hand slid into her dagger sheath, but rather than the weapon, she withdrew something small enough to fit in her palm. To fit into the box that now lay empty in my hoard.
My treasure.
Its pulse sang through the thread connecting us, resonating with a frequency that vibrated in every scale on my body. After weeks of torment, the missing piece of my hoard was within reach.
Her hands shook.
Tears streamed down the mess of her face as she shouted, “You promised!”
Her voice cracked on the last word. I could not help but admire the courage enabling her to stand before me now, even as rage froze my veins. She was my enemy. I would treat her as such.
“My life for theirs. Release him and take me. I surrender.”
The alpha roared, raising a smaller gun.
The young wolf was no longer relevant. I opened my claw and let gravity handle the rest. He fell for at least a hundred feet before there was the wet crunch of a body meeting stone.
Tyrin swooped for the alpha, knocking him off the root right as a shot rang out. The shot went high, and the net intended for me unfurled about three feet above my head.
I pivoted mid-air and dove for the little thief.
Ziara met my gaze, but she did not run. Her eyes were bloodshot, defeat rounded her shoulders, and some ridiculous part of me longed to comfort her.
The idea was ludicrous. I aggressively discarded the notion even as I snatched her from the earth.
My claw closed around her with a care I had not intended and could not explain, as I neither crushed her nor pierced her flesh. The artifact’s pulse merged with my own, and the void that had tormented me for weeks sealed shut with a satisfaction so profound it bordered on euphoria.
My treasure had been returned to me.
I blew a gust of ice at Ziara’s third companion, temporarily freezing him to the root in case he also had a net gun to discharge. Flying out of the canyon, Tyrin and I left the wolves behind.
The little thief trembled in my claw, small, warm, and sticky. My húskarl fell in beside me, bloodied but intact, his wings beating in steady rhythm.
I climbed higher, feeling untouchable, as the island shrank beneath us until the canyon was nothing more than a scar in the earth.
I had retrieved my treasure and the thief who dared to steal from me. Soon, I would have my answers.
Pain pierced through the meat of my claw.
She’d stabbed me.
Annoyed that the female kept trying my patience at every turn, I flexed my claw and gave her a firm squeeze, hoping to encourage her to make wiser decisions. I was trying to keep her alive. The least she could do was cooperate.
She gasped and stilled in my grip. Her heartbeat hammered through the thin barrier of flesh and bone between us, rapid and defiant and impossibly alive.
The thief had surrendered her freedom to save her people.
I had not yet decided what I would do with her, but as the island disappeared beneath us, the wind carried the faintest trace of her scent past my snout.
Wild, mysterious, and… wrong. Not the wrong of something broken, but the wrong of something misidentified.
Something hidden beneath the wolf that did not belong there.
The thief had her secrets. I intended to unravel every last one.