CHAPTER ONE #2
My jaw fluttered with the effort to keep her pinned beneath my gaze.
Was that what my mother had looked like, when Griffon had held the delicate thread of her children’s lives at the edge of a blade?
Or had she even been given the chance to beg before her own life was stolen with one flippant flick of his wrist?
“Yes, we can explain.” Her voice shook on every word.
“We went to the council. About what we saw. But they brushed us off and told us not to concern ourselves. But we were, genuinely. For Privalt. For our friends and families. We asked some people if they thought we should try to contact the gargoyles and anonymously tell them what we had seen. They all said no. We didn’t contact them, we swear it. ”
“And we don’t know a Griffon Ryker,” Jeremy tacked on. “Please, I’m begging you, just don’t hurt her. She has nothing to do with any of this.”
They never do. I forced a snort and rolled my eyes. “When has that ever mattered in situations like this?”
His throat bobbed with a thick swallow. “Then please don’t hurt her, because she is still just a child.”
Those were poorly chosen words. The rage that flooded my system now was a bonfire. “How many like her died fifteen years ago?” I hissed. “What makes her special, that she deserves to live, just ‘because she’s a child’? The same consideration wasn’t given to my little sister. Or my baby brother!”
My lip curled and the dagger heated in my palm. Jamie’s tears struck my hand faster and the stench of burning flesh punched into my awareness.
I jerked the blade back an inch, my hand quivering with the effort to rein my magic back in. “Were you bastards working with them even then? Is that why she was spared?”
“We lived in Fallhaven when the Solstice Massacre happened.” Macy took a step toward her child and I raised a brow, eyeing her progress. She wisely stepped back.
I waited, but they just stood rooted, eyes pinned wide as the four moons.
My brows hiked up my forehead. “So, that’s it?
The two of you are going with, ‘shipbuilding da’kai and we don’t know anything else’?
” The da’kai had damned near disappeared after Solstice.
Hell, I’d never even seen one of the beasts.
And this was the story they’d concocted?
Jamie quailed in my grasp, her small frame shaking so violently I thought she might shatter before I was done with her. The vibrations slithered over my skin and left me feeling dirty. I already knew there wasn’t a brush coarse enough to scour off this kind of filth.
Jeremy’s head lurched back and forth in tiny, rapid jerks. “There is nothing else to tell, I swear it. We haven’t spoken to a stonetalon since before Solstice.”
Jamie’s fingers dug into my hand, the silky material of her tunic sliding over my skin with each of her wild breaths.
“But I am certain we can offer you something else of value. In exchange for her life.”
“Such as?”
“Coin,” he predictably blurted. “We have coin. A lot of it. I’ll give you whatever you want. All of it.”
A disgusted scoff leapt off my tongue. My hand lurched a fraction before spasming around the dagger’s hilt, rebelling against the notion of a fresh coating of blood.
But then I saw my little sister, Lynnix, laughing as I chased her around the kitchen.
I saw her foot catch in my mother’s skirts and her tumbling to the ground, her giggle a music my heart would never know again.
Jackson had sat against the cabinets, babbling, his little mind too young to know what was happening but old enough to know he was happy to be a part of it.
But they were gone. And these people still mingled with the monsters responsible.
My gaze hardened. “Wrong answer.” I jerked my hand to the side.
The blade bit deep into Jamie’s flesh, the feel of it sending a shudder skating down my spine. A wet gurgle filled the room. My father’s disapproving frown flashed behind my lids, but I blinked it away as her body slumped to the floor.
Her parents’ grief shattered the stagnant air, their keens broken and raw. My eye twitched again at the sounds, so like those that had rung through the city that awful night. I swallowed hard, averting my eyes from the body bleeding out all over my boots.
I surged forward and grabbed Macy’s arm. Jeremy lunged for me, his teeth bared in a feral snarl. I flicked my finger and a wall of flames erupted between us. His eyes darted between his dead daughter and his wife, now standing just as Jamie had.
“What will it be, Jeremy?” I demanded, the crassness of my voice at odds with the tightness in my chest. “Is your wife going to join your daughter in the Fade?” My hand trembled as the next words exploded out of me. “Or are you going to tell me where Griffon is?”
He lurched toward the fire but jerked back, cursing.
Angry blisters marred his face and the skin at his neck where his tunic stood open.
“I don’t know who Griffon is! My wife doesn’t know who Griffon is!
And my daughter sure as fuck didn’t know who Griffon is!
” Spittle flew into the fire and it crackled and hissed between us.
For Them.
I shrugged and dragged the dagger across Macy’s throat, my hand shaking so badly I nearly dropped it. She fell on top of her daughter, her blood flowing over Jamie’s cheek to join the rapidly growing pool at my feet.
“No!” Jeremy roared. “No!” His hands tore at his hair and he sank to his knees. Sobs shook his broad shoulders.
I snuffed the flames and stalked toward the broken man. “Last chance,” I barked. “Perhaps your own life is worth bargaining with, since theirs clearly weren’t.” I rested the tip of the dagger against the hollow of his throat. “Where is he?”
He raised red, hate-drenched eyes that were too much like a reflection of my own. “When someone finally manages to gut you,” he snarled, his face twisted into something barely human, “I hope you get lost in the Fade and our memory haunts you for the rest of your cursed eternity.”
I jerked the blade and the sound of his body striking the ground rang through my skull. I looked everywhere but the pile of bodies at my feet. “No. I’m pretty sure the Fade will carry me straight to hell,” I muttered.
I stumbled toward an office adjoining the kitchen and away from the unbearable truth buried in those words.
I attacked the parchment-strewn desk, flinging ledgers and bills of sale to the floor.
It was a mess by the time my fist finally closed around the one I desperately needed to be there.
I sunk into the deep, suede-covered chair behind me.
My bloody prints smudged some of the ink, but not enough to obscure the words penned in brutal strokes across the page.
I read through it a half dozen times in the faint light that filtered through the window.
I secured your contract with Archon Navi. Bring my cut and I will tell you where to meet her contact with the first shipment. I’ll be in the clearing north of Dray’s Crossing at the height of Gideon’s full moon. -G
“The Alarin gargoyles’ leader? The wine must really suck across the sea.” I drew a long, shaky breath through my nose to steady my racing heart. “Gods, they really did let the child craft the cover story.” Why this was worth dying for, when they admittedly had gobs of coin already, was beyond me.
I swiveled the chair and looked out the floor-to-ceiling window behind the desk, where two of the four moons were visible in the night sky.
Gideon’s was still the largest, but each night it appeared a little smaller.
With the arrival of the winter solstice, Arawn’s would dominate the night sky and it would be the winter god’s time to reign from his celestial kingdom.
Gideon’s moon was missing only a sliver now, its full glory just two nights away. Dray’s Crossing was a hard day’s ride east of Vircann, and sat halfway between Privalt’s capital and the gargoyle fortress, Falcos. And I didn’t have long to get there.
I pushed myself out of the chair and stalked back into the kitchen, my eyes glued to a nice painting that hung beside the archway to the sitting room.
But as I stepped onto those fluffy carpets, I couldn’t stop my body from pivoting back toward the carnage I’d left heaped on the floor. I stumbled back a step.
So familiar. So horribly, undeniably similar to what I had walked in on fifteen years ago. I couldn’t tear my eyes off them. Off their gaping throats and glassy stares. For a flash—one miserable blink of my eyes—it wasn’t three bodies I stared at, but four.
For Them.
For Them. For Them. For Them. The chant stampeded through the too-tight confines of my mind. I ripped my gaze from the bodies and left the suffocating house.
Because everything was for Them.