CHAPTER THREE
My bleary vision focused on Councilman Omri Bellan, crouched in front of me with a bandage plastered to his left shoulder. It was stained by an arrow-sized circle of blood, just above his heart.
A crisp breeze rustled the dead leaves that still clung to their branches. The rattling taunted my traitorous mind as I crept through the dark, conjuring an image of bones cascading down a mound of skeletons. The hair on my arms shot skyward.
“Stop it,” I hissed under my breath. I focused my attention on my feet and smothered the phantom bodies in thoughts of just one, burning to ash in these noisy godsdamned trees.
I glanced back toward Dray’s and the road that either speared toward the eastern coast or jutted south, ending in Cyprian’s ruin that had been left to crumble into the sea.
But it was swallowed by the night and lost in thick trunks and dead brambles.
The Falconridge Mountains loomed just ahead. The clearing was close.
Only a soft, diluted light filtered through the canopy to guide my silent steps.
The chittering of insects and owls trilling into the night did little to drown out the blood roaring through my head.
I stopped when a break between two towering oaks framed the open meadow, awash in the moons’ pearlescent glow.
And there he was.
Griffon stood with his back to me, his head tipped to the star-flecked sky.
Hands that had once dripped with Lynnix’s blood were slung into his pockets, a soft, whistled tune drifting to me on the crisp air.
His hair was close-cropped now, not the shock of inky black I remembered.
My body trembled as I stared at him, but my lips peeled back off my teeth with a feral grin at the sight of his soft, wingless back.
Arrogant fool, for standing there in his human form like he was invincible. Smoke drifted from my balled-up fists, my magic eager to prove the extent of that miscalculation.
Griffon’s whistling ceased, the last note ripped away by a gust of wind. His head swiveled toward me. A grin tipped one side of his thin lips, eyes that were too large for his skull alight with glee. Mine narrowed. This was not the Griffon who haunted my nightmares.
A faint twang tiptoed through the rattling leaves. I flung myself to the side but pain still blazed across the outside of my left shoulder. My right drove into a tree root jutting from the ground. I sucked in a tight breath at the dual pains.
I dragged myself behind a tree and called on my fire but—nothing. “No,” I breathed, staring at my empty hands. “No, no, no, no, no.” This had happened once before. Once, when Bellan had cut my palm with an ironweb-laced dagger. “So you know,” he’d said, “if you are ever struck with it again.”
My power thrashed. But the ironweb had caged it, and my skin was a barrier as impenetrable as steel.
“Fuck,” I hissed.
The arrow had come from the left of where the man had been standing.
I scrambled to the side and darted for a tree further from the clearing.
Another a dozen paces from that. Then another, skirting pools of moonlight that would end my life as surly as if I could still turn myself into a signal pyre.
Dead branches clawed through my cloak and tore into my flesh.
I slammed my back against a trunk and ripped off the cloak. My chest heaved against the leather encasing my torso, my fingers fluttering at my sides. Never had I been this vulnerable. Alone in the dark with no idea who was trying to kill me or how many there were.
Never had I been the hunted.
I dissected the darkness ahead of me and found nothing.
But every instinct screamed that death now waited in those inky shadows.
My darting gaze landed on a small divot carved into the base of the mountain to my right.
I shoved myself off the tree and plastered myself into the side of the recess.
I slammed my eyes shut and forced my wild breathing to slow as my shaking fingers closed around the hilt of my father’s dagger.
I would not die here. Not before my dead were avenged.
“Come out and play, little Lydia.”
The insects and birds knew monsters prowled in their midst and ceased their chatter.
The singsong voice sliced through the eerie quiet. “Cat got your flames?”
The archer crept toward me from the left, a notched bow in his hands and gaze sweeping the forest. If he separated me from the landscape, the shot was clear.
A shadow, struck by an errant beam of moonlight, stalked the alcove from the right. My skin tingled and I knew he had been waiting on the path back to Dray’s. The specter of his finger waggled in the air, pointing straight toward me. The archer’s back straightened and he lifted the bow.
I darted out of the recess and drove the dagger into the corded stomach of the man who had outed my hiding spot.
It lurched to a stop halfway up the blade.
I threw myself and what little momentum I had left against the hilt and forced him to pivot.
An arrow struck his back and reverberated through my hands.
I ripped my dagger free and charged the archer.
He tore another arrow from his quiver, his eyes darting between me and the bow.
I careened into him as he lifted the weapon and drove my weight into the dagger and whatever part of him it had found. His bellow was greeted by a flurry of feathers and my own ragged cry as I tore the dagger free.
Before I could slam it into him again, the glint of light striking metal flashed in my periphery. My blade tumbled out of my hands. I flung my palms against the forearm that soared over my shoulder and shoved against it with everything I had.
A wild howl ripped up my throat as the man behind me gained a fraction, his blade inches from my neck.
I surged upward and flung my head back into his face.
It connected with his nose and he stumbled.
The moment his back impacted a tree I rammed my head back again.
His nose caved under my skull and his grip loosened.
I twisted away and spun to face the first man I’d spied in the clearing.
Those too-big eyes were wide, their whites stark in the faint light.
I knelt and plucked a second dagger out of my boot, this one a tiny stiletto not much longer than my hand.
He smiled, his teeth stained with the blood that oozed down his face.
My muscles locked as I realized his attention was pinned just over my shoulder and not on me.
The godsdamned archer tackled me, his grunts of pain taking a waltz with my shrieks of panic. Thick limbs wrapped around me and pinned my arms and legs. I flung my head back again but it slammed into a chin. He cursed but didn’t loosen his grip.
“Just die al-fucking-ready,” Big Eyes said, his voice thick and nasally through the broken nose. He advanced on me, his dagger angled toward my ribs. He wasn’t just going to slit my throat anymore. He was going to gut me for fighting back.
“No.” I thrashed but didn’t gain an inch of freedom. I tracked that blade; imagined it plunging into my body. My muscles clenched to the point of breaking in anticipation of the agony that would consume me. “No. Fuck. Fuck!”
A shadow peeled away from the darkness behind him. Brutal, leathery wings speared toward the heavens, the midnight black of their clawed tips gobbling up the diluted light. Another slow, predatory step brought a face out of the shadow. I stopped fighting.
This was the face seared behind my lids in the dead of night, when I awoke tangled in sheets drenched with sweat that felt too much like blood.
A smirk twisted Griffon Ryker’s full lips.
He glanced toward the ground and brought his bare foot down on a stick.
My would-be assassin spun. His broken gurgle punched through the roaring in my ears a second before he smacked the ground beside me, four long gashes in his neck weeping blood into the dirt.
Griffon stalked toward me and the man still suctioned to me like a godsdamned octopus, blood dripping off his dagger-sharp talons.
A pair of loose pants hung low on his hips, his torso bare and skin as hard as the craggy peaks at his back.
The amusement scrawled across his face as he surveyed my predicament was at odds with the sharpened ridge of his brow and harsh jawline, his slightly elongated pupils pinned on us with the single-minded focus of a predator.
Intricate veining embellished his wings like a sheet of thinnest marble.
My lips parted in a feral snarl. “Griffon,” I hissed. “Let go of me!” I twisted in the man’s grasp. “Let me go so I can kill him!”
The stonetalon laughed—fucking laughed, the deep timbre of the sound vibrating through my fluttering chest. “I’ll just leave you to it, then,” he drawled.
He reclined against a trunk, his arms crossing over a broad chest. “Since you were managing so well before I showed up.” He tipped his chin to the body that lay in a deepening puddle of red.
The limbs holding me vanished. I scrambled to my feet and dropped into a high crouch. My flames were still caged but it didn’t matter. I’d go down tearing him apart with my bare hands if I had to.
He scoffed and answered words I hadn’t spoken.
“You can’t kill me. Not without your demon fire.
And certainly not with that toothpick.” Eyes drenched with disdain dropped to the stiletto in my hand, then shifted toward a spot over my shoulder.
“But perhaps you’d like to ask him why they just tried to kill you? ”
My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached, my fingernails slicing into my palms. “And turn my back on you? Never.” My gaze raked over his body, searching for a weak spot to jab the blade.
The amusement on his face slid into a cold, mocking sneer. “Your positioning is irrelevant, human. If I intended to kill you, you wouldn’t be breathing.”
Welp, circumstances being what they were, that was probably true. I loosed a shriek and tore after the man who had held me to die. He was nearly to a horse, tethered to a tree a few dozen feet south of the road, and I wasn’t going to make it.
“Fuck,” I breathed as he clambered onto the beast’s back and angled him east.
Griffon plummeted out of the sky and landed in front of the horse, his knees bending to absorb the impact. The beast reared and dumped his rider in the dirt before fleeing, the whites of his eyes flashing like little moons as he sped past me.
I glanced back down the road. My brow cocked at the sight of the stonetalon dragging my quarry by the collar of his robe, back toward me and the cover of the trees.
He dumped the archer at my feet and I planted a booted foot on his chest. This whole mess was his fault—his arrow that had deprived me of my magic in the first place. I narrowed my eyes on the blood leaking out of a dagger-shaped hole in his shoulder. Damn my frantic aim to hell.
He held his palms out toward me. “I was just following orders,” he sputtered, each word tripping over the next.
“Whose?” I demanded.
His head whipped back and forth. “I don’t know. We never know who hires us. There are places. Where the rich bastards leave payment and the name of a target.”
“So you’re a Shadow? You’re all Shadows?”
He nodded frantically, his gaze darting between me and the fucking stonetalon, who was lounged against another tree with a nonchalance that obliterated my last vestige of control.
“You’re no good to me if you know nothing! And getting paid to murder someone is not orders!” I carved halfway through his throat, his blood painting a thin line across the front of my armor.
My gaze slid from the body to Griffon and the bored expression plastered to his face.
“Have you ever interrogated someone before?” he asked, voice full of gravel.
“You’re supposed to, I don’t know, break something before whacking the head off.
” His eyes, black as the sky above us in the faint light, rose to meet mine. “In case he was lying.”
“I really don’t care if he was lying,” I spat.
“My only concern is leaving another corpse for the rats.” My fingers flexed around the stiletto’s hilt.
The blood that coated my skin—both fresh and stained—tugged at my hands, like a chain that dragged through the years and anchored my fate to the beast in front of me.
The bastard rolled his eyes. “And I really don’t give a shit about your delusional vendetta.”
My hand cramped around the dagger.
“Archon Davina has ordered an audience with you.”
A chuckle bubbled up my throat and floated off my lips, an abomination of a thing in the surrounding carnage.
“You’re fucking insane if you think we’re both leaving here alive.
” Would the blade go through his eye? Or was that as impenetrable as the rest of him?
I’d never actually tried—I normally just watched them burn.
The eyes in question sparked. “I’m not dying tonight. And unfortunately, the Archon made it clear you were to still be breathing when I dump you at her feet.”
Every facet of my awareness narrowed on that face.
He was so close. My blood boiled with magic desperate to fulfill my greatest desire.
“I will tell that foul, scheming, cowardly stonetalon nothing. And may her black heart get lost in the Fade and rot,” I snarled.
“This ends now. You pay for what you did now!”
His jaw clenched, the muscles in his neck standing in relief as he took a step toward me. “Weak and stupid. Typical human,” he spat. “Pity, really. I’d expected more from Vircann’s precious pyro.”
“Come and find out how weak I am.” I wouldn’t win. But I was damn sure taking a piece of him with me. My breaths came in short gasps again. The knowledge that I was about to leave this world screaming raged through my skull.
He drew a deep breath through his nose. “I would rather drown myself in the middle of the oath-cursed sea than drag some human to Falcos. But you’re still coming with me.”
“Stop fucking talking and fight!” I screamed.
He was fast. So. Damned. Fast.
I barely saw his fist, gobbling up my entire field of view, before the night swallowed me whole.