38. Syneca #3
Let the world worry about the world. I needed Lyric. Before he died.
I rose to match her glare, moving myself in front of Silas to get her attention.
“I need to know about the dragon. That’s why we came.
Everything else you’ve told us matters, but it means nothing if I’m dead.
So tell me about him, because there were red dragon scales found here and they were once stored with government records in Grimora, which means someone took them from this place and handed them to the Magistrate’s office, and I want to know why. ”
The Keeper looked at me with far too much patience.
I’d had enough of patience.
“Ignis,” I said quietly.
The corner of the table caught fire, flames moving in a neat line along the wood. Controlled and completely mine.
Calder went very still.
She blinked. Unhurried and un-fucking-bothered. “All races but yours share the blood of what happened here. But the hunters were the last to arrive. Someone had to summon them, which means they were not responsible.”
I pulled the fire back.
“As for the red dragon, the details are muddied by time. It was not important to remember him. What I can tell you is that he did not simply vanish. He was taken. By whom and to where, that answer likely sits with the races that were present.”
The Keeper looked at the flames on her table, then at me. “If you’re quite done trying to burn down my home, you should leave.”
“We’re free to go?” I asked.
“Did you think you weren’t?”
I drew in my power, the flames dying.
“You have what you came for. Your weapons are on the porch.”
Calder was already standing.
“One more thing,” the old crone said, and her eyes found mine again. “The debt you carry. Don’t let it make you reckless.” A pause, as she took in the marks across her table. “More reckless.”
Standing outside the cottage moments later made us no safer than in the strange woman’s home.
The Ash beasts were sure to come if we lingered.
We made our way back toward the falls, walking closer to each other than necessary, seeking the only light available if we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves.
Dez kept his voice quiet. “What now? Stop Evanoch from being released or find Lyric?”
“No matter what the woman said, we keep to our goal,” Silas said. “We can’t stop Evanoch’s prophecy without hunting down every moonborn and killing them.”
“Then we find Lyric first,” Calder said.
“I’d rather not go traipsing into the death forest. Plus, Lyric has been gone for a hundred and seventy-five years. What’s a few more weeks going to hurt?” Neither of them answered, so I pressed on. “If Evanoch gets free before we—”
The pain arrived without warning.
It started in my nerve endings, a deep and building burn that had everything to do with the debt written into my bones the night I’d agreed to terms I’d barely understood. It spread upward from my stomach, climbing my spine, wrapping around my ribs until breathing became a negotiation I was losing.
I kept walking for three more steps through sheer stubbornness.
Then my knees hit the ash.
“Syn!” Pip screamed.
“Syneca?” Silas’s panic was not guarded at all.
I couldn’t answer. The pain had found my lungs and was ripping through them. I pressed my palms flat against the ground and focused on the cold against my skin and tried to remember how to take a breath that went all the way down.
It didn’t work.
Silas dropped to his knees in front of me. His hands found my face, tilting it up, forcing my eyes to his. “Look at me. Syneca. Look at me.”
His eyes were not what I expected. Not calm. Not careful. Not any of the things Silas was when the world was watching. But his voice was steady. “You made a bargain. You know what this is.”
I did know. I’d felt the edges of it before, that first warning press when she’d released me in the Underworld. This was what happened when you tried to walk away from an unbreakable bargain’s terms. The debt didn’t negotiate. It didn’t care about Evanoch or the prophecy. It just collected.
“Lyric.” His voice was steady and low and very close. “Say it.”
“You have to say it,” Pip echoed from beside him.
The pain tightened. My vision blurred at the edges.
“Lyric takes priority,” I said through my teeth.
It didn’t stop immediately. It tapered, slowly, the way a fire died when you took away its air, degrees of relief that felt almost worse than the pain itself because relief meant it could come back.
It settled finally into a dull ache behind my eyes and the memory of what my nerve endings had just been through.
Silas’s hands were still on my face.
I became aware of that slowly, the warmth of them, the steadiness.
Until the light from the falls went out.
Not dimmed. Not faded. Out, like something had swallowed it whole, and in the sudden dark the Ash gave up every sound it had been holding back. Low and guttural snarls, coming from every direction at once.
Ash beasts. More than I could count by sound alone.
Silas was on his feet before I was.
They hit us from four directions simultaneously.