59. Syneca #2
He’d held the doorway like he’d promised, and the doorway had taken its price. A blade stood out of his stomach, and the blood had already spread beneath him across the cold stone, too much of it, too fast.
Around his throat sat another Ash beast collar.
I hadn’t known. I crouched, reading the runes because there was nothing else I could do for him.
Memory runes layered thick across the band, the same corrupted dialect that had been on Lucy’s.
Except the daylight restriction on his collar was missing.
And several others were replaced with more memory runes.
Lucy dropped into his blood. “Tavian. Tavian, look at me. Tell me how to help you, tell me what to do.” Her hands hovered over the blade, over the wound, shaking as much as her voice. “Don’t you dare die. Tell me how to fix this.”
“Can I take this off,” I whispered, looking into Lucy’s frantic eyes. “I don’t know how else to be helpful.”
She nodded, fighting back tears as I put my hands to his throat. I knew this work now, knew exactly where the gaps were. I unwove it in one pass.
The collar fell open.
Tavian surfaced with a gasp that arched his whole body off the ground, and the first thing out of him, before pain, before fear, was a name. “Celeste. Celeste.”
I went still. He was laying there, breathing, but bleeding out. The man who’d sworn he’d never seen a red dragon, who’d taken one look at Lucy and saved her several times. It was him. The whole reason we’d crossed three lands.
Relief hit me so hard I barely registered the griffin that hit the ground beside us hard enough to throw grit. Calder dropped off Silas’s back with Ramiel right behind him, and the second they were free, he shifted.
Silas’s eyes swept the scene. Me first, fast and thorough. Then the man bleeding in the dirt.
His whole face changed. The careful set of it dropped away all at once. His mouth parted. The color went out of him, and for one breath he didn’t look like the demon who walked into every disaster certain he’d walk back out. He looked like a boy who’d just found someone he’d lost long ago. “Lyric?”
“This is Lyric?” Pip asked, eyes wide and full of sorrow as she flew from Calder’s pocket and hovered near the man.
Lyric’s shaking hands came up and caught Lucy’s face, smearing her with his own blood, dragging her down close, like he couldn’t hold his eyes on her past an inch.
“I saved you. When you were a baby. I saved you.” His breath rattled wet.
“You were my last rebellion. I got you out. I got you out. Why did you ever come back, foolish dragon?”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy whispered and her sob went straight to my heart.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Lucy. You have to let him go.” She didn’t move, so I gripped harder and made my voice the steady one, because one of us had to be and it wasn’t going to be her.
“Listen to me. We know how to save him. We do. But not here. You have to let him go with Calder so we can.”
Silas cleared his throat and stepped away. “Hunters. Coming down the mountain and they have witches with them.”
Some stubborn part of me had let itself hope the fire took him, that I’d left Wickett burning on that floor and because I still bore his mark, it only meant he was off somewhere dying a slow and painful death. I should have known better.
I’d watched men like him survive worse than me.
So, of course he hadn't burned. He was too vicious to give me that. And he’d been tracking me across every land we’d run through.
The only real surprise was that it’d taken him this long to come down the mountain.
Between us, the whole of Luneth Hollow was waking into chaos.
Dragons loose in a sky they’d never been given, doors thrown wide, a city finally free all at once.
“Calder.” Silas’s voice was sharp. “Take them. Now.”
Calder was already crouching, already gathering Lyric in his arms. Pip dove into his pocket.
But Ramiel didn’t move. “I’m not leaving. You need me here. The cover, the illusions, you can’t hold this without—”
“Calder needs an anchor to Kiamond more. If he dies, she dies,” Silas said, pointing at me. “You have to get Lyric to Lore. Now.”
Ramiel looked at me. At Silas. At the line of hunters coming down the white face of the mountain.
Then he swore, low and filthy, and put his hand on Calder’s shoulder.
“You too, Syneca,” Silas growled.
“Not a chance.” I turned to Calder. “If he dies, I die. Go now.”
Calder nodded. The four of them folded out of the world between one breath and the next, and the battle cry came rushing in to fill the place where they’d been.
Silas turned to me.
He shook his head and I knew exactly what it meant. I’d thrown myself behind a wall I couldn’t be pulled back through, I’d broken an altar with a dragon and a prayer, I’d done a dozen things he’d told me not to do, and he was furious about every one of them.
So, he did the only sensible thing. He grabbed a fistful of my coat and hauled me toward him.
His mouth came down on mine and the anger went straight into it, all that held-back, white-knuckled control breaking loose at once.
There was nothing careful in him now. One hand fisted in my coat and the other drove into my hair, tipping my head exactly where he wanted it, and he kissed me like he’d been rationing himself for years and had finally run out of reasons to.
I felt the heat of him through every layer between us.
The taste of him. The low sound that ground out of his chest when I kissed him back just as hard, fingers twisting in his coat to drag him closer, because I was also done pretending I wanted anything more than this.
He kissed me like he’d made up his mind.
Like he didn’t care who came down that mountain or what they saw.
His teeth caught my lower lip and my knees forgot their job, and the only thing holding me upright was the arm he’d locked around me, the solid certain heat of him bending me into the line of his body.
And somewhere in the middle of it, something gave.
A weight simply lifted off my chest. The life debt unspooled and let go all at once, a tether snapping clean.
The suddenness of being free of it nearly undid me more than the kiss had.
No more bargain with a Fury. No more leash on my own thoughts.
No more dying a little every time I let myself want the wrong peace.
Free.
I gasped against his mouth and he swallowed it, and for one impossible second there was no city falling apart beneath us, no hunters on the slope, no impending fight. Just his hands and his mouth and the wild reckless certainty that I’d have crossed three more lands for exactly this.
He pulled back first, just far enough to breathe, his forehead dropping to mine. Neither of us said anything. Then he went rigid.
His head came up. That sharp, scanning focus snapped back into place all at once, sweeping the slope, the rooftops, the chaos boiling up from the city below, counting heads the way he always did when the danger wasn’t done with us yet.
“Syn.” Something cold threaded through his voice. His eyes cut back to mine. “Where the hell did Lucy go?”