Chapter 5
Aeson
“FIVE DAYS. FIVE. FUCKING. DAYS!” I snarl, my fist coming down hard on the arm of the chair I just dropped into.
A distinct crack fills the air, and the armrest crumbles into pieces that promptly fall to the ground. I stare at the damage and talk myself down from using it as a sign that I should destroy everything else around me to help purge my broiling frustration.
The diaphanous map floating in front of me flickers and then settles when no further violence disrupts its signal.
I stare at the barren terrain glowing before me and take in the crimson dots speckled across its surface like blood spatter.
It’s a macabre reflection of how I feel right now.
Each scarlet speck on the map represents a false alarm, a trail that was tracked relentlessly, only to end up with nothing to show for it.
Every day I study this tapestry of my failures, and just like the blocked bond sitting in my chest, it offers no answers as to how Ever Tenebrae is eluding me.
An impatient rumble climbs up my throat as I review the projection of the deadlands for the thousandth time.
My temper rides me almost as hard as my dragon, both infuriatingly tethered to the absence of one conniving little Syphon.
The only thing I’d like more than incinerating this map and never thinking about it again is finding Ever—and the only way that will happen is if I solve the puzzle of where, in this Source-forsaken desert, she’s hiding.
I scour the detailed imaging of The Scorch’s peaks and valleys like I haven’t dug through all of its secrets a hundred times already, but we’re missing something. We have to be. I just can’t for the fucking life of me figure out what.
Endless black dunes stretch across the surface of the glowing screen.
Massive yardangs line the west coast, rocky cliffs border the east, but drones have searched both, and Ever’s nowhere to be found.
The few carcasses of rotted cities from before The Bearing have been cleared and then burned until not even the skeletal remains of the long-forgotten structures exist anymore.
It helped purge my frustration?.?.?. for a time, but it’s been five days and we still have nothing.
“Careful, or you’re going to send yourself into a frenzy again,” Tove censures, strolling into the tent designated as our command center.
Her dark hair is freshly buzzed, and her gaze is playful, but there’s concern swirling there too. My answering grumble earns a dismissive scoff, and she drops into a chair across from me.
“Careful, or you’re going to send him into a frenzy,” Ogdan corrects, his gray eyes fixed on Tove as he joins us.
He adjusts the knot of burgundy hair at the back of his head, but it’s nothing more than a cover for the way he slyly studies me. Whatever he finds must not be too worrying, because his attention leaves me and turns to everyone else pouring into the tent after him.
“What about a frenzy?” Chastain asks, the last one to file in. “Should I have one of the other Flights send down more blood brokers to help take the edge off, Aes? I don’t think there’s many left to hunt in the lower territories anymore aside from the stinky ones we still haven’t found.”
I glare at him, needing the reminder of another failure like I need a hole in my leg.
“Nice, airhead,” Tove snarks. “Can’t you see he’s already feeling all miserable? Why remind him that we haven’t found those Tainted fucks that you know who escaped from?”
I sigh and narrow my gaze at the antagonistic Seeder. “You can say her name,” I grumble at Tove.
“I know,” she chirps. “But I prefer not to.”
I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose as though it will make all of this go away.
“Come now, Scion, you didn’t think it would be that easy to find her.
She stayed hidden for sixty-two years, probably would have kept it that way forever if those blood brokers hadn’t driven her off a cliff,” Farrow encourages, but the reassurance doesn’t land—mostly because I did think I’d find her by now.
I had complete faith that our affinities and superior magi-tech would have her cornered within hours, days at most, and yet none of those things have produced even the thinnest lead.
We have her blood from the hospital in Lairwood, but her reveal after she killed the Matron altered her signature, and the specimen can’t be used to track her.
The samples from her decoy bank deposits and the animals she’s been using to create false trails have also been a dead end for the Thrashers.
I thought the frail bond connecting me to Ever might reveal some sense of where she is, but it’s been completely useless.
She’s disappeared without a trace?.?.?. like she never existed at all.
I rub the center of my chest as unwelcome feelings try to barge through my pique.
Right now, anger is my refuge; it’s my driving force and the foundation of my focus.
But with each day that passes, with each hour that turns up no signs or hints of the Syphon, my fury is gradually morphing into worry.
It now crawls beneath my skin, relentlessly burrowing into my marrow until all I can think about is every horrible thing that could be happening to Ever while she’s out in the world alone.
What if that evil bastard Wistan has her?
What if we think she’s hiding, but really she’s in trouble?
The depraved tallies and the malevolent slashes covering my Bonded will haunt me until my dying day.
What if he’s doing that to her again? She could need my help, and I’m just sitting here breaking furniture and rage-burning everything in sight.
A ripple moves through my scale armor, and my Wing stops talking immediately.
The urge to shift is overwhelming, but I fight to walk it back, grappling for control while I calm my emotions.
It used to be as easy as breathing. I was taught by the best at a young age to stay in command of myself, but the broken connection with Ever, and the distance between us, is making it increasingly harder to level out.
Like he can read the direction of my thoughts, Jori steps up and draws my attention.
“She revealed, Aes. She has scale armor and can heal. She’s not vulnerable like she was before.
No affinity can get near her now without her explicit permission.
If she’s in danger, she’ll shift and then we’ll find her.
She’s okay,” the Healer soothes, and I cling to each word like it’s the only thing keeping me afloat in a perilous sea determined to drown me.
My Wing gives me time to get my shit together, and their silent support is like a cooling mist slowly working to douse my fire. When it feels like I can breathe again without melting everything around me, I open my eyes.
“How can the bond be making me feel like this , and yet I can’t feel her ?” I ask, not missing the edge of desperation clinging to each word.
No one answers, because no one knows.
“Maybe she’s not even in The Scorch. When you brought it up in the rookery that night, her response could have been calculated. Maybe she was trying to throw you off. She could be on the other side of the country for all we know,” Gatlin offers, and Karis nods his agreement.
“No, she’s here,” I counter. “I may not be able to sense her, but I sense that.”
“The dwarves will arrive later today. Their loam hounds are built for subterranean tracking. If she’s underground, we’ll find her,” Sondar assures.
I notice that his long black hair is dripping water down his violet scale armor, like he just got out of the shower and didn’t dry off. Or maybe it’s sweat. Who knows.
“I’ve got a Flight combing through the wyvern archives to see if there’s anything of interest there,” Ogdan adds.
“We know there’s a connection with them and the Syphons; maybe they have a way to protect their nests that we’ve forgotten about, something that would help keep them hidden from dragons specifically. ”
I nod, grateful for the reminders that we’re doing everything we can. I just wish it made me feel better, or at least dislodged this feeling that we’re racing against some kind of impending doom.
Restless, I stand and stride out of the oversized tent.
Bone-melting heat crashes into me instantly, and I once again curse this horrid place.
The sun is hot, the sand is hot, the bloody air is blistering.
There’s no escape from the searing touch and the unforgiving conditions of this hellhole.
How Ever or anyone else survived down here is incomprehensible.
I’m both astonished by her perseverance and skeptical of her sanity.
To say nothing of the fact that she shouldn’t have been out here in the first place.
She should have been in Four Tiers, with The Horde, with me.
I shield my eyes against the bright onslaught of the day and survey the endless expanse of the sand and dunes I can already feel sapping me of my energy. Anger begins to roil and roll through me again, and I move away from camp so I can give in to the bitter bite of my dragon.
“Find me something to kill. A lot of somethings,” I rumble, the threads of my temper already fraying despite my white-knuckled attempt to hold everything together. “Anyone or anything that deserves a painful end.”
“On it,” Herm declares, peeling himself away from the group surrounding me to make the necessary arrangements.
I start to run, the terrain fighting me with each step. My feet sink into the hot, abrasive sand as it gives way to my strides only to pull my feet deeper into its clutches. Fire sears me from the inside out, and I let the inferno claim me.
One step, I’m a drake sprinting through the desert, and the next I’m an obsidian dragon taking flight.
I roar as I climb into the blistering sky, the sound a declaration of my rage, my wrath, my vow.
I will never give up. I will rip the deadlands apart dune by dune if that’s what it takes.
Ever Tenebrae is mine , and there is nowhere she can hide that I won’t find her. I don’t care how long it takes.