Chapter 15
Rell
Rell walked ahead of the wagon, boots punching through the half-frozen soil with every step. The air was sharp enough to make his eyes water. Through the trees, the lantern light stuttered— just enough to make out the Snatcher wagon The Hive had borrowed. Permanently.
It sold the lie well enough. Cracked paint, iron locks, dried blood nobody had bothered cleaning because, honestly, it helped.
From the road, you’d never guess it was hauling anything except the Empire’s usual brand of misery.
The real Snatchers were in a ditch ten miles back, horseless and considerably lighter in the coin department.
Inside this wagon, small bodies huddled beneath layers of wool blankets, breath rising in tiny clouds despite the brazier’s glow.
A half-eaten loaf of bread sat beside a pot of honey, fingerprints still visible in its golden surface.
In the corner, a girl with a fading bruise across her cheek clutched a wooden horse to her chest, her fever-flush finally receding.
A Hive healer leaned forward to brush damp hair from a boy’s forehead as he whimpered in his sleep, her callused fingers gentle against his skin as she hummed three low notes that seemed to settle him instantly.
Florence’s plan was eating through the north like rot through cheap wood—slow, quiet, and impossible to stop once it got started.
Every wagon they hit meant fewer kids delivered to The Institute, more coin trickling back into villages that hadn’t seen a full larder in years.
Parents sold what they had to survive. The Hive just made sure “surviving” didn’t come with a body count attached.
He adjusted his crossbow strap and watched the dark. The Whispering Woods were doing their thing tonight—sounds that had no business existing, coming from directions that didn’t make sense. Trees talking to themselves, probably about him.
He should’ve been tracking. Listening for pursuit. Instead his brain had decided this was a great time to think about Elora.
He’d run the story enough times. The Al’terans were saviors, not savages. She’d woken up somewhere Thorn couldn’t reach. She was fine. The blank stare meant nothing. He almost believed it on good nights.
This wasn’t a good night.
He shook it off. The north didn’t forgive distraction, and he had a job.
The wagon creaked along behind him, its rhythm steady.
The Hive men at the reins were solid—quiet, no wasted movement.
Half of them had probably been cargo themselves once.
Rell trusted them to hit the drop point by dawn, hand the kids off to the river caravan, and disappear before anyone started asking questions.
He turned back toward the faint glow of the wagon lanterns, each exhale birthing ghosts that vanished into the night.
Behind him, one of the guards—Daven, the one with the burn scar stretching from jaw to collar—hummed three notes, then four, then three again.
“Little Sparrow,” his mother had called it.
Rell would hum it while combing his fingers through his sister’s hair on winter nights just like this one.
Though it sounded more like a dying toad when Daven sang it.
Crack.
Something heavy. Fifteen paces ahead. Too deliberate for falling branches.
The humming stopped mid-note. The wagon groaned to a halt.
Rell’s hand found the crossbow before his brain caught up. Up it came, bolt seated, string taut. Good. Fine. He was fine.
“Hold.” Low, steady. Everything listened—even the horses, which never listened.
Inside the wagon, a child whimpered. Wool rustled.
Then the canopy went insane. Birds, dozens of them, exploding out of the branches in every direction, feathers and moonlight and chaos, gone as fast as they came.
Then nothing. Not even wind. The Woods had gone so quiet he could hear his own pulse.
He squinted into the dark between the trunks, where the shadows had started doing something shadows weren’t supposed to do. Not moving, exactly. More like—rearranging. Like one patch of dark had quietly stepped behind another.
“Eryk.” He didn’t raise his voice. “You seeing this?”
“Nothing yet.” Eryk’s pupils had gone faintly blue from the night-vision draught. Useful. Currently not useful enough.
Then a scream.
Rell ran. Eryk was already in the underbrush, thrashing, fingers at a wound that had no business looking like that. “It came from—” Blood in his teeth. “Nowhere—”
The mist pulled apart, and his blood did something dramatic.
It was massive. Black fur that didn’t reflect light so much as eat it. Wings half-open, dragging the ground, leaking something that looked uncomfortably like aurora light. And the eyes—molten gold, fixed on him, clearly was a chip on its shoulder.
“A nightglider,” Rell said, to no one in particular.
The driver turned, face pale in the lantern light. “A what?”
The nightglider turned its head toward him, the motion almost human in its precision. Then it roared. The horses screamed. Somewhere behind him, a child started crying. The driver lost his grip on the reins.
Rell’s finger crushed the trigger. The bolt screamed through the air—
—and punched through empty darkness.
The creature was simply gone. The shadows where it had stood looked like ordinary shadows again.
The silence hit hard. Rell’s ears were still ringing. He forgot to breathe. Somewhere behind him, one of the horses was making a sound he’d never heard a horse make before.
Rell lowered the crossbow. His arms were shaking. Sweat had gone cold on the back of his neck. The road ahead was empty—or looked it. He kept the bolt seated.
Nightgliders didn’t cross the border. They were Al’teran—deep jungle, open sky. Not here. Not this far south.
Unless they had a reason.
His grip tightened on the crossbow. “Viliam?” he murmured under his breath.
The thought clawed at him. If it was Viliam, why appear now? Why attack his men? Why watch instead of speak? But if it wasn’t…
Another shout ripped through the night.
“Behind the cart!”
Rell spun. Mathias’s boots slipped in the mud as he dragged Eryk’s limp form toward the wagon, leaving a dark smear across the frost-crusted ground. Behind them—there—a patch of darkness thicker than the rest, moving against the wind.
The nightglider came out of the dark fast. Its claws caught air an inch from Mathias’s ear, close enough to pull hair.
Rell threw himself into its flank—something in his shoulder gave, and his vision whited out for a second.
The beast barely moved. Its gold eyes cut to him, then away, like he wasn’t worth the effort.
Mathias got both hands under Eryk and shoved him over the wagon’s side. The driver’s whip cracked.
“Go!” Rell’s voice scraped raw from his throat. “Ridge!”
The driver’s face drained of color. “But—”
“GO!”
Leather snapped. Hooves thundered. Frost exploded beneath wheels. The wagon’s retreating silhouette left Rell alone with his ragged breath clouding before him and the beast’s vendetta.
The nightglider hadn’t moved. He could see the individual hairs of its pelt, the way its chest expanded and contracted. The muscles along its shoulders were bunched tight. Its eyes were fixed on him. Just that—fixed, unblinking, the way nothing wild ever looked at anything it didn’t intend to kill.
With a desperate lunge, Rell clawed at his belt pouch, fingers seizing the glass vial. He ripped the stopper out with his teeth, tasting bitter residue as he hurled it down with all his strength.
The brilliance potion went off loud. White light punched outward in every direction, hard enough that he had to look away.
When he looked back, the nightglider was still there. Wings half-open. Not retreating.
“Come on, then,” Rell said. His finger found the trigger.
Then the light shifted across its face, and Rell went still.
The eyes. He knew those eyes. Not the gold—that was new—but the set of them, the way they fixed on him with something past animal rage.
Something specific. His stomach dropped.
He’d seen that look before, across a fire, across a room.
Directed at other people, never at him. Until now.
His breath caught. “No…”
The nightglider’s pupils contracted to golden slits. Its maw gaped, revealing teeth like jagged ivory daggers. The roar that followed vibrated through Rell’s ribcage and scattered frost from pine needles overhead.
Rell’s fingers hesitated with the crossbow.
Four hundred pounds of midnight fur slammed him backward.
His spine hit frozen earth, knocking the air from his lungs in a white cloud.
Claws punctured leather and sank into his shoulders.
The creature’s back legs pinned his hips, one massive paw pressing his belt where the knife hilt jutted uselessly.
Each exhale from the beast’s nostrils steamed in the cold, carrying the metallic tang of Eryk’s blood.
“Fuck,” Rell wheezed through compressed lungs.
The nightglider’s jaws snapped open inches from his face. Saliva dripped onto his cheek, warm against the night air. Its growl went straight through his skull and didn’t stop.
Rell’s eyelids dropped. His thoughts narrowed to the certainty that nobody would even find the body till spring.
He waited for teeth. And waited.
Instead—
A wet crack of bone. A low, guttural groan that sounded almost human.
He opened his eyes.
The beast’s muzzle was gone. Its claws, still on his shoulders, shortened to trembling fingers. Wings retracted, bones shifting beneath skin that glowed faintly in the light of the brilliance potion. Where fur had been, there was now flesh, though more sun-kissed than he remembered.
And above him, golden eyes in a face he’d spent two months trying and failing to not think about.
“Elora,” he whispered, the name escaping before thought.
Rell went still. She was real. She was here. She was furious.