Chapter 39
Elora
The Red District sprawled beneath Elora like a map of glowing embers.
Her shadow passed over a drunk couple stumbling from a pleasure house, neither looking up to notice the dark shape against the moon.
She angled her body, feathers adjusting as she spiraled around the communication tower.
Its spire pierced the darkness, the signal light at its peak pulsing with hypnotic regularity.
On a walkway below, a guard yawned and stretched, his crossbow hanging loose at his side, eyes never lifting to the night sky.
Elora circled higher, riding a warm updraft that lifted her above the tower’s peak. There—just beneath the beacon housing—a maintenance balcony jutted out. No footprints disturbed the thin layer of soot coating its metal floor. No human scent lingered there.
Perfect.
Elora circled once more, assessing the space.
The balcony was small but sufficient for landing if she was precise.
A window stretched across the wall beside it, the glass dark except for occasional flashes of light from within.
The room beyond looked vacant. No movement disturbed the shadows inside, no light other than occasional glimmers reflecting from the signal apparatus above.
Her golden eyes cut through the darkness as she nudged the window with her muzzle. The glass yielded silently, sliding on well-maintained hinges until the gap was just wide enough for her to enter.
Blood. The copper scent slammed into her before she’d even crossed the threshold—fresh, overwhelming. Her nostrils flared, nearly retreating from the assault. Still, she forced her massive form through the opening, shadows clinging to her fur as she dropped soundlessly to the floor.
That metallic smell grew heavier inside, mingling with the acrid notes of sweat and terror, plus something else—something familiar that bristled her fur.
Her vision adapted immediately to the darkness, revealing the small round room.
Crimson stained the wood in violent sweeps, evidence of someone who had struggled while bleeding profusely.
A body slumped against the metal support pole. Wrists in chains, hands fallen open like wilted flowers. Blond curls—once bright as summer wheat—now dark and sticky where they clung to pale skin.
Symond.
Elora’s heart stuttered in her chest. The battered body chained to the pole seemed impossibly small—nothing like the towering presence that stood over her months ago, claiming that her pain was his justice.
She shifted back to human and knelt beside him.
“Symond,” she whispered, her fingers finding his throat. Beneath the skin, nothing. She pressed harder, waited. Then—a flutter against her fingertips, so faint it might have been her own pulse echoing back. Skip. Beat. Skip. Skip. Beat.
She tilted his head back carefully, pushing the matted curls away from his face. The sight made her stomach clench.
Dried blood caked the edges of his mouth, crusting in thick flakes down his chin and neck like rust on old metal.
Her stomach twisted as she traced the trail of gore down his body.
His once-pristine Institute robes in tatters, the fabric sliced open to expose his bare chest to the biting air.
Angry welts crisscrossed his skin: burn marks, precise and intentional, forming strange patterns she couldn’t decipher.
They looked raw, blistered, like someone had pressed hot metal against his flesh repeatedly.
“Symond,” she whispered again, her voice catching in her throat. “Can you hear me?
A tremor passed through his eyelids, so slight she might have imagined it. Then his hand twitched, rising shakily from his lap to grasp her arm. His fingers barely encircled her wrist, the grip so weak.
Elora looked at his face, meeting his gaze as his eyes cracked open.
Recognition flickered there. He knew her.
But beyond that simple awareness lay nothing.
No relief at being found. No fear of what might happen next.
His eyes were hollow, empty pools that reflected only resignation.
The vacant stare of someone watching their own funeral from miles away.
“Who did this to you?” She gently took hold of his shoulders, keeping him upright.
His cracked lips parted. He struggled to form words, jaw working uselessly. The sound that bubbled up from his throat raised goosebumps on her arms—a wet, gargling keen that climbed in pitch until it cracked. His right hand lifted, trembling violently as he pointed behind her.
On the ground lay something small and glistening wet in the shadows.
At first, she thought it might be a scrap of raw meat, perhaps bait for an animal trap.
Then she saw the distinctive curve, the small bumps of taste buds still visible on one side, the jagged tissue at the base where it had been wrenched free.
The metallic scent of blood rose from it, mingling with the copper taste that suddenly flooded her own mouth as she realized what she was looking at.
Her throat constricted, acid burning up her esophagus.
She forced it back with a hard swallow that made her eyes water.
When she turned back to Symond, his vacant stare pierced through her, his once-arrogant face now a broken mask.
Her knees weakened; the room tilted slightly as if the tower itself was swaying beneath the weight of what had been done here.
Her skin burned as though she’d stepped too close to fire.
The nightglider within, clawed inside her ribcage, raking against bone and sinew, a visceral rage unrelated their shared past. The Institute, his arrogance, his cruelty toward her—none of it mattered right now.
What lay before her transcended personal grievance. This was desecration.
Symond’s pupils dilated. His gaze fixed over her shoulder. Elora spun.
A leather coil sliced the air with a hiss, missing her ear by a finger’s width. It struck the metal pole with a crack that showered orange sparks across the floor. Her heel caught as she stumbled backward, shoulder blades hitting a beam.
Above the whip’s handle stood a man she knew—one-eyed, ginger-haired.
Gerard.
His lips froze mid-curl, teeth still bared in anticipation of a hit that never landed.
He looked wrong somehow. Diminished. His pants hung loose at the hip, no belt holding them up, the hem of his shirt only half-tucked, ginger hair unwashed and sticking up at odd angles.
Stubble patched his jaw unevenly. His remaining eye, though—that hadn’t changed.
It still held the same hunger that had followed her at The Institute.
Heat flooded her gums as her fangs descended, pricking her lower lip from within. Her fingertips tingled, then split as claws emerged with soft clicks against one another. She kept the full beast leashed, for now.
Gerard’s throat bobbed. A muscle twitched beneath his jaw, pulsing in rapid rhythm. His gaze dropped to her hands, lingered on the curved claws, then jerked back to her face. His eye widened, pupil shrinking to a pinprick as his breathing quickened with rapid pulls of air through flared nostrils.
What she saw in that single eye made the blood in her veins run hot with satisfaction.
Fear.
Real fear. The kind that didn’t come from threat assessment or tactical calculation. The kind that lived in the body, in the memory of something that had already happened.
Good, she thought.
Gerard twisted a ring from his finger—plain metal, unremarkable—and set it on the table with a soft clink.
His attention wavered, fixated on the ring. She tensed, recognizing her opening. Then the metal circle moved—just slightly—on the wooden surface, as she shifted her weight between her feet. Like a compass finding magnetic north.
Her eyes narrowed, but the leather whip whistled through the air before she could process what she’d seen.
She flung herself backward near the windows, feet slipping in the tacky blood.
The coil cracked where her face had been a heartbeat earlier.
Her spine slammed against stone, breath punching from her lungs.
When her vision cleared, Gerard stood between her and Symond, leather coiled around his fist, a snake ready to strike again.
The moonlight streamed through the windows, stripping away the shadows that had concealed her.
The leaves and vines of her Al’teran garb clung to her skin, and she felt the inadequacy of them in a way she hadn’t since the first time she put them on.
Gerard’s eye traveled the exposed skin between each tendril of greenery, lingering at the curve where waist met hip.
His voice dropped to a purr, the tension draining from it. “Well.” His tongue darted out to wet his lower lip as his eye traveled down her body, pausing on the leg she refused to put pressure on. “This isn’t what I expected to be bringing back to Thorn.”
He let the whip dangle, the leather tip brushing against his thigh in slow, rhythmic strokes. “I had a corpse planned,” he said, his voice intimate as a lover’s whisper. “Not exactly what Thorn wants, but still acceptable.”
He tilted his head, the single eye moving over her again, undressing her inch by inch, lingering at her waist where a vine wrapped twice around bare skin. His breathing quickened. “But this—I might need to sample before delivery.”
The beast surged so violently in her defense that her vision fractured at the edges, gold flooding everything until the room pulsed with it. She forced it down, commanding it to wait. Elora understood with a cold, crystalline clarity that his need to claim could be the thing that would undo him.
Gerard wasn’t Thorn—the true architect of her suffering—but the hunger to end him burned just as fierce. Florence’s careful plans dissolved in the acid of her rage.