28. Adelina #2
I look out the window. The moment passes quickly.
By late afternoon, the road descends toward a wooded stretch less than an hour from the port. The trees here grow thick and dark, their branches tangled overhead. Snow lies in patches among the roots, but the road itself is mostly mud and stone. The carriage slows as the escort tightens around us.
I notice the shift in movement. The change in the horses. The way Rowan’s voice drops outside and does not lift again.
Kaedryn leans toward the communication slit. “Report.”
Rowan answers from the forward line. “Too quiet.”
The air in the carriage changes. Sylas’s easy expression disappears. Soren reaches for the satchel at his feet.
I sit very still. It’s too quiet. I don’t hear anything at first. Only wheels. Hooves. Leather. Wind moving through branches.
Then the horses scream. The carriage lurches sideways so hard I’m thrown against the wall.
Pain flashes through my shoulder and back, but the sound outside is worse.
Metal drawn. Men shouting. A wet, snarling cry that does not belong to any animal I know.
The carriage stops with a violent jolt, and Kaedryn is already on his feet, one hand braced against the ceiling, the other reaching for the door.
“Stay inside, Adelina!” he orders. Then he is gone.
Sylas follows. Soren grabs my arm before I can move, not harshly, but firmly. “Stay low.”
“What is it?”
Another scream rips through the road. This one is not a horse.
Soren’s expression hardens. “Varrow.”
The word turns my blood cold. Every child in Dravaryn knows stories of the Varrow.
Twisted things that feed on fear, despair, panic.
Creatures that wait in ruins and forests and borderlands, drawn to weakness like wolves to blood.
I thought most of those stories were meant to keep children from wandering.
Then something slams against the side of the carriage again. The wood cracks against a tree.
Soren swears and shoves me down as black claws rip through the window frame, splintering polished wood inches from my face.
A shape presses against the broken opening, humanoid but wrong, its skin gray and stretched too tightly over sharp bones, its mouth too wide, its eyes like a sheen of oil over water.
Fear detonates through me.
The creature inhales. I feel it pull.
Every terrified thought, every broken hope, every memory of my brother’s voice, the temple steps, Freya’s hands vanishing beneath a trapdoor, all of it surges toward the Varrow, my fear transformed into smoke and its mouth the only place it can go.
Soren strikes it with a burst of pale magic, driving it back from the window. “Move!”
He does not wait for me to obey. He pushes the carriage door open and pulls me out into chaos.
The road is full of them. A swarm.
They move between trees and guards, fast and jagged, bodies flickering with blackened magic, claws scraping over armor and wood.
Some crawl low over the ground. Others leap from branches with terrible precision.
One clings to the side of a horse, draining the animal’s panic until it collapses screaming beneath the weight.
Kaedryn is in the center of the road, wings out.
I have not seen them like this, fully manifested, black with deep blue-green undertones, vast and armored along the leading edges.
Shadows ripple across them like living metal as he cuts through the first line of Varrow with a blade in one hand and magic in the other.
His command rolls through the road, heavy enough that even I feel my knees weaken under it.
“Hold formation!”
His men obey instantly.
Sylas fights at his left, quicker than I expected, his magic striking in clean arcs that force two Varrow back from Kellan.
Rowan and Merritt move as though they have done this together for a hundred years, back to back, blades flashing.
Kellan is bleeding from one temple but still standing, driving a sword through the chest of a creature that screams without sound.
Soren remains near me until a wounded guard collapses nearby and he is forced to turn, magic already gathering in his hands. “Stay behind the carriage,” he snaps at me.
I press myself against the broken side of the carriage, heart hammering, hands shaking uselessly beneath my cloak.
The world is too loud. Too fast. I do not know where to look.
I do not know how to help. I do not know how to protect myself from creatures that drink the very emotion I cannot stop feeling.
A Varrow looks at me from across the road.
It smiles, and dread drops through me.
It starts toward me. I back away and hit the carriage wheel.
My wings flicker at my back, instinctive and weak, answering fear before sense. Pain lances through the hidden injuries at their base, so sharp my vision sparks. The wings falter and fail to manifest.
I cannot fly.
The Varrow lunges.
A guard steps between us, a younger Elyrian soldier whose name I don’t know, with a green cloak torn at the shoulder and fear bright in his eyes. He drives his sword toward the creature, but it twists around the blade and slams him into the carriage.
His head hits the wheel. He drops.
The Varrow turns back to me.
I cannot move. It comes too fast. One clawed hand closes around my throat, and the world goes cold from the inside out.
The draining is not like pain. Pain belongs to the body. This belongs to the mind and soul.
The Varrow pulls, and every dark thing inside me rises toward it, drowning me in fear and despair. I see the temple steps disappearing behind rain. I hear Varek whispering that I still belong to him, and Kaedryn calling me selfish.
Then the sudden, hollow thought breaks free, and I wonder if it would be easier to stop fighting because every road only leads to another cage.
My foot catches on something, and I fall on my backside. The creature’s face lowers close to mine. Its mouth opens.
A sound slips from me, thin and broken. Not a scream.
Surrender. Defeat.
And something in me hates it enough to anger me.
My hand brushes something on the ground. A hilt. The fallen guard’s sword. I close my fingers around it.
The Varrow pulls harder, lifting me a few inches off the ground.
It drinks my despair deeply. Its grip is like iron around my throat.
Black spots crawl across my vision. I don’t know where the heart is in a thing shaped like nightmare.
I don’t know how to fight. I have never been taught to hold a blade except as a ceremonial object, never taught to kill anything, never taught to save myself when running fails.
But the creature is close, and instinct does what training never did. I drive the blade upward with both hands. It sinks beneath its ribs. For one awful second, nothing happens.
Then I twist.
The Varrow jerks. Its eyes flare wide, oily darkness flashing silver-black, and the draining stops so abruptly I gasp.
The creature makes a sound like wind forced through broken glass.
Its grip loosens. I shove the blade deeper, sobbing now, not with grief or terror alone, but with every last scrap of fight I have left.
“Let go,” I choke as I use the leverage to stand. “Let go of me.”
The Varrow collapses. It falls hard, taking the sword with it, its body striking the mud at my feet before beginning to unravel at the edges into something darker than ash, threads of blackness peeling from bone and sinking into the wet ground like spilled ink.
I stare at it. My hands are empty. My lungs do not work. Someone shouts my name. I turn, or try to. The road tilts.
A second Varrow springs from the trees. I see it only as a blur, launching toward me with claws extended.
Then darkness sweeps between us.
Kaedryn.
His wing comes around me like a shield, hardening mid-motion into overlapping plates of black and blue-green armor.
The Varrow hits the outside with enough force to make the entire wing shudder.
Kaedryn’s arm locks around my waist, pulling me back against him as his other wing snaps outward and drives another creature away.
I should pull away. I should fear him.
But the wing around me blocks the world, and for one impossible second, all I can feel is heat at my back, his body behind mine, his breath harsh near my ear, and the violent, living force of the pull between us as it flares hard enough to burn.
“Stay with me,” he says.
I can’t answer.
His magic rolls over the road, darker than before. “STOP!” The command strikes like thunder as shadows explode.
Rowan and Merritt cut through two at once. Sylas drags Kellan clear, and Soren slams a burst of light and force into the creature clawing toward the fallen guard. Kaedryn turns and keeps me behind his wings as the last of the attackers are driven back and killed.
I hear it more than see it.
Screams. Steel. The horrible wet tear of bodies unraveling. Hooves stamping. Men breathing hard.
Kaedryn’s heart pounds against my shoulder where he holds me too close and not close enough to stop the cold spreading through my limbs. The draining has left something missing. Or maybe it woke what was already wrong.
My knees give. Kaedryn grips me tighter before I fall. His wings fold closer around us, shutting out the road, the bodies, the blood, the twisted remains of the creature I stabbed because I was too stubborn to die.
His face fills my vision. Gone is the cold, controlled man I know. Now he is furious and afraid.
“Adelina!”
I try to speak. Nothing comes. The pull between us flickers, then blurs.
His hand cups the side of my face. “Look at me!”
I am. I think I am. But his face is already fading, black at the edges, silver at the center.
The last thing I feel is the armored shelter of his wings around me and the strange, terrible thought that I have never once been protected by something so dark.
Then the world lets go.