Page 40 of Merciless Is My Crown

Down here, the brimstone stench was choking, and dragon skeletons towered over us with an enormity I couldn’t wrap my head around. I’d never seen a creature this big, couldn’t even imagine something this large moving across the ground, much less sailing through the air.

Mountains that looked like anthills now loomed like lonely sentinels. Down here the effects from the magic were devastating, my magic already waning as if the island was sucking out my marrow.

“This is a trap,” I hissed to Zorander. “Are you feeling the effects?”

He flexed his fingers as if they were stiff. “We have to make this fast. Before we end up like them.” He jerked his head to a bleached ribcage a few paces away. “As much as I’d like to end up on an island in the middle of an ocean, I have no desire to spend my time as a pile of bones.”

Torin went straight to Simon. “There.” She pointed above us. “Halfway up. Do you see that?”

Spikes of glossy black obsidian burst from the mountainside like a giant’s crown had been laid there, completely at odds with the roughly tumbled granite that formed the rest of the island. Each spike had to be fifty feet tall, ten feet around.

“That’s where we’re headed.”

The four of us went still, spotting the same thing.

Movement below those black obsidian spikes, followed by the distant crash of tumbling rocks. Raziel rolled his neck with a dry crack. “That answers that question. Now we have to find out how many and what are they.”

“We weren’t here long enough to see anything but the dragons.” Simon kept his gaze pinned on that spot below the obsidian, but whatever that was didn’t move again. “We only saw three dragons and they were ten, twenty times the size of whatever that was.”

“So not a dragon, then.” Raziel sounded almost…disappointed we weren’t battling our way through a horde of enormous, dangerous beasts.

He shot me a crooked grin, and I couldn’t help sighing when he added, “Not that I want to fight a dragon, mind you, but I’d be lying if I hadn’t hoped to at least see one today.”

“Let’s get up there and free your friend.” I double-checked my weapons, handing Simon my extra knife. Raziel did the same, giving Torin a blade small enough to conceal in her palm. “There’s a place to land once we’re up there?” I asked, holding out my hand to her.

“Zeph’s den is a cave deep inside the mountain. There was a parapet outside the entrance, like the one we landed on but smaller. That was before the Oracle did…that.” Simon shed the robe, then we flew upward through the mists.

16

TAVION

Jealousy turned every thought inside my head to a despairing, aching roar.

Dark, malicious thoughts—I had no idea where they came from—swirled in my head, settling like crows on carrion, picking and tearing.

This wasn’t even my wolf…this was something else.

I managed to hold my tongue when Anaria finally disengaged herself from DeVayne’s naked body, grinding my teeth together hard enough I might have broken a molar when she took the fucking coat I’d found her and wrapped the bastard up.

All while I was fucking hemorrhaging rage. How dare she? How fucking dare she make this out like getting us to Nightcairn was her responsibility and I was nothing but…a hinderance?

I was not sick.

There was nothing wrong with me.

I was fucking fine.

I’d been tortured nearly to death by that sadist Mistress, hadn’t eaten or slept properly in weeks, and before that…well, Solok had damn near broken every bone in my body. Of course I was fucked up in body, mind, and spirit.

Who wouldn’t be?

She thinks you’re weak. Worthless. Useless.

Blackness swirled in, biting and nipping, planting ideas—fucking images—that took root the moment I thought them. Anaria. Tristan. Laughing together. At my culpability.

“We go through the portal tonight,” I decided, taking back control, not giving two shites who liked my decision. “I want this fucking place at our backs by the time we stop for the night.”

Even Tristan, who looked like death warmed over, nodded.

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