Page 108 of The Jasad Crown

I tried to spit on his sorry attempt at a face, but the soldier’s arm was a boulder on my windpipe. The dulhath trailed a curved nail over the inside of my arm and lifted my hand to his face. He ran his nose over my palm, inhaling deeply. “What a true treat you are, Essiya.”

His lips curled back, revealing the bladed tip of his black tongue. With a gooey squelch, it split into seven wet slivers, each tip sharper than an arrow and likely capable of winnowing through skin and bone.

Dania’s bloody axe, I was going to be eaten. Five years living in Essam and slaying every beast Hanim could conjure only to die in the Mirayah. Jasad would fall because their Malika had gotten herself digested in a place that shouldn’t exist.

The tongues sprang toward my arm, and I shut my eyes, bracing for agony.

It never came.

I snapped my eyes open to the dulhath gurgling, clawing at his neck as Arin’s blade slid across his throat. With a fist in the dulhath’s thin hair, Arin slammed the blade into each of the dulhath’s eyes before cutting his tongues at the root, silencing the creature’s screams.

Sizzling blood splattered over me and the soldiers. They shot toward Arin as the dulhath’s body dropped to the sand, dead at last.

The Nizahl Heir put distance between us, drawing the mutated soldiers away from me. His hair had dried in dark silver waves, falling around the bruises matting the side of his face. Arin picked up the dagger I’d thrown at the dulhath and wiped it clean with the edge of his coat.

Get up and help him, I shouted at my prone limbs. The soldiers streamed toward Arin, leaving me behind like a forgotten pet, but I could not bring myself to do more than sit up in the sand.

I wanted to see him fight. I wanted to see what it looked like when Arin of Nizahl didn’t hold back.

At first, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. The soldiers seemed to drop around him untouched, hitting the ground without getting up again. He was barely moving, but they were falling.

Until the next wave of soldiers swarmed him, and I realized they weren’t keeling over on their own. Arin struck at a preternatural speed, a blade in each hand, slicing the soldiers at critical points—the pulse at their neck, their throat, the lower right of their belly. One of them threw himself at Arin, knocking him back a step and dislodging one of his daggers. I scrambled to my feet, but Arin had already hurled the soldier like a javelin, knocking him into three other attackers.

My mistake was in thinking an unleashed Arin would fight the way I did. Where I descended into a fog of instinct, reacting as my blade demanded and surrendering to the skill of my body, Arin led with his mind. He was a lightning strike, not a storm. Precise, fatal, and terrifying to behold. His body flowed with a grace and focus I would never master, not in any number of lifetimes.

It was awe-inspiring. Infuriating. Unbelievably attractive.

I wiped some of the sand from my cheek and shook myself. Indecent thoughts about the man currently slaughtering my would-be murderers was a normal reaction to almost being eaten.

No reason to allow Arin to have all the fun. I hurled myself into the fray, leaping onto the back of a soldier rushing Arin and tackling him to the ground.

“Did you enjoy the show?” Arin growled, wrenching a soldier to his knees and snapping his neck. The body listed, spraying sand as it thumped to the ground. In his last seconds, I could have sworn I saw relief in his eyes.

I caught the blade Arin tossed me and grinned. “Immensely.”

Between the two of us, we finished off the remaining soldiers in record time. When the last soldier fell, I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand and gazed at the corpses strung along the shore. How many? Fifty? A hundred?

My heart pounded, my breathing erratic from the exertion and the unrelenting heat of the sun. Arin slipped off his coat and threw it over his shoulder. Somehow, his vest had remained unscathed in the melee, the black clasps over his chest buckled tight. Without glancing at me, he strode over the bodies and headed for the woods.

Very mature. I followed him, enjoying the flex of his broad back as he maneuvered around the graveyard he’d created. “Too late to pretend,” I called in a singsong. “The dulhath said you went looking for me.”

Tension feathered across Arin’s shoulders. He was more wound up now than he’d been while facing a small army.

“Where are we going?”

He continued walking at an arrogantly fast clip, and I struggled to wade through the sand after him. Blocking me out was his grand approach, really?

“I don’t have my magic here! And I am guessing you found out you aren’t able to drain magic, or you wouldn’t have needed to kill the dulhath with your knife. We need to work together to get out of the Mirayah, and your theatrics are not helping anyone.”

Arin stopped to pick up a rock and wipe it on a dead soldier’s sleeve before tucking it into his pocket. Not a glance or syllable in my direction as he strode off once more.

Releasing an embattled sigh, I bent and scooped a handful of wet sand. I patted it into a ball, drew my arm back, and threw.

The ball of sand hit the back of Arin’s head and exploded. I had the rare pleasure of watching the Nizahl Heir halt in his tracks as sand dropped in clumps into the collar of his shirt.

“Do you want me to be in your debt? Is that why you keep saving me?” I snapped. “Keep your favors. I can take care of myself.”

At last, he turned around. “Debt?” Disbelief sharpened the word to a deadly point.

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