Page 23 of Beast of Blood and Ash
The air thickened, pressing in. My heart jerked, a stuttering, frantic bird against my ribs. I squeezed my legs tighter, gasping, sweat slick on my brow. The panic boiled over.
When I opened my eyes, there was a monster in the doorway.
A scream snagged in my throat, a hook in my flesh, unable to break free. I saw blood. A sword. Red scales. Giant wings. The figure filled the entire entry, too wide for the frame, his head ducked under the lintel. His tail flicked with restless, deadly intent.
He was going to take me back.
Oh god. Oh god. No.
I scrambled backward, my legs tangling in the thin bedding. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. My body locked down as the monster stepped into my room. Blood dripped from his blade to the floor, scenting the air with copper and smoke and a wave of Drakarn heat that was too much, burning, suffocating me.
“Reika.”
That voice. Deep, a rumble like shifting stone, yet gentle. The sound was a strange comfort, frayed around the edges but careful, as if he knew what fear tasted like.
Omvar.
Though he was covered in blood, he didn’t raise his weapon. His massive silhouette pulsed in the heat crystal’s wavering light, gold eyes fixed on me, unreadable.
“You need to come with me.”
He sounded wrong. Too calm, too controlled for the carnage staining his arms and claws. Muscle flexed under red-black scales as his sword swung low at his side. Blood, some of it his, most of it not, spattered his chest and trickled across the ritual scars that mapped a history of violence.
My mouth worked, but no sound came out. Then I found my voice, a jagged croak. “What?”
He stepped closer, moving with the caution of a man approaching an animal about to bolt. I pressed myself farther away. My herb satchel spilled to the floor, mint and fire-thistle, my only shield, utterly useless.
“It’s Ignarath,” Omvar said. He sounded like he bit the words in half to keep from snarling them. “It isn’t safe.”
The world shrank to the beat of my own heart. Ignarath. The name was a blade pressed to my throat.
I drove my back against the icy wall. “No. No. I’m safe here.” My voice was a thin thread of sound. My nails dug into the stone at my side, seeking an anchor. I shook my head, again and again. “I’m safe here.”
Omvar’s eyes flickered with an emotion that was there and then gone. Regret, maybe. He crouched, a mountain of muscle and scale, folding his wings as if to make himself smaller. “You’ll be safer with me.” His voice was steady now, a low drum in my bones, but something wild burned behind it. “I walked throughthe city, and no one tried to stop me. Do you think they’d stop someone else? Skorai wants you back.”
Skorai. Tournament Master of Ignarath. The monster’s monster.
My skin went cold. No one tried to stop him. The realization trickled through my panic, chilling me to the bone. My safety here was a lie, just another thin door between me and the jaws of the world.
I dug my heels into the sleeping platform, trying to ground myself against the terror flooding every vein. “I’m not going. I can’t.” My voice broke, all my intended fury coming out as brittle desperation.
He sheathed his blade, the movement slow and deliberate, a statement hanging in the air between us. He raised both hands, claws tipped with blood, palms up in a gesture of surrender.
“I swear on the Forge and my honor,” he said, the words thick, like a prayer, “that no harm will come to you. Not while I breathe.”
A Drakarn oath. The Forge. Even I knew what that meant. Words that could not be broken.
My vision swam. I was shaking so hard my teeth clicked together. “Why would you do that?” I rasped.
He didn’t answer right away. The silence stretched, heavy with his scent, smoke and ozone and something I couldn’t name that called to a part of me I refused to acknowledge. His chest rose and fell. The faint, terrifying pulse of the mate-bond thrummed under my skin, ancient and wild. My body wanted to lean into that heat, to let it burn away the chill, but I recoiled from the memory of what his kind could do.
Omvar moved closer, one step, two, so careful. He stopped just out of reach, lowering his massive body to his knees to be level with me. His hand rose and hovered over my wrist. He didn’t touch. I could see the tremor in him, a fight against theurge to grab me, to drag me to the safety he promised. But he didn’t. He waited.
I stared at his hand. Fangs. Claws. Blood.
Fight or freeze.
I closed my eyes, trying to follow the memory of his voice. Gentle. Always gentle, even when his presence made every alarm in my body shriek.
