Page 9 of What Whispers in the Dark
A moment of silence. Then …
Aiden’s eyes sprang open, finding Eldacar’s soundless stare.
What?He bunched his brow and angled his head down. Had he left his belt open again? The snaps and ties of his pants? Something on his face?
Eldacar looked at Aiden, puzzled, and then drifted his gaze to Alora’s darkened tent. Red curly locks drifted along his palm as he scratched the back of his head and down his neck. Those brown eyes filled with something like panic. “Aiden…”
But the crack in Eldacar’s voice … how his skin had suddenly blanched …
He wasn’t joking.
Aiden fumbled to his feet, stirring dust in the wake. Alora’s tent was in front of him in an instant before he swung open the flaps and burst inside.
A quick scan of the tent.Empty. Truly-bloody-empty. Fucking hells.
In the back, a broken table and gaping hole in the canvas stared back at him like a cruel smile. And from the light pull of energy constantly causing the hairs on his half-human arms to stand, Garrik’s shield remained. No Ravens—no one unpermitted to slip through it—found their way in. Which meant…
His stomach nearly hollowed out.
No—no!
Aiden stormed out the doors and surged toward Eldacar. Before the young male could do anything, he latched onto Eldacar’s shoulders, shaking him in urgency. “How long ago?” he boomed.
Jade would hang him from the gallows for this. Garrik would let her do it. He wouldn’t blame them.
Terror filled Eldacar’s eyes as he stuttered, “I-I d-don’t know! T-t-twenty m-m-minutes, maybe!”
“Bloody hells!” In one breath, Aiden ran to the last horse hitched at their firesite, leapt and mounted, and tore past Garrik’s tent like a branch of lightning was chasing him. Smears of white rushed past the borders of his vision. He weaved, missing posts and ropes between barracks, almost toppling over soldiers patrolling, and jumped over fires with dinner stewing that heknewhe could make better with a simple spice or sauce.
Focus.
Alora was out there. The one thing Garrik had charged him with. The one thing he was confident he could do and blundered it up the moment he was left to his own devices.
“Move!” he shouted and waved his hand when Dragons didn’t see or hear him incoming. Very nearly flattening one young male in the dirt and knocking another into a rack of bows. The sound of the snapping wood dragged behind like his horse’s breath. Panting as hard as he was with every stomp of its hooves.
There was only one way Alora could go, and he was headed directly for it. Not the lake, not the hill with their sentries—onlyone.
Soaring by the line of hitched horses, Aiden knew Garrik would feel the magic rip through his bones, but it didn’t stop his horse from tearing through the shield. Leaving Aiden wholly unaffected before they sprang over fallen trunks and entered the forest.
Aiden gripped the sword strapped to his side and burned his eyes into the trees blurring by. With a low snarl, he threw out to the surrounding darkness, threw out as if his simple ask could have the female answer him, “Where the devil are you?”
Every last second they spent in Brennus’s camp turned her gaze as searing as a dragon’s flame. Which didn’t seem possible since they were already scorching, havingjusttorn through Ravens in the forest.
But now …nowJade was expected to stand idle, her daggers making her skin itch with anticipation, while her High Prince had been forced to encounter thatbitchbefore disappearing inside the High General’s tent.
It wasn’t long before she trained her lethal intentions on another.
The vile monster stared at her from across the camp. He said nothing—he didn’t need to. His presence alone was an offense. A sickness unleashed on their world the very moment he breathed in it.
And Jade, knowing she could not kill him—not here—decided her hatred was a blade, and she would make certain he felt every starsdamn cut.
This bonus sceneis nestled inside Chapter Fifteen, where Garrik and members of his Shadow Order enter Magnelis’s war-camp, which is led by Brennus. Garrik was forced to encounter the pain of his past and then enter the High General’s tent while Jade and Thalon were ordered to remain outside. Without their High Prince, can Thalon and Jade keep the peace? Or will the scars of Garrik’s past tear open and reveal the festering wounds buried beneath?
One thing was certain. She was going to stab Malik in the fucking face.
Jade kept her silence. Didn’t speak as she sat on the thick wood of a hitching post. One knee bent near her chest with her forearm poised on it, while the other leg dangled, anchoring her boot to the grass. Carefully sharpening her dagger, the very motion a threat, she studied the male who leaned againsta considerable pillar near Brennus’s massive tent, arms folded across his chest.
His wide shoulders draped along the wood that smelled as if someone had recently suffered a whipping while tied to it. And by the fresh stains of crimson, she didn’t doubt someone had been.
