The feline hissed again, and Loche moved with his mother’s deliberate steps, his eyes leaving hers only to search for anything he could use as a weapon, with Iviry doing the same on his mother’s other side.
As the cat continued stalking while they came up empty, he could almost hear Meyah snicker in his mind.
I am going to win,her dark gaze seemed to convey as the feline blinked, its thick eyelashes fluttering.You are going to die, and I am going to live, and I am going to win.
Iviry must have felt something similar because she snarled so viciously that even Loche stopped in his tracks.
He shook his head at his raging wife, but it did little to settle her. She snarled, “You’re not getting away with this, you bitch. Loche is right, you know. You are nothing like him. You are but an embarrassment of aperson, and we are going to erase you from this fucking world.”
Under other circumstances, he would have savored Iviry calling his mother a bitch, but right now? When they were tired after countless hours of battle, when they’d both sustained injuries, then there was no damned end in sight for this war? And without any fucking weapons to protect them?
No. Loche took a step forward as Iviry continued, “You’re a coward, Meyah. I’ve heard all about you. Leaving your son? Trying to manipulate him? Trying to fucking kill him? I am humiliated for you. Look at your people! They all left you forhim!”
“Iviry,” Loche cautioned, watching the hairs on the back of the large cat rise in anger. “Iviry, that’s enough?—”
“No! She should know what she missed out on!” she snarled back, her wild eyes finding his for a moment before locking back on his mother. “You fucked up, Meyah. Loche is the strongest, bravest, most loyal and caring person I have ever had the chance to meet, and I am almost three hundred years old! You don’t deserve to breathe the same air as him, and you definitely don’t fucking deserve to kill him.”
He knew what Iviry was fucking doing. She’d seen—not only on that ship, back when they fought the rebels, but on Korina—that he didn’t have it in him to kill his mother.
Right now? Iviry was trying to bait Meyah to go afterherso that she could try to take his mother down instead. Loche’s hands clenched, and he searched the bloodied and dirty deck once more for any weapons, butthere were none around them, the ship only slick with death.
None of his soldiers lived anymore. Black masks and bodies were scattered every few feet behind him, having joined Ardow and Venko in death.
It appeared the Oakgards’ Fae had decided to leave Meyah to it: The ship that had threatened their own steered toward where most of the screaming was happening.
The air stilled for but a second, and that was the only warning as his mother went after Iviry.
If Loche thought he’d known fear, there was nothing that could compare to his mother ripping a chunk of flesh out of Iviry’s side. His wife’s—his fucking mate’s—scream was the only thing Loche could hear as his body went warm, then cold again.
A rage he’d never known started in his heart and pumped out to every other limb until it felt like he was on fire.
Meyah hissed at Iviry as the Fae limped backward, blood gushing through the hand she had pressed into her side, and if the fury within him hadn’t already consumed every waking thought and reaction, Loche would have flinched at the roar that pierced the air. It came from his own throat—from something that had slumbered deep within him, unwilling to wake, but that now ripped through muscle and skin and flesh as he leaped forward on large golden paws.
He saw his own reflection in his mother’s wide eyes when she turned her head his way.
A lion, one he’d only seen a pelt of once, stored in the cellars of the white castle of Ellow—with gray eyes narrowed to slits and teeth as long as his arms once hadbeen—sprang through the air, and it was the last thing his mother fucking saw as he pounced on her.
He wasn’t Loche anymore. He was no regent or human or man. He was the lion, the animal’s instincts fully overtaking his mind, and he roared again before his teeth sank into his mother’s exposed feline neck, not hesitating for a second before he ripped her entire throat out.
Iron filled his mouth, and he spat and hissed as his mother’s now human body dropped from his maw, a paw with sharp claws ripping through it before it even landed on the bloodied deck beneath—making sure not even an ounce of life remained within her—before he took his mother’s foot in his mouth and threw her broken body overboard.
Loche—or the lion, he wasn’t entirely sure—roared again, the sound accompanied by the wyvern’s war cries, and the few shifters still alive cried back in whatever form they were in, their souls somehow sensing his. He roared for the dead around him, for the energy bolting and rushing through him, and for the people he would continue to kill, until either his lion succumbed or he’d killed every last enemy.
A hand weaved into Loche’s mane, and he turned his massive head to stare into Iviry’s blue eyes. Before he even knew what he was doing, he’d curled around her, a soft huffing sound starting in his throat, and she grinned at him—actually grinned—when he jerked his head.
His wife understood what he’d asked. While she was tall, taller even than Lessia, Loche barely felt it as she pulled herself onto his back. Her cry of outrage mingled with his next war call, the perfect harmony ringing in his sensitive ears as Loche threw himself off the ship, lettinghis long legs take them toward where all ships were now gathering.
Iviry leaned over his head as the wyvern that had watched them took his side. He’d never loved her more as she whispered, “Let’s kill some fucking enemies, husband.”
Chapter 45
Lessia
Ydren was tired.
Lessia sensed it in every swerve and turn the wyvern took to avoid the waves from the ships, as well as the wood and other things the Oakgards’ threw their way.
The violet wyvern had fought so bravely, had not made a sound or complaint as Lessia steered and commanded and drove even Auphore to the brink of utter and complete exhaustion in her quest to try to save whoever she could in her search for Merrick.
