I stand from my chair, smoke streaming from my nose, understanding her immediately. Hyacinth regards me with sincerity. “Would you stand with me?” I ask directly. “Or are you loyal to your matriarch?”
“What’s going on?” Stacey whispers to Sabrina.
Hyacinth stares at me. “It will be more difficult than you think. Many have tried before you.”
Power gathers within me, rallying to be used. Rallying for blood. I take a deep breath, looking out of the window. Scythe trusted me with his empire. He has faith in my decisions. I know this world just as he does. Know the risks. Understand where the power lies. Where it has lain for so very long.
“Until now,” I say carefully to the room, “my strategy has been a defensive one. I keep reacting to the blows sent my way. But defence is the strategy of prey.” I turn back to Hyacinth, full meaning in my gaze. She seems to understand because she rises to her feet, her mates with her. “I will do this the old way. I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.”
Hyacinth grins. “I have a blood quill.”
“Perfect.”
She retrieves a black quill and dry inkwell from her backpack and hands them to me. I sit down at the dining table and set the inkwell to the side. Minnie rushes forward, unclipping a clean piece of paper from her folder. Raising my left hand, I shift my incisors into cobra fangs and prick my left index finger. The venom, mixed with the blood, seeps out of my finger, and I squeeze it into the inkwell. Combined with the anticoagulant effect of my own venom, the blood flows freely and makes it easier to write with it like ink.
Serpent kings and queens have been writing letters in their own blood and venom for centuries. I’m just joining in on the action. I dip my quill into the mixture and begin working.
Ten minutes later, I’m done. I set it down and look at my handiwork before carefully folding the letter and placing it in an envelope Minnie hands me. Without another word, I nod at Beak, and he pushes off the wall he was leaning against, following me down the stairs to the dormitories below. Yeti also follows.
Stacey and Minnie whisper in the sitting room behind me. Marduk seems to be explaining things to them. “She is making her move,” he says.
I head down the corridor, stopping outside one of the rooms. “Is this one of them?”
“Three of the seniors occupy this room,” Beak confirms.
Yeti has a strangely amused glint in his eye. The bloodthirsty bastard. He knocks on the door above my head. Somebody within groans. There’s a dragging sound before the door opens to reveal a skinny, dishevelled male no older than nineteen. “Oh…shit, uh?—”
Beak shoves his way into the room, pushing him aside. The room has two sets of bunk beds on either side and two desks between them, but it’s cluttered with things they’ve scavenged across the years, trinkets and trash in every corner. It smells of male sweat and rubbish. “We’ve come for a visit, Stuart,” Beak says, scanning the room for other people and finding none.
“Th-There’s no one else here,” the hyena stammers in a nasally voice. “They’re in the dining hall.”
“Great,” I say, “you need to get dressed and pack a bag.”
“What, why?” he asks, clutching his blanket around his shoulders like it’s going to save him.
I hold out the note. “You’re going to take this to your queen. You’re going to leave now and not stop until this is in her hands. Do you understand me?”
He hesitates, mouth gaping like a fish. “W-Where’s Mr Kharkorous? Mr Fengari?”
A rage takes over me. There comes a sound like a terrible lion’s roar in my head. My hand whips around his throat as I seize him, squeezing. A draft of my power lashes around his body as I snarl into his face. The floorboards vibrate under our feet. “They are not here,” I say in a low, dangerous voice. “I am. And Isaid,do you understand me, Stuart?”
He lets out a terrified, choked squeak, and I release him. He staggers backwards, loudly drawing in air but vigorously nodding. “Yes, Lady Boneweaver! I’ll do it right away!”
I storm out of the room, power pulsing through my veins. It feels like it’s pooling in my head, my hands, my feet. It feels like it’s going to bring the entire building down. My body burns as I speed down the corridor. My leg aches by the time I reach the stairwell, so I shift into my eagle form. But as I snap my wings out and lower myself to the ground floor, I realise something with surprise.
This form is not quite right.
I burst out of the front door, Bastien the gargoyle’s whoops of glee almost drowned out by the roar in my head. A roar that started when I saw Xander injured by other dragons during the fight at Drakos Estate.They are not here. I am.
For the second time in my life, I shift into my dragon form. Rage and fury incarnate, I grow colossal. My mouth becomes a muzzle with sharp teeth that I bare to the sky. Human shouts sound about me, and screams of terror, but all this fuels the need I have to declare myself. I launch into the sky on powerful thighs, sweeping my wings out and down. I cut through the air, my snout aimed at the animus dorm, the stricken faces of the animus students glued to their window as I pass over them, aimed right for the roof.
I land heavily, the structure groaning under me. Or is it sighing with relief? My roar charges into the sky, the deep sound vibrating through my body, my bones, the only thing to placate this maddened fury. My blood becomes fire, and power spirals into my lungs, rotating with power like a gathering cyclone. One inhale. One exhale, and my vision is obscured with retina-blinding blue so hot it heats up the stone beneath me.
My anima declares itself to the world. And we will not be defied. Not until our mates are back within our nest. Not untilour enemies lie in bloody, torn pieces upon the grass. Below, the humans gather; guards in all black and students with bare skin stare up at me. The animas of my pack and the hatchlings stand with them, panting, faces flushed.
A redheaded woman stands among them, a shawl tight around her shoulders. She raises a hand, her palm outwards like a blessing. She wears a small smile, and her eyes are twinkling.
I hear her words inside my head, soft as flickering candlelight.“The academy has a new guardian now. That’s all I ever was. There is a power here that must be protected, and if you so choose, you can tap into it.”I can only stare down at her.“If you need me, I’ll be at the Agnis family property. Goodbye, Aurelia.”
