Just as he smelled a sudden swell of smoke before flames jumped orange and bright off to his left. Someone had thrown a bottle of spirits into a campfire, and the resultant blaze licked at low-hanging branches…and caught.
The trees were green, damp, vibrant with spring life; their leaves would smoke, rather than burn. But the forest floor was littered with dry needles, and old, beetle-eaten branches, and the those would catch. Would light this hillside up like a Yuletide table laden with candles.
Leif.Alpha. Mate. Mine.
Fuck everyone here. They weren’t his people, and he didn’t care if they lived or died.
“Where are you going?” Cassius asked, when he turned to leave.
Had Leda asked, he would have kept walking. But to be questioned by a prisoner? Ragnar turned, snarling, nails sharpening painfully. “What business is it of yours?”
“Leda! Leda!” It was that fool stepson that Leda was fucking. Something that started with a C, the bookish one no one had thought to take along on the mission lest he trip on a twig, fall, scream, and bring the whole Sel army down upon them. Now he came bolting through camp, winded, shouting for her.
Cassius wasn’t distracted. His eyes seemed to glow in the dark, that awful, unnatural vivid blue, like a frozen lake back home. His white face was drawn in tight lines.
“Will you not defend your friends?” he asked.
Ragnar barked an ugly laugh. “What friends? No one loves me.” And he turned once more, empty-handed, and leaped through the undergrowth, skirting wide around the flames, and the chaos, and the Southern men dying, and ran through the darkness toward his alpha.
~*~
Cassius stood a long moment, the cacophony of the attack ringing all around him, the flames leaping, spreading, growing, until their crackling threatened to drown out the shouts of men and the chime of steel. Ragnar had disappeared, lithe as a doe—or as a wolf, even on two legs. He would go to Leif, Cassius knew, to his bonded master, and alpha.
And where would Cassius go? When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw that Lady Leda and her young lover were gone. Beyond that, the tent where he’d been held collapsed with a flutter, and moonlight chased over golden metal, pauldrons humped like dew-shiny beetles in the gloaming.
He could run. Slip off through the tree trunks, blunder his way through the forest, and get back to the road. He could go south, or north, or east, or west. Could take his chances inthe forest, or hole up in an abandoned farmhouse. He would be alone in a strange land, without supplies, and the mere sight of him would send locals into a paroxysm of fear. He’d likely get shot by a farmer. Or fall victim to lions in the woods.
Up the hill, he heard the high, shrill call of a drake.
He firmed up his grip on the stolen sword, and set off at a jog, following the trampled path that Ragnar had left.
~*~
Amelia applied pressure to the reins and blinked against the sting of the wind as she banked Alpha in a wide circle high above the chateau, well out of scorpion range. Alpha grumbled, wanting to go lower. Through the bond, he showed her the empty walls, the vacant yard; pushed his sense of body heat and expelled breath inside the house itself. Not so much as a dog patrolled the gardens, which lay fallow and heaped with last year’s dead vines, not planted for the spring that had finally arrived.
Alpha tugged at the reins, and Amelia increased her pressure on them. “Not yet.”
Reggie had signaled her, just as they’d agreed: three short flashes of the lantern, and one long one. And Alpha couldn’t see or smell any humans outside the mansion; there were no guards, no cookfires; no one was checking the horses in the stables, or ducking under the trees for a clandestine tryst. The chateau grounds were utterly still. Alpha sent her an image of a fox burrowing through the tall grass, in search of mice, but that was all.
Still, Amelia had misgivings.
But maybe that was because her hand was on fire, and the tingling had spread halfway to her elbow.
The pain had grown so intense that her skin had begun to feel cold. But each time she darted a glance toward her palm, itlooked the same: smooth, unblemished skin and a single, dark scab where the emperor had sliced her.
An updraft filled Alpha’s wings with a sound like ship sails snapping in the breeze, and he trilled an inquiry.Now? Yes?
The hot pulsing in her hand was making it hard to concentrate, but she trusted him—trusted that his senses were so keen that there wasn’t a chance he was missing an ambush.
“Yes,” she said, gathering her muscles, hunkering low over his withers in anticipation of the descent. “Now.”
He trumpeted to the girls, and they trumpeted back.
Then they dove.
~*~
“…make our way as quickly and quietly as possible to the ground floor windows,” Connor was saying as they jogged up the final incline toward the chateau gates. “If Amelia is diving, and—yes, there they come—the drakes will start on the top floor and work their way down. It’s important that no one gets onto the lawn and makes for the walls.”
