The panic crested into something else. Something molten and furious and absolutely fucking feral.
“The children aren’t here,” I snarled against the hand clamped over my mouth, biting down again when the bastard didn’t let go.
“We’ll find them,” the leader said with casual certainty that made my vision go red. “Ashterion has plans for all of you.”
Like hell.
The fury wasn’t mine anymore. It was something older. Something that had been sleeping in my marrow since I crossed the Veil, coiled tight and patient, waiting for exactly this moment to wake up hungry.
The thing beneath my skinroared.
And I erupted.
Black flames exploded from every inch of my body.
They poured out like I was bleeding darkness, like someone had cracked my ribs open and all the rage I’d been swallowing for a year came flooding out in a torrent of shadow and cold fire.
They didn’t burn me. They should have. Fire was fire, and flesh was flesh, but these flames felt like an extension of my rage, my terror, my absolute refusal to let anyone touch my children.
The flames spread across the ground in serpentine waves, climbing trees, wrapping around flowers that wilted and blackened at their touch. The air itself seemed to dim, realitybending to accommodate the fury bleeding out of me in frozen, hungry torrents.
One of the masked bastards was screaming. The sound cut off abruptly when my fire found him.
He didn’t get back up.
The flames wanted more.
They hissed it in my bones, in the spaces between heartbeats where reason used to live.More. More. More.
Feed us the ones who’d threaten children. Feed us the ones who’d drag innocents to shadow lords with plans. Feed us everyone who thought they could take what wasn’t theirs and walk away breathing.
The fire didn’t care about mercy.
Neither did I.
The hands holding me jerked away with screams that tore through the afternoon air like broken glass. I caught a glimpse of the one who’d been covering my mouth—his gloves were ash, his fingers blistered and raw where the flames had touched him.
Good.
The fire avoided Brynelle entirely, flowing around her like water around a stone.
It reached for her attackers like it was hunting.
“What the fuck—” one of them started to say.
He didn’t get to finish. The flames found him, wrapped around his legs, and he hit the ground screaming. The others were backing away now, but there was nowhere to go. The fire had surrounded us, contained us, and it was hungry for the blood of anyone who thought they could threaten what was mine.
The flames roared higher, and I felt a shift in the very air around us. The garden was changing, reality bending to accommodate the fury pouring out of me. Shadows deepened. Even the water in the pond turned black as ink.
A figure slammed into the ground beside me.
Winged. Male. Unfamiliar.
He was tall, powerfully built in that way that suggested he could snap necks as easily as breathing. One side of his head was shaved close to the skull, while the other bore hair that shimmered between midnight blue and indigo, falling past his shoulders in a cascade broken by tight, intricate braids.
He took one look at the carnage around us. At the bodies wreathed in my flames, at Brynelle writhing against her bindings, at me standing in the centre of it all like some nightmare queen, and smiled.
It wasn’t a nice smile.
