Harlan mutters a prayer under his breath, voice cracking with every word. Joran huddles deeper in his blanket, eyes darting like a trapped animal. The younger Zmaj doesn’t move, but his wings twitch with sharp, nervous jolts.
I keep my eyes on him. The scarred warrior isn’t tense or straining—just steady as a rock. Waiting. Something in that steadiness steadies me too. Then the storm’s pitch changes.
A low vibration hums through the bone at my back, faint at first, then stronger. The moan of the wind drops into something deeper, something heavier.
Not the storm. My heart slams against my ribs. The younger Zmaj stiffens, head jerking up. His eyes lock on the hollow’s mouth, black and wide.
“It’s here,” he whispers.
“What’s here?” Joran asks, his head snapping up and his voice shaking. “It’s just wind. Just bones rattling.”
The ground trembles, sand shifting in waves as though something massive moves outside. The air thickens, choking,and a shadow slides across the narrow crack of light. Not wind. Not storm. Something else.
The scarred warrior rises, smooth and certain, striding past me toward the darkness at the back of the skull. Feeling tentative but unwilling to stay back, I move to his side. My knife looks pitiful next to the long, shiny blade of his lochaber.
The ground shifts. Subtle—easy to miss with the storm outside our shelter—but it’s there. I look up at the Zmaj, and he is looking down at me. His eyes narrow, his tail twitches, tossing sand behind us. He tilts his head to one side, slightly, but the question is clear.
“I’m ready,” I say.
He nods. It’s enough. Something uncoils in my chest. It feels as if a weight lifts off my shoulders. In this moment, right before I’m probably going to die, it feels like things can change. Like I’m not fighting to be noticed, but fighting with someone who knows I am here. With him.
The hiss is soft, and the only warning we have before it blurs out of the dark.
16
KARA
The hiss slides out of the dark like breath from a throat too large for the world.
It’s close enough that heat washes across my face—wrong, because heat feels wrong in a place full of bone and sand—but there it is, a humid tang that smells of damp fur and rot and something metallic underneath. My stomach flips. My knife feels even smaller.
The movement in the shadow is faster than I expect. Not a creep, not a crawl—more a blur, like the shadows fold in on themselves. The bones shiver as it shifts, a deep, echoing clack that runs up the skull and vibrates in my teeth. For a heartbeat I see nothing but a smear of darker shadow, and then the world narrows to an eye.
It gleams faintly—not the hard bright of insect, nor the flat shine of lizard—but a deep, wet glint that catches the slit of light like a pool. It’s not round, but almond-shaped, with a pale rim that makes it look like a wound. It blinks once.
Everything in me screams to move, to shove back, to run into the storm and be swallowed by sand rather than by whatever this is. My feet refuse. They’re rooted by the weight of his body beside me—the scarred warrior a stone wall I never asked for, and yet I’ve never needed more.
He doesn’t hesitate. He steps forward, blocking whatever slight slice of light penetrates through the skull. The lochaber rises. His scale-lined hand tightens on the haft the way a prayer tightens a throat. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t hurl bravado. He simply shifts, every muscle coiling like a spring.
The creature—if it is a creature—makes a soft, resonant sound. Not a growl, not a roar. More like a throat clearing, a low vibration that runs under our boots and makes the sand quake. Another eye opens opposite the first, and then a suggestion of a mouth—too big, too broad—slides into view, lined with teeth that are not quite bone, not quite scale. Something in the mouth gleams; a sheen like oil on water.
The younger Zmaj hisses, a sharp sound that sparks the rest of us out of our frozen fear. Joran scrabbles back, flinging his blanket, eyes wide and wild. Harlan’s prayer breaks into a stutter. My hand tightens on my knife, my muscles drawn so tight they’re near breaking.
The creature shifts again—a broad shoulder, a forelimb that ends in too-long claws, scales as dark as the storm between spins of sand. It seems—impossibly—both ancient and new, like a thing born of deep desert memory and something feral, newly shaped by the storm’s teeth.
It leans its head further into the light, nostrils quivering, and the breath that washes over us now carries a taste of carrion. I cough, the sound raw in my throat. The smell has another noteunder it—sweet, clinging—like the sap from the cacti we pried at. Poisoned, bitten, rotted.
A single, obscene click echoes—sharp and deliberate. The creature’s head tilts, as if listening to something inside the skull that none of us can hear. Then its eyes find ours.
They stop on mine.
I feel the world fold. Nothing else exists but that slow, terrible sense of recognition. For an instant the creature’s gaze is not hungry, not mindless—there is a shape of thought there, a flicker like the ghost of a mind—and it meets me across the small gulf. I want to flinch. I want to hide. Instead, my chest opens like a birdcage and some raw, fierce thing pushes up through me—a stupid, bright certainty that I will not fall apart here.
The scarred warrior’s hand brushes my arm as he adjusts his grip, a contact so small and deliberate it takes my breath. The touch is not comfort; it is acknowledgment and a command. Stand. I straighten just enough to be steadier under his gaze.
The creature inclines its head a fraction, close enough that I can see the rasp of tiny hairs at its lip, the way the light laces its throat in pale bands. Then, with a motion slower than my heart can follow, it withdraws a step back into the hollow’s throat and disappears into the dark.
Not retreat, not yet. It folds away, deliberately, as if deciding where to hunger next.
