CHAPTER 14
LYKOR
The memory of lightning still echoed in Lykor’s shoulders, though his scales had taken the worst of the charge. When they’d returned to Asharyn, Jassyn’s mending had driven out the scorch, but his hands had lingered for long enough that Lykor almost believed something else might spark there.
Almost.
Then Jassyn had pulled away. And the absence haunted him more than the storm—even a day later.
Lykor shoved the thought aside, matching Jassyn’s stride through the druid jungle. The heavy air clung like the memory of their first encounter beneath this canopy. He hadn’t questioned Jassyn’s choice to heal him here instead of in Asharyn—something about needing the earth’s energy.
The glade where their people had camped a week ago lay eerily still—ash-circled fire pits sinking into moss, the bones of a temporary home already devoured by the jungle’s slow hunger.
Lykor decided he could stomach vines and damp air again if it meant soaring the sky. Even if circling back to this grove nudged them closer to the king’s armies in the mortal realms.He accepted the risk, but the delay in the search for Skylash still chafed—a bitterness honed by the fact that it was for his sake.
Footfalls landed close behind. Intruding. Unwanted.
Miraculously, he’d held his tongue when Vesryn and Fenn followed through the portals that he’d opened back across the Wastes. But now—with their shadows dogging his heels and the mending looming like an execution block—his neck prickled, as if it already sensed the axe in their eyes.
“I agreed to healing,” Lykor muttered, keeping pace at Jassyn’s side as the canopy pressed darker overhead. He shot a scowl over his shoulder at the pair following. “Not an entourage.”
“I need Vesryn’s shadows,” Jassyn said, parting a tangle of vines with a wave of his hand.
His voice was too level, too measured with the kind of calm that only meant something beneath wasn’t. Lykor’s eyes cut to him, already not liking the sound of it, and trusting the prince’s involvement even less.
“Let me do the rending,” Vesryn called from behind. “I’d be faster.”
“In the way a butcher is faster than a surgeon,”Aesar mumbled in Lykor’s head.
Lykor rolled his eyes, ignoring them both. His glance snagged on Fenn, shouldering his druid flight leathers—though Lykor had never asked him to bring his gear from Asharyn. Fenn’s fangs flashed in a smile that promised nothing good.
“That doesn’t explain the captain’s presence,” Lykor grumbled.
“Pain management?” Jassyn offered, his voice pitched higher with the question.
Lykor stopped cold, glare sharp enough to peel bark. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s only fair,” Vesryn shot back, jabbing a thumb at Fenn as they all halted. “You mademeendure his fangs, remember?”
“I don’t need venom,” Lykor bit out.
“You say that now,” Fenn said, idly twisting one of the obsidian scales dangling from his ear. “I’ll be gentle. Well, that is, depending where you let me bite.”
Lykor bared his own fangs, the snarl already rumbling.
Jassyn pinched the bridge of his nose, looking ready to bleed patience instead of Essence before he silently lifted his hands. Turquoise light fountained, spinning into form. Of twisted shoulders. A ruined spine. Scar-laced nerves writhing with phantom pain.
Lykor stiffened as the illusion floated between them. Every injury etched mercilessly clean. Every mutilation mapped in perfect clarity.
“I need you unfeeling for this,” Jassyn said softly. “Temporarily paralyzed.” He motioned toward the vertebrae and tendons. “I’ll channel Vesryn’s rending through the bond, deconstruct everything, then rebuild.” He didn’t quite meet Lykor’s eyes. “The venom is better than…the alternative.”
Every muscle braced. Coercion. Masking pain the same way Jassyn had with the prince, when he’d knit tattered legs after the druids’ flayers.
So this was what Jassyn’s vagueness had been circling—the sidelong glances when he thought Lykor wasn’t looking, the half explanations, the detour into the jungle. The truth kept quiet because Jassyn scorching well knew Lykor would’ve refused to participate.
Clenching his teeth, Lykor bit down the impulse to portal back to the desert. Too late for cowardice dressed as second thoughts.
Instead, he growled, “You could’ve just led with ‘spinal detonation.’” The words came out harsher than he meant—gallows humor honed sharp against himself, even as the sight of bone unraveling wrenched the breath from his lungs.
