I fucking should have.
“Yeah,” he said softly, reading my thoughts all over my face, perhaps feeling them with this strange connection we shared. “You should have.”
“Seems everyone wants you dead,” I snipped airily as pinched a small cracker between my fingertips and popped it into my mouth. The grainy walnut texture fell apart like delicious, buttery crumbs on my tongue.
Cool air wisped out and nipped at my bare arms as I opened the fridge and dug around the crisper drawer. Spinach, carrots, celery, and peppers were fished out. I found some feta and herbs too before slamming the door shut. Arching a commanding eyebrow at Graysen, who was leaning against the kitchen counter, he shuffled over so I could get to the cutlery drawer. It made almost no noise. There wasn’t the usual clankof metal. I should have remembered that there wouldn’t have been anything I could use to cut the vegetables. All the drawer contained was godsdamned plastic forks and knives and spoons.
I hissed at Graysen, waving a useless knife in his face. How the fuck was I supposed to make a salad with a plastic knife as my only tool?
He dropped his gaze to his feet and toed the tiles, trying not to grin.
I tossed the knife into the drawer and slammed it shut with annoyance. Rifling through a bottom cupboard, I found a porcelain bowl and slapped it on the counter with an irritatingthumpbeforerunning the sink’s cold water tap and washing the carrots.
“How the hells did Silas find us so quickly?” Graysen asked.
I dumped the first slender carrot into the bowl and washed another one, running my fingers back and forth over its ridges. While I finished another mouthful of crackers, I pondered his question. There was only one way Silas could have tracked us so fast. “I think Silas started hunting Danne as soon as he realized he’d been betrayed. Perhaps when you destroyed the Cloakers that shielded me, Silas knew exactly where I was.” And obviously, Silas had arrived at the bottom of the cliff just as we’d left it. I’d followed bends and curves in the river,swiftingin short bursts, until I’d come upon a lake and a cottage surrounded by wild grasses.
Silas arrived a moment later.
And we’d had a confrontation when Silasdaredto end what was mine. I’d dredged up the last scraps of my power to thwart him and demand that he leave immediately.
Finishing up the carrots, I snatched up a red pepper to wash. I couldn’t prevent my thoughts from spiraling onward, and two opposing thoughts filtered through my mind.
Perhaps I should have ended Silas.
Perhaps I should have taken up his offer and gone with him.
Either way, it was too late.
I thought back to that last moment when I’d driven Silas away. He’d disappeared. Which was odd because nothing living couldswift. And none of theswiftingwinds accompanied him that normally pulled me into the void. He’d simply vanished.
And before all of that, I’dfeltSilas. He’d grabbed hold of me before I’d keeled over. Deprived of oxygen, he cradled me on his lap to breathe air into my lungs. Warm lips and warm-bodied—he wasn’t dead, nornot-quite-living. Yet, he could be something like me, with something inside him that made it possible toswiftlike a wyrm. Or something else equally strange.
But what Silas had done was different.
It was as if he moved so fast that I hadn’t been able to see him move.
His companions hadswifted…
But not Silas.
Slowly, as the threads wove together like a tapestry and created a pattern in my mind, I noticed Graysen setting up a wooden chopping board on the counter beside my vegetable bowl. “Why did Silas kidnap you? What does he want with you?” he asked, not bothering to look my way as he pulled a switchblade out ofwherever-the-hellshe’d concealed it on his body and rinsed the deadly blade beneath a stream of hot running water and frothy dishwashing liquid.
I’d heard him, but my mind was busy ticking over with Silas Boon.
Silas had vanished or moved as fast as Graysen had done after I’d kicked the tennis ball at him. One moment there. The next gone.
Were Silas and Graysen the same?
Or different?
Placing the pepper in the white bowl, I half-snapped the greeny-gold fronds from the top of the celery and used them to pull the thick fibers free from the stalk. And now it was me intently watching Graysen’s reaction as I shared in an off-handed manner, “He knows, at least that’s what he suggested, that I’m a wyrm.”
“So the Children of the Harbinger are after youbecauseyou’re a wyrm.”
“It seems the logical reason,” I said, popping the celery into the bowl.
He unleashed a violent string of curses and took out his anger on the vegetables. Snatching up the bowl, he tipped it up and over and shook everything out onto the counter in a rainfall. Grabbing hold of a carrot, he sliced it into thin rounds so fast that thethuddingof his blade upon the wooden chopping board sounded more like the rapid fire of a machine gun. In a few seconds, he’d chopped up all the vegetables and tossed them into the bowl. The spinach and herbs were next, the pungent aroma of thyme and marjoram and a splash of olive oil pervading the space between us, and last, he threw crumbled feta on top of the salad, and his dagger into the sink with an explosive clank.“Fuck!”
