The Uzrek answered my unspoken thoughts.“You were young at the time and oblivious to what you’d witnessed.”
“How did he look at my mother?”
“With a strange mix of emotions,”the wizened creature replied.“Admiration, longing, and regret…perhaps even a touch of pride.”
What the hells?
It was an onslaught of information overload.
Sirro and my mother? What kind of connection did the two of them have? Maybe she hadn’t even been aware of his attention. Maybe it was due to her saving the life of a Horned God all those years ago.Sirro’s life, perhaps?Maybe his affection for her simply had to do with her rising to a position a servant never had before.
Butregret and longing?
That sure as fuck didn’t sit well with me.
I was even more determined to find this Yezekael.
There!
A shift in the darkness where the gloom was more filmy than flat.
An opening.
“Finally,”the Uzrek sighed in a way that sounded bored. As if the fucking thing had been dealing with a distracted child and had to lead me here like an infant.
“I can hear all your thoughts,”he hissed.
“It comes with snooping in people’s heads.”
I could smell it before I could see it.
Yezekael’s stale, spicy scent wafted in, and I dragged it through my nostrils.
I crawled closer, carefully peering through the crack in the rock, and there it was. Yezekael’s new nest.
It was much like the abandoned nest Mela and I had found over a week ago. The space inside was larger, though, and against the uneven wall was the beginning of a new collection of strange bits and pieces.
This time I couldn’t enter. I could only see a partial view of the nest formed from bent branches and bones that were more whitish than mottled, and that was telling about how long the creature had been here. The nest wasn’t quite as big as the other either, as if it were still being made. Torn pieces of fabric, a few feathers, and pieces of jewelry poked through the woven structure.
Relief and determination swelled in my chest.
Now, finally, we had a lock on Yezekael.
“Indeed, you do, son of the wyrm,”the Uzrek chuckled in my mind.
Now to find a way to trap it.
Across the burrow, I spied an entrance.
“There’s a way into its nest. The passage it uses to come and go. How do we get to it?”
“You don’t. It will know if you’re about. This way, you have a chance to capture it unaware.”
The air knotted thickly in my throat, and my lips pressed together hard as if determined to stop the words that needed to be said. Yet, we wouldn’t have found Yezekael’s nest without the Uzrek’s help. I swallowed back distaste and pushed it out.“Thank you.”
But there was nothing but silence on the other end of the mental line until a delighted chuckle bounced inside my mind.“See, it wasn’t so hard to say after all, death-dealer.”
I crawled slowly backward along the serpent’s tunnel. I smelled like a mix of the catacombs and stone eater, rank and foul, and as I wiggled and shunted backward, I tried to work through everything we’d need to trap Yezekael, but Nelle…
