I was a Wychthorn of the Great House.
I would bow to no one.
And I would never let them see me break.
Tipping up my chin, I met her icy gaze with my own.
Graysen squared his shoulders as if bracing himself for pain. His deep voice rumbled through the room. “Wychthorn’s a wyrm.”
Ferne’s mouth fell open.
Her shock was almost palpable, a sudden chill that rippled outward and raised goosebumps along my arms. Hearing itspoken out loud, a name given to the power, to thethingthat lived inside me…
So much had happened in the space of an hour, a day, a weekend. Only to learn the truth, meet my wyrm and have the creature that had been with me since birth leave me. No…not gone, just hidden from me in a way I hadn’t had time to work out in my mind.
A wyrm.
I was a wyrm.
I caught the flash of confusion sweeping across Valarie’s features. “A wyrm?” she repeated. Her brows nudged together as her gaze turned to her nephew. “How can that be? They are beasts.”
Graysen had his back to me. His armor clung to his tall body, broad but streamlined. He adjusted his stance minutely, running his fingers through his ash-streaked hair, then dropped his hand to brace it on his hip. I watched those powerful shoulders lift as he shrugged. “Who the fuck knows?”
It was Ferne who put it together. She rose, her chair scraping along stone, before angling her face toward us both. The strip of lace across her eyes appeared a darker shade of blue in the dimly lit room. “You’re a Tamer,” she said to Graysen in that low, raspy voice of hers, an incredulous note in her tone. “That’s why I could feel what was between you two. Why there was that strange connection you both shared.”
Valarie’s calculating gaze crawled all over Graysen. He’d shifted sideways and angled himself slightly so I could see his profile. He looked cold and unaffected, but I knew him…at least I thought I had. The thumb digging into the tip of his middle finger gave him away. He, like me, was trying to come to grips with the knowledge, what it meant for both of us, to finally understand why there had always been that hyperawareness that sparked and shimmered between the two of us.
“It’s not corporeal.Not-quite-living.She can’t shift into the beast. I guess it’s more appropriate to say she’s part-wyrm. For some godsforsaken reason, it’s as if the spirit or essence of a wyrm has attached itself to her.” The reason no one, not even the Crowthers, could ever have anticipated, nor guessed what lurked beneath my skin.
Our world had never seen such a thing before.
Graysen turned fully to face me. A shiver rippled down my spine at the sight of how empty his expression had become. A cold mask he hid behind, I reminded myself. His gaze resembled his aunt’s as he raked it from the top of my head to the tips of my dirt-encrusted toes, sweeping back up again as he assessed me clinically, like athing. “The wyrm hasn’t reached maturity. It’s still adolescent.”
I blinked in shock. The wyrm had been massive. How much bigger was it going to grow? How much more powerful? Those beasts could bring mountains to their knees, and the Crowthers’ fortress would have been reduced to rubble if it had reached maturity.
But it also made sense why my emotions were so closely entwined with the wyrm’s. Adolescent, the wyrm was temperamental, full of fire and anger. The reason it was kept in burrows deep beneath the earth until it gained control of its emotions.
“She saved your life,” I heard someone say above the sudden noise of the door opening and heavy boots clunking on the stone floor. Caidan entered the room, his arm slung around Jett, supporting the youngest Crowther brother as he limped beside him.
I had. My wyrm lashed out when Graysen approached, drawn to me like a moth unmindful of a flame. Reacting instinctively to protect me, my wyrm breathed flames of sunshine andmoonlight to obliterate him. But… I’d saved Graysen’s life by casting a tempest of cool air to drive the fire aside.
“You would have been barbecue,” Caidan added with taunting amusement.
Less than barbecue. He would have been incinerated into nothing. Not a speck of cinder or ash would have remained.
I slid my gaze to Graysen. A muscle feathered in his jaw as he stared back at me.
Even now, with Zrenyth’s rope collaring me, I didn’t regret saving his life. But he couldn’t learn my weakness, so I bared my teeth at him.
And because I was watching for it, I saw a sharp glint of guilt flash through his eyes before he turned his gaze aside.
Caidan led Jett to a couch and eased him down. Jett stretched his long legs out and tipped his head against the headrest, wincing and turning away from the light. Sweat plastered loose strands of hair to his temples. Though his muscles were locked and tense, a faint shiver ran through his limbs.
Valarie crossed the room to a small table next to the couch. She picked up a candelabra, its radiance casting a brief golden glow over Jett. Fat molten wax dripped as she moved it away, allowing the gloom to settle around him. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said to him as she set it on the fireplace mantel.
“Nothing better to do. Besides, I wouldn’t want to miss this,” he gritted out between clenched teeth as those eyes, shining bright in the darkness, met mine.
As Caidan turned—the breath whooshed from my lungs.
