“You’re hurt…” Ferne cried, spinning around. How she knew, I didn’t know.
“I’m fine,” but his voice scraped out, raw and uneven, as he flopped onto the couch beside Jett. The side of his face I hadn’t seen when he entered the family room showed melted, puckeredflesh pulled out of shape and his scalp exposed in scorched streaks.
In fascination, I watched the warped skin slowly heal, the vicious third-degree burns smoothing and becoming less angry and inflamed. He gingerly flexed his jaw and winced.
Ferne hurried toward the filing cabinet, her hands spread before her, guided by the awareness that came with her bloodline.
Metal clunked and grated as she dragged open the bottom drawer and pulled out a soft leather bag. She moved to the couch, and the bag thumped softly at her feet as she knelt beside Caidan. Tilting her head, she rummaged around inside, feeling the shape of the vials and roots and glass containers, I imagined, and fished out several syringes, offering them to her older brother.
Caidan picked a mossy-green potion, a mixture of medicine and magic melded together by House Simonis.
He half-shrugged out of his jacket, drawing a shoulder out far enough so that he could stab the needle into his upper arm and pump in the painkiller. As the medication worked its way through his system, his eyelids lowered as he let out a sigh, his form relaxing and curving into the cushions behind him.
Ferne offered the same handful of syringes to Jett.
But he grunted out ano.
Ferne huffed out a breath, and her mouth was a bitter line as if she’d expected his answer and it still annoyed the hells out of her.
Fatigue limned my body, and my knees wobbled, threatening to buckle. I’d reached near-exhaustion fighting for freedom. I steadied a hand against a shelf. The leather-bound books pushed back against my fingertips as I dug deep, drawing on what little energy remained.
Graysen cast a swift glance at me, worry almost indiscernible, but ithadflickered through his gaze.
Anger burned brightly.What right did he have!
The sudden sound of the door shoving open, unhurried footfall, and whispering leather sliced my thoughts apart and had all our attention swinging toward the room’s entrance. Valarie’s twin brother, Varen, and the Crowthers’ father strode in. Kenton was close behind him, a large hand clasped at the side of his neck as he rolled it from side to side. Sweat, dirt, and soot covered each of them. Ash coated their unruly black locks. And blood… Blood was smeared all over their armor, into the dirty creases of their fingers and calloused palms, splattered along their cheeks.
They brought with them the stench of smoke and death. But hadn’t that been me? Wasn’t it me who had wielded that, inflicted it upon them?
It was deathly quiet.
Kenton leaned his thigh against the lip of the table, folding his arms across his massive chest, his chilling focus solely on me. And my fingers inched for my adamere bracelet…only to scrape against the naked flesh of my inner wrist. The beads that kept me in check and comforted me when I needed them the most were gone. Lost somewhere in that nightmare I’d survived only yesterday.
Graysen paced back and forth in front of me. His footfall didn’t seem agitated, nor was the way he carried himself, but there was something territorial about his actions. I realized no one could get past him to me, and I wondered if he was aware of it.
I caught the perplexed look that passed between Jett and Kenton.
Varen, the Crowther family’s patriarch, was the tallest of them all, and there was a brutal beauty in his weathered features. Hebraced his hands on the back of a chair. His roughly hewn voice split the silence apart. “We lost good men and women today.”
And those eyes, those violet eyes, shifted my way. All of them. All the Crowthers stared at me with angered grief brimming right below the surface, but there was also an unease as if it were a rocky truce between us. As if they thought I might suddenly strike out and unleash the wyrm.
But of course, I couldn’t, because the magic encircling my neck cut me off from the power that resided within me.
“The wounded are in the infirmary. Some won’t make it through the night.” Varen dropped his gaze down to his fingers, clenched tightly around the wooden chair before pushing off to straighten. He wiped a hand down his face, shooting a decisive look at his sister. “We’ll bury the dead tonight.”
Caidan propped his elbows on his knees, bowed his head, and hid behind bloodied hands that kneaded his temples and hairline.
“Collens? Hollis?” Jett asked, his fingers balling into fists on his thighs.
Varen swallowed thickly, then nodded, and rattled off a series of names. My fractured mind took in only a few.Gretchen, Liam, Hollis.But the fallen were named. Named, they became people. People fatally harmed.
I’d killed them.
Me.
My stomach clenched, and the acidic taste of bile burned its way up my throat.
I may not have taken a life, punching back with dark power and wicked howling wind, but I hadn’t reigned the wyrm in. I’d allowed it to maim and kill. It had torn through the Crowther ranks, slicing and dicing and crushing them beneath its might. Incinerating them with its wyrmfire threaded with moonlightand sunlight, a mixture I’d never heard or read about in my quest to learn more about wyrms in my childhood.
