“Totally didn’t. I had that handled.”
“If by handled, you mean a feather’s breadth away from being ripped off his back and shredded, then yes, little sparrow, I agree.”
I roll my eyes, and he nips at my neck as I watch Lazza continue to hurtle toward the ground. I’m certain that at any moment, he’s going to spread his wings and swoop back into the air, rallying impossibly like every fucking annoying villain in every movie ever. But I watch as he plunges wildly, and then with a deep boom and a plume of dirt and debris, Lazza smashes into the unforgiving ground.
I’m shocked and completely speechless. I thought for sure that wasn’t going to happen. A cheer rises up through my chest, but I bite it back down. I survived two falls just like that, and if I can, he sure as fuck will. Zeph aims for the crash site, and I catch Ryn’s and Treno’s gryphons already landing nearby. Red-purple dirt floats heavily in the air as Zeph and I land, and I push out of his hold and immediately call on my whip swords. I keep them in their sword form, and I see out of the corner of my eye that Zeph does the same thing.
Treno shifts out of his gryphon form, but Ryn stays furry and feathered as back up. Treno moves toward us, his mismatched eyes trained on his brother’s body. Worry starts to simmer in my chest. Treno knew that Lazza making it out of this alive was impossible, but knowing something and seeing it through can be very different things.
His gaze hardens, and I can’t even begin to imagine the rush of emotions that must be going through him right now. He closes the distance between us in a few strides, and just when I think he’s going to streak past me to either check on or maybe finish off his brother, he stops and wraps me up in a hug.
The gesture takes me by surprise, but I don’t hesitate to squeeze him back, hard.
“I’m so grateful you’re okay,” he tells me as he presses a kiss to the top of my head. I can feel the relief that washes through him from the contact.
I can only imagine what happened after I disappeared from Ryn’s lap. I’ll ask them about it later, but first we need to finish this. Treno puts me down and calls on his swoosh blades. He keeps his eyes trained on the sky, like he’s waiting for the stars themselves to shoot down in defense of his brother.
Looks like I’m not the only one who feels like this is suddenly too easy.
We cautiously approach the small crater that Lazza’s crash to the ground created, and I see that Lazza isn’t in his gryphon form anymore, but he’s still just lying there. I wonder for a brief moment if this is how Zeph found me after our first meeting, and this moment feels oddly full circle.
Lazza is bruised and battered all over, but not an ounce of sympathy strikes through me as I take that in. I saw what he’s done to Saner and her mate, and who the fuck knows how many other gryphons have suffered in the past from his wrath.
“Can you break the Vow with him being unconscious?” Treno asks me, and I freeze, remembering my failed attempt earlier.
“I don’t know if I can at all,” I confess, loathing the way it makes me feel as though I’m letting them down. “I tried earlier, I did what I thought I was supposed to do, but it didn’t break. I must be missing something, but I just haven’t had a moment to try and figure out what,” I tell them.
“We don’t have to keep him alive to break the Vow. I say cut his head off and then work on the rune later,” Zeph declares, and bewilderment sifts through me.
“We don’t need him to break it?” I question.
“No, he controls the Vow right now because of his bloodline, but Treno is just as capable. We can have Wekun remove the block on Treno’s Vow, and you can try to destroy it that way.”
“Wait. If we could dothat,why the hell didn’t we do it before?” I demand, confused. I thought Lazza was the key in all of this, not just his bloodline in general?
“Because we don’t actually know for sure if that’s correct,” Treno interjects. “We think maybe it could work, but it’s not guaranteed. We all decided that going to the source and breaking it that way was the surest option. But if you can’t break it yet, I’m with Zeph; Lazza’s too dangerous to keep around.”
Ryn growls deeply, and I take that as his vote of agreement too.
I take a deep breath. “Let me try again, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll go with the gryphon way of kill first, figure the rest out later.”
Zeph studies my face for a beat and then nods. Relief washes through me at his silent vote of confidence, and we start to approach Lazza’s still prone body in the dirt. I feel as though I’m walking straight into quicksand as I get closer to Lazza. It’s like I know it’s dangerous, but I won’t know how dangerous until it’s probably too late and I’m being sucked under and suffocated to death.
I expect Zeph to toe him to see if he moves or if there’s any indication of some other possible threat, but instead he walks over and stabs him with a sword through the shoulder. Lazza doesn’t even flinch or make a peep, and as shocked as I am by the brutality of what Zeph just did, we know Lazza is completely unconscious now.
Zeph nods at me, and I tentatively make my way over to him. Lazza is face down, which makes this part easy, I guess, but now I just need to figure out what the fuck I’m missing. I kneel next to Lazza’s body and reach my hand out to cover the Vow rune on the back of his neck. I take a deep breath and close my eyes and try to piece together what it is that I might be missing.
I’m touching the magic, I’m saying the words… “Nusht fialow odreece tamod kle.” I’m willing the magic to break.
I wait again to see if what I just did will work this time, but again nothing happens. Frustration slams through me, and I tighten my grip on Lazza’s neck and try to figure out what the fuck is going on.
I flip through everything I can recall from Nadi to my dad and what’s been said about Bonds and the Vow and how they work. Nadi said I needed to speak it into existence. My dad told me I already knew how to do this, to think back to the lessons. I sift through the lessons I can remember. The first time I used my will and got in trouble for freezing the animals. The words I used to bind them to me and force them to listen. The lesson with Princess.
I pause and retrace my mental steps.
The words I used...
I focus on the memory of the time I froze the animals.“A word is never bad, but bad things can be done with words, and we must make sure that we keep ourselves and others from doing that.”My dad’s words bounce around in my brain, and I realize something. I didn’t get in trouble for using the word, I got in trouble for forcing my will on something and then using my magic to enforce it.
