“That easy, was it?” Sinadim asked, panting with the shock. With the fever that still danced inside his skull, dizzy as he balanced on the edge of an abyss where Renegade lay in peaceful ignorance. Unguarded… “If it was so easy to escape, why stay?”
At this, Giaus merely grinned—and shoved him toward the light. “To war, general.”
Shaking his head, Sinadim forced his fractured mind to focus. Set the shock aside and turned his thoughts to an unwinnable battle. To the logistics of what he might find outside the shelter of this doomed bubble…
“Wait,” Sinadim whispered on the heels of a gruesome thought, twisting so he might see Giaus’ face and know if the other male had devious intentions. “What will you do?”
The king reeked of smug confidence when he shrugged, and said, “Slaughter the infected.”
“But—”
“They cannot be saved.”
“Balkazar isyourcreation,” Sinadim argued, trying to force the king to slow before an apocalypse was loosed on his small pack. “Surely—”
“Balkazar will be called to join the horde, if he hasn’t already joined it,” Giaus said, his voice a hard line that brooked no argument and sent a chill to whistle through Sinadim’s blood. “Your war chief—and all hope for any others he may have infected along the way—is gone. These are the hard truths ofkings, Sinadim. The feral court is not your genteel Silver City. Here, death is theonlymercy for the hopeless lost.”
“And who are you to decide who lives or dies?” Sinadim snarled, tripping only for Giaus to catch him by the nape and set him right.
At this, Giaus rolled his eyes and stopped in the center of the den. Feet spread shoulder width apart, he tipped his head back and drew a breath between parted lips. “Can you not taste it?” he asked. “The corruption and rot—it’s all that remains of that vile cretin you so loved.”
Almost against his will, as if given permission to acknowledge what he’d won by vanquishing the killing fever, Sinadim’s eyes fluttered closed. A breath pulled in. Sent swirling over the shallow dimples now lining the roof of his mouth, where scents became tastes he could see.
The explosion of color was just as jarring as it had been the first time. Just as bewildering to his overwrought mind.
“Pick one trail,” Giaus hummed. “Tease it free of the others.”
Sweat beaded across Sinadim’s brow, rolling down the deep furrow of scars that no longer itched or wept.
They were dancing all around him. A miasma of color and texture indiscernible from one to the next—until he did as Giaus said.
It was there, all around him. The evidence of daily pack life a rich, storied narrative he could unravel with a single breath.
He could see it all.
The phantom of his fight with Balkazar, painted in angry swirls of noxious fumes. The pattern of violence disturbed by Sickle’s passing as the Omega had fled certain death, and again by Micha—who’d been the one to deliver a pitiful bundle of charred bones.
With a single flick of his tongue, Sinadim knew Keever and Konjo had come no closer than the mouth of the den.
He had the taste of their fear.
And just there, hidden where only he and Giaus might see, thin, imperceptible tendrils of golden slick buried beneath mundane layers.
But he knew, without a hint of doubt, that none of them showed any signs of infection. None but Balkazar.
Rotten from blood to bone with a strain of Trax that offered nothing but misery.
“The things I can see,” he whispered, staggering toward the light. Incredulous and dazed as his feet moved and his brain spun.
From the clearing, a roar. That of a beast in pain, it jarred Sinadim into action and banished any trace of miraculous sight. In an instant, his vision cleared to show the drab, dingy interior of Renegade’s den, and any hint of fantastic color receded back, into the shadows from where it had come.
It was a roar he recognized, distorted though it may be.
A battle cry he’d heard a thousand times, both in the Silver City, and beyond it.
That of a male who’d sworn to lay down his life in protection of Sinadim’s bloodline—only to betray everything he’d ever upheld as precious, for he was lost to the madness of a virus wreaking havoc in his blood and brain.
“By the Nine…”
