And it might have been enough.
Ears flicked back, pressed to his skull, Sickle steeled himself for the leap.
What he needed most was a way to defend his den against interlopers. An advantage over the razor-sharp instincts of monsters who would see him perish against impossible odds. He needed a way to not only refuse the call of the primordial reptilian queen who demanded he kneel, but to maintain his vow to never do so again.
The obsidian glitter pulled him forward. A relentless lure of necessity, it forced his courage to build with every greedy step closer to that gaping maw of pointed, deadly teeth.
He reached. Fingers inching not toward the pointed tips—that had already bloodied his digits with their serrated edge—but to their root. To the band of brittle charcoal keeping them anchored in bone.
It was nothing to wriggle them loose. A joy to watch what had once been gore-soaked gums crumble away at his lightest touch.
One by one, they popped free. Dropped into a tinkling pile of deadly potential, the brood mother’s teeth had been tempered by the fires that burned inside all lava-kin. In life, a noxious, organic magma contained in the gullet, but in death, it spilled over and raged out of control. Obliterating what remained. Sinew and muscle, bones and fat. Everything…
… except the teeth.
Whatever impossibly hard mineral they were made of had turned to obsidian glass in death.
A gift from the Nine. Gods and Goddesses whose lore he knew well, who’d never bothered to notice him when he’d been nothing but a queen’s plaything. Deities who must now have some stake in his survival… some reason to offer gifts instead of demanding sacrifice.
Some reason that he had survived, in spite of everything.
Change on the wind, and no room for the old-world relics who couldn’t adapt.
Sultana would see him hollowed out by her consorts.
Consumed from the inside at her command…
Sickle had nothing but his wit and a hollow corpse, but from that, he meant to give himself claws.
Sixty-two of them, to be exact.
Serrated from point to base, deadly sharp all the way to the root, the canines were as long as his forearm. Perfect for landing the killing blow, only to retreat so any hapless prey might bleed to death. Now repurposed, he fashioned all four canines into curved blades and tucked them into his belt. Two on his outer thighs, the others hidden at his lower back. The rest he kept for tools.
Fifty-eight wicked, glittering black talons that would give even the best Anhur warrior pause.
Grinning now, Sickle showed the point of his own canines as he worked. Turning his attention to the scaly hide that hadn’t dimmed or tarnished under extreme heat, he ignored the slice of nicked fingers, wedged his new knives between the scales, and began to cut. Working wet leather with the skill and speed of one made to sew elaborate gowns for his Anhur queens, he pulled two full sets of custom armor from the carcass before the sun yielded to the triplet moons.
And it was then, as he toiled, that he felt the night calling. Seduction from the shadows, there was beauty in the twilight. Peace in the roar of the night things waking to stretch leathery wings and sharpen claws, for in the formless shrieking he heard what lay hidden, and knew.
They were calling him home.
Armored from fingertips to nape, from skull to heels, a new brand of warrior was born in the wilds. One whose tattoos meant nothing where they couldn’t be seen. To whom strength and speed were secondary to cunning wit, and the accuracy of a well-placed slice from a blade.
This was a paradise meant for the vicious, where the wilds refused to suffer the ignorance of fools.
A place where Sickle of the Silver Court couldn’t survive, where only a shade of who he’d been might be free to thrive.
Confident, ready, the Omega male dragged the remains of the brood mother back into his den. Fingers hooked beneath the edge of a shattered mandible bone, he felt something pop. Something that oozed where his fingers slipped for purchase.
Gooey slime.
A fetid liquid that reeked enough to send him staggering back, retching at the end of every breath. The scent was laced with something that made his nape tight with the unmistakable shiver of fear.
An instinctive thing linked to his olfactory senses. Primal memory of phantoms in the gloom.
He cursed himself for a fool, turning to scrub his palm against the limestone walls of his den—and succeeded only in spreading that sludge in an arc of reeking denial.
Lava-kin stink glands.
