“Because he protects what’s his.”
I give a small shiver. “What about you? Will you be okay alone with…everything that’s happened?”
Adira’s returning grin is rather alarming, and irritation rankles in my chest that I’ve inadvertently said something naïve. I’ve always been a clever observer of people, reading them before they can see to the heart of me, but since I arrived in Letum, I’ve been tumbling untethered in the air, unable to regain my bearings and find the ground.
Feral woman.Niko’s words echo in my mind, and I hate that in this, he’s right. I’ve spent so much time here railing against the unfairness of my circumstances, rather than thinking my way around them. Perhaps I’d have learned the way of the land far faster if I’d shown an ounce of kindness to any of these people, but there exists a part of me that instinctively fights anything that dares come too close. Thorns have covered my skin for longer than I can remember, spearing for the soft parts of others before they can find the soft parts in me.
I know Adira hears my racing thoughts, but thankfully, she doesn’t acknowledge them. Instead, she grips her spear and says, “Don’t worry about me. I am wilder than the wood itself.”
Somehow, she’s right. The forest winks emerald in the dark—all sprawling vines, and thick, moss-covered trees—and the colors of Adira blend in seamlessly. The gray of her eyes is the same shade as the shadows between the trunks, her onyx hair the same hue as the pieces of night sky peeking between the leaves. The painted designs on her skin appeared abstract and odd in the dim light of the tavern, but now, it’s apparent they mimic the sprawl of the forest, their glowing spirals both as beautiful and brutal as the wood.
“Go straight to the palace and wait for Niko inside. You can never be too careful in Letum…what does not exist one day may appear the next. It isn’t safe to wander.”
“It isn’t safe withhimeither,” I mutter.
“Ah, but who better to protect you from monsters than another monster?” she says with a wink. Before I can respond, Adira has melted into the shadows of the trees.
Turning back to the carriage, I examine its gilded façade. I could climb back in and go sit in the castle like a good girl, waiting for king’s return.Ifhe returns. I still have no idea what a Strayed is, but whatever was happening in the city seemed like far too much for one man to handle. There’s been no sign of an army or a royal guard, nothing that would indicate there’s anyone to help him defend against those wreaking havoc in the harbor.
Maybe I’ll get lucky, and they’ll kill him off before I have to.
I unsheathe my sword and close the carriage door, patting it on the rear like I’m sending a horse off. The carriage doesn’t move, so I elect to leave it behind as I step up to the stone gate. There is no door, and though I tense, waiting for some unseen force to throw me backward, I breeze through the archway with no resistance.
I’m done cowering. Done worrying for my sanity, and hoping the entire experience just disappears from my mind. It’s time to learn more about the world I’ve fallen into, and what better way to get a feel for the world than a walk? The palace grounds should be safe enough. And if they’re not, I’m adept with a sword.
It only takes a few moments to realize walking was a mistake. The stupid silk slippers do nothing to shield my feet from the black gravel of the drive, the sharp little stones piercing through the flimsy fabric and digging into my soles with every step. Cursing them loudly, and King Bastard for dressing me like a doe-eyed damsel, I begrudgingly move off the path to trek through the grass.
Unlike the beach or the forest—or even the mist-soaked city harbor—there are no bright plants or flowers on the grounds. There’s nothing but a long stretch of neatly clipped grass and the black drive winding lazily up the hill toward where the palace looms. It’s an odd dichotomy—the complete lack of anything living when the world surrounding the Lunaedon is thriving and lush.
Then I remember the way my flower crumbled with one touch of Niko’s ribbons. The way he’d siphoned everything vibrant from it and left behind a rotting carcass. How those ribbons did the same thing to Jamie.
Suddenly, the lack of life around the Lunaedon makes far too much sense.
At the very least, the open grounds keep my imagination from wandering too far and imagining what’s lurking behind every tree and shadow. Before the plague, I lived with my family on an acre or so of land upstate that was bordered by a thick forest. I’d had to walk through it every day to get to school, and I never failed to terrify myself conjuring up what could be living in the trees. Sometimes the imagining had been based in reality—bears or mountain lions, mostly—but more often than not, my over-active mind would dream up fanciful creatures. Tigers with black eyes and fangs as long as my arm, that survived solely on human flesh. Banshees that could scream so loud, I’d go deaf and blind and never find my way out of the wood. Shadows that could pierce through your skin and take over your mind.
I shake my head pointedly, clearing the images away. My father had always told me there was no use in being afraid of the imagined—it was only the real things that could hurt me. In the end, it was his fear of both that damned me. And mine…mine kept me alive.
My stomach lurches as a savage snarl rips through the night. I whirl, all thoughts of my father, and the resounding pain of hismemory, dissipating as I stare up in frozen shock at the creature stalking toward me.
Heart thumping painfully against my chest, I blink in an attempt to clear what’s surely a hallucination. For there is no living creature with eyes that glow red or fangs so enormous, they hang from its glistening maw like razor-sharp stalactites. Nor any whose body is so powerfully muscled, whose head towers at least ten feet off the ground.
But no matter how fiercely I rub my eyes, the beast becomes no less real. And as I take in the creature’s beautiful fur, striped in a unique pattern of black and orange, and the looming, skeletal wings that sprout from its back, dread drops into the pit of my stomach like hot iron.
Somehow, it’s the creature I dreamed up in childhood, the one I’d imagined on all those walks home. The one I haven’t thought of inyearsuntil a few moments ago, now stands before me, lowering its giant head in pursuit of the hunt.
How?
The question has barely formed in my mind when the tiger-beast lunges for me with a terrifying snarl. Panic surges through my veins like icy water, because however this creature is here—whatever the magic of this fucked up kingdom—if it truly is the one I dreamed up as a kid, it means one thing: iteatshumans.
I barely have time to raise my sword when the creature barrels into me. The breath shoots painfully from my lungs as I crash to the ground, so the scream of agony remains trapped in my throat as two claws pierce straight through my shoulder. Scorching pain radiates through my arm as I squirm against the beast’s heft, and my brain reverberates in my skull as it releases an ear-splitting roar.
Letting out my own scream of fury, I stab the small gladius upward with my uninjured arm. Blood sprays my face as the weapon sinks into its muscled chest, but the blade is far tooshort to have reached anything fatal. Hot breath buffets my face as the creature roars in fury, and it takes everything in me not to let go of the sword to cover my ears.
My shoulder throbs as I yank furiously on the pommel, but I realize quickly my efforts are futile, and the blade has stuck into bone. The tiger slashes its head, wildly trying to dislodge the weapon, and I take its momentary distraction to roll out from underneath it just as one of its giant wings comes slashing toward me.
Weaponless, my head swims as I scrabble to my feet and stretch my arms out as wide as I can. I have no idea how to kill the thing or if it can evenbekilled. Somehow, in all my imaginings of the creature, a weakness had never come up. I try to remember any of the wilderness survival my dad taught Celie and I, but as the tiger lowers its head and prowls toward me, red eyes glinting ominously in the dark, the thoughts come slow and disjointed.
Am I supposed to play dead? Be big and loud?
