Just because I have been pretending to be ordinary for everyone’s comfort doesn’t mean that Iamordinary.
I am wearing the fucking bow, so no one will even see anything out of the ordinary, no telltale glowing of my eyes, as I spin quickly in a kata to augment my senses.
My dread grows as I turn back to Zan. “I don’t feel a concentration of your scales anywhere but here. Can you locate them?”
“With effort. It’s not easy for me to feel such a small sliver of my power when I’m encased in it. However.”
Without warning, Zan rams an open palm into the front door of Nomi’s house, and it disintegrates.
All at once, my sense of inside the house opens up—I hadn’t actually realized it was being hidden, before, that no one could sense what lay inside from the outside.
But now I feel what Zan must have suspected: banked rage.
We rush inside and immediately almost trip over Nomi’s form on the ground, lying unconscious on her back.
She is wearing the dragon scale talisman, but the scales are black and crumbling, like they’ve been overwhelmed and exhausted. Their protection spent.
“Wait,” Zan says as I rush to her. “Sometimes moving humans when they’re injured—”
“Iknowthat, I’ve been on battlefields before,” I snap. “But if it’s just magical backlash that caused her to black out—”
This time I extend a hand that glows with wrath despite the suppressing power of the bow—which also disintegrates in my hair, overwhelmed, becausefuck this—and send a beam of wrath straight into Nomi like a bolt of lightning.
Nomi’s eyes fly open, and she gasps as she surges into a seated position, her eyes wild.
“Guardian, report,” I grit out.
Her gaze flies to mine, then to Zan, seeing us for the first time and an instant later realizing what it means, before turning back to me with a snarl.
“The Order took Teren,” Nomi says.
For a moment, I probably appear still.
I am capable of blank shock, but that is not what I feel in this moment.
But the pool of wrath inside me goes from a simmer to an explosion in an instant, and it takes me a moment to let it rise while fighting the urge to give it form.
Not yet.
But that thought, too, only causes it to grow.
Because some part of me knew.
Not the specifics. There are so many things the Order could have done.
But I could have been here the whole time, had I not counseled myself toward rationality rather than acting on my anger. We could have organized someone to follow the priests and see where they took Teren, if not stopped them entirely.
But I elected to wait. To not act on my power.
There are costs to this kind of freedom.
Nomi scoots back from me, her expression gone careful at the intensity of the magenta aura spilling out of me.
I turn away from her, toward the door.
Zan grabs my arm. “Not yet, Yora.”
It is an effort of will to not lash out at him with my wrath. “Donothold me back,” I tell him coldly.
