The Lifebind burned a singular, dire warning on my wrist.
Koryn was in danger.
CHAPTER 23
KORYN
The bitch stabbed me.
She melted the metal clasp that held my stupid velvet gown closed in the front and stabbed it into the tender skin just beneath and between my breasts. It hurt, but I’d survive. She’d only punctured an inch or so.
Icicles dripped from my fingertips like talons, ready to be thrown like daggers, five all at once from each hand. Mine would go a lot deeper than a fucking inch.
But she had Isanara.
Why did you wait so long to call for me?
Power crystallized within me as I took in the scene. The auburn-haired fae woman from the throne room, the same one who’d stood over me with such disgust in the bathhouse, had my familiar trapped in the corner where one of the straight spoke hallways dead-ended into a curve.
Isanara lifted her head up, but she couldn’t reach far. She could roar. The bricks in the surrounding walls shook.I had it handled.
There is a spike in your wing.Two, actually. Both lodged between adjacent membranes on her right wing.
They were the only thing keeping me from completely losing control. If the fae bitch could so easily turn a small pendant into a weapon, then the spikes lodged in Isanara’s wings could do even more damage.
A small price to pay,Isanara said, still all sass. But I could hear the strain in her voice. Her bravado would run out eventually. In the end, a legendary creature or powerful familiar, she was still a child.
And I had not been here to protect her.
What could be worth this?
Isanara snapped her head to the side, jaws out, and I saw it.
It had lived in my nightmares for hundreds of years. Every time I smelled blood, it brought me back to Janessa, dying in my arms, her blood coating my hands. Every scream I’d heard, thousands of them, brought me right back to hers as she died in the temple on what should have been one of the happiest days of her life.
The intricate blue-stoned, fae-made diadem that had killed my sister lay on the red brick-paved floor between my familiar’s front legs.
Do you know what that is?Even in my head, my voice shook.
Isanara was too busy snapping her jaws at her attacker to notice.It looked tasty.
“Take another step, and I will freeze the blood in your veins where you stand,” I said. I stood framed in the curved corridor, my adversary in the adjacent straight spoke. Between us, backed up against the wall, was Isanara. Her attacker had dared a step closer, and that could not fucking happen.
She had perfectly molded, deep red lips that contrasted with her pale skin. By any standard, human, witch, or fae, she was stunningly beautiful. But that did not make her sneer any less nasty.
“I am not afraid of your kind,” she spat.
I threw out my right hand, sending the sharp icicles from my fingertips flying across the space between her and Isanara. The woman lurched backward, but not in time to avoid one of the blades of ice cutting through the hem of her gown.
“I do not care what you think about witches,” I snarled in time with my dragon’s own warning growl. “You should be afraid of me.”
“My bastard brother’s lover and her pet? Utterly terrifying.” But she didn’t take another step.
I had to get the spikes out of Isanara’s wings. Once she was free, she could take care of herself. Though the woman must be damn fast with her magic if she’d managed to impale her in the first place. Whoever she was, she was powerful despite the curse. The rumors said that was why the fae had retreated to Balar Shan, to conserve and concentrate what magic remained to them.
She looked over her shoulder. A second later, I heard what she had. Footsteps sounded somewhere behind her. We would have visitors soon.
I could kill her with or without an audience.
