The shout punched through the roar of the blood-tide.
My lord. Fenrik.
The words snagged on a jagged edge of my remaining humanity. Not the title—I didn’t care for the title—but the loyalty. The desperation. The voice that had talked me down from the greenhouse roof when I was fifteen, bleeding and ashamed.
Thorven.
Horror spiked through me. I was looking at the man who had stood by me when everyone else had fled or died. And I was close to eviscerating him. My hand collided with the dungeon wall with a loud crack.
It didn’t feel like hitting stone, it felt more like hitting water. The solid foundation rock that had held up the manor forcenturies, gave way like wet clay. My fingers—my claws—sank deep, tearing through the minerals with a shriek of pulverized rock. I dragged my hand down, fighting the momentum, using the friction to arrest my forward motion. Dust plumed outward, choking the air. Four parallel gouges scarred the granite wall—deep, jagged trenches.
Thorven was pressed against the opposite wall, his chest heaving, his face drained of all colour. He was staring at the ruin of the granite, and then at me.
“Fenrik?” he whispered, his voice trembling.
From the upper floors, I heard the Sentinels approaching. The stone serpent, the wolf, the lion—they roared in unison down the dungeon stairwell. They were screaming because I was screaming. The curse had jumped the gap, turning the guardians into amplifiers for my own soul. The house answered them. A groan shuddered through the floorboards beneath my boots, and a fissure unzipped down the corridor wall to my left, racing from ceiling to floor. Another followed on the right. Plaster rained down around us, coating my shoulders in white dust. I tried to pull free, but my fingers wouldn’t obey. They were locked, my claws were hooked into the stone, fused by the surge of magic pulsating through my veins.
The world was washed in blinding silver. It poured from my eyes, casting shadows against the destruction.
Thorven scrambled backward on his elbows until his back hit the far wall. His eyes were wide and unblinking as they fixed on me.
“Run,” I choked out, but the word came out as a snarl.
He didn’t move. He couldn’t. I had paralyzed him with fear as surely as the stone paralyzed my hand. Then I felt warm. It was faint, a ghost of a sensation against my back. Tentative and shaking, but undeniably there. It landed on my spine, right between the shoulder blades where the phantom wings were tearing at my skin. The silver haze fracturing my vision wavered.
A low, painful whine sounded near my knee. Kirion. The wyrmling was there, pressing his flank against my leg, the poor thing trembling. The hand on my back pressed closer.
“Fenrik.”
Her voice was barely a whisper, but it drowned out the screaming Sentinels.
Even though I felt coming back to myself, there was no gentleness in Lysa’s correction. The golden warmth of her magic punched through the freezing shadows of my curse like a heated iron rod. It found the beast thumping its rhythm against my ribs and grabbed it by the throat.
Snap.
My heart seized. It was a physical brutality, the sensation of a dislocated shoulder being wrenched back into its socket without warning. The extra beat, that shadow-echo that had been driving me mad for years, was strangled into silence. My heart gave one pause, and then kicked back in. I hit the stone floor, when the shadows that had been elongating my limbs and fusing my fingers to the stone evaporated.
“Fenrik?” She was too close.
I dragged my head up, sweat stinging my eyes. The lantern Mrs. Crane had dropped was sputtering its last, casting shadows that made the scene look like a massacre. And it almost was.
My gaze locked on the granite foundation wall. Four parallel trenches, deep enough to bury an arm in, had been carved through the rock. The edges were pulverized. I had done that.
I looked past the ruin to Thorven. My groundkeeper, my friend. He was pressed into the corner, his face the colour of parchment. He wasn’t looking at Fenrik Stormgarde, the boy he’d taught to ride.
I am going to kill them.
The realization wasn’t a fear. It was a certainty.
“Get back,” I rasped, scrambling backward on my hands and heels.
Lysa reached for me again, her hazel eyes wide, filled with defiance. “Fenrik, your heart—it stopped racing, I can feel—“
“Don’t touch me!” I roared, the sound tearing my throat.
I recoiled from her as if she were the one made of acid. I backed up until my spine hit a crate. Seeing her there, illuminated by the dying lantern light, dusty and determined and so fragile... it broke something inside me.
Kelda was right.Kelda warned me. She said I was too volatile. She said bringing an outsider here would only end in blood.
