I draw my lips back in a quiet snarl, a wolf’s growl, and that’s when I become aware of the cutting sensation across the left side of my bottom lip.
I run my tongue across my upper teeth to discover one sharp tooth protruding on my left side. My hair at the corners of my vision is now the color of Skirra’s dark-gray fur.
The hole in my chest has closed. Malak’s dark device must be part of me now, but so is Skirra’s soul.
Malak stands, half-crouched opposite me. He grips his hammer in his left hand while his black medallion is wrapped around his right palm. His dark-colored clothing can’t hide my blood. It’s splattered across his face and neck and hands.
I speak and my voice is a growl that rumbles through me, guttural in a way it never was before. “You should have kept me chained, Malak.”
He’s tense, his chest rising and falling, his heartbeat drumming in my hearing as he watches me with wary eyes. “I did.”
He did?
I glance back at the table to see the mangled chains strewn across it. Also Skirra’s body, now chain-free and curled up as if he’s sleeping peacefully.
Did I place him like that before I slid off the table?
I’m not sure if I did, but I quietly make him a vow. When this is over, I will bury his body wherever he wants.
I turn back to Malak, but that’s when I realize that something isn’t right about him. His hand is upraised, his medallion sitting neatly against his palm, but the metal is dull and lifeless.
All around me, I can sense creation magic—Blacksmith magic—that I couldn’t discern before. It glimmers in the air, brushes across my skin, and sparks at the edges of my vision.
And yet when I look at Malak’s hand where I expect his power to be, there is nothing.
Where is his power?
Then I realize I’m looking in the wrong place. His power is not in his right hand, after all.
My lips part in surprise. “You’re left-handed.”
He jolts but my mind flies back to the moment when Malak checked Asha’s hands up on the mountain and found them wrapped in warm cloths.
He checked her left hand first.
“So is Asha.”
His face pales. “How did you?—?”
“I can see your power,” I say, following the stream of it out from his left palm, the way it travels to his fingertips and up his arm, seeming to feed his heart like a flow of life-giving blood. “I can see it all.”
“How?” he snarls. “How can you see Blacksmith power when I cannot?”
It must be Skirra’s wolfish senses combined with the Blacksmith magic now resting within my heart.
It makes sense to me now that Malak dismissed the guard on the rampart and that there’s silence around the outside of the castle, which indicates he dismissed the guards from there too.
He wouldn’t want his people to see him use his power like this.
I pace toward him, remaining conscious of the way he’s gripping his hammer and the way his power thrums in response to the contact with that metal. “Your people call Asha powerless, but she’s like you.”
“Sheispowerless!” he snaps. “She needs a hammer like mine. Without it, she may as well be human.”
“Then make her one.”
“You know nothing,” he shouts at me. “My sister was the hammer-maker and she abandoned me.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “She died.”
