I only make it ten paces before the sound of quick footfalls behind me makes me pause.
I half-turn back to find Lucian coming after me.
He quickly draws level with me, reaching for my hands, even though they hold my deadliest weapons: my claws. “Sister?”
I struggle to keep my voice clear of the sadness that’s welling inside me. “Yeah?”
“I need you to know what frightens me the most about what I saw in the book.”
I try to smile. “All the dead bodies? Murderous me cutting through them without mercy?”
He shakes his head, his expression deadly serious. “It was watching you die at the end.”
A shiver runs through me before I can suppress it.
When Lucian first recounted the vision to us, he said that when I’d finished slaughtering all of the dark magic creatures, a new being had come to fight me.
He couldn’t see that being’s face. He doesn’t know who they are. He said they’d had wings, and their wings might have been red, but he couldn’t be sure.
That being kills me.
They lift me to a great height, and, while I’m still alive, they drop me.
I break against the ground because I don’t spread my wings.
Fucking useless wings.
Lucian did everything he could over the last month to teach me how to use my wings, but I still can’t fly.
Now he’s tense where he stands opposite me, his shoulders hunched and his expression drawn. “Can I show you something?” he asks.
“Of course.”
He rolls up the short sleeve of his black tunic, enabling me to finally see his tattoo.
It depicts rocky mountains, inked in gray, but surrounded by a golden circle. Through the circle is a flow of amber lava that cascades from one of the mountain peaks.
“I don’t know a lot about my mother’s people—the gargoyles—but every gargoyle clan had an emblem. A mark they would give their brethren,” Lucian says. “Her clan, the stone gargoyles, apparently dwelled in the mountains—inhospitable ones. The kind with volcanos in them.”
It isn’t lost on me then that Jonah—who acted like a father figure to my brother—is a jotunn who has an affinity for fiery volcanos.
“When I was fifteen,” Lucian continues, “Dad gave permission for me to get my mark. Actually, he didn’t object at all, and I think it was because he hated me so much. Far better that I was marked as a gargoyle than as his son.”
My chest constricts. I was the firstborn. I have the black blood and the ability to heal quickly. As the second-born, Lucian was a punching bag.
Lucian clears his throat. “It was the one time I was allowed to connect with my mother’s old clan.”
“The clan who betrayed her,” I say.
“Fucking monsters, the lot of them.” Lucian nods. “It was dangerous for Mom to go back there, but without my mark, I would be clan-less. Their culture demanded that they couldn’t deny me my mark. Of course, the ink they used was deliberately infused with toxins and I was sick for days. But I survived.”
My blood boils, my anger nearly as strong as my sadness. That gargoyle clan is on my list of targets when…if… I ever claim the Nostra Empire.
“My point is that I never had a home until now,” Lucian says, reaching for my hands again. “This pack—yourpack—it’s my home. It doesn’t matter where we are. As long as we’re together, that’s where I belong. You’re part of my home, too, Veda.”
Tears appear in his eyes, but his mouth is down-turned, telling me they’re angry tears.
“Don’t fucking die on me,” he says.
