Merrick paled, looking over at Sparrow. “One of us did,” he admitted too quietly.
“What?” Laurent crossed his arms, eyes narrowing, as Sparrow swallowed and looked down, scuffing her leather boots against a dried blood stain on the floor.
Merrick inhaled slowly before answering. “The kill shot Adara aimed at Lenna… It stopped my heart. Ididdie for a few minutes.” He reached his arm out, wrapping it around Sparrow’s slim waist. “Sparrow bought me back.”
Laurent resisted the urge to remove Merrick’s hand from Sparrow. Now was not the time. Not with the fate of the continent resting in the resolution of a battle none of them were involved in. Even before everything started, this had ultimately always been Esmeray’s fight.
“How?” Keerian crossed his arms, wincing slightly from his injuries, and surveyed Merrick up and down as if he couldn’t accept the utter nonsense Merrick spouted. Merrick threw him a droll look in return. “Then you weren’t dead. No one can bring a soul back from Minmere.”
“But I did,” Sparrow whispered hollowly, not meeting the Golden Gargoyle’s eyes. Instead, she stared at her hands, her brows pinching. “Myacat… I didn’t even know if it would work but…I use it to bring flowers back when they begin to die. I built on that, and in my panic…my magic intensified. I touched Merrick’s chest, saw his soul floating in pure darkness, and I pulled it back into his body.”
The four of them, somber-faced, stared at each other. Sparrow suffered minor injuries, a few cuts and bruises, but that was all. Laurent sustained slashes to his arms and back, the material of his robe ripped and hanging. He was pretty positive his hand was broken, but with his accelerated healing, he knew he’d be back to full health in a few hours. He was more worried about the scrapes on Sparrow.
Merrick looked great for a male allegedly back from the dead. His bronzed skin stayed a little pale as he recounted his out of body experience, and his left wing still hung at an unsettling angle, but he assured everyone multiple times that he would go to a healer to make sure his broken wing was set correctly to avoid permanent damage.
Keerian still shouted down his mind connection to Esmeray but there was no answer from the other side of their ring. Sparrow, Merrick, and Laurent also tried, and failed.
“We need to find Esmeray,” Keerian ordered, his metallic wings rustling with impatience. “We couldn’t take Adara in her Sentry form all together–what is Esmeray going to do that we couldn’t?” He began pacing, those golden wings catching the light of the full moon now well past its apex. “If we can somehow track her, if we can narrow down where she went, we could bring in reinforcements from the Palace. I just got Esmeray back. I willnotfucking lose her again.”
Sparrow moved away from Merrick to grip Keerian’s hand in hers gently. “You know Esmeray best. She wouldn’t do what she did without reason. Keep faith in her.”
Laurent opened his connection to Esmeray again. There was nothing but deafening silence on the other end of the ring.
“Where are you?”Laurent shot down his ring to Lenna. If Lenna peered into the Prism, she could track the Queen’s most recent memory and see if they could glean any information.
There was no answer from Lenna’s ring either.
“Well, Esmeray isn’t dead,” Merrick noted dryly, nodding towards Keerian. “You’re still standing.” With a glance at Sparrow and Laurent, Merrick continued, almost sheepish, “And…something else happened–”
Sparrow shot him a look that conveyed the message of “shut the fuck up.” Laurent winced, inclined to agree with Sparrow's decision. Now was not the time.
Before Merrick could say anything else, the throne room doors creaked open and Lenna’s curly red hair appeared. Laurent sagged in relief. Sparrow, whirling towards the doors, cried out and ran to the Oracle, wrapping her in a tight embrace.
Sparrow had waned her out once Adara began shifting, and Lenna, thankfully, had taken one look at Adara’s lengthening teeth and practically jumped into Sparrow’s outstretched arms.
The battle that waged in the Great Hall had dissipated once word of Adara’s disappearance spread. It seemed the beings forced to participate in the bullshit full moon celebration had ruthlessly beaten back any of Adara’s remaining supporters, and now healers slowly wove through the injured, helping who they could.
With a tight frown on her otherwise bloodless face, hands palming the dull grey Prism, Lenna announced, “I know where Esmeray went.”
Chapter fifty-seven
Esmeray
Thehardsnowbrokemy fall as I landed, claws digging into the frozen earth, skidding to a stop against the broken columns surrounding the ruins of the temple. Still in Sentry, my ragged breath left behind plumes of hot air as I scrambled my way up and over one of the half-buried pillars, trying to steady my breathing as I dove into a small recess that hid me from view.
Adara stalked around the ring of the ruins, growling deep in her throat, her massive head shaking off snow drifts from our crash landing. Her tail steadily bashed against the temple, breaking huge chunks of rock off the pillars surrounding me. I had gotten a lucky hit in the moment we appeared high above the mountains of the Obsidian Palace and I freefell down into the ruins themselves, where the haphazard rubble granted me a little coverage.
“Where are you, little sister?” Adara hissed venomously as she blasted through a large wall of the ruins with a burst of spell enhanced silver magic. It shattered to the ground, much too close for comfort.
I shifted back into my normal body to fit under the broken pillar easier. My entire being hurt. Now, in this form, without the bonus of thicker skin, I shivered against the cold wind that stirred up snow flurriesall around us. Crawling on my stomach, I surveyed the battlefield from my vantage point, the moonlight gilding everything silver.
We were way above the highest spires of the Obsidian Palace, on the mountaintop itself, where the air was achingly thin and the temperature dropped dangerously low at night. Even though the stars illuminated the mountain brightly, a hundred yards down the mountain, dark shadows of a tree line stood tall and bare, defiantly growing in the harsh conditions. Snow blanketed the ground up here year-round, and the deserted ruins were rarely, if ever, visited. Sometimes Sentries would come up here for training, but I doubted I would get lucky enough for a pack of elite gargoyle warriors to find me.
Not that I wanted them to. Adara’s wing was bleeding profusely where I’d bitten her, the blood dripping down her side and bouncing off the snow. If I could get her to shift, I could get her subdued. Slowly, I reached into my pocket of space and pulled out Goldriel.
She wasn’t healing fast.
But I didn’t know if that was a side effect of whatever spells she cast or because her magic was burning out. I prayed it was the latter. Her nostrils flared, trying and failing to scent me as the wind thrashed through the jagged ruins, scattering Adara’s hope of detecting me easily.
