The candle sputtered by the window, the first grey light rising toward us.
Some of the newcomers jittered with restless energy, tapping the table as though anticipation itself might sign them to the mission.
Their first assignment, and a dull one at that.
Callum scanned the rest of us, the stare slipping past Ford and me entirely. We were locked in the final throes of a brutal thumb war, cutthroat strategy required when the subject of killing was off the table.
“You’re dismissed,” he said, just as the candle nearly guttered entirely, flame quivering against its wax prison.
Twenty minutes. That was all the dark we had left today.
The others filed out, their boots fading down the steps as Callum moved past the table, eyes fixed on the window where a pale light had already blurred across the lake.
It was the kind of false dawn that fooled the world into thinking it was awake. Moonless grey. Neither night nor morning. The hour when dreamers lingered and fighters sharpened their blades.
His hand slid into his pocket, knuckles twitching over something small, unseen, before drawing it back out and snapping his fingers. Every candle in the room died at once, plunging us into a velvet-dusk.
The door slammed shut, and Callum led us out of the cabin, boots crunching over roots and damp soil as the forest welcomed us.
No stars. No sliver of moon. Not even the promise of sun.
His shoulders tensed with every stride, hand still lingering near his pocket, where whatever he hid waited.
I had seen him break. I had seen him blaze. But this, this simmering quiet, this was new. Worse.
We all felt it. Like walking beside a fire that hadn’t chosen yet whether to warm or burn.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ronan
HE HEARD HER BEFORE HE SAW HER.
A voice drifting through the trees, a lure meant for prey.
Leather split, muscle giving way as wings tore free from the shadow where Ronan knelt at the cliff’s edge.
Below, the Firen Forest festered, a scar in the world, home to the beasts left behind when hel’s portal sealed shut.
But some of them wore beauty like a blur.
The mortals stumbled through bramble and bone-thick thorns, lungs rasping with every failing breath.
She had been chasing them for over a mile now. They thought the dark might hide them, that if they crawled beneath brush and held their silence, she would miss them.
Ronan knew better. Knew the predator she had become.
Still, he did not move. They weren’t worth breaking cover yet. So he sat, where stillness still slept, and listened.
Her voice weaved through the trees again, familiar enough to cut, mellow enough to beg belief. But beneath every syllable, there was a fracture. A note that was too tantalizing—
As if a part of her still longed to be free.
A long, pitchy howl split the forest. A dire wolf, its call breaking through the sound of the screams.
She had found them.
The metallic stench drifted up to the cliff where he watched, copper and rot clinging to the air, gnawing at his tongue, curdling down his throat.
