Good enough. I liked Gwen. She was strict with the girls but still loving. She was no Elaine, but as close as you could get. We’d let most of the staff go on paid leave for now, trying to limit knowledge of where my sisters lived. Gwen cooked, cleaned, did laundry, everything a mother would do, and I was grateful to her.
Tetra leaned her cane against the wall and hobbled over as my gaze flicked to Valor. She was starting at Tetra’s foot again!
I kicked her under the table, and her head snapped up to me. Guilt marred her features, and she reached for a chicken drumstick.
What was going on with her?
“Look at Ariyel with the girls,” Tetra said as she passed the window. We all peeked out to see her wolf lying in the grass with Zara and Liana. Even Gwen’s owl creature was flying circles above them.
“I want a creature early, too!” Virtue argued. “It’s not fair that only Valor gets one.”
I sighed, tearing into a chicken drumstick. I was already sick of this argument. I was willing to bet it was going to repeat every week until they were nineteen. They would probably wear me down by their sixteenth birthday and I’d let them go early just to shut them up.
Parenting was exhausting.
I opened my mouth to tell Virtue to give it a rest when the sirens rang out. The war sirens, the new ones I had installed in case there was a repeat of what happened the night my father died.
An attack on Riverine.
I burst up from the table so fast my chair knocked over. Tetra limped to her cane, wincing with each pressure she put on her foot.
“What’s happening?” Victory whimpered.
“Keep them safe,” I told Gwen, who was already pulling a hidden katana out of a kitchen cupboard.
I was halfway out the door with Tetra on my heels when Valor ran up beside me. “I’m going too.”
“No, you’re not!” Gwen, Tetra, and I all said at once.
“I have a Talanagi!” she growled.
“With no battle training andnogift yet. Get inside and stay alive!” I barked, physically pushing her back into Gwen, who pinned her to her chest.
I let the door slam behind me, ignoring Valor’s screams, and ran for Liana.
‘Is Kohen attacking after our truce? I’ll kill him,’I told her.
‘I just asked Onyx. He said it’s not them,’she told me, already bent down so that I could leap on her back and into my saddle.
I stopped when Zara stood, and I met my sister’s creature’s gaze head-on. “Your job is to keep Valor safe. Until she’s eighteen, you both live undermyrules. You cannot join the fight today,” I told her sternly.
Zara’s voice in my mind was a surprise.‘I would never take her into battle so soon.’
‘Part of her magic,’Liana told me.
“Okay, well, thank you,” I told her, not wasting any more time on that. When I spun to tell Tetra I’d fly over the city to try to see where the fighting was coming from, my heart sank. She was way behind me, whimpering in pain as she limped across the grass on her cane. Ariyel pounced across the space to meet her.
It was a bad pain day. I didn’t want to force her, but her power had the incredible ability to save lives.
“If you can’t—” I shouted to her, climbing on Liana’s back.
“Go! I’ll follow you,” she told me, chucking her cane like it was cursed, and leaped on Ariyel’s back, sitting up with confidence as Ariyel dashed across the yard and out front.
Whoa.
I tried not to think about the fact that Tetra was riding her wolf into a battle just like Kohen predicted.
Fine, he could see the future, that much I would admit, but it didn’t mean everything he said he saw about the future was true. He could have lied. Liana flew up, and I didn’t have time to even dwell on Kohen because the second we hit the sky, a scream tore from my lungs.
