Not away but forward.
His free arm hooks behind the monster’s neck, dragging it down into his space. Holding it there. Controlling it as the creature bucks, trying to tear itself loose. Sorren shifts his grip and forces the monster’s head back to expose the hollow seam where a throat should be.
He drives upward. The stolen dagger punches beneath the creature’s jaw in a single brutal thrust, angled toward the crown of its skull. Sorren does not stop. He forces the blade, tears up through it.
Up.
Through.
Until the tip bursts from the back of the monster’s head.
For a moment, they remain there. Locked together.
Then the creature shudders once and dissolves into a heap of broken twigs that collapse onto the dirt and crumble into dust.
Just like the flower petal.
I don’t have a chance to celebrate.
Sorren teeters, then collapses. Blood pours from his injured side in a rush, soaking the earth beneath him. The soil ripples as it drinks him in, darkening, swallowing, as if thirsty for his death.
The bottom of my cage vanishes, and, for the second time, I’m falling.
I land in a heap next to my mate. Dirt scrapes my already ravaged hands as I claw across the ground reaching for him, but before I touch him a sound causes me to freeze.
“Nora,” my mother cries, her voice thin and threaded with agony. “Please, Nora. Help me.”
I stagger to my feet and whirl around. Mom sits on the ground a few feet away, her shoulders slumped and her head lolling.
“Mom?” I take a step toward her, dread slicing through me. She’s worse. So much worse than the last time I saw her. Her hair has thinned to scattered clumps that barely cling to her scalp. Her cheeks are hollowed, her eyes sunken deep into their sockets, revealing the skeleton beneath her skin. Her lips are cracked and peeling, split at the corners and scabbed over.
“Mom! What happened? How are you here?”
“It brought me,” she whispers, and begins to cry, small, broken sobs that tear out of my throat. “The egg that is not an egg at all. It hurts, Nora. It hurts so bad. Everywhere.”
I lift my foot to run to her.
“Nora, help me.”
Sorren’s voice is ragged behind me.
I turn.
The blood beneath him has spread far beyond his body now. It’s no longer a pool but a widening slick, thick and black at its center. Steadily, it creeps outward.
“Please,” he croaks. “I’m dying.”
“You request Thornreaper, Heir’s Mate,” says the voice.
Light explodes around us, blinding, searing white. I throw up my arm to shield my eyes and scream. My mother and Sorren scream with me. Our combined cry rips through the air.
When my vision clears, a sword stands planted before me. Its tip is buried deep in the earth, its hilt rising toward the sky. The blade is the burnished bronze of old copper, mottled with veins of green patina. Lichen clings to it in delicate patches, as if it has grown from the forest floor rather than been forged.
The hilt is carved with winding leaves and branches. Flowers bloom along the guard.
Around the grip…thorns. Thousands of them. Tiny, curved, vicious things. They jut outward like the ribs of a living thing. Like teeth sharpened to a point.
No hand could close around that hilt without being torn open.
