Page 136 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

My throat works, words fleeing from me. Does she know we could challenge the rule that only one survives? There’s a brutal gleam in her eyes—I can’t tell.

The crowd roars. A murderous, thunderous burst of energy crackles through the rain and the thickening mist blotting out everything beyond the stands. Fuck, how is it getting even thicker? My skin crawls.

Saraid circles me.

Her back is to the stands, and to anyone in the baying crowd, she must look like an animal about to go in for the kill. But I’m close enough to see the wariness in her eyes, the blood smeared in her hair.

“I don’t want to have to kill you.” Saraid drops her voice, battle-axe raised high at me. “Not when we could both rise and walk away from this.”

Rise.

I risk one half step closer to her, one eye glued on her axe.

“Why should I trust you?”

Saraid is working with the Whisperers, but what if this is a trap?

Low enough for only me to hear, she hisses a rough, rolling string of syllables—the same ones I sounded out from the edges of the book Wolf gave me, the same ones Talon told me mean that, maybe, not all of us have to die.

“Because we both know it doesn’t have to be this way,” she says, and those cat eyes are pools of pure, calculating menace. “Now drop your fucking blade, or I’ll have to explain to Wolf why I killed his little pet when he so nicely asked me not to.”

Hewhat? “I’m not his pet.”

“Prove it.” Saraid cocks her head in challenge. “Yield and prove you’re worth the price of keeping you alive.” Her slash of a mouth twists up. “Or die on all fours like a dog with my axe in your chest.”

I don’t trust her. I can’t trust her, right? She’s a noble—everything I should hate, should want to tear apart.

But Wolf…hetrusts her.

Rain hammers down, blurring everything in brutal streaks of slate and gray and black, and thunder erupts overhead. Lightning forks, and I smell it—the static charge of chaos sizzling all around us.

My heartbeat sounds like wings in my ears. And there’s no room for doubt or hesitation in the answer that crashes through me now.

I trust Wolf. Despite everything, I do.

So I trust her, too.

My fingers unclench, and the blade falls, smacking the mud.

Saraid tilts her head, rain streaking the blood in her golden braids to rivers clawing down her cheeks. She steps toward me, axe still high.

My heart seizes.

Then she turns to face the crowds and slides her axe into the holster at her hip.

There are no bodhran drums, no rising melody of pipes through the howling, ripping wind—nothing but static building and racing up my spine. The mist is so thick, the very vines in the garden seem to lose their color and shift deathly gray in the dark fog.

Saraid offers a hand to me, her eyes unreadable in the slashing rain.

I take it—and the crowd gasps.

“Twosurvivors?”

Another thunderclap.

The wingbeats of my heart only grow louder,louder.

The pressure in the air around us electrifies; my ears pop.