Every leaf on the Ancient turned toward the wolves. Not with the wind. Against it. A rippling wave that spread outward from the trunk as if the tree had drawn a single, enormous breath. Then came the whisper. Thousands of voices layered into two words that crossed the distance and drove themselves into my skull like nails.
She’s here.
The wolves froze. The younger male recoiled. The older soldier raised his rifle. The alpha did not flinch. He pressed forward, Ziara at his side. Fear shortened her stride and stiffened her shoulders, yet she followed anyway.
They reached the trunk, and the alpha turned to face her, one hand clasping her shoulder. I strained to hear his words, but thedistance and the canyon walls swallowed them. Whatever he said was brief. Then she stumbled, as if he had pushed her forward. From my angle, I did not see the blow, but it was the only explanation.
The bark opened like a mouth and swallowed her whole.
The younger male lunged. The alpha’s arm shot out, stopping him mid-stride. The older soldier lowered his rifle at the alpha’s signal, though his grip remained white-knuckled.
I barely registered their reactions because the thread connecting me to my treasure pulled so tight it screamed.
Then it snapped.
The reverberation hit me like a war hammer to the sternum. My knee buckled. I caught myself against a boulder as the place inside me where the artifact had lived for decades ripped open, hollow and howling. The bloodstone was gone. Not distant. Not muffled. Not concealed behind wards or walls.
Gone.
“M’lord!” Tyrin seized my arm.
I could not answer him. My vision blurred as I scanned the canyon. The younger male’s expression was stricken, but he kept his place behind the alpha. The older soldier stood rigid, rifle trained on the trunk. The alpha watched the tree with an expression I could not read.
Crimson sap wept down the silver bark in thick rivulets, adding to older stains. It pooled on the roots and dripped from the branches, painting the Ancient in streaks of red that looked nothing like sap and everything like blood.
My blood thundered in my ears.
Had he sacrificed her?
Had that calculating, cold-eyed wolf fed his faithful thief to this ancient thing? Did he relinquish her blood, her body, and my treasure with it? Was I too late?
Ziara.
Something fractured behind my ribs. Not bone. The slow, grinding crack of a foundation that had held for a quarter centuryfinally giving way. The void where the artifact should have been, filled with a cold so absolute it burned.
Mine.
The artifact was mine. The thief was mine. And that calculating wolf had brutally discarded both.
“M’lord.” Tyrin’s voice came from leagues away. “M’lord, we must think before?—”
Ice I had not intended to summon erupted across the ridge, sheathing the brush and cracking the stone beneath my feet.
I shifted.
The transformation was not voluntary. It was detonation. Bone cracked and reformed, scales tore through skin, and my wings unfurled with a force that splintered the trees concealing our position and cast the ridge in shadow. Silentium vanished into my hoard as talons replaced fingers, each one longer than the daggers the little thief had pressed to my chest, and infinitely less merciful.
Tyrin launched himself clear of my expansion and shifted without hesitation, his gargoyle form erupting in a burst of stone-gray wings and ancient armor. Clawed hands drew his axe, and he did not try to stop me again.
I dove.
Nearly vertical, the wind shrieking across my scales as the clearing rushed up to meet me, I released a roar that had been building since the moment the little thief had disappeared.
No longer.
Twenty-five years of isolation, of patience, of careful restraint, compressed into a sound that cracked stone and sent the canyon walls weeping rubble.
Rifles rose. Muzzles flashed. The staccato crack of shots fired preceded the thud of bullets sparking against my scales like struck matches before ricocheting into the canyon walls. They were mere raindrops against a mountain.
