They’ve breached it.
“No!” Rasha yanks against her straps.
I force all my energy to focus on Draewulf, on weakening his abilities, as he flips around and growls.
The icy swell in me latches onto the ability in him. Slowly, steadily, I reel his darkness in, imagining I’m unspooling it toward me like a thread even as I raise my voice to speak to Eogan inside him. The Eogan who no longer exists, but maybe some part of his soul, his goodness, does. “These people have done nothing to you.” I lift a hand, willing him to come closer.
He moves toward me even as his eyes dance in mockery. “Nor did they do anything to help your people, Nym. Don’t waste your compassion on those who would care little for those not their kind.”
I lift my other hand and sense it as he steps even nearer—the
strength in him is burning wild and thick. I pull it and expand the vortex now until it’s roiling like a bleeding whirlpool inside my chest, drawing in the bloodlust atmosphere, feeding off it and begging for more. His power may be stronger than mine, but I can certainly weaken him enough to take us both over the railing. And if I have to—take down the ship beneath our feet.
There’s a nudge behind me and out of nowhere, I feel the large guard. He slips something metal and cold into my hand—a knife? Then he strides away toward the dining area without looking back.
“At least Nym’s ‘kind’ are actual people,” Rasha suddenly yells.
I peer over.
She’s trying to distract Draewulf. She felt the knife too. “At least they’re not stuck inside a wolf’s body, whose only followers are created from the carcasses of dead men!”
The monster snarls through Eogan’s mouth, and before I can cut the cords, he’s cleared the last three steps and grabs Rasha. “Plucky words coming from a woman,” he rumbles. He rips through the ropes that tie her down and drags her toward the railing’s opening beside the boarding plank. And holds her there, twenty feet above a wall of rock.
I gasp. She claws and scratches and kicks, and I twist the blade in my hands and slice against the ropes, managing to cut up my fingers, which become slick with blood.
“Do you really want the Cashlin queen’s daughter’s death on your head?” I yell, working faster. “You’ll call down a hailstorm of vengeance on your
own
daughter.”
The rope snaps and falls away. I wipe my hands against the back of my skirt and, gripping the knife tighter, edge toward him.
Draewulf smirks at my sudden forward movement, and slips his hand down Rasha’s arm until he’s only holding her by one wrist.
“No!” I lunge for him. He slaps me backward, sending me sliding across the deck, and lets her sag farther over the side.
She carves her fingernails across his face and shoves her foot into his groin.
He doesn’t even flinch. Just smacks her with his free fist and Rasha’s head careens back, her body going limp like the yarn doll I was once allowed to play with during my stay at owner number three’s. Rasha’s eyes have nearly rolled back, but I can still see the edges of them focused on Draewulf holding her. They’re beginning to glow red.
I grip my knife just as, from the dining room behind Draewulf, Myles emerges holding a sword and strides through the crowd of staring Bron soldiers. Beside him is the large guard.
Did the soldier free him too?
The guard begins speaking to his men.
Then the soldiers are surrounded by a group of five wraiths descending from the captain’s quarters. The men draw their blades. I frown.
“So it’s immortality you’re after, eh?” Rasha’s airy voice floats over, and the heightened way she says it, the loudness—she’s offering it as much for my knowledge as to keep him occupied.
“Nym!” Myles points his sword toward Draewulf.
The beast whips his face toward her. “What did you say?” he snarls.
Rasha’s eyes are bright red. “You want to live forever.”
His expression goes black.
“You don’t just need their blood to regain your body, you need it for immortality. You need it because it’s tied to their land.”
Myles inches closer.
Rasha’s voice lowers. “You think you can rule forever.”
The vortex in me, which faltered when Draewulf lashed out,
picks up like a low buzzing in the back of my head. I push it out toward him again and say loudly, “Immortality? Seems a bit wasteful considering you’ve destroyed everyone you’d want to be immortal
with
. Aside from your daughter, of course. Although I have a feeling she’s not going to survive much longer.” I smirk.
His expression turns enraged but I don’t care. As long as it’s directed at me. I keep my hand with the blade at my side and flatten my other palm against the air, lightly tugging at his powers again. Taking one step, two steps, three steps closer until I’m almost near enough to touch him. “You’ll spend eternity alone.”
He releases Rasha over the edge just as I lurch for her, but I’m too late. She slides from Draewulf’s grip and I scream. I swipe after her. The moment slows—and I am vividly aware that even as she’s falling, the airship is pitching as if to catch her.
Myles is simply standing behind Draewulf watching. Not moving an inch to save her. He’s got his sword raised at Draewulf’s back though.
Suddenly the large guard is there on the plank. He’s grabbed Rasha’s wrist just below where her fingers were able to clamp around the ship’s railing, thanks to the airship tilting for her. His men’s swords are flashing at the wraiths in my periphery.
I don’t stop to question their help—just exhale and flip around to thrust my blade out, but Draewulf’s hand is faster than mine. He twists my arm before I can connect with his rib cage, flicking my wrist and sending the blade scampering across the deck as he leans in to settle a disgusted gaze on me.
I blink straight up into those eyes even as the question emerges:
Why is Myles just standing there? Why doesn’t he stab the beast?
Shaking, I put my hand against the monster’s chest. “You’ll live
eternity without your wife. You’ll spend the entirety of it knowing she abandoned you because you became what she couldn’t stand.”
I thrust with all my strength, shoving the power against him, over him, feeling it draw strength from him. He convulses and the energy it brings is intoxicating on a level beyond anything I’m prepared for.
I press harder and allow the vortex to expand beyond my chest to my veins, my nerves, my entire being.
Abruptly Myles’s hand slips out and clamps down over my owner-circled arm. He grips tight and even without his abilities, I can feel the response from my Uathúil blood reacting to his as the roar and clash of the wraiths and Terrenes circle the air around us.
Draewulf shudders and his eyes go wide, flashing black and glassy before dimming. Then he’s trying to pull away, but it’s like the three of us are lashed together by the vortex’s hunger for his power.
His body is rippling violently, and suddenly I think he’s going to rip apart at Eogan’s seams just like Breck. I wince and wait for him to burst out of Eogan’s skin.
Instead black wisps emerge as if erupting from the very deck beneath his feet. Swirling up, dipping down to cover him. With another mutter, he shoves them toward me, toward the large Bron soldier who’s just pulled Rasha to safety, and toward Myles. The wisps blind me, but not enough that I can’t feel Draewulf shuddering harder now, as if using them is draining the life from him in the same way I am.
His chest and arms heave, then they’re convulsing, and the black mists swirl back to wind up around his feet, his legs, and slip across my arm. Until they’re snaking around my hand, whispering words I can’t quite make out.
They circle up and swirl overhead, blackening the sky above us, and the uncomfortable thought flashes—this is how my chest looks inside. A gaping hole of darkness. Then the vortex opens around my soul and spine, and it’s like there’s not enough air, not enough world around me to absorb. I surrender to it.
From somewhere in the distance I hear Rasha’s voice, but it’s muddied and too dim to make out.
“Finish it, Nym,” Myles hisses. “Take what is oursss.”
Draewulf slices a hand back at Myles, but the lord protectorate is no longer there. He’s ducked down beside me still holding on to my arm, looking at me with the same expression the Faelen people had last week—as if I am some kind of talisman.
Draewulf tilts his head back as if disoriented. He mutters something and Myles yelps and his grip flinches as the monster curses him. But I swear in that split second I can almost read the doubt, the question. The fear in Draewulf’s eyes.
A fear suggesting that when this thing in me takes over, it will be merciless in its absorption. A fear suggesting what I could become with his kind of power. I could use it to save this world. I could be powerful like him.
A heartpulse later he pulls back with a roar, but I keep taking as he recoils. I don’t even have to touch him now because the energy’s owning my head and thoughts and will. It’s consuming me to use me, and the numbing it brings to all the grief and weariness is the most beautiful feeling.
Draewulf drops to his knees just as the black spirits return and collect around him in the same way the roars of wraiths and soldiers collect in the air around us. His Draewulf body flickers in my vision, flashing between wolf and Eogan.
Only abruptly . . . there’s a third man.
A different man.
One who looks very much like Lady Isobel.
It’s his face that stalls me in the midst of the noise-plagued atmosphere. As if it could shock the very hunger from me because this man is old and frail, yet beautiful in his perfection. A man whose eyes are the blackest onyx and grossly aged by the atrocities they’ve seen and caused. Aged by the hundreds of lives the monstrous spirit he traded his soul to has devoured.
From out of nowhere the dawning comes and squelches within my chest.
He is as much a slave to the animal he’s become as Eogan’s body was.
I drop my hand. The vortex in my blood writhes even while I force it down. Because for whatever reason, I cannot kill this man.
“Nym, what are you doing?” Myles yells beside me. “Keep going—you’ve almost got him. Take him down! I command you to take him down now!”
I try to shake Myles’s hand off and step back, but the next thing I know, Draewulf’s eyes flinch and turn repulsed. As if he knows what I’m thinking and cannot bear it. Cannot bear the mercy, the pity for him that is welling up inside me. And I have no idea where it’s coming from—this grief for a man who has taken lives simply because he forgot how to live his own.
I’m shaking so hard, trying to clamp down this vortex in me as I lift a finger toward Draewulf. But this time it’s in empathy.
And Myles is still gripping my arm and screaming.
“You have power but you can choose differently how to use it,” I whisper, with a glance up to where I know Kel is sitting in the captains’ quarters.
And this time I mean it. We both know I mean it. “There’s always a choice.”
Draewulf’s lips curl up and his eyes narrow.
“Please choose differently,” I say, and for the slightest second my voice cracks.
Before he can react further, his head jerks back and twists and suddenly there’s a ghoulish cry coming from it that sounds like the very pit of hulls. Myles’s hand slips free of me.
Draewulf’s yell is followed by a ripping sound, and I swear the fabric of reality, of who we are, rips apart as simultaneously Eogan’s body becomes transparent, like a ghost, and Draewulf’s wolfish form seems to solidify inside of it.
I back up.
He roars and throws himself at me.
I lunge away just as his body hits mine, and there’s a loud crack as if the sky just shattered.
What in—?
I grab out to him, but he slips away and stands. And I’m left blinking, shaking my head because I’m suddenly aware Eogan’s physical body is beside me, half covering me, bloody and dead. And Draewulf is alive and uncurling in front of me to his full height.
I gasp.
The sounds of war and death fade from my hearing. Everything fades but the sneer plastered across his countenance as he looks strange. Ethereal. A wisp of a spirit with a man’s legs and body, but a wolf’s face and claws. And the gloating expression promising that he will never choose differently. Because he made his choice long before I was ever born.
I swallow and pick up the blade from where it fell when Myles dropped it. But just as I push Eogan’s body off me and lunge forward to stab the spirit, Draewulf wavers and floats out of reach. He’s materializing. His voice, his bones, his skin, his fur. And I can hear him
muttering, as if calling himself into full existence, from the wisp that was wrapped inside Eogan’s body to the full, solid wolf I’ve seen once before. In a battle much like this.
A sob breaks out. It takes me a second to realize it’s from my own throat. I brush away the tears suddenly streaming from my eyes and attempt to reject the fact that Eogan’s body is lying next to me.
I can’t look at him. At whatever pieces of skin and bone are left from Draewulf shredding through his body. Just like he shredded through Breck’s. Just like he’s shredded a final time through my soul.
Focus on the enemy, Nym.
Before the last remnants of what I am become utterly undone.
A
NOTHER CRACK RUPTURES ACROSS THE SKY.
It’s followed by a crack inside me. I can feel it. Hear it. As if someone’s poured heat over my muscles and bones, and that icy metal Draewulf sealed them over with when he cut out my Elemental powers a week ago in my room at Faelen’s Castle has just warped.
It curls me in half.
I hit my knees as another shudder rocks through me and suddenly that heat is flowing, and the metal and ice are melting to mix in with a fluttering in my veins.
What in—?
The fluttering reaches my chest and forces me to drop the knife just as Lady Isobel’s voice screams, “We have the king!” over the noise of the Bron soldiers fighting wraiths near me. “Take him to my father!”
Draewulf whips his wolfish head toward her at the same moment his fur-covered body becomes solid. The same moment a sensation as familiar as the breath in my lungs surges through my own bones and arms, and all the way to my fingertips. Like a song weaving beneath my skin.