Chapter 13

There was not a lot of thought going through my mind when I descended from the sky like a Valkyrie and plunged the blades of both knives—Haversey and Hellim—into the head of one of the sleeping wolves. And I didn’t feel bad about any of it either because I was just numb inside. Numb and broken.

This moment … it was like I was experiencing both Air’s and Dyre’s deaths all over again. I wasn’t even present in my body when I started attacking the wolves, waking them slowly from a death sleep to the smell of blood and wild howls of pain.

That’s probably why I was so open to Dyre when he possessed me again, for the second time that day, and took control of my weapons. Even though I knew that I had to fight, that I needed to live in order to keep these men bound to me, I just gave up. If Dyre hadn’t taken over, I’d have probably died right there in a circle of razor wolves, my soul consumed and gobbled up to sleep alongside Talon’s.

Instead, without having anyone else to look after, Dyre was a beast. He tore through the wolves like they were made of paper, shredding them with my knives while the griffins—and their precious cargo—stayed nearly eighty feet back from the carnage.

Of course, that only kept Jas out of harm’s way, because the men came to me anyway, even though I almost took control of my body again and sent them back. But we needed the backup, tearing into the wolves’ bodies and releasing the hordes of souls. This time though, there were far less wolves than before, and we’d ambushed them, not the other way around.

Since I wasn’t worried about my body, I felt the souls come for me that time, desperate to latch onto the edges of my magic. With my mind free to focus, I threw up a shield around myself and let them bounce off with screams of rage.

There was only one soul that I was looking for here, and as soon as I found him, I was taking him and we were getting the flub out of here.

With how few wolves were left, it didn’t long to kill them, such a different outcome from last time. The snow ran red with blood, but none of it was ours.

“Where is he?” I gasped finally, as Dyre separated from me and stood there with a dark, stoic sort of expression on his face. Most of the souls we’d freed were starting to realizing I wasn’t going to be quite the easy target I was last time, and slowly, they drifted away and disappeared.

A huge purple fox trotted up beside me—Trubble—and fluffed his tails to get my attention. Seeing him like this, it was hard to believe what’d transpired between us earlier. Flub, it was hard to believe that Vexer was dead.

Closing my mind off from the pain, I followed Trubble over to where a small ghost sat in the snow, panting, his eyes wide and his red braid hanging forward as he leaned over and looked about two seconds from passing out.

“Talon,” I whispered, dropping to my knees in front of him. I threw my arms around his neck, tears streaming down my face as I tried to imagine a moment in my future that wasn’t going to suck, that wasn’t going to be dark now that Vexer wasn’t in it.

At this point, I was literally begging Haversey to have left him as a ghost.

That was the only hope keeping me float in that awful afternoon sunshine.

“You didn’t have to come for me,” he whispered back, his voice gravelly and harsh as he slowly, carefully put his arms around my shaking body. “A sacrifice is a gift that never needs to be paid back.”

I drew away from him and then pressed my mouth suddenly to his, tasting just a brief moment of that first kiss between us, the one that seemed so long ago, like it was in a different life altogether. I hadn’t been so conflicted, so weighted down, so scared … and so wanting then. It was like a dream.

All of these new changes in my life: finding out that Airmienan loved me, meeting Elijah, dating Vexer, discovering Talon, learning about Dyre and Trubble, and dragging Spicer along for the ride … I liked all of those things.

And if I could just get that spell to work, then maybe my life wouldn’t be Hell.

But it was Hell right then.

Drawing back from my kiss with Talon, I simply put my face in my hands … and wept.

When I next stood up, I was leaving for Markt and I’d be gods-damned if I wasn’t going to find out what’d happened to Vexer.