22

“What is happening?” Olivia whispers.

“Burnu,” I mutter, the name pushing through my fuzzy memory.

I drop the twig. My breath becomes a brick in my belly.

“But what are they?” Philia wonders.

“Something worse than a wolf,” Jadon says. His eyes flicker to his sword, and the muscles in his jaw flex. Even he doesn’t think his sword stands a chance against these creatures.

The wolves, still mid-transformation, roar. But this is no wolf roar. This roar is fire and thunder.

Olivia whimpers, and her fear cracks something open in me. A burning fuzziness fills my blood, and warmth radiates from my chest and through my arms and down my legs. My amulet pulses in time with my heart, and that dark stone comes alive with soft light.

I have no memories of it but know without a doubt that I’ve met beasts like this before. I’ve slain beasts like this before. And I can do it again.

My amulet pulses as fog rises and swirls across the glen like glossy white ribbons.

“Phily, Olivia,” Jadon whispers, “Kai and I will fight. When I say so, run to the first tree you see and climb as high as possible.”

“Climb?” Olivia repeats. “But wolves—”

“Can’t climb trees,” Philia says.

“But those aren’t wolves,” Olivia snaps, “not anymore.”

She’s right, but the only hope for survival is for us to defeat the burnu, and that will be impossible with two girls underfoot.

A quick glance reveals that all three creatures are in the last stages of transformation. We’re out of time.

“The safest place is up,” I say, jerking my chin in the direction of the trees behind us.

“We’ll keep them from coming close to you,” Jadon shouts. “Now go. ”

Olivia and Philia race back to the poplars right as the three fully transformed creatures rise to their full, impossible height and roar.

My amulet beats, and a buzz fizzes through my body until my fingertips tingle. Heat rushes through all ten digits like wildfire. The wind is ready. But why now? What’s changed? Is it because they changed from wolves to… this ? Burnu? Otherworldly?

I make eye contact with Zigzag, still marked by that blue lightning bolt on his snout even in his new form. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”

The burnu to our left pounces.

Before Zigzag can attack me, I lift my arm. The powerful punch of wind bursts from me, driving the burnu back. He crashes against a tree, rolling and recovering too quickly. I can’t build up any more force, not so fast, and he’s already on me. I scrabble over the rocky forest floor until I find another stick, a thicker stick. With a wrenching howl, I strike and twist the stick hard enough to drive it deep into his eye. Warm, bright-green liquid erupts over my hand. But that doesn’t kill him. I release the bloody weapon and grab another stick from the grassy ground.

Jadon makes quick work of another burnu with his sword, jabbing it into the creature’s eye. More spurts of warm green blood. That burnu’s definitely not having breakfast this morning…at least not in this realm.

With only one working eye, Zigzag’s head dips and stays low as he watches his fellow burnu fall. But his attention quickly turns to the beta burnu, who’s still lurching from Jadon’s strike. Zigzag barks at him, and the beta growls in response.

The beta lunges, and Jadon spins to face him, wielding his sword in a clean arc.

Green blood explodes from the beast.

The second burnu charges at Jadon, but I don’t turn to watch. No, I’ve got my eyes and hands trained on Zigzag, who hasn’t let a twig in his face stop him. My fingers fluctuate from hot to cold. No! I can’t wait for whatever’s happening with my hands to either stop or start, so I grab three more sticks and a jagged rock from the grass, tuck them into my ripped breeches. In the light of the rising daystar, I can see every hair on Zigzag’s coat and the fine gray bristles on his snout.

“Why are you here?” I murmur to Zigzag, readying myself, feet apart. “Who sent you?”

Zigzag responds with a growl that ends in one word. “Destroyer.”

What does that mean?

He snarls, “Die!”

A growl starts in my belly, twists up my throat, and then thunders like an erupting volcano. My amulet is hot against my chest, alive. “Make me.”

The burnu rushes at me and—

Howls of pain. The creature is suddenly wrapped in a purple light, a spectral lasso that wasn’t thrown by me.

I leap backward in surprise and watch as the mysterious lasso tightens, digging into the beast’s fur, past his skin, until all of the burnu glows lavender. But that light does more than glow. That light grows. And grows, and grows, pushing and expanding the burnu from inside until…

The creature explodes; pieces of burnu fly everywhere.

Then that purple light dissolves, and two burnu lie still among chunks of the third. The glen slips into a nervous quiet—interrupted only by my ragged breaths and pounding heart. But I don’t dare move. Is it over? How is it over?

Slowly, I face Jadon.

He’s breathing heavily, wearing a similar expression of surprise. “Was that you?” he asks. “That light?”

“No. I… No.” Awed, I stare at the space where I first saw that violet light. I want to say more, but I can only say, “No,” again.

“Then…” Jadon swallows, fighting through his shock. “What was it?”

I tear my eyes away from the sky and peer at the trees. “There’s something back there,” I say. “We felt it at the river’s edge, remember?”

“Maybe? You’re better at sensing those vibes than me.” Jadon kneels beside the two intact burnu corpses, and his eyes roam across their bodies, across their pools of blood. “Yeah. Something stopped that burnu, and it wasn’t us. There’s more than just burnu here.”

He makes a quick scan of the forest, then positions himself before the dead beta. With both hands, he pries open the burnu’s jaws until there’s a sickening, wet crack of bone and muscle. The eyeteeth twinkle in the morning light. Jadon grabs one of those canines and wiggles it back and forth.

As he works, I notice the bandage that protected Jadon’s hand is gone. It must have fallen off during the fighting. But there’s no bloody wound there. Just a tattoo with an intricate design that I can’t make out.

“What’s that?” I ask, nodding at his hand.

“What’s what?” He doesn’t stop pushing around the burnu’s tooth to look down at his hand. “Nothing.” The tooth pops out, and he says, “Success.” He tosses me the trophy, even though it hadn’t been my power to end this beast.

I catch the tooth, then watch as he tugs his sleeve down to shield his marked hand.

“We shouldn’t linger.” He pulls out the second tooth easier than the first. He drops his trophy into his breech’s slitted pocket, then turns to the poplar grove and shouts, “Phily! Olivia! Come down—it’s safe!”

I take a step toward Jadon, but I sink to one knee. The adrenaline from combat is draining from me, and now, pain in my leg and forehead runs free across my body. I try to stand, but a potent combination of exhaustion, fear, and bone-breaking pain pushes and punches me. I stagger over to a tree trunk, completely unable to hold myself up.

“Shit, Kai.” Jadon bounds across the fallen burnu to reach me. His eyes search for my injuries, pausing at my banged-up hands, my scraped forehead, and the worst injury of all: my ripped, bloody leg. His eyebrows rise, and he mutters, “Shit,” again. “Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”

“I didn’t think it was this bad.” My words are slurred and soft. My vision swims, and two Jadons gape at me, their four eyes filled with concern.

“We need to look for help,” he says. “You’ll die out here.”

“We need to get back to camp,” Olivia whispers.

Just the idea of walking back to camp makes me sink against the tree.

“We’ll go back once we get her someplace safe,” Jadon says.

Philia says, “But we might have something in our packs to—”

I wince as pain fragments explode from my leg up to my hip.

“She needs something more than whatever’s in our bags,” Jadon says, voice strained.

Through a gap in the trees, I see a slope that ends with white smoke rising in the daybreak.

“There.” I point toward it.

“Where there’s smoke,” Jadon says, “there’s fire.”

And where there’s fire, there’s a house filled with people.

“Let’s get you some help,” Jadon says. “Can you walk at all?”

I close my eyes, my lashes now tacky with tears and burnu gore. I rub my temples and try to convince my body that we’re fine, we’re okay, we can make it to the white smoke. We’re fine, we’re okay, we can make it to the white smoke . I keep thinking that, over and over until I’m standing and limping through the grove of trees. The undergrowth quickly swallows us, and between the fire in my leg and the pain ripping through my head, I can only trundle, trip, run, start, stop, and—

“Jadon?” I’ve lost track of him. Maybe he’s fallen back to check on the girls. “Where did you—?”

And then I hit a wall and cry out as I crash back onto the ground. I try to sit up on my elbows to see what I hit and I see that it’s not a wall at all. And I didn’t hit it.

No, an old man has just plowed into me. He’s gray-haired and silver-bearded, with smooth, parchment-pale skin. His eyes are bright lavender, and in his long hands he clutches a dark wooden staff topped by an iron snake eating its tail. There are cutouts through the snake’s metal body, and all of it pulses with the same lavender glow that killed the burnu.

I can’t take my eyes off that illuminated ouroboros.

“Oh goodness,” the man says.

“Kai?” Jadon calls somewhere behind me.

But I don’t turn around. I can’t. My eyes are caught in this old man’s lavender gaze.

Then those lavender eyes drop down to my amulet, and they widen. He takes a quick breath, then says, “You’re here.”