“This way,” someone says, and our flanking guards lead us to the plank.
“How does a balloon of air hold up such a thing?” Rasha murmurs.
I shake my head, but as soon as we’ve reached the bottom, I pull her away from it as fast as they’re leading, lest it tilt and accidentally crush us. The thing looks three times as intimidating as it did in the dark back in Faelen.
The waiting Bron soldiers surround us, and I realize the shorter ones aren’t just the size of children—they are children, perhaps between eight and thirteen years old, leading us across the courtyard toward one of the copper doors of the palace. I search for Kel among their faces even though I know he’s still on the ship. Is this what he does too? Act as a child soldier?
My legs feel like jelly and Myles’s must as well because he’s limping funny.
“For admiring the warrior spirit, you don’t walk like one,” Rasha tells him. She peers back at me and giggles. “He’s certainly a wobbly baby, no?”
Myles sniffs and looks like he’d like to make her face wobbly. Which only makes her laugh more as we enter the building and the long hallway lined with more soldiers.
One hundred, two hundred, three hundred paces, the floor is gradually tilting upward so that by the time we emerge into a wider corridor with windows, we’re looking out over the city again. But I’m hardly paying attention—I’m watching Draewulf edge along outside our group, with his shifting eyes and that same expression he had when he killed the poor airship guard.
He’s eyeing every Bron here with it.
I slow. The delegates keep walking as the elderly man who met Draewulf at the base of the airship moves ahead and announces, “His Majesty has matters to attend to. Come, I will show you to your rooms.”
I dig my fingers into my bandaged palms and look to the side for Draewulf.
“Don’t look so nervous, pet.” His growl in my ear makes me jump. “They’ll think you don’t trust me.”
When I turn, that disgusting wolfish curl of his lip is two inches away. I lift my fist.
“Ah-ah. Watch yourself or else their blood will be on your head.” He smirks. “At least, sooner than the timing I have planned.”
“Leave me alive and I will kill you,” I say quietly.
“If you still had your Elemental power, I’d believe you. Sadly, that’s why I had to eliminate your kind.” He reaches out and pats my face. I flinch.
I grab my stinging cheek only to find that when I pull my hand away, it’s tinted with blood. “You blasted—”
He raises his hand to give me a good look at his fingers, which are beginning to curl and his nails are growing longer. Like claws. He leans in. “Don’t worry, pet—not much longer and he’ll be free. Forever. Because even you can’t stop me now.” With that he turns and nods to the Bron escorts who instantly enfold him before hurrying him away.
Leaving me with the terrible assurance blooming that he is beginning to absorb Eogan’s body.
I swallow and watch him, that horror in me growing, suffocating, as my hands are still clenched into fists. As if holding my fingers gripped like that will keep some part of him in existence—will keep some part of me breathing despite the knowledge that I am so close to losing the one person I care for in this world.
Knowing that when I let go, the rest of me will shatter.
Ten steps.
Fifteen steps.
Twenty steps.
The steady sound of Eogan walking away clips out a rhythm. Kill me, kill me, kill me. Thirty steps. Kill me. Kill me. Like a mantra burrowing its moldy fingers into my bones. Until I can’t bear the noise of it anymore, and I crush my hand bandages beneath my fingers just to feel the shock and pain jar through me. To shut out the internal voice yelling that he and everyone else are going to die if I am weak and unable to do what needs to be done.
I can’t do this. I can’t stop Draewulf like this.
Draewulf turns the corner. Just as the last of him disappears and the guards surrounding me prod me forward, I swear a whisper floats back. Eogan’s breath breezing across my soul, “Don’t let him take who you are.”
They were Colin’s last words.
Except Draewulf’s already taken who I am. What I am. Along with the people I love.
I pick up following the delegates who’ve stopped to wait for me and glance down at my bandaged hands, my fingers, my gimpy wrist, as the words stir something in my soul awake.
I won’t let him take any more.
I glance ahead at Rasha who’s in conversation with the old man. Then at Myles who’s watching me.
And I give him a sickened nod.
CHAPTER 14