Page 4 of Of Daggers and Deceit

“Are you okay?” a worried voice asked, and my gaze lifted to a long-limbed shifter with shaggy brown hair just like mine staring back at me.

My stomach tightened with fear as I scrambled back. I didn’t recognise him as someone from my ring, and I hated that, as a Gifted, I couldn’t scent him to determine exactly what he was.

“Wait, stop,” he called with his hands reaching towards me. I paused.

“What are you?” I found myself saying, my curiosity driving me onward.

He smiled then, a broad, toothy grin that lit up his shockingly beautiful features. “I’m a Gryphon.”

“No, no, no,” I said aloud, my hands gripping my head. That girl was stupid, so easily deceived.

I took one of my tools and began to scratch away at our names on the rock, grinding it away in the hopes of erasing the memory. That moment took so much from me. He took so much from me.

My sweaty hand slipped against the metal of my tool as I worked to grind the rock, no longer preoccupied with obtaining pigments for the paint.

Beneath the heat of the sun, my hand slipped again and again, unable to hold a firm grip on the tool with the sweat coating my skin, but my pain pushed me forward despite it.

I threw the tool down onto the rocky floor with a cry of frustration. I could still faintly see our names etched there, though I’d made some serious progress with their removal.

I leaned back on my heels and tipped my head up to the sun, my eyes shuttering closed. Then, I picked up my water bottle and sipped it.

“You draw?” he asked curiously, his eyes spying the sketch book in my hands. I looked down at it nervously and nodded.

“Can I see?” he prodded, and my fingers tightened on the book. I’d never shown anyone my art before, and it wasn’t the kind of work people around here were used to seeing. I called it Celestial Mapping—a guide to the stars above us.

But I wanted a friend, and he seemed to want one too.

So, I flicked open the first page and held it out to him. “Just one drawing,” I told him, and he beamed back at me as he moved around to look at it.

“This is incredible. You are incredible!” he exclaimed, and I’d blushed. “Where did you learn to draw like this?”

“My dad,” I’d replied. “He loved the stars and had mapped and written about a lot of his travels. I try and spot things he wrote about, copying his style.”

Jakari’s eyes peeked up with curiosity. “That sounds amazing, Raya. Is that the other book you brought?”

I glanced across at it sprawled out on the ground and nodded. I liked that he was interested in the same things I was.

A warm hand gripped mine.

“Will you tell me about them?” he asked gently.

I scrambled back on the floor and rolled over. I needed to get away from this cliff edge. It was making me remember terrible things about a few moments in time I wanted to burn from my memory. That moment had been the origin of my pain.

I got up and shoved my tools back into my backpack with haste, choosing to leap and scramble my way back down the cliff as fast as possible.

My lungs wheezed, and sweat dripped from my body as I hit the sand and fled fast, not even bothering to slow down, despite the heat of the burning sun. I needed to exhaust myself and run away from the terrible memories his friendship had cost me. The memories I knew would come if I’d stayed. Those were the ones I dreaded. The ones where I was left alone, crying tears to a lonely night sky, my father’s journals ripped from my grip and stolen from me.

I pumped harder, the breath stolen from my lungs. I was desperate to exert myself, to flee.

Anything to put distance between myself and the memory of him.

BODHI

“Fucking hell. Pull your punches a bit, Bodhi, or I won’t make it out to the defence this year,” Hayden demanded as he copped his second kick to the gut from today’s training session.

Not keen to bend to his demands, I struck again, a right fake followed by an uppercut to the jaw, which he dodged and then returned with a left hook, which just managed to scrape my chin. I grinned wickedly, loving the thrill of competition, even if I hated being part of the city’s defence—my lifetime punishment for ending up here, not that I even remembered how I ended up in this city.

Sweat was pouring down both our faces, evidence of how hard we were working today with the threat of the first thinning of our city’s shield in the coming days.

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