Page 100 of Blood Feast

“Lio! Cassia!” Lyros’s voice drifted into their hearing.

“Just a moment,” Lio called back.

“Don’t you dare leave us behind!” Mak’s shout sounded far away. He gave no sign he had heard Lio.

Cassia put the breadth of the circle between her and Lio to stop herself from pulling him down to the grass with her. She gulped at the cool air, trying to close her arcane senses to the Lustra.

He turned away from her and adjusted himself. “Bleeding thorns.”

“Sorry.”

When he faced her again, his fangs were somewhat tamed, but there was still heat in his gaze. “Don’t apologize.”

She tried communicating with the stones’ magic again, holding Mak and Lyros’s arcane signatures in her thoughts. She had taught the Lustra passages to recognize other Hesperines besides her Grace. Would these even more ancient stones understand the same?

Nothing happened. Mak and Lyros’s shouts grew more urgent. Cassia was out of options. She fingered Rosethorn, her artifact that held both Mak’s and Lyros’s magic, as well as hers and Lio’s.

She drove the dagger into the ground.They’re my pack.Let them in.

There came a shift, not one she could see, but one that made her arcane senses spin. And there were their Trial brothers, Knight, and the horses, right where they had left them, a few paces away in another time or place.

Knight trotted to her side, wagging his tail and nudging her for attention. He did not appear troubled by the Lustra’s tricks.

She rubbed his ears. “You liegehounds have something of the Lustra in you, don’t you?”

He looked into her eyes with his earnest, honest ones. On impulse, she reached for that sense she’d once had as a human.As if she could speak to him without words. As if he might speak back.

But that awareness of their bond eluded her now. A sense of loss cut her deeper than she had expected. She had known she had given up her beast magic when she had accepted the Gift. She had meant it when she told Lio she was satisfied with her plant magic and the power of Hespera’s blood.

But looking into Knight’s opaque eyes in the dreaming circle of her ancestors, she caught a glimpse of what she had lost.

Mak and Lyros rode into the circle, leading her and Lio’s horses. Mak leapt off Bear and marched up to Lio. Taking hold of Lio’s shoulders, Mak gave him a shake. “Did you learnanythingin the Maaqul? Didn’t you swear to us you wouldn’t charge off on your own anymore?”

“Mak, I didn’t mean—”

“I can haul your ass out of a jinn prison, but not out of—whatever in the Goddess’s name the Lustra just did. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. You could have been dying a horrible death in front of us, where we couldn’t find you.”

“I’m usually safe in—”

“The Collector is trying to break down a Lustra door. Do you think anywhere is safe?”

Lio fell silent. “I’m sorry, Mak. It was blind instinct to find my Grace.”

“Hespera knows we understand how that feels. But don’t be an idiot about it. Do you think it helps your Grace if you run into the unknown? All of us are safer if we stay together.”

Lio looked stricken. “I’m so sorry. I should have realized I wasn’t only putting myself at risk.”

“For a scrollworm,yourbrain is full of rocks sometimes.”

“It won’t happen again.”

Mak collared him in a hug, then set Lio away from him.

Lyros came to check on Cassia, and she offered him her own apology. “I didn’t realize coming in here would cut me off from you.”

“You went in as a precaution,” Lyros replied. “You negotiating with the Lustra first made more sense than Lio charging in after we realized what it would do.”

“That wasn’t entirely Lio’s decision.” Cassia avoided her Grace’s gaze, trying to keep the mental images at bay. The Lustra’s demands could so easily make her forget the hurt and anger in their Union. “Once the stone circle realized who he is to me, it was rather demanding about him joining me.”

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