Page 181 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

His lips drew back, showing flat white teeth, a snarl emerging with every breath as he built up a head of rage, a vein pulsing in his temple.

He fell on the woman.

She screamed, a high, reedy sound that made the wargs howl, and I closed my eyes. I couldn’t stop myself. Miro’s fingers dug into the woman’s arms, the tendons in his arms and throat standing out like cords as fingertips punctured skin. He sank his teeth into her cheek, ripping his head sideways with a sharp jerk and tearing flesh away.

Acrid bile rose in my throat at the sounds, and all I could do was swallow it back down, twitching with every ripping tear and snarl.

“Bring another,” Hakkon said, and I opened my eyes to see him smiling faintly. “One is not enough for this little lamb.”

Miro crouched over the woman’s body, that sleek bronze skin shining wet and visceral, panting through a mouth painted with gore.

The muscles under his skin wriggled and shifted, slug-like and nauseating. His nails looked sharper, longer.

This time he didn’t wait when the wargs dragged another prisoner before him. He dug his hands into the man’s stomach, ripping through soft skin to draw his guts out amidst the shrieks.

I bent in half, swallowing hard, my mouth full of saliva and my nose filled with the sharp, hot reek of fresh blood, Miro’s snarls becoming deeper, more sonorous, with every second that passed.

Hakkon touched my hair. “You’ll have to grow a stronger stomach to run with the hunt, red one. Your husband did this; should you not look upon it with pride in his ferocity?”

I slapped at his hand, straightening myself, and saw Miro plunge his face into the prisoner’s torn-open chest. There was a sharp crack, but it wasn’t the breaking of the victim’s bones.

Miro screamed, rearing back, and I saw that his skull had split, cleaving wide open from the crown of his head to his nose, his jaw jutting forward and distending his face…

I put a hand over my mouth, screaming silently, nothing but a thin hiss of air emerging. Miro’s screams were raw and guttural, tearing from a throat as broken as mine.

His skin was splitting, his human face stretched flat and warped, eyes bulging wildly as something, glistening slick and wet, began to emerge from the terrible gash in his skull.

Hakkon’s hands caught me as I threw myself back from the emerging warg, clamping around my arms like bands of iron even as I clawed at him with my nails.

“She’s seen enough of the birth. Take her up, Daniil, and guard the door. He’ll want more to eat.”

He forced me into another set of harsh hands, and there was no fighting the inexorable tide drawing me away from the awful sight of Miro and the things on the ground before him.

Those hands picked me up, and I was flung over a hard shoulder. It drove into my guts, punching the breath from my lungs.

With black blooming before my eyes once more, I didn’t remember the trip to the top of the tower. I sucked in desperate breaths, clinging to consciousness with sheer willpower even as Daniil dumped me onto a cold stone floor.

For a while I laid there, twisting in pain around my bruised stomach, pulling air into pummeled lungs. The screaming was still audible, cutting like a knife through the howling of a thousand wargs.

I didn’t move until much later, when the sun crept through a narrow window to paint the walls red. It was a small room, with a tiny cot on the far wall from the door, and a small table and chairs under the window. All of it simple, crude; a tower for a prisoner.

I got to my feet, clutching my sore stomach, and tested the door as quietly as I could. It was locked, of course. I crept to the window next and looked down.

A long,longway down. The fields of Foria were muddy and churned, the wargs gone beneath the surface into their burrows.

There, in that slick and blackened patch of earth…

I hiccuped, choked, and closed my eyes. Miro was one of them now.

And with all those burrows, those thousand wargs lying in wait… there was no escape.

Chapter 44

Bane

The others caught up, their horses drooping and tired, and no one said anything as they looked out over the ruins of Rose and Thorn, the smoldering ashes of the cabin set in the great deadened plain.

The golems and I had traversed the mine shaft with relative ease. The trail was clear, undisturbed by wind or water, the ground flat; only once had I smelled somethingother, something still living, but whatever it was, it hid itself away, vanishing deep beneath the mountain.

---