Page 163 of Her Psycho Beasts

Savage stills then turns his face up to look at her. My hand reaches to grip her tiny wrist. She looks at us then, one at a time.

“But there is word on the moonbeams. A whisper of an eagle with blood on his hands.” She squeezes my face to urge me. “Chains that bind you are the key. A great longing you will know. Suffer the torment of the dark. Then forever freedom you shall sow.”

“What do you mean?” Savage whispers

She shakes her head as if in warning.

But I know exactly what she means. Sometimes you have to go straight into danger to get what you want.

My mother disentangles herself from us and rises, treading featherlight feet across the sand. She casts a look back at us, smiling with sharp teeth. And that final image of her, truly a creature of the water, beautiful, silver, and dark-eyed will forever be burned into my eyes.

“It must be dark before the dawn. Such is the rule of the wild.”

“You can’t be serious,” Xander scoffs, after we return to him and I relay what we must do.

“It sounds like fun,” Savage says, wiggling his toes in the sand. “I’ve never played prisoner before. I hope Beak will tie us up!”

“But we don’t even know what’s in there,” Xander points out. “Halfeather will charge triple for my dragon kidney, that’s the only thing I know for sure.”

“We won’t let that happen,” I say evenly. “Halfeather also has enemies. His brother, Dirk, for one, has had his eye on the estate for years. Perhaps we will make an agreement with him.”

“Scythe’s inklings are never wrong,” Savage says firmly. “If he says we need to lock ourselves up in an enemy dungeon and stay there for an unknown period of time without food and water and face unknown peril, then we will.”

Xander throws his hands up in the air, but I know he trusts me implicitly. “Fine, you nutters. Fine.”

Seven weeks later, we sit in Halfeather’s dungeon, injured and starved, watching an ethereal creature walk into the darkness of our lives.

The ether told my mother that the solution to all my problems lay in Halfeather’s dungeon. It was the first time it was wrong. Because Aurelia Boneweaver had only made everything worse.

Chapter 87

Scythe

Almost a year after the fact, I return to the ex-Halfeather House, currently being re-built from the ashes. This time of night, the construction workers are long gone and I’m free to make my way inside.

Me and my horde, that is.

Me and my madness.

Scaffolding frames our entry into the wide darkened interior, where I make my way to the space the stairs once occupied. The burnt wood and melted metal has been removed and replaced with a ladder, and I climb down it quickly, years of scaling up and down a dragon making me limber.

It’s pitch black in here, even my shark eyes are not enough to broach this midnight dark. I take the torch out of my back pocket and flick it on, angling it down the chamber.

Though the builders have swept away the debris and ash, the acrid smell of the dead and burnt still lingers. The obsidian bars to the cells are still intact but bent to either side when Xander bent them open to get us out.

I stop outside the cell I occupied during my time here and crouch down, brushing my fingers across the stone.

I’d first met her here. Her ballet flats had stopped right over this stone when she’d gifted me track pants.

It was the first time in memory that someone had sought to cover my body. She hadn’t known what it meant to me then, and she still doesn’t know what it means to me now. Without even knowing us as hers, she’d given Savage chocolate and Xander music. She’d given meclothes.

And that had started us down the path of tragedy.

A breeze tugs my attention away from the cell. A primal sense of warning. Foreboding.

Something is following me.

I turn around and beckon to my stalker. He appears, a ghostly, translucent grey, the bald eagle in the sweeping black robes, gliding over the stones.

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