Page 10 of Flight of Fate

“What’s this?” One of them says, bending out of his blanket to assess my frantic fight against the iron vise that is his fingers.

The second male leans in, his face so similar—twins, I realize, and it feels like I’ve had the same realization before, but I can’t remember. Blood is pounding in my ears, drowning out the softvoices as they discuss something … something about me, about what to do with me. I caw my lungs out in screams for help, but why I thought anyone would come, I can’t remember.

Flee. Fly. The sky is safety. The ground is death.

The ground is death even when I’m not in the hands of these people who are now staring at me like they can read a truth from my feathers.

“Are you a bird, or are you one of those creepy shifters?”

Shifters.There was something… Far away in the darkness that my memory is becoming, a flicker of truth rings at the word. But am I a shifter? I’m a crow. A bird. Wings and all. I can’t remember the last time I’ve shifted into anything other than this form. The feathers are my clothes, and the wind is my companion.

A companion… The colors of the ocean flicker before me, but I can’t tell how they are connected to me and why they make my chest ache.

So I caw and caw and struggle to free myself.

“We’ve seen enough of them shift to know their tells,” one of the twins says.

Them…I wish I knew who they were talking about. And shift…

“This one is too small to be one of the Crow Fae,” the other twin assesses. “It’s impossible to tell the gender of these birds, but if it’s a female, it’s definitely not a shifter.”

The dark-skinned man gives him a sideways glance, the cruelty in his eyes turning into curiosity as he tilts me upside down as if I had any external organs indicating my gender.

“It was spying on us, though,” Gus points out. I wonder what he means by that.

The twins chuckle.

“I mean it. This bird has been hopping up and down this tree”—he points at the pine I plunged from—“for a while. I swear it was trying to sneak away when I caught it.”

“You caught a bird?” One of the twins laughs. “Is our mission so boring that you need to catch yourself a bird to torment?”

Gus growls at the male, and my blood runs cold. I stop fighting at the authority in the wordless warning.

“Tie it up and throw it in a bag. We’ll take it to the palace tomorrow. Perhaps it will make negotiating a bit easier.”

I hear the words, but I don’t understand their meaning until one of the twins pulls a string of leather from his pack and ties a part of it around my neck then wraps it around my body inch by inch as Gus slides down his hand to expose my wings. When those are thoroughly bound, he ties a knot around my legs, rendering those sharp talons useless.

I can’t breathe, can’t move, but Gus laughs as he tosses me into the light jute bag and holds it up like a trophy. The world is a dark, airless void, but I pant through it as something shimmers deep down inside of me. A thread of silver and gold so thin it barely casts light into my panic, but the thread doesn’t end with me. It’s a long, barely-there connection to a world out there, one beyond my feathers and my meek and desperate caws. I tug on it. And it tugs back. A promise. I’ve made a promise I can no longer remember, but it was a binding one, and no matter how my instincts are telling me a bird is all I am, the thread is holding me to this promise.

So I count my heartbeats as I wait for the males to deliver my fate.

If I die not fulfilling my oath, the person on the other end will be free.

Seven

Myron

My wordsstill echo through the hallways as my chest tightens at the sight of Kaira’s tears. I can’t remember when I’ve last shouted at someone like this, but when the part-Flame came up to me earlier, informing me that Ayna told her she wasn’t going to return to the palace after training or for dinner, or even to sleep, I lost my temper so thoroughly I couldn’t even remember my own name.

Now, I’m a solid case of remorse.

“At least, now we know we don’t need to send half an army out to comb the woods,” Tori says quietly. If his tone is anything to go by, he’s being cautious not to set me off all over again, because next time, words might not be the only thing spraying from me, and he is really fond of this sparkling joke of a palace.

All I do is throw him a dark glance. “Would you sit tight if it was Clio out there?”

The answering look he gives me says it all.

Never in his right mind would he sit tight if his mate was unaccounted for and potentially in danger. But he’s had to, so he expects me to do the same.

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