Page 159 of A Reign of Roses
For in her gnarled clutches—
Were screaming Fae soldiers.
Clawfuls of them.
She was larger than the runt I’d adopted, but just as menacing as I’d remembered—the strix that had birthed my own pet. One my father had won from a nasty Solaris breeder decades ago.
Acorn’s mother.
She squawked and swerved in midair, and Acorn took flight out of a broken stained-glass window, shooting out into the smoke-filled night to meet her.
A vengeful grin split my face.
Arwen told me how she’d freed the creature. How she could have chosen to see the darkness, the suffocating fear, but she hadn’t. And now, the mighty, healed strix had flown across the channel—the single most treacherous journey that existed—to come here. To her child. To help us.
The two of them shrieked happily, devouring men left and right, and I took off once more, farther and farther away from my keep. Deeper into the night-shrouded woods. Through the gnarled trees, the snow-packed earth chilling my bones, my body, my breath—
The Blade of the Sun solid and mighty in my grasp, I could almost feel my grin as the blade and my lighte worked in tandem, slamming into anyone who was foolish enough to find themselves in my path.
Each whip of my darkness sure and swift and steady.
Each lash precise and lethal.
One such motion sliced through another Fae, already half-ravaged by a shirtless Hemolich drinking the blood from his very neck as he swung at me.
By the time I reached Lazarus’s encampment, it was a mere shellof what it had been hours ago. While my men had converged on the walls of Shadowhold, cutting down the lizard beasts from Garnet and fortifying the keep, it seemed most of Aleksander’s men had come here eager to partake in the gory,gleefulbloodletting of the Fae who had once enslaved them.
I almost felt sorry for the pitiful souls.
But not sorry enough to slow my pace. All I could see was my own blinding determination. That, and the feeble wood structure that had hastily replaced what was once my father’s tent. And if he wasn’t there…
I’d scour the earth for him.
We’d won the war. I had the blade. I wouldn’t stop.
I’d hunt him down until—
“We can’t find him, either.”
I scanned the smoking, ashy remains of the camp, torchlit and pillaged. Relief I didn’t know I’d needed wheezed from me.
Griffin. And Mari.
“What are you two doing here?”
Mari frowned. “Same as you. Looking for Lazarus. Onyx and the muscly guys who drink blood have the Fae soldiers beat.”
Griffin exhaled hard, eyes on the burns down the left of my face. “I should have been fighting beside you.”
Mari brushed a hand down Griffin’s arm and his shoulders softened.
But all I could think was her name.
Arwen, Arwen, Arwen—
To see her face once more before I ended this. That pinched brow or elegant nose or her full lips curling in a smile.
“I’m fine,” I told him. “Where’s Arwen?”
