Page 202 of Lana Pecherczyk
Vendors scattered like startled insects, faces frozen in horror. Stalls lay overturned. Charred fabric smoldered. A cage of contraband metal had melted into twisted, unrecognizable slag. Manabeeze popped from random corpses and floated, illuminating what hid in the shadows from flames and embers.
Not chaos. Carnage.
Lightning hadn’t just struck. It had raged, jumped from stall to stall, body to body.
“Help!” Someone clutched River’s sleeve. “Please!”
River shoved him aside, mind whirling and giddy from his instincts screaming at him. Not again.Not again.His gaze swept the devastation. Surely Cloud was attacked first. Someone must have provoked him.
He almost tripped over a female sprawled across broken wood, wings splayed at impossible angles, feathers smoking. Her eyes stared sightlessly toward the canopy. Another body curled beside an upended stall, chest rising and falling in shallow gasps.
Each victim carved fresh guilt into River’s soul.
“What happened?” he growled, grabbing a nearby crow shifter by the throat, lifting until his feet dangled and his wings drooped. “Who did this?”
The crow wheezed, eyes bulging. “Lightning … so much lightning.”
“I fuckingknowthat.” River’s grip tightened. “Who?”
Don’t let it be him. Don’t let this be?—
“Guardian.” Fingernails scrabbled against River’s wrist. “V … bloody V.”
River dropped him. Felt dizzy. Sick. The vendor crumpled, gasping.
No.
Not after their reconciliation.
Not after River’s apology.
Not after Cloud had asked for help.
But the evidence lay scorched into flesh and fabric. Undeniable. Ringing in his ears multiplied. This wasn’t a mistake. This was premeditated. It had to be. Cloud hadn’t wiped the V from his face, hadn’t turned up at the hearing, hadn’t even claimed River’s debt. No. That would be too easy. All this time, Cloud was still functioning with a single purpose—Vengeance.
“Please.” A female voice croaked from beneath collapsed canvas. “My mate…”
Mate.
One word uttered from a distraught woman’s lips was enough to put River’s head back in the game. He forced himself forward. Each step felt like walking through quicksand. He crouched beside the wounded female and moved a column of splintered wood from crushing her chest. But the fool crawled back into the debris, clawing at wood and canvas and dirt, digging, crying for her mate.
River gently touched her on the shoulder and said, “I’ll get him. Stand back. He’d want you to be safe.”
Her bottom lip trembled. Tears spilled free over her soot-stained cheeks, but she nodded, shuffling backward. River used his gift to feel out the Well. He touched the earth, grounding himself, and sent his awareness through mana, into the destruction. An echoing ping of life was two yards away.
It took a hefty dose of muscle and mana to lift the entangled, collapsed framework from a mangled body. The male’s breathing came wet and ragged. Blood and dirt mattedhis swollen face. Pupils contracted to pinpoint pain. His nails were torn, fingertips worn down to bloody stubs from trying to claw his way out—to reach his mate.
He tried to speak. Tried to go to her, but River pushed him down.
“Don’t move,” he said, and moved his hand to the male’s grimy neck. He used his gift to sense the extent of injuries. No broken spine. “Some internal bleeding,” he noted. “A good shift into your crow form will heal you better than I could. Well enough to fly out of the danger zone.”
He glanced at the female and ushered her forward.
She ran over, sobbing as she collapsed on her mate. They gripped each other as if nothing else mattered. Not the pain the male surely felt with wounds like those. Not the sharp things she kneeled upon. There was only gratitude. Relief. Joy. Love.
Seeing it hurt River more than any wound, and he couldn’t understand why, only that it made him ache to return to Blake, to be done with this job and its fucking miseries. To put this madness behind him.
“Go,” he croaked, then cleared his throat. “Shift and return to the Great Murder. It’s safer there. Be together.”
