Page 57 of House of Embers
Roake’s eyes found Audria’s, and he reached a hand toward her as if she could save him.
Then Kerrigan brought the pommel of the sword down on his temple. He collapsed into a pile of limbs on the hard ground.
“Time to go,” she told Audria.
Then Kerrigan activated her mother’s bracelet. A gap opened in the air around them big enough for them to walk through. One moment, she was standing before Roake’s unconscious body, and the next, she was at Tieran’s side.
“Audria,” Kerrigan said, reaching a hand through the door.
Audria wiped a tear from her eyes and then took Kerrigan’s hand, leaving Roake and the Society behind. The door closed behind her with finality.
Chapter Twenty
The Jump
Wynter
“You didn’t have to come along,” Wynter snapped.
“You need me.”
Wynter shot Dozan a feral glare. “Needis not the word I’d associate with you. Now be quiet. I have to concentrate.”
“What word would you use?” Dozan asked. He’d sidled up closer in the darkness. She could feel the heat off him. Smell the husky scent of him. Feel the way his eyes traced against her bare skin.
“Stop. Talking,” she hissed.
He smirked at her but thankfully remained silent for the next stretch of their walk. This was why she had wanted to do this part alone. She worked best alone, even if the last couple monthshadbeen better with Dozan at her side. Begrudgingly so.
“Okay,” Wynter said as they came out of the pitch-black into the tree line on the other side of the valley. “We wait here for the signal.”
Kerrigan was to be her queen, and while Wynter hated letting her go off alone as the diversion, Wynter knew it was necessary. If anything happened to Kerrigan, then Fordham would never recover.No one could afford to lose either of them. However, no one else was going to be able to do what Kerrigan was doing right now.
Dozan’s shoulder brushed against Wynter’s, and she resisted the shiver that snaked up her back.
“Cold?” he asked, his tone teasing.
“Pay attention.”
He stifled a laugh, and then they fell back into silence. The world slipped away with him at her side. It had been so long since silence like this was permissible. For years, she had been like her broken mother, with glass shattering in her mind. The illness had crept inside her and seemed to take half of who she was. Her mother had succumbed to it, death being preferable to the endless rattle of the world. Wynter had been certain that would be her fate as well.
Until Kerrigan had done the unlikeliest of things. In her final attempt to avenge her people, Wynter had stabbed Fordham in the stomach. If she was going to her death, then she was taking him with her. Kerrigan had outsmarted her. She’d had every right to kill her, but she’d made a different call.
When Wynter had woken in Dozan’s strange and unforgiving Wastes, she had thought herself above it. Except his healer had known of her illness. He’d had a solution her people had never known existed, had not even truly known it was an illness. As the glass reformed in her mind, the death rattle long since gone, she returned wholly to herself, with Dozan at her side and Kerrigan and Fordham willing to not just let her live but work with them to make a better world. She owed Kerrigan more than her life. She owed her everything.
She nodded at Dozan. He slid his fingers into her own, and she suppressed another shiver at his touch. Then she tugged the shadows, as effortlessly as breathing, and dissolved into a puff of black smoke.
A second later, they were at the outskirts of the encampment, within the ring of dragons. No one moved at the intrusion. Audria was the only person on watch, and she was gone, and Roake had gonewith her, just as Kerrigan had suspected. That left two sleeping Fae scouts, the scholar, and the dragons. The goal was not to alert the dragons at all.
Wynter signaled Dozan to the right while she took the tent to the left. She slid silently across the ground, honing all her instincts to a razor’s edge as a shadow-wrapped blade dropped into her hand. The Fae inside was snoring faintly as she opened the flap. Kerrigan had told her to incapacitate the other guards so they wouldn’t be followed. She had thought that Wynter was agreeing to knock them out. That was what Kerrigan would do. They were not the same person.
The blade slit through his throat at the height of a snore. He gurgled blood in the back of his throat, eyes shot wide, but he was dead before he could even reach for her.
One down. One to go.
Wynter swiped the blood off her blade onto the male’s clothing before exiting the tent. Dozan left the other tent in the same moment. His blade still dripped red. The man had more blood on his hands than even her. She had no idea why the sight of him in all black, red hair blowing in the breeze, eyes dark and mischievous, a blade covered in another’s blood made her hot.
Why? Why this man? Why could this measly human heat her blood?
