Page 128 of Memories Like Fangs
Waytooeasily.
“So, you feel it, too?” Byrd asked. “Something feels…off, right? It’stoosimple.”
“Something else has to be coming.” I gripped the hilt of my blades tighter.
“What is Cooper and Lilah really planning? They sent in soldiers to a war that they knew they would lose, but that is only if the war in question was to take the enchantment. They have to have a different goal in mind.”
“I was thinking the same thing. But, what is it?”
“Definitely nothing good.” Byrd’s wings fluttered behind her, lifting her off the ground. She held out her hand to me. “Maybe we should help Maisie and Talli, and see if we can get some answers that way?—”
Suddenly, a shot rang out through the park. It should have been unremarkable and just another part of the background noise of war. We were on a battleground, after all, and bullets had been flying all day. The echoes of this one after its firing sliced through reality. It distorted the air, silencing everything else. The closer it got, the more things fell away. The world tilted with its trajectory.
Everything slowed down.
My focus zeroed in on the bullet and nothing else.
The bullet arced through the air like a blood-red comet.
It was aimed with perfect precision.
Straight for Byrd.
When it hit, the sickening crunch was so loud that I wondered if my eardrums had ruptured and made my ears bleed. The bullet tore a hole through the membrane of Byrd’stop-left wing, stretching from the tip toward Byrd’s spine. The frayed iridescence of the edges of the wound was coated in red with veins stretching from it. Byrd’s shriek shifted to a roar, the sound so raw, guttural, and agonizing that it sliced into my own spine. The scream was hers, but her pain bloomed so white-hot and searing and consuming in her body that it spread to my own body and forced me to blink back tears. Unable to fly with her hurt wing and through the pain, Byrd plummeted from the sky. I was quick to catch her in my arms.
“W-We have got to st-stop falling for each other like this,” Byrd hissed through clenched fangs. Her joking eased some of my worry, but her tail curled into her like a wounded, vulnerable animal. The wound in her wing was about the size of a softball, but it was enough to make her wing twitch in pain. I clutched her close to me, wishing to just start running away from here with her in my arms.
I kissed her forehead. “I will never stop falling deeper in love with you or catching you when you fall,mi libélulita.”
“Who even shot me?”
I knew the answer before I saw him emerge from the far side of the park. I only knew one person who could make a shot like that.
Cooper.
Tall and broad-shouldered, he managed to make the long rifle in his hands look small. His blond hair was slicked back, and his face was too clean and chiseled like some soldier Ken doll. The freckles dusting across his cheekbones and nose lied to the onlooker about any softness or innocence he possessed. His icy blue eyes gave him away. They cut straight through you. Not like a knife, but with the clinical precision of a scalpel.
Worse, behind him were about thirty or so hunters.Realones. They were not the amateurs we’d been mowing down all day. No, these fuckers wore the appropriate clothing,clad in sleek dragon leather and clothes with sigils to make them impenetrable by normal means. Their movements were measured and coordinated, making it clear that they had training. Still, they hadn’t been born into this life like me and my cousins. Their dragonblood weapons were manufactured and unoriginal, resembling human weapons with machine-etched runes under the auras of blood magic. Every set of their eyes was locked on their targets.
Us.
Cody and Cole stepped up to either side of me and Byrd. Cole raised an eyebrow. “Well, this is an annoying inconvenience.”
“Nothing we can’t handle. We used to take little bitches like this down in our sleep when we were kids. At least now it’s a bit of a challenge.” Cody smirked. “Plus, look who’s finally shown his stupid face.”
“He’s our triplet brother, Code. We literally share a face.”
“Yeah, but he got the stupid third of it.”
“Focus,primos,” I commanded as Cooper approached with his team behind him. He stopped a few feet just before us.
“It’s time to pay for what you’ve done, lizard,” Cooper said, his voice calm but his sneer making every part of the sentence a slur.
Byrd motioned to get out of my arms, so I sat her down on her feet. She held her wounded wing out. The red edges of the tear hardened and jutted out, becoming shiny, sharp, and jagged. It grew in size to cover the hole. Then, Byrd vibrated the wing for the crystal pieces to fall to the snow, revealing her wing fully healed and whole. Byrd stood proud, her back straight. The end of her tail flicked with barely contained rage, but most of it trailed behind her like a regal train. She looked like a fucking queen.
No, a fuckinggoddess.
Fuck, I can’t wait for this woman to be my wife.
