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As if my words summoned him, Azar rockets through the sky overhead, crashing into the mountain next to me. Are you alright? He stomps his way down to the outcropping we’re standing on.
She was almost eaten by some kind of horned nightmare, Hyperion says. Next time you want to ditch her somewhere, let me know. I’ll watch over her for you—I quite like her.
“I’d have been fine.” I unsheathe my swords.
She’s lying, Hyperion says. She was staring at him with her eyes all wide and shocked and her mouth was dangling open like this. His jaw goes slack and his eyes widen dramatically.
I grab a rock and lob it at him. “I didn’t look like that at all.”
You so did. Hyperion’s laughing. It was the funniest thing I’ve seen all day, but only because I kept you from dying.
“It was a good thing you were here,” I say. “Thanks for saving me.”
Hyperion smiles, and his teeth are much scarier than the demon beast’s were—razor sharp and gleaming. It was my pleasure.
Go back now. Azar doesn’t thank him. He doesn’t even look at him. He’s too busy inspecting me, his giant head lifting and shifting to catalogue my every scratch and scrape. I have many things to do before we can return to inspect the volcano.
But this is the main reason we’re here, Hyperion says. And you said a storm’s coming. We should look into the creatures before it hits.
Later, Azar says.
“But I’m fine,” I say again. “Hyperion reduced the creature to a pile of?—”
Come with me. Azar’s being awfully authoritarian.
“Now, look here,” I say. “We can’t just leave Hyperion sitting here, waiting for us to go back in there.”
But before I can say anything else, he grabs me with his front claws and launches into the sky, leaving a very amused Hyperion to stare up at us from below, shrinking as we shoot upward.
What on earth were you thinking, traipsing into that volcano alone?
“I could hear them,” I say. “The chanting—I don’t think it was coming from humans when I was there last. Today, it was coming from creatures trapped in the volcano.”
Azar flings me straight up into the air and flips around, sliding underneath me. And then he really starts to move. We’re flying so fast that my vision blurs. The tears leaking from the corners of my eyes are freezing in place.
Do you know how many times in my life I’ve been truly afraid?
The bond’s nearly black. I wonder whether he knows I can’t possibly talk at this speed. He finally slows up, but the only thing underneath us is miles and miles of dark ocean in all directions, and the only thing above us is the susurration of the aurora borealis.
Never. In all my life, I’ve never known real fear, and today, I realized why. His head whips around so that he’s looking at me as we zoom through the sky. His eyes are such a bright gold that they’re shining in the dark like lanterns. I’ve never cared enough about someone to really, truly care what happened to them. But today, I was terrified. Never, never, leave the place I put you and go off on your own, placing yourself in danger when I’m too far away to do anything about it.
“I’m sorry.” I could say more, but anything else feels. . .superficial compared to what he just confessed.
I couldn’t leave when I realized you were in danger—good job masking, by the way—because I was surrounded by other earth blessed. So many of them. It took me far, far too long to come up with an excuse to leave. And then, I move so slowly in my earth blessed form that I couldn’t get to you quickly enough.
I’ve never seen a car go as fast as Axel at his top speed, but I suppose it’s all relative.
“Are you calm enough to talk about what happened yet?”
He whips his head back around and takes off. I barely grip the saddle handles in time to keep from flying head over heels backward. I guess that’s my answer. I’m not sure how long we fly—I really need to find some kind of watch—before he slows. I wait for him to tell me that he’s ready to talk, but I realize that’s not going to happen.
After a few lazy circles close enough to the coast that I can make out land, I just start speaking. “The volcano was calling to me. I can see that now, with a little distance between us and what happened. At first, I was fleeing the wolves.”
Iceland has no wolves.
“It does so,” I say. “I could hear them howling.”
You heard the wind, Azar says. Our research says there are no wolves. I also haven’t sensed any—domesticated dogs only.
