In a fit of coughs, I found my feet and looked toward Finn, hoping for some last-ditch plan. He met my gaze, his eyes wide and glistening with panic. Behind him, a section of the wall was open.
He glanced back at it, then back at me. His face twisted with something I couldn’t read. His jaw worked, and his hands came up, forming half-formed signs that dissolved into fists.
He spun and ran into the darkness.
“Finn!” The name tore from my throat, a raw, useless sound he couldn’t possibly hear.
My mind went blank, static white. He didn’t. He wouldn’t?—
Yet the passage was empty. He was gone.
My arms started shaking. The room seemed to tilt. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real.
He’d abandoned me.
Fiorella’s laughter cut through the ringing in my ears—sharp and victorious. I turned to face her, alone.
Chapter 14
Sidney
My chest heaved, each breath a jagged gasp. I stared at the empty passage where Finn had vanished, waiting for him to reappear, to laugh at some impossible joke, to signal that he’d found another exit.
Anything but this crushing silence.
“Abandoned you, did he?” Fiorella’s voice dripped with delight. “How delicious.”
I spun to flee. Yet the compulsion struck, yanking me still. My legs locked.
My feet moved against my will, forcing me to face Fiorella and her mates. The chamber was a tomb, and I was to be its newest corpse.
My mind, a frantic buzz just moments before, went quiet. The world narrowed to the glint in Fiorella’s eyes and the slow, triumphant curve of her mouth. The pain in my cracked ribs faded to a distant echo.
Finn was gone. He’d left me. The stark, simple fact hollowed me out, leaving nothing but a fragile shell.
Licking her lips, Fiorella raised her blade. Herremaining devotees closed in, their movements still sluggish from the spores but no less lethal.
A tremor ran through the stone beneath me. Not the familiar groan of shifting walls, but something with a cadence like a drum beat. Dust rained from the ceiling. Fiorella paused, her head tilted.
Then came the roar.
It was not the shriek of the pale creatures or the cry of a vampire. This sound was ripped from the heart of the wild, a bellowing, guttural sound that promised torn flesh and shattered bone.
A shape of impossible size and fury filled the opening where Finn had fled, a nine-foot-tall nightmare of speckled grey feathers. Its oversized, beaked head, like that of a monstrous owl, swiveled, fixing huge, yellow eyes on the scene. The creature had the body of an oversized bear, muscles rippling beneath its hide, each limb tipped with dagger-length claws and great wings furled against its sides.
A tytoursus. A king of the forest wilds.
And on its back, clinging to its neck, was a grinning redhead.
“Finn!” I gasped. The tension in my stomach eased. My shoulders loosened just a bit as I realized what’d happened.
He slid off the creature’s flank, nearly collapsing. The tytoursus steadied him with a gentle nudge.
Sorry I took so long,Finn signed. He nodded to the bird-headed bear.Had to convince him to help. His name is Ash.
“Your defective Turned brought reinforcements,” Fiorella sneered. “How quaint.”
Brute tilted his head, his jaw slack and eyes wide, just as Ash charged. The tytoursus swatted him sideways. The vampire’s body hit the wall hard with a loud crack. Borisstirred and cracked open his eyes. He rose and limped over, tearing out Brute’s throat with his teeth.
