If she despises monsters so, she shouldn’t have climbed beneath the covers with one.
“You’re right.” The words are slow. Contemplative. “Thereisonly room for two.” Arkyn shoves to a stand. “Take off your necklace and follow me.”
Sereme’s eyes widen before her brows pull together. “Why?”
“Because I said so,” he jabs, moving through to his slumbersuite with an air of nonchalance.
A brief hesitation before Sereme follows in the wake of the Scavenger King’s tattered cloak, pausing to primp herself in the tarnished reflection of an ancient bronze breastplate, seemingly expecting him to lead her to his fur-laden pallet. Slowing when he walks straight past it and strides through a doorway at the back of the suite, through a shadowed tunnel.
It takes too long for her to voice the question Arkyn can sense squirming behind her lips. “Arkyn … where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
The answer is gobbled down like scraps tossed to a stray, their footsteps echoing off the close walls. His heavy and thumping; hers the persistenttapof heels clipping against stone.
The tunnel finally opens to the outside world—a solemn stretch of thick white snow lit by the luminous Moonplume moons hanging overhead, the odd puddle of mist drifting with the lazy breeze.
A mild slumbertime, quiet aside from a pack of chitterlings bickering in the distance. Even so, Sereme shivers, rubbing her arms from the bitter cold. “What are we doing out here?”
The question loosens from her blue-tinged lips with puffs of breath, making her appear vulnerable.
Weak.
Things Arkyn finds offensive. This female thought herself fit to be his queen, but here she is, cowering from the cold.
The world will eat her up.
“We’re here because I no longer have use for you,” he states with a sigh, picking dried blood from beneath his stubbed nails. “Your mouth is warm but your assumptions itch more than my fucking fingers do, and I’ve grown bored of your presence.”
Each foreboding word leeches more color from Sereme’s face until she’s as pale as the Moonplume moons, eyes round to match their shape.
She reaches forward and grips his bicep. The right one, which was almost entirely eaten by dragonflame so very long ago. “Arkyn,please—”
“Get your hand off me.”
She recoils from the fire now brewing in his eyes, a tremble taking her over that’s not born of the brisk, biting wind—perhaps falling into the realization that she’s being discarded. That the male renowned for scavenging things, for treasuring the trash of others, istossing her away.
Arkyn lifts his chin, looking down at her beneath lowered lids, wondering how she’ll fare out there in the cold, dark world. If she’ll fall or thrive.
If she’ll drop to her knees for someone else and try to suck her way back to the top.
“Long ago,” he utters, flicking another curl of dried blood onto the snow, “the male who spawned me cast me onto the plains and told me torun. He, too, saw me as a tool to be sharpened for his own ambitions and nothing more.”
Sereme sucks breath to speak, hushed by a flippant dash of Arkyn’s hand.
“You, I see, care only about what I can provide you,” he states, tone cold and bland—the words hanging moons between them … jolting. Threatening to fall.
Todestroy.
“Given you no longer have anything I desire in return, it’s your time to run.”
Sereme wobbles back a step, her purple boot punching a hole in the unblemished snow stretched behind her. “Arkyn, my love—”
Cliár erupts free from her burrow in the mountain—a blast of flame, screeching as she cuts through the sky. Her splayed body eclipses a moon like a blazing smear, leaving a wake of ruddy stardust.
Sereme staggers at the sight of the ancient, mighty beast, hand to her chest while puffs of panicked breath all but cloud her face.
The Elding Bird slices sideways and banks, the slumbering world awakened by the heavy drum of her feathered wings.
