With any luck, the little thief would likewise be forced to surrender to her exhaustion.
The living space still retained a broken television, a ruined sofa, and a surprising quantity of debris. Everything bore a sharp, electrical scent. I procured a broom from the kitchen and swept clear the refuse before stretching out upon the floor near the window, taking care not to touch anything to which the acrid reek of radiation clung.
“Rouse me in three hours,” I commanded.
Tyrin bowed his head. “Rest well, m’lord.”
I succumbed to slumber the instant my head came to rest upon my arm.
FREAKY-ASS SANDSTORM
Ziara
Tali was sitting cross-legged on the bar, swinging her legs and talking a mile a minute about something one of her teachers had said. I leaned against the counter, half listening, half enjoying the normalcy of it. The den hummed with its usual sounds—distant conversations, the clank of pipes, the faint thud of boots on patrol.
Home.
“—and then she had the nerve to tell me I was being disruptive. Me! I was asking a legitimate question.” Tali’s indignation was so pure it bordered on theatrical.
“Was the question relevant to the lesson?”
“It was relevant to my education.”
“That’s not the same thing, pup.”
She huffed and kicked her heels against the bar. “You sound like Mack.”
“Mack sounds like me. I had the attitude first.”
She grinned at that, and the warmth of it settled into my chest like a good meal. This was what I fought for. These moments.This kid, with her big mouth and her bigger heart, safe in the tunnels where nothing could ever…
The temperature dropped.
Not gradually. Not like the house’s heating had glitched. The cold arrived all at once, instant and absolute, as if someone had opened a door to the Arctic and invited it in. Frost crept across the bar beneath Tali’s legs. Her breath misted. Mine did, too.
Tali’s eyes went wide. “Zee, what’s?—”
She froze. Mid-sentence, her mouth still shaped around the word she’d never finish, her skin white as death. The patrol’s footsteps cut off. The pipes went silent.
Everything stopped.
He stood at the entrance to my living room, silver eyes scanning the space with an unhurried intensity that made my skin crawl. His gaze moved over the cracked mirror behind the bar, the tin-tiled ceiling, the tunnels outside my window. He took it all in. Cataloguing. Memorizing.
The way my blood turned to ice had nothing to do with his magic.
He’d breached our defenses and now stood in the heart of everything I’d sworn to protect.
I stepped in front of Tali on instinct, putting my body between the dragon and the frozen pup, even though some rational corner of my brain knew none of this was real. It couldn’t be real. He could’t be here.
It had to be another dream.
“Get out,” I snarled.
He ignored me, his attention drifting to the girl behind me. His head tilted, a predator spotting something interesting in the underbrush.
“So, this is where you hide,” he said.
I wanted to rip the den from his sight. Tear it away like a curtain and leave him staring at nothing. Every face he saw was one he could hunt. Every tunnel was a path he could follow. I wished I could gather them all up—Tali, the patrol, every frozenwolf in the den—and shove them somewhere his silver eyes could never reach.
