Page 37 of Bite Bonded Bride

The first soldier barely registers as a person.

Obstruction. I take his throat with my left hand and remove it. The sound is wet and final. His partner turns⁠—

Prey.

I put my claws through his chest from behind before he finishes the turn. I don't stop. The roar in my ears is Cybele, her presence somewhere in this chamber, alive, a bright furious flame at the fringes of my senses and every body between me and that flame is simply something to be moved.

My warriors pour in behind me. The chamber erupts.

I hear the fighting peripherally. Steel. Shouting. The crack of Vrakken magic meeting elvish counter-spells. None of it involves me. I have already identified the fastest path through the remaining soldiers and I am carving it open with both hands, not because I have to but because something fundamental in me has decided that precision is a luxury I no longer owe these people.

A sword catches my side. Slides between two plates of my armor and bites into the muscle beneath.

I don't pause.

I drag the soldier forward by the wrist of the hand holding the sword and feel the joint separate before I throw him into the wall hard enough that the stone spiderwebs on impact. Fine cracks race up toward the ceiling. Dust falls like ash.

The mountain is listening.

Somewhere below us, the Wildspont shrieks. A low, resonating sound that vibrates through the soles of my boots and into my spine. The ruins are complaining around us, ancient stone made brittle by years of dying magic, and every blow I land against these walls is another insult the structure is slowly deciding not to forgive.

I don't care.

Three more soldiers close on me together. Coordinated. Trained.

I give them three seconds of effort. No more.

The blood in my mouth tastes like iron and old magic and I realize distantly that one of them managed to open my cheek before I finished him. I wipe it away with my bare wrist and keep moving.

Then I see Malachar.

He is not fighting. He is standing near the far arch with his sword drawn and his eyes fixed on me, and even from twenty feet away I watch the calculation happen on his face in real time. He came here expecting to find a prince. A political creature that weighs consequences.

What he is looking at instead makes him go still.

He raises one hand. A sharp, silent gesture.

Light detonates. White-hot and blinding, filling the chamber like a second sun, burning the shapes of everyone in it into bright afterimages burned directly into the eye. My warriors stumble. I hurl up one arm to shield my vision and snarl.

And by the time the light collapses, he is gone.

I could follow him. The instinct claws at me to hunt, pursue, end it and I take two steps toward the arch before her voice cuts through every other impulse in my body.

"Zareth."

Just that. My name. Hoarse and shaking, but alive.

I turn.

The cell door is iron-and-stone, old enough that the hinges have partially fused to the wall. I tear it off anyway. Not carefully.

She is on her feet when I reach her. She looks at my face and doesn't flinch.

She looks at my hands, at what is on them and doesn't look away. Her amber-brown eyes move over me slowly, cataloguing the damage, and what I find there when they come back up to mine is not fear. It is more complicated than fear. My chest tightens when I identify it.

She is looking at me like I am real.

"Are you injured?" My voice doesn't sound like mine.