Page 3 of Keldori By Daybreak

Pain shot through my forearms as four shards of bone erupted through my muscles at my bidding. Dark blood stained their serrated edges, then turned to dust as it dripped off the blades.

“Wren!” Gams shouted a warning. “You’ll be ashed—”

“Then clear me a path!”

“I’m afraid you have a severe misunderstanding regarding how storms work. No one is making it through that!”

“I can!” My voice was a feral growl, and my bones splintered and elongated as I pulled at my grandmother’s Magick to bolster my Nightmare form with muscle and claws.

I would finish this now. I would see my grandmother again. I would not let her die.

“Look at me, Wren! Let me say goodbye to my granddaughter!” The desperation and finality in her tone felt like a betrayal somehow. This was not and would not be goodbye, and the idea that she could even suggest this might be our last meeting was vile.

I refused to look back at her. That wasn’t really my Grandmother after all. Those weren’t the arms that had comforted me so many times. Those weren’t the hands that had wiped away so many tears.

Uneven sheets of ice passed beneath my feet as I hurtled over the frozen bay. Gams’s voice, too young to be hers, chased after me, but I was too fast and her storm was too loud for me to make out what it was she said.

Sleet tore at my skin, and one, then two, of the bone spikes I’d armed myself with snapped off in the onslaught of hail.

I kept going.

I would prove Gams wrong. I would make it through the storm. I would save Skalterra. I would save Keldori. I would save my grandma.

The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up, azure lightning flashed, and heat and pain ripped me open from the inside out as the bay burst in an explosion of fire and electric Skal.

2. Cognitive Psychology

“No!”

Heavy quilts fell away as I sprung upright in bed, and pain lanced my side. I cried out against the fire in my broken ribs and then collapsed back against my mattress.

The door slammed open, and a flurry of orange flames lit the pelt-lined walls in shades of amber. The bed buckled as it took the weight of the cloaked figure that leapt to stand over me. The glowing orange scythes in his hands crackled with Skalmagick and sent shadows up his cowled face, from which his orange irises glowed down at me.

“What’s wrong?” Ciarán scanned the windowless room for signs of danger. I tried to kick him off the bed, but my legs got tangled in my quilts.

“Get off!” Agony spasmed through my ribs, and I curled in on myself.

“Blue?” Ciarán’s scythes dissipated, leaving us in the dark. He dropped to my quilts to hover his hands over my side.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” I hissed at him through gritted teeth. “Or are you too busy lurking at my door?”

“You know me, my Lady. I’m never far if I can help it,” Ciarán murmured. “Is it your injuries again? Are they bothering you?”

“It’s nothing.” I faltered, wondering if I could trust Ciarán. He was one of the last people I wanted to confide in, but Liam?

He would’ve known the exact right thing to say to loosen the knot in my ulcer-ridden stomach. He would’ve climbed into bed and held me until I fell back asleep so I could wake up well-rested and ready to do whatever it took to save my grandmother.

And Liam was Ciarán, whether I’d fully accepted that reality yet or not.

I sighed in defeat. “I saw my grandma. She—”

“Sorcha!” Ciarán slid off my bed and whisked back into the darkened hall.

“It’s fine!” I pressed the heels of my hands back over my eyes.

Ciarán called for Sorcha again, loud enough to wake the entire hovel, and I pulled my quilt up over my head. It was the middle of the day. There was no need to get all of the nocturnal inhabitants of our hideout up before the sun set for the night.

“Is it her ulcers?” The quilt whipped away almost as quickly as I’d disappeared under it. Sorcha stood overhead, the orange flame in her hand casting a halo of light through her frizzy gray curls. Orange irises glowing against black sclera, just like Ciarán’s, glared down her wrinkled nose at me. The old woman had spent so much time the last week fussing over my injuries that I was starting to forget what she’d looked like back home in Keel Watch Harbor.