Page 101 of The Reckoning of Starlight

He watched the last of the general’s defiance burn out in his eyes before rupturing them. Swollen sockets wept black tracks down his face.

A pulse of Essence split the chamber.

Lykor wheeled, fangs bared, as a portal tore open.

Vesryn stepped through, igniting orbs of illumination overhead. Lykor blinked against the sudden glare, scowling.

Vesryn’s gaze found Lykor first, then cut to Elashor. He went rigid.

Blood sheeted from the ruin between the general’s legs. He convulsed in the bindings, gagging around the severed flesh Lykor had rammed down his throat. Rending stitched his toothless mouth shut, leaving him only enough air to choke around the final disgrace.

“How the fuck did you portal here?” Lykor demanded.

Vesryn forced his gaze back to Lykor. “Blossom showed Jassyn this chamber. Jassyn showed me. I knew this was the only place you’d be.”

“Reckless bastard,” Lykor muttered. “You could’ve walked straight into stone.”

Vesryn ignored him. “I take it the interrogation is over?”

Elashor’s flayed chest hitched. A slick lobe of lung inflated between his broken ribs, then collapsed with a wet rattle.

Lykor tilted his head. “Does that answer your question?”

Vesryn’s shadows struck before Lykor could stop them. What remained of Elashor detonated across the chamber, gore slapping the rock.

“I wasn’t finished with him,” Lykor snarled, slamming both palms into Vesryn’s chest. “He didn’t deserve mercy.”

Vesryn shoved him back. “I didn’t do it for him.”

Denied even Elashor’s last scream, Lykor shook his head and ripped open a portal.

Vesryn stepped in front of it.

“Move.”

“He earned what you did to him.” A muscle ticked in Vesryn’s jaw as Lykor’s frost whitened the air between them. “But you went on long after he had nothing left to tell you.”

“Then you already know answers aren’t why I stayed.”

Lykor shouldered past him and crossed the void in search of Jassyn.

Elashor had been the first, but scores more still breathed. They were already corpses. They just didn’t know it yet.

CHAPTER 27

SERENNA

After two full days and nights in the Everfrost Caverns, Serenna stood in the open. She caught Fenn’s arm as he reached the cliff’s edge, his wings twitching toward the sky. Metal flashed along his face. He looked like himself again, and that’s what made her pause.

“Your piercings,” she said. Studs and rings glinted along his ears and brows, each piece restoring what Taryn had stripped away.

Fenn’s eyes slid past her toward Vesryn, who stood on her other side, the clawed tips of his wings flexing to bask in the dawn.

“Why are you looking at him?”

Fenn’s fang clicked against the ring in his lip. “Your princeling helped me…reacquire them.”

“Reacquire?” she echoed, leveling him with a look as she shifted into her wings. Membranes unfurled through the slits in her armor, rustling in the icy wind rolling off the peaks of the Everfrost. Cold gnawed at her skin before scales climbed across her arms. “Please tell me you two did not go back to Centarya.”