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“I’m no problem.”
“But you will be,” his voice is a snarl, and he’s not even ten feet from me now. I can’t waste time regretting my choice to come out, because I’m already out here and need to focus on fixing it.
I’m not helpless.
I’m not useless.
I can run, throw things, scream.
“Wait,” I snap at him, lifting my hand up, fighting to stop it from trembling. He’s tense, and this close. His eyes are wild in a beautiful and painful way. “I know you’re just trying to keep him safe, but I can promise you, I’m not a danger to him. I’m trying to help him get his throne back--“
“Then you are the last thing he needs. I’ll destroy you both, you and that key--“ These are the last words I’m going to hear. Iknow it in my bones.
“But the key doesn’t work the way you think it does!” I cry, and the words tumble out of me.
There’s silence. He’s frozen, three feet from me. He is wild, up close, where Hadrion is polished, Cyrus is feral. His eyes are heavily lashed, almost like he’s wearing dark eyeliner, and when he speaks, I can see the sharp points of his canines.
I shudder.
So inhuman. So much more so than Hadrion.
“You have thirty seconds,” he threatens me, and I know he means it.
Every beat of my heart is taking me closer to my destruction, and I better come fast.
“I can’t give it to him. I don’t know how to open the gate myself, and he says I can’t, that it’ll kill me, that he forbid it,” I blurt out, racing against time. I can see the tick of his pulse in his neck, the tense way his body holds itself underneath his clothes. He’s wearing an old leather jacket, worn at the cuffs and collar, a ripped t-shirt under it and faded jeans that have seen better days.
And his boots.
I hope that the dark stains on the brown leather aren’t blood.
I can only pray that they aren’t.
“He said you couldn’t open the gate?” He’s breathing slowly, lightly, and his tongue flicks out over his lower lip, like an actual thought instead of just the feral desire to rip out my throat, is floating around in his brain.
“I can’t.”
“You can’t, or you won’t?”
“Does it matter?” I ask him, and my fingers clench and unclench. “The end result is he needs to find another way.” I don’t need to be totally honest with him. That I think there is a way to open it and put Hadrion back in his rightful place, but right now I haven’t figured that out.
I just need him to believe me and not destroy me.
“What did you tell him you wanted in return for the key?” His words are low and soft, and his eyes gleam in the dark.
“Return for? I can’t give it to him, didn’t you—”
An inhuman roar echoes down the street, and Cyrus freezes, whipping around, his arm out in front of me.
“What—”
I don’t have a chance to say anything else, because something is coming at us, or someone.
Thundering up an alley, yellow eyes glowing in the dark, is a creature towering over us, nearly ten feet tall. Cyrus snarls in response, shoving me fully behind him, and gives an answering howl that sends every hair on my body standing straight-up.
It’s a man, his skin flickering with fire and lightning, coming for us, me, the key. I know it.
I was so stupid to walk out here, acting like the world wasn’t filled with darkness that I don’t understand or even know about.
