Crap.
“Well, you see …” I edge backward, swipe the bag off the ground, and swing it over my shoulder. “As I’m sure you recall, she used to write in a diary.”
“No.”
“Pfft. You know I feed off that word,” I boast. “Besides, I’m not just doing it for you. I need to know things she can’t tell me. It’s messing with my head now that she’s … alive again.”
“Then I’ll go.”
I snort-laugh. “While Cadok may be aloof enough to let you roam his kingdom unguarded, Tyroth is not. And he hates you. Fiercely. I can make myself unseen. You can’t.”
He levels me with a stare to match that of his beast barely protruding from the shadows at his back. A single look that makes me feel more valued than Pah ever did—even though he knows I’m more than capable of taking care of myself.
Sometime, I’ll thank him for that.
“You got rid of that bangle. You told me so.”
“I lied,” I say with stony precision.
I didn’t lie. It’s gone. Meaning I have to get it back. Not that I’m going to tell him that. He’ll blow a fucking artery if he knows where I tossed it.
His eyes narrow.
“Oh, and I intend to be gone awhile. Taste some delicacies on the way,” I say, waggling my brows.
He immediately breaks my eye contact, shuddering. “I don’t want to know about that, thank you very fucking much.”
No, but I need him to shuck this conversation like an itchy cloak. My insinuation that I’m going to prowl for a few good lays is a certain way to repulse him enough he’ll—
“Fine,” he growls, probably knowing I’d do it without his blessing but that it’d hurt me more than it’d hurt him.
Love him for that.
I flash him a smile. “Dear brother, are you worried about me?”
“Since the dae Pah shoved you in my arms—squirming, bloody, and screaming.”
Since he realized he was all I had.
He doesn’t need to say it. I can see it in his eyes. Our one good parent died bringing me into this world.
Hard for me to mourn someone I never knew, but I hate that I took her from him. That Kaan was forced to raise me because Pah didn’t care whether I lived or died.
The prick.
“I wish he had another neck to sever.”
“I wish he had three,” Kaan snarls, stalking deeper into the darkness, followed by the grunting sounds of his ascent onto Rygun’s saddle.
I frown after him, wondering what he means by—
“Oh …”
Shit.
Kaan can’t contain a secret for long before it gnaws through his gut. Eventually, he’ll have to tell Elluin what Pah somehow accomplished that terrible slumber over an eon ago when her life came crumbling down.
When she woke to find her entire family poisoned to death.
For someone already misted by the beginnings of bloodlust, that’s the sort of news that can paint your vision red. Plant you with an appetite that can only be quelled by revenge.
I’ve seen bloodlusting folk who’ve failed to satiate their savage desires, rabid like a tick-bit Sabersythe, the only cure their own swift and merciful death.
And with Pah already dead, slain by Kaan’s hand …
Rygun begins to edge forward like a mountain shifting from its perch, and I press myself flush against the wall—pack in hand.
“Be careful,” I yell at Kaan, despite not being able to see him from all the way down here, trying to become one with the stone.
“Always,” he bellows before Rygun hefts off the plateau’s edge, his tail the last part of him to slither from the burrow as he plummets from sight.
The booming thud-ump of dragon flight has me spinning to see Rygun soaring toward the east, Kaan saddled between his massive wings, a cluster of spears notched by his boot.
My heart bangs against my ribs like a gallop of hooves.
Snarling, I flip up my hood and whip my head back around, large stones shifting beneath my heavy-booted stomps to the Loff’s lapping tune.
Chase death, Elluin Raeve—
I slap myself.
Hard.
It’s all some strange, fucked-up coincidence. Or perhaps someone messed with my head while I was knocked out. Fiddled with the threads of my brain. Tied knots where they shouldn’t exist. Patched me up incorrectly.
That must be it.
That has to be it.
I come to a red-stone wall that stretches from within the jungle, across the shore, and disappears into the Loff’s ruffled depths, many luminous warding runes carved into its stumpy height as well as a bunch of painted words: