Page 48

A low, unnatural buzz pressed against my senses. My head snapped to the side, locking onto it instantly. I yanked the reins. Umbra skidded to a halt, hooves tearing through dirt and wildflowers.

Due east. Five klicks.

Screaming.

Shadows slipped from my skin, curling close as they fed me secrets no one else could hear. I stilled instantly. Impossible…

Monsters only hunted in the dark, yet the sun poured over us like molten gold, and still the familiar sounds of carnage flooded my senses. A village under attack.

I could leave them. Keep riding. Reach Lyra faster.

Every second I wasted here was another she spent without me. With him.

I could ignore them. Pretend I hadn’t heard. But my people would die. My people. The people I chose to rule and protect.

A snarl built in my chest, the decision was already made.

“What is it?” Caelum asked, already reading the look on my face.

He knew what I was. That I could feel monsters like lost kin.

“Something to kill,” I said, voice low and lethal as I drove Umbra forward, veering toward the village at a full gallop.

The onslaught came into view and my grip on the reins turned my knuckles white.

The cobblestoned streets were painted with blood, gleaming in the sun like a beacon of reckoning.

Dead bodies were discarded on the ground as if worthless. Pots were tipped over along the village’s pathways, once beautiful flowers now trampled along with the peace that would have once been here.

Frantic heartbeats filled my ears, and I knew without looking that most of the Fae here were hiding.

I slid from Umbra’s back, tying his reins to the crooked fence of a cottage without taking my eyes off the carnage.

I breathed in slowly. Beneath the fear and blood was something wrong.

The scent coiled through the air, sharp and metallic, laced with something that set every instinct in my body on edge.

“A Zyrrith swarm,” I murmured. The buzzing wasn’t just sound, it pressed against my skull, relentless.

“How is that possible?” Caelum said from behind me as Solas cursed under his breath.

My vision shifted and the world sharpened. Colours dulled, edges honed to a knife’s edge as the predator beneath my skin surged forward, stretching into the space behind my eyes.

I could not just hear them, I could feel them. Every beat of their hearts—rapid, erratic, inhuman. Thrumming through the air like a pulse I could track.

One.

Ten.

Twenty. No… more.

“Thirty of them,” I said over my shoulder. They were scattered across the village.

Moving. Hunting. Feeding. Their wings carved through the air in jagged bursts, their presence flickering against my senses. I tilted my head slightly, locking onto them all at once. Every heartbeat.

Hunt.

Steel rasped against scabbards as Solas and Caelum both drew their weapons. Swords imbued by her.