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He huffed again. “I thought you’d say that.”

“What do you know?”

“I know plenty. I know you don’t get enough sleep. I know you stay up late doing things you probably shouldn’t be doing. And I know you hate mornings, but you love coffee. It’s the only thing you consistently consume in the dining hall every day.”

I let out an angry huff. “We’re talking again?”

His jaw tensed. “We were never not talking.”

“If you say so. Then what came up yesterday?”

“How’s your head?” he asked.

“Rhyan, what in Lumeria happened? I seriously want to know.”

He frowned, eyeing me carefully. “You didn’t hear anything at your dinner last night?”

I set my mug down on the table, angling my body toward him. “My father was called away early by the spymaster. I thought…I thought it might be about the Emartis.” Shit…I shouldn’t have been drinking. I’d sat through a hundred of those dinners before. Why had last night been any different? I was sick of playing my role, but I had to do it. I could have pushed through. I should have pushed through sober. Now, I might have missed something important.

Rhyan bit his lip, his good eyebrow narrowed.

“Did something happen? Something new?”

“No,” he said. “The Emartis seem to be in the pattern of making themselves known with some sort of show and then going completely quiet. Having been named a terrorist organization this week by the Bamarian Council, they will most likely be exceptionally quiet. For a time. My guess is they went underground. We probably won’t hear from them for a few weeks. But when we do, it will be big.”

My stomach twisted as I thought of how they were probably together now, plotting, planning. I closed my eyes, hearing the now familiar hum of the magical ward protecting my apartment. The wards had been doubled, so the sound was even louder than before, though within a few days I’d become almost numb to it. Now, I listened, feeling incredibly comforted by the extra level of protection Aunt Arianna had put in place.

“So not the Emartis?” I asked.

He shook his head but offered no more information.

“You’re going to have to bring me coffee if you want me to keep guessing.”

“It’s just not the kind of news that’s fun to wake up to, especially hungover.”

I tensed. He was probably right, but not knowing was worse. “I can deal. Tell me.”

He scrunched up his face like he really didn’t want to tell me but sat forward as he said, “Scouts are reporting an unusually high level of akadim activity in the south.”

“What’s a high amount of activity? What scouts? Where?”

He ran his fingers through his hair. His curls looked like they’d been brushed out earlier, loosened into bronzed waves. The movement of his fingers highlighted the scar running through his left eye, but then his hair fell over his forehead, hiding most of the mark. “They’re not typically found below the northern countries except during winter, and even then, you usually only find about a handful of akadim barely making their way past Cretanya.”

The southern country was a close neighbor, sitting just above Elyria. I mentally mapped its location and distance from Bamaria in my mind. “So were they spotted in Cretanya?” That was close. Too close. It left only one country between us and those demons.

Rhyan shook his head grimly. “There was a nest discovered in Elyria.”

“Auriel’s bane! Elyria,” I said. Elyria shared our northern border—it was where the akadim attack had happened at the end of summer, right when Rhyan had arrived. “Um, how many akadim are usually in a nest?” I was still catching up on my akadim reading since becoming a soturion, but even in all my years of study, I never recalled nests being mentioned.

Rhyan shrugged. “The nests are kind of a new thing. Most akadim historically are loners, traveling in small packs, only forming brief alliances with each other. This is usually due in-fighting for control of, well, their food supply.”

People. Souls. The monsters ate souls. That was their main source of food. Sometimes they ate bodies, and sometimes they did worse. And sometimes it wasn’t all in that order.

“Most of the nests I’ve known about in Glemaria have perhaps a dozen akadim at most, though from what I’ve seen, the number frequently shifts. They’re very territorial—not willing to let many into their packs. Hierarchies form and reform all the time. More often than not, fights break out, and civil wars erupt with different akadim backing different leaders. The groups usually shrink on their own and disperse without any soturion aid. But this nest in Elyria showed evidence of about…we think maybe two dozen akadim in a pack.”

My stomach sank to the floor. Two dozen akadim, only one country away from mine. The akadim that had made its way to the Bamarian border, the one Rhyan had slain, had been the closest brush with an akadim I’d ever had. We never got reports of them coming this close, this far south in the Empire. Never so far from winter and never in such numbers. I’d been taught to fear them and take precautions my entire life the way I’d been taught to never make a deal with the Afeya. But the akadim had always been so distant. It was hard to imagine, to really understand, the danger they presented when they’d never gotten close before.

“There’s growing concern about the way the akadim are interacting with each other. Like they’re…organizing. Planning. No one knows why. It’s a complete aberration from their normal behavior.”