Page 29

IRIS

Nine minutes later, all the Farguard’s Guides and Sentinels—excluding the ones busy getting their hands and asses healed—are waiting for me over a rushed dinner in the mess hall.

I’m even wearing real pants.

After I grab food, I’ll be ready to wing the most de-motivational speech in military history.

But before that, I’m stalled in the hallway.

Feeling a familiar power pulse, I squint at the ceiling. “Why is Vhex on the roof?”

“Ideally?” Remy answers. “Jumping.”

“He can fly,” I remind him, trying to read Vhex’s energy through the floors.

His patterns feel…weird.

Then again?

What would Vhex’s normal be?

I let out a breath when Vhex moves. “Here he comes.”

“Shall we hide?”

“Can you pretend to cooperate?” I itch my prickling throat. “Your bickering is giving me hives.”

“Not hives.” Remy snags my fingers. “Poison. Speak of the devil.”

On wings of pink fire, Vhex singes the walls, but at least he’s wearing his human-colored skin.

“My Guide.” Vhex ducks Remy’s shadow-lasso, coming in hot and folding me into his wings. “My wife, my life. I heard your call.”

His hug digs the commander’s badge into my boob. I wiggle from his grip and bat his flames before they eat my hair. “I called for everyone.”

“Not that call.” His rogue fang pops out with his wicked grin. “The one from your veins.”

His skin is so warm, mine flushes in response.

I cough against a growing prickle, but the itch goes deeper than my throat. My blood shifts south.

Vhex smells smoky and rich—all blood, sweat, and dark, red berries.

My body doesn’t just remember his touch.

It craves more.

I inhale his collarbone, enjoying the greedy sweep of his silks and the heat of his wings.

Remy growls a reality check.

That, and Vhex’s bare shaft grinds my stomach.

I’m willing to have battlefield sex. Cafeteria-floor-linoleum sex is where I draw my line.

Especially when hundreds of nosy soldiers are already peeking through the double doors, watching how I deal with the nightmare dukes.

I tense from my toes.

The more they gas me up, the harder they’ll kick me down when I lose my spot.

“Wait outside if you want to fight.” After checking them head-to-toe and confirming that they’re stable enough, I pull back my silks. “If you’re coming in, then make yourself some magic pants and behave.”

Leaving them to decide, I walk into the mess hall. It’s a generic cafeteria with long, wood tables, decorated by a charred and roughly Remy-shaped hole that tears through the floor and ceiling tiles.

Compared to who knows what else Vhex and Remy have bulldozed, a little basement access shaft is practically a bonus feature for the base.

Sentinels carry their dinner trays around the hole, not paying it any attention as they find their seats.

They do pay attention to me .

Cherise waves from the front of the hall. She sits with a mixed group of Guides and Sentinels, next to the conspicuously empty head table.

I guess the commander’s seat is reserved.

As I walk between rows, a hundred soul-silks sweep across my path.

Every one is three-quarters of a soulmate.

I tense so hard that my jaw clicks.

With so many super-compatible Sentinels so eager to say hello, my power fights my hold. My fingertips buzz and start to leak a little glow.

My instincts scream.

Soothe them all, all at once, right now.

I stumble, overwhelmed.

Vhex and Remy pop out of nowhere to catch my arms.

Remy’s coolness settles on my left.

Vhex’s fire heats my right.

I sigh. “Thanks.”

An intense, wordless squabble rages in the ripples of their power, but the space between them is weirdly quiet.

They’re so strong and all-encompassing that they block me from sensing the energies of weaker Sentinels.

Being split in half isn’t so bad.

With their chaotic assist, I shake off the grip of my very mis -guided Guide instincts.

Soothing fifty C-classes isn’t the way to show my worth.

Neither is burning myself out.

Tried that.

It didn’t work.

I take Vhex and Remy’s hands. “Stick with me.”

Vhex locks our fingers, teasing my knuckles with licks of hellfire. “Nowhere else I’d be.”

As shadow vines climb my arm, Remy snorts. “There are many other places you might go.”

“No one’s going anywhere,” I say and tug them along.

We pass Sentinels I’ve guided.

Guides are scattered around the tables, some sitting on a Sentinel’s lap, some straddling two or three. Most drooping over their plates, exhausted after the battle.

Everyone hunches as we pass, instinctively ducking away from the aura of Vhex and Remy’s volatile, S-class power.

I don’t feel the strain.

I just have to keep holding their hands and combing their silks.

When I reach Cherise, everyone else at her table goes face-to-plate.

She locks on to me with a ruler-straight gaze, working hard to ignore the Sentinels I’m wearing on my arms.

“You’re using that badge well, Commander,” she says lightly.

“I hope so.” I’m about to use it a lot more. “We have to talk about zombies.”

“And the monster that resurrected them.” Cherise shudders, and her hair ornaments clink. “I need a second shower after all that necromancy.”

“Same.” My skin pebbles. “Do you want to address the guard? Or should I say a few words?”

Her eyes narrow. “Have you eaten anything since yesterday?”

Huh. Good question. “When was yesterday again?”

With so much going on, hours feel like years.

“Go. Eat,” Cherise says, gently shooing me away. “We have a crisis twice a day. If it’s not on fire, it can wait. Besides. If you sit at that table for ten minutes? Morale will soar.”

Now that food is an option, my stomach whines. Pre-plated trays sit on the pick-up window into the kitchen. I crane around Vhex, trying to see what’s set out. “What’s for?—”

Shadows pull out a chair for me at the head table and then usher me into it in one smooth, sideways drag. A loaded tray winks in front of me as Remy slides into the chair at my side.

“—dinner?” Before I can finish the question, I’m blinking at a plate of sandwiches.

“You’re hungry,” Remy says as his shadows slice my bread. “Would you like to be fed?”

“No.” I brush his wisps off my plate. Other Sentinels don’t dare to stare, but their attention sticks to me as tightly as Vhex & Remy’s silks.

Cherise is right about morale.

I need to show them that I’m in control.

Even more, I need to show them who I’m keeping under control.

After ripping through a blockade of shadow ropes, Vhex flashes into the chair opposite Remy. He wears fire armor low on his hips, flashing his abs, but concealing below the waist.

“Easy.” Before his snarl turns into a growl with fireballs, I give him back the hand that was ripped away. Vhex softens as I stroke his palm.

When his rumbling drops closer to a purr, I turn to Remy with a lifted brow. “Did you want me to feed Vhex? Or does he get his own plate?”

Remy doesn’t answer, but a third tray drops onto the table.

It falls from high up and hits hard enough to knock over the sandwich.

“Ham. Again.” I check my sandwich and find thick slabs of the same ham I ate yesterday—the same ham that I ate day after day on the train north.

“You want something else?” Vhex asks, sliding his chair closer. “Venison? Dragon? I’ll hunt for you.”

“I’m not that picky.” I’d rather eat ham three meals a day than go back to “fine dining” at Kyorgos house. The duchess loves shellfish. She moans when she sucks out their buttered brains.

Nope. “Ham is great.”

I take a bite with no complaints.

It’s the first time I’ve sat quietly for more than thirty seconds since arriving at the Farguard. My fingers twitch, instantly wanting to scroll, but Vhex and Remy hook my attention better than my phone.

Vhex is so clingy, I end up shoving half a sandwich into his mouth to keep him from pulling me into his heated lap.

Tending their silks and trying to balance my attention between them, I turn back to Remy. “How often does the train bring supplies?” And news from outside.

“It doesn’t,” Remy answers. As he tilts his head, his thought pattern shifting to more of a churn. “Or it doesn’t anymore? It stopped. I can’t remember when.”

“That’s concerning.” I swallow another bite. I’ll ask Cherise how the guard runs later. The warden deserves a raise and her own parade for keeping operations going on her own.

I dig in to my second sandwich, rushing to pack in calories while I can. The ham is so salty, Remy winks me a second cup of water, too.

I have to ask. “If supplies aren’t coming in by rail, where are we getting all this ham?”

“I know this one.” Vhex pauses, licking the salt off his fingers. “Gold-tusk boars. They spawned a godsdamned stampede—a few years back? We’re talking hundreds of thousands of car-sized pig-beasts. Epic barbecue. Farguard has cured meats for years.”

“Ah. Yes. We traded the tusks for weapons and crystals.” Remy’s brain-fan slows to normal speeds.

Mine starts to heat. “Wait. Faervaine isn’t funding the Farguard at all?”

“Not in the past decades,” Remy answers. “Now and again, the palace sends us someone to bury.”

“No one comes to us because they want to.” Vhex’s eyes flash berry red. “Except for you, Wife.”

I only wanted to join the Farguard in the sense that it was my only option.

Remote. Forgotten. Dangerous.

Salary paid in boar.

Altogether, somewhere Alessandra Ashbourne and Calliope Kyorgos would never think to look for me, or chase me if I were found.

I don’t understand what the emperor is thinking, risking the northern border by running it like a misfit dumping ground.

As one of the misfits, I can only protect our corner of the world.

Even if every moment is more fucked up than the one before, at least I’m doing something .

I’m not sitting in an empty room, waiting for some asshole to remember I exist.

I’m not wasting my power.

And I’m trying not to lie to myself anymore.

I don’t love guiding because I was born to help.

I love it for the power .

Every Sentinel in the hall peeks at me from the corner of their eye, wanting my attention. Wanting my care.

Vhex and Remy crank that feeling to infinity, only they’re not trying to be subtle.

They beam want and need into my soul.

I feel it in the cling of their silks. In strokes of Remy’s shadows and the ticklish grazes of Vhex’s blunted claws.

It’s like they’re trying to touch every inch of me down to individual cells—as if they’ll find juuuuust the right spot and our souls will magically bond.

An imprint is biologically impossible, and yet they keep trying—they’ll never stop trying—because even when they’re feral, out-of-their minds, out-of-control, their bodies and souls know that I’m the one.

I don’t know how long I’ll be THE one to them.

But, with a horde of kobold zombies stumbling toward their undead overlord, who knows how much time any of us have?

I fill my stomach and let the Sentinels stroke me until I’m shivering.

Stars help me.

I think I love the Farguard.