Page 71 of The Cradle of Ice

Meryk rubbed his chin and lips, plainly anxious, talking to keep himself from rushing out into the village. He scooped his wife closer. Both their gazes never drifted from the doorway.

Graylin knew their concern.

Nyx isn’t the only one missing.

32

NYX LUNGED UP as Henna was snatched from Daal’s arms.

“No!” she wailed.

Nyx thrust an arm high. Her fingertips brushed a wingtip as the beast swept upward. But she could do nothing more to stop its escape. She could barely keep her legs, exhausted from her battle with the horde-mind, beaten down and weak.

Next to her, Daal cried out in anguish and panic.

His pain, her guilt, stoked a fury inside her. It steadied her feet, narrowed her vision to a sharp focus. She had suffered so much, an innocent herself. She did not ask for any of this. A litany of misery and pain ramped through her: orphaned and abandoned, tortured and humiliated for being born near blind, seeing her dah and brothers slain—then torn from all she knew and loved, thrust into a role she didn’t want, a duty that would only leave a wake of death.

No … no more …

She gathered all that pain as she stared up at Henna’s limp form.

Another innocent …

I won’t allow it.

She grabbed Daal’s arm, mostly to keep from falling, but down deep, she instinctively knew what she wanted. A part of her knew from the moment she met him. It wafted off of him like his sweaty musk and shone from the ice of his eyes.

With her touch, fire surged into her body.

She gasped at the power, fueled by Daal’s panic. Each beat of his heart—sounding like the distant beat of a drum to her roaring ears—filled her with those flames, driving into a dark well that welcomed that energy, sapping it out of him.

She understood what was happening.

He is flashburn, and I’m the forge.

Nyx accepted this and stood tall, raising her arm again. She dug the nails of her other hand into the muscle of Daal’s arm, drawing blood. She drew and drew upon his fire until she could hold it no longer.

She screamed that energy back out, a dragon’s roar of bridle-song. She gloried in that power, ablaze in the energy. It struck like a fiery arrow into the beast.

As it did, for a breath, she saw the creature in its entirety, stripping through shaggy fur, down to bone, blood, and nerve.

The bat writhed in midair, trapped there.

She drove deeper and burned its heart away with a dark satisfaction.

It wailed, flailing wildly, casting smoke from its mouth. Linked by death, she again brushed against the malignancy of the horde-mind. She sensed no fear, no anger, only cold interest, as frigid and immense as the Ice Shield itself.

To it, this death was but a single mote.

She also didn’t care.

As the bat died, so did that connection, snuffing out like the life itself. Still, for the briefest flicker, she sensed another lurking in the depths of that malevolence. A spider in the shadows. Thwarted, it slipped deeper into the darkness, turning away, but not before she caught the icy glint of its cold cunning, appraising and adapting even now.

Before she could look closer, it was gone.

“Fre gah!” Daal hollered at her, slamming her back into her body.

He ripped his arm free, her nails gouging his flesh. He lunged away, as if scared of her. But that was not it. Instead, he dashed off, arms outstretched. A tumbling figure fell through the air.