Page 2 of Valor’s Flight (The New Protectorate #5)

Faced with the unlikely prospect, Alashiya wasn’t sure what she’d say to a god except, perhaps, that he was a century too late to help her.

Whatever had happened, there appeared to be no sign of life in the barn — threatening, friendly, or divine.

The large barn door was still closed. There were no voices, no footsteps.

If there was a shifter about, an owl certainly wouldn’t have perched contentedly on what remained of the peak of the roof, its golden eyes calmly surveying her.

Animals usually became restless and wary when a bigger predator was about, so his relaxed posture eased her worries.

It’s nothing. Thank the gods.

Alashiya’s sweaty grip slackened on the scissors. She pressed the heel of her hand into her eye, fighting back the sting of tears. She could’ve collapsed into the undergrowth and wept with relief, but she wanted to get back to her bed far more.

She’d just begun to turn around when the horrendous clatter of something moving in the barn made her heart lurch. The owl let out a low, authoritative hoot, as if to say, You should probably check on that.

Her breath escaped her in a long, reedy exhale as she stared unblinkingly at the white trees. The warmth of the night had turned to cold needles, thousands of them pricking her from within and without.

It’s just the debris settling. That’s all.

The fantasy was shattered not a moment later by a terrifying animal rumble.

Cold sweat dotted her forehead as she forced herself to turn back around.

The owl remained where he was, but his head had cocked to peer down at the barn below his talons.

He didn’t appear alarmed in the slightest, but why would he?

He could fly away at a moment’s notice. What a relief it would be to have a pair of wings.

It’s an animal, she thought, fighting the sharpest edge of hysteria. It has to be.

Animals tended to like nymphs. Even the most aggressive moose or wolves wouldn’t attack her, so long as they weren’t ill or injured.

But a moose wouldn’t have dropped out of the sky, so that left only a handful of terrifying options — almost all of which involved her being shredded by claws and potentially eaten.

Whatever it was, it sounded big. Bigger than big.

Alashiya’s fingers had begun to numb from her grip on the scissors, but she didn’t feel any discomfort as she stared at the old, rotted wood of the barn door.

The air stung her eyes and forced her to blink.

This was stupid, she decided. Running in the opposite direction of the intruder was obviously the right choice.

It was all very clear to her now. Why hadn’t she done that?

Why didn’t she ever actually listen to what her instincts tried to tell her?

A charged, syrupy summer breeze, a prelude to the coming storm, had picked up and was no doubt blowing her scent through the gaps between the wood of the barn. If the creature was alert at all, it probably already knew she was there.

The instincts of millennia, of every one of her line who’d come before her, were a live wire inside her, urging her feet to move. Her pulse jumped in her neck and wrists with a frenzied beat.

A plaintive whistling note pierced the air. Alashiya’s right foot, which had moved backward without her conscious permission, froze. More noises came from the barn. A lower, sadder sound was followed by one she knew well — the involuntary, breathy moan of a creature in distress.

A lump lodged in her throat. Whoever or whatever had crashed into her barn was possibly injured.

That changed things. It both lowered and escalated the risk of confronting it considerably.

An injured intruder was less able to harm her, certainly, but the likelihood of attack from a large, wounded animal increased.

The smart thing would have been to make the trek through the woods to her closest neighbor’s home. The Thompsons had a telephone she could use to call the rangers station. A wild-eyed troop of young, eager shifters with tranq guns could be there in twenty minutes.

It was funny how most of the time twenty minutes didn’t seem very long. Twenty minutes of sleep was nothing. Twenty minutes of facing down an injured animal all by herself was very much not.

But doing the smart thing meant possibly leaving an injured creature — sapient or not — to die alone.

Alashiya couldn’t make herself walk away, not when those terrifying but pitiful sounds continued to reach her. She tried to. She really tried.

But could she face herself if she turned her back on a dying creature?

No, she decided, at once resolute and annoyed with herself. I may be the last, but that’s not how we were made. If I die, it’ll be because I chose to help. Even my ghosts couldn’t blame me for that.

Still gripping her scissors, she shuffled stiffly away from the treeline. One shaking hand rested on the handle of the door. She had to say something, make some noise to alert the animal to a friendly presence.

Her throat was almost too tight to make any sound, but she forced herself to speak. “Hello?”

It came out as barely a whisper, the syllables of the word nearly swept away by the breeze curling through the bony, watchful trees, but the creature must’ve heard her.

There was a pause, followed by a low, menacing rumble.

It sounded like some great engine roaring to life just beyond the door.

Like every souped-up, nut-dangling, chrome-finished truck she’d ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on had melted together to have a monstrous metal baby in her barn.

It couldn’t have been an animal. It just couldn’t. It was unlike anything she’d ever heard before, and so loud—

Alashiya nearly stumbled back a step, but her fingers remained reflexively hooked around the handle, stopping her retreat. She couldn’t pry her fingers away. Her arm was locked there, like it was drawn to the door by some invisible force.

The strangest feeling hooked its claws into her.

It was a pull behind her breastbone, the faintest tug as all her blood rushed away from her head at once.

It was that same force that held her arm captive, and now it sought to pull the rest of her toward the door.

Her senses tingled with staticky awareness.

Whatever was beyond that door knotted a thread around her beating heart and yanked.

The boards that made up the door were in fairly good shape, considering their neglect, but time and the seasons had warped them enough that there were gaps between several.

She peered into the largest one, but despite the hole in the roof, there was even less light inside the barn than outside.

While she stared, desperate to discover what she was dealing with, the terrible warning growl grew louder and louder.

Figuring she was already in for a pound, Alashiya stuttered, “Ca—can you speak? Are you injured?”

The growl died away. For several seconds, the world went quiet. Shaking from head to toe, she dared to lean closer to the door, her head angled to look through the widest gap.

She saw nothing but darkness. It was an all-encompassing blackness that appeared, after a moment of inspection, strange.

The fine hair had just lifted off the back of her neck when a violet eye the size of a dinner plate appeared an inch from the door.

It was an almost unnatural color, so vibrant that it seemed to appear from some other world.

It was the most purple thing she’d ever seen.

It glowed beneath a pitch black lid, and its sinister expanse was broken by an almond-shaped pupil narrowed to a quivering, hair-thin line.