Furie turned and tilted her head sharply. "To keep you here" - she snatched Kaderin's wrist, twisting her arm back behind her - "and to ensure you always remember what I said... " With one brutal yank she snapped Kaderin's arm - her sword arm - then released her.
Kaderin stumbled back to face her, but the heel of Furie's palm slammed into her upper chest. Something else snapped. Kaderin flew a dozen feet back, the force rendering her unconscious before she hit the ground.
He never got a chance to see how hurt she'd been, or how she'd recovered, because another scene arose.
Kaderin's boots clicked as she sprinted down foggy back alleys. The rookeries she passed were filled with Lore beings, their deadened eyes staring out of the mist. It was London in the eighteen hundreds.
Her sword was strapped securely over her shoulder, and her thin shackles were tucked into her belt at her back. She was tracking two vampires, brothers, and her ears twitched when she sensed them. She drew her sword, but they were fast as they suddenly traced around her. One delivered a crushing blow to her head from behind, the other dealt a hit to her temple that nearly blacked her vision completely. A trap.
They let her stumble away for a goddamned block. Playing with her.
Tired. I just want to sit, she kept thinking in a daze. Just for a second. She finally collapsed, falling to her back.
The vampires returned, one holding her down, the other raising his sword above her neck. And she felt not even a trickle of fear. As they bent over her, their eyes became more apparent to her dimmed vision. Red, dirty eyes, staring down at her. No, she didn't feel fear, no revulsion - just nothing.
Another vampire materialized, likely wanting to see the momentous kill. The brothers' attention was drawn away for an instant. It was all she needed. Earlier, she'd fallen back onto the shackles. Without warning, she whipped them out and cuffed their wrists together. They struggled to break free, but somehow the metal held even with their obvious strength. They tried to trace in different directions and couldn't.
As she rose, the third vampire fled. She tilted her head at the two, and murmured, "I told you I'd kill you," then let instinct take over -
He bolted awake at the sound of her shrieking, the loudest he'd ever heard, and clamped his hands over his ears. When the windows began to crack, he lunged for her and forced his hand over her mouth. Her fingers shot out, claws bared to snatch at his heart, but he caught her wrists in his free hand.
She was staring at him but seemed unseeing, her pale face lit by a series of lightning strikes just outside. He pulled her into his arms until she finally stopped fighting. But then she began softly weeping. His whole hand pressed the side of her head to his chest.
As he sat back in the chair with her in his lap, his dreams came over him in a rush. For ages in the past, Kaderin hadn't felt?
And now she clearly did.
No wonder she'd been so confused the morning they'd met. He didn't understand how this could have happened to her, but he'd experienced her lack of emotions. He couldn't imagine how difficult it would be to recover them.
"You've made me feel," she'd hissed at him that first morning.
Could I really have had something to do with this?
Her shoulders shook, and his shirt grew wet with tears, and it was killing him. "Brave girl," he murmured against her hair. "You are safe." No wonder she was vicious. She'd had to be to survive. "It doesn't have to be like that anymore." Eventually her breaths grew quick and light as they did when she slept.
He'd begun to recognize that although she was perfect on the surface, his Bride was wounded, scarred inside, and now he knew why.
And he'd seen only a few nights in her life.
He knew she feared at every hour that he would become like those who had toyed with her in a filthy back alley and had savaged her army of young Valkyrie. She dreaded seeing his eyes turn red.
When she clutched his shirt in her panting sleep and nuzzled his chest, realization hit him sharply. Staring out over her head to the valley below, he suddenly knew that he was meant to be here at this very moment, to comfort her, to protect her.
All the choices he'd made to direct his life - and all the choices that had been taken from him - had conspired to bring her to him. His seemingly endless years at the castle, though he'd been alone and weary, had been a worthy sacrifice to ultimately have her.
Sebastian was meant to call her his own. The good and the bad. She'd been made for him, and he for her.
Tomorrow, Sebastian would face Nikolai again. He could no longer deny that Nikolai's decision for him had been a fated one.
Chapter 13
20
Cave of the Basilisks, Las Quijadas, Argentina Day 10
Prize: Two eggs of the Basilisk, each worth thirteen points
T he crackle of flexing scales and the sibilance of a forked tongue sounded behind Kaderin, echoing throughout the cavern system.
With her sword sheathed at her back, she sprinted, her night vision taking her from one underground chamber to the next. She'd covered every inch of this hive of tunnels dug through solid rock in antiquity.
Yet she'd been unable to pinpoint the exact position of the three beasts she'd heard stirring down here. Nor had she been able to find either of the eggs, or an alternative exit.
Each tunnel had a high-ceilinged chamber at its terminus. In the chambers were the old nests of a basilisk, a giant scaled dragon with dripping fangs the size of her forearms and a lethal tail, corded with muscle.
She had checked every nest for eggs but found none. There was another cavern system in the mountain a ravine over - the prizes must be in that one. The only things she'd found here were the ancient remains of female human sacrifices, and more recent ones from archeologists of the ill-fated variety.
The name of the area, Las Quijades, meant "the maxillary bones." Many thought the region was named after the bandits that used to run rife through these valleys, who gnawed on cow jawbones. Or they assumed the name referred to the abundant dinosaur fossils discovered here.
Neither was correct. The basilisk young killed by ripping the jaws from the heads of those human sacrifices.
The archeologists who dug here didn't understand that not all the dinosaurs were embedded in rock yet. They would explore, deeper and deeper, and then a team would be eaten, and the government would say they were lost in a flash flood -
No more scales flexing. Silence. In the lull, Kaderin's ears twitched, detecting footsteps - running, with a quick footfall but heavy in weight. Bowen. It had to be.
She'd known they would have a confrontation and had suspected the high point value of this task might attract him. But she'd been greedy for those points as well, and there were two eggs. Ah, but just to make things more interesting, Cindey was on her way here as well. Kaderin had spied her renting a Jeep in San Luis, the closest town, just before she herself had set out.