Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(98)

The child-eating god took a step back. The rip in reality collapsed, the final echoes of his voice dancing on the wind.

“UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN.”

I fell on my back, my arms wide, and stared at the blue sky. The air tasted so sweet. Everything hurt.

Derek howled again, singing a song of triumph and blood.

In the distance wolves howled, answering him.





18





The old ruin around me lay silent. I had no idea what it had been in its past life. A hotel, a concert hall, a school? Two stories tall, it was perfectly round, and rose fifty feet above us in a dome punctured by rectangular windows, their glass long gone. The center of it lay open. Dust stained the once polished marble floor. Along the walls, columns supported a narrow balcony. Somewhere within the ruin, there were probably stairs that led up there, but neither Derek nor I looked for them.

He lay next to me in the dirt. He hadn’t bothered changing shapes to ease the strain on Lyc-V, and right now he was shockingly large, a true monster sheathed in silver fur.

The box sat between us on a dusty step. Moonlight shone through the windows above, and it set the enchanted bone aglow.

I stirred the coals in the metal pot in front of me with a long stick and tossed another handful of dried herbs into it.

I had fallen asleep on that battlefield, right in the ashes. Derek had moved me to the grass. When I woke up, hours later, he was the first thing I saw, still in his wolf form, sitting next to me, silhouetted against the setting sun. Soot and blood stained his silver fur. Bald patches marked his right arm, some still blistered and oozing fluid, where the heat had cooked him. I asked him if it hurt, like an idiot. Of course it hurt. He lied and said no.

The box waited next to him.

I had insisted on confirming that Saiman was still alive. Once I saw him with my own eyes, the lot of us walked out of the portal, and now we were here, in a ruin on the edge of Unicorn Lane, waiting to settle Derek’s debt to a kind priest. The wolves had spread out and hid, forming a perimeter around the ruin. Derek told them to not interfere unless Unicorn Lane spat something particularly nasty in our direction.

I had been sitting here for hours, and we hadn’t said a single word to each other.

He was leaving in three days. Two now. It was after midnight.

I didn’t want him to go.

It was absurd, and stupid, and when I thought about him leaving, it hurt. He’d lived. It was enough. He had his life, I had mine, and after tonight we would go our separate ways. It was for the best.

There were so many things I wanted to ask. None of them mattered.

Derek sat up. His ears twitched.

A strange shape squeezed through one of the empty windows and perched on the balcony, staring down at us with disturbingly human eyes.

She was the size of a female lion and most of her was built like one, but instead of a sandy-colored pelt, her hide was covered with fine brown hair, like the flanks of an Arabian horse. Two massive wings thrust from her back, their feathers a matching tawny brown flecked with white and gold. Her feline legs didn’t end in paws, but in monstrous hands with oversized cat-like fingers armed with sickle claws. Her thick neck supported a nightmarish head, her face a strange evolution of a lion muzzle with a flat feline nose, split upper lip, a large maw revealing fangs, and disturbingly human cheekbones and forehead. If lions had evolved the way humans had, they might have looked like her.

A golden circlet crowned her brow. Thick gold armbands studded with red stones clasped her wrists. The gold necklace around her neck was splattered with dried blood.

A female sphinx. My first time seeing one.

The sphinx stared at us with glowing turquoise eyes. Creepy.

She opened her mouth. “Do you burn the funeral herbs for yourself or for the wolf?”

Her whispery voice raised the hair on the back of my neck.

“I burn them for you,” I told her. “I brought a coin with me so you may take it to the ferryman. I know the local Thanatos. He’s a kind man. He will guide you well.”

“How thoughtful of you, human.” Her claws scraped the stone. “The wolf hasn’t touched the treasure. He may go.”

“You killed my friend,” Derek said. “A holy man.”

“He touched the treasure. He had to die.”

“He helped many people,” Derek said. “He healed the sick, he fed the hungry, and he shielded the weak. He didn’t steal the box, yet you killed him.”

Her eyes shone. “His heart tasted like any other.”

“You knew he no longer had the box. He wasn’t the one who stole it. You could have chosen to spare him,” Derek said.

She seemed to think it over. “Yes.”

“You could have given him a swift death.”

She flexed her fingers, and her claws scraped the stone again. “I like prey that fights back. You have not touched the treasure. You are not my prey. Leave.”

Slowly, deliberately, Derek put his clawed hand on the box. “How about now?”

The sphinx dove off the balcony. Derek leaped off the floor, meeting her in midair. The wolf and lion collided in a whirlwind of bodies and fur. They rolled around, snarling, growling, biting, and clawing.

I stirred my herbs. It was his fight. That’s why he’d returned to the city. I had to let him have it.

The sphinx clawed Derek’s side, ripping through skin and muscle. He gripped one of her wings and bit it where it joined her body. She screamed, and they rolled again, smashing against the columns. Dust rose in the air. I coughed.