Page 13 of Bite Bonded Bride

He pushes off the doorframe and crosses to me. Stops close. Looks down.

"Your shoulder," he says.

"Seralya fixed it."

"Good."

He doesn't step back. I don't either.

The bioluminescent moss flickers once behind him, in the corridor, where the air has gone slightly wrong. His eyes cut toward it instinctively, then back to me.

And I think: I know what you've been carrying. I know what they did to you. And I don't know what to do with any of it except stand here, too close, and feel the ground shifting under everything I thought I understood.

I keep that thought to myself.

8

ZARETH

It comes from the ceiling and the only warning I get is a crack in the rock face above with a spray of loose stone, then the creature drops between us. It is enormous. Limbs too long for the torso they belong to, joints bending in wrong directions, its body bloated with whatever passes for life inside the corruption. Its smell of rot hits me first then the smell of the Wildspont's poison wearing flesh like a disguise.

Cybele stumbles back as I move forward.

My magic answers sluggishly than it should, a dull throb where there used to be a clean surge of power. The mountain is dying. I feel it in my own bloodstream, the stuttering pull of underground magic that has sustained my kind for centuries now flickering like a candle left in the wind. It costs me more than it should to summon the shadows to my hands. It costs more than yesterday.

But my hands remember how to kill even without magic.

I catch the creature's nearest limb, a twisted rope of muscle and bone with three elbows and I pull. It makes a wet sound. Satisfying. I feel the bones resist, then give, the crack traveling up through my palms as the joint separates from itself. It shrieks like a stone dragged across stone, and I twist the limb further, past the point of separation and repair, until I am holding what used to be part of it and it’s scrabbling away from me with the remaining limbs.

I follow.

There is no fury in this. Only efficiency. I have killed things like this before, when they were smaller, when the corruption was younger. Now they grow larger because the Wildspont is growing larger, and I am growing tired, and I kill it the way I do everything I cannot afford to feel, cleanly and without hesitation.

I drive my knee into its ribcage. Feel the ribs fold inward. Reach through the gap that creates and grip something vital and tear until the creature's movement becomes twitching, and there’s only stillness.

I stand over what remains. It is still technically moving. They always are, these corrupted beasts do not know how to stop, even when every mechanism has been destroyed. One remaining limb drags uselessly against the stone. I crush it beneath my heel.

Then I look at Cybele. She is pressed against the far wall, chest heaving, eyes wide and fixed on me. Not on the creature.

"Move," I say. "That noise will draw the others."

The alcove is small. I find it twenty meters further down the passage, a natural hollow in the rock, dry, defensible on three sides, just wide enough for two people who have no interest in being this close to each other to sit with their shoulders pressed together and their thighs touching from hip to knee and absolutely nowhere to look that doesn't eventually lead back to the other person's face.

I am aware of every point of contact. Her heartbeat is loud in this silence. Humans always underestimate how loud they are to us, the constant percussion of that small, stubborn heart, beating faster than it should, a rhythm my own body tracks without my permission. I can smell her sweat. The copper thread of old blood from the injury she sustained earlier, still healing. Beneath both of those is a warmer touch of life.

My fangs ache. I press my tongue against the back of them and stare at the passage entrance and say nothing. She lasts approximately four minutes before she opens her mouth.

"You look at them like they're already dead."

"They are."

"Before you touch them, I mean." A pause. "You look at me like that sometimes."

I turn my head slowly. She is watching me with those amber-brown eyes, direct in the way surface humans rarely are when they're sitting next to something that could kill them in three different ways without trying. "You should sleep," I say. "Your body heals slower than mine."

"Answer the question."

"It wasn't a question."