Page 9 of Bite Bonded Bride

"Would you have listened before you stepped onto it?"

The pause is long enough to constitute an answer.

We find a safe pocket a few minutes later. A sealed chamber, no visible entry point except the crack we squeeze through, ceiling intact, no air movement suggesting open connections. I do a full perimeter check from habit before I allow myself to sit. My legs have stopped shaking, which I count as progress.

Zareth stands in the center of the chamber. He has been standing since we arrived. I don't think he is capable of stillness in the way humans are, there is always something slightly alert about him, even at rest. A predator's readiness that never fully powers down.

I'm organizing the chalk sticks in my satchel, more for something to do with my hands than any real purpose, when I feel his attention shift. Toward me. I look up. He is watching me the way he watched the creature. Without urgency. With patience. With the focused, evaluating quality of something that is recalculating.

"You know how the terrain works," he says finally. Not a question.

"I told you what I was."

"You told me you drew maps."

I hold his gaze. "Same thing."

He says nothing to that. But he doesn't look away either, and whatever I have been to him since this started, a threat, nuisance, fragile liability, it is not quite what I am to him now. I am not sure the new thing is safer.

The ruins settle around us, and somewhere beyond the walls, the creatures move through the dark.

6

ZARETH

The forgotten tunnels smell like centuries of rot and silence. I've walked these passages before, maybe once, twice, when I was young enough to think exploring the dead districts held some romantic weight. They hold nothing except the collapsed bones of what my people used to be. Carved archways half-swallowed by cave-in debris. Wall murals worn to ghosts. Pillars that once held ceremonial meaning reduced to stumps jutting from the stone floor like broken teeth.

This is a graveyard. Every inch of it.

My low-light vision catches what the dark hides from Cybele, frescoes of feasting halls that haven't hosted a living soul in over a hundred years. Names etched into doorframes in old Vrakken script. Vhalor. Mordath. Serevaan. My ancestors, woven into the architecture of a world they built, lost and left for the corruption to finish.

I keep my steps measured. My awareness fans out in every direction, a habit older than thought. Cybele trails a half-step behind me. I can hear her breathing, steady and controlled despite the darkness pressing against her eyes like a blindfold. She's been following the sound of my footsteps with her hand grazing the tunnel wall. Not complaining. Not asking for light. Just adapting.

Stubborn creature.

The ceiling above us is wrong before I register why. A shift in airflow. A weight distribution that doesn't belong. My body reacts before my mind catches up and I drop, spin, claws extending as the first one drops from the crevice above like a stone.

Gaunt. Fast. Silent. Corruption has hollowed it out until it's more absence than animal, black fluid weeping from the joints, eyes a flat, milky white. I catch it mid-air by the throat, feel the wet crunch of cartilage under my grip, and slam it into the far wall with enough force that it stops moving before it hits the floor.

The second one is already on me. I turn, rake my claws across its chest in a single fluid tear motion, and when it staggers I drive two fingers into its abdomen and pull. The wet, sucking sound of it is not something I need to think about. It collapses.

Behind me, Cybele makes a sharp, startled sound and presses herself into the corner between two fallen pillars. I register it peripherally. Good. Stay there. I'm already moving toward the third. I don't hear the fourth. It drops from directly above her alcove, and my body pivots but too slowly, I'm too far, the angle is wrong and I know before I even finish the calculation that I won't make it.

Cybele shoves me. Both hands flat against my chest, full weight thrown into the motion with zero hesitation, and I stumble sideways just far enough that the creature's strike misses my throat entirely. Its claws find her instead. I hear the sound of it, a wet deep drag of tearing and then her sharp, punched-out gasp.

I take the creature's head off with my bare hands. A white-hot surge of failure floods from my chest outward, burning through every artery. I stand in the silence with something dead in my hands and look at the woman sliding down the wall with a spreading dark stain across her left shoulder, and I think:

I couldn't protect her.

The prince who was supposed to hold a dying kingdom together. The man who has slaughtered things three times his size without blinking. And this human is bleeding on the floor of my ancestors' tomb because I was three feet away.

I'm beside her before I decided to move.

"Cybele." My voice comes out wrong, somewhat lower than it should, stripped of command. I turn her carefully, and she hisses through her teeth, and the sound of her pain undos me in a way I don't have language for.

"I'm fine. Am I fine?" she says, her skin has already gone ashy. The wound is deep and jagged, not clean, and the darkening edges are ones I recognize. Corruption in the claws. Her human body cannot process this. I know this.

"You're not," I say.