Page 248 of Feralheart

You bite back.

“I will.”

She didn’t argue further. Just spread her wings and launched along with Aristus.

Lyndie waited near the structure’s entrance, blood-spattered and hollow-eyed. She still held the blade, Vella’s blood dripping slowly from the tip.

We climbed off our dragons and started toward her, bones crunching beneath our boots, each step shouting our position.

The vein-streaked, white stone building glowed with its own light, and its low thud echoed in a heartbeat.

Old magic saturated the air, thick enough I could taste it.

The structure wanted us. It pulled at my magic, demanding, insistent, not asking permission. If I let it, it would reach inside me and gobble down what it needed, the same way it had been taking from dragons and riders for centuries.

Horror rippled across my skin.

We reached the big doors carved with runes, and they swung open, revealing a foyer beyond.

I stepped inside and stopped breathing.

The space was too gorgeous to be true.

My eyes watered as I tried to track dimensions that refused to stay fixed. The exterior had been about thirty feet across, yet the interior stretched like a throat that had swallowed the entire world outside.

The white stone hadn’t been carved. It looked grown, from enormous bones that had been polished until they gleamed. Blood-red veins ran through it, but I suspected they weren’t decorative. Because they moved. Slowly. Jerking in time with the steady heartbeat-thud vibrating through the building.

We’d stepped inside the beast’s core.

And it was still hungry.

The world tilted. Fen’s hand found my elbow, steadying me before I could fall.

“Lean into me,” he said quietly, his breath warm against my temple. “I’ve got you.”

His body was solid against mine, the only fixed point in a space that refused to stay still.

Magic crackled through the air, and Lord Andra appeared, materializing in the center of the foyer with a flash of blue light. Lord Holmen followed, then Lady Chambers. The Queen’s Council in full force.

Queen Valindra came last, in a magical projection, her form translucent and shimmering.

She looked exactly as she had the one time I’d seen her at a distance, composed and immaculate, the kind of beautiful that had been maintained rather than given. Her eyes moved across the space, a general surveying a battlefield. They landed on Fen and moved on without stopping.

She couldn’t even take the time to come here in person.

“Remarkable.” Lord Andra’s voice carried across the open space, warm, almost jovial. “Three riders, bound by unforeseen harmony. A bond that goes beyond bloodline and station. It’s truly remarkable.”

“Was remarkable,” Lord Holmen said. “It appears their sweet bond has been severely damaged.”

“Broken, if I had my guess,” Lord Holmen said.

The queen smiled. More or less. “You’ve proven yourselves worthy beyond all expectation,” she said in a stilted tone. “This trial has tested you, shaped you, and you’ve emerged stronger for it.”

The words rang empty, because they’d been carefully chosen to sound praising while meaning nothing.

Hope crossed Fen’s face before he could stop it, the reflex of someone who’d been reaching toward this woman his whole life. He straightened, his chin lifting. Some part of him still believed she’d see him.

When her eyes passed over him again, he stilled. She’d decided he was contaminated beyond saving. Her son had died the moment he crossed the boundary to sit by my fire. The person standing here, the one I’d watched choose differently at every turn, simply didn’t exist to her anymore.