Her shrieks were grating, like a sword scraping against the inside of my skull. In my cell, I’d grown used to silence. Why couldn’t I experience this reunion with my soul in peace?
For the love of the gods, was my mate really this loud?
I tuned her voice out, focusing again on the warmth of my soul as we fell. And yet I still wasn’t whole. My soul still wasn’t in my chest.
Sadly, it had ended up in the body of this shrieking Night Elf. Had fate, had Wyrd really tied me to a burglar like this one? Perhaps fate was punishing me.
And yet perhaps her screaming, given these circumstances, was normal. Trapped in isolation for a thousand years, I thought I’d completely lost my mind. I’d forgotten entirely what it was like to feel anything.
It was hard for me to remember normality or what it meant to feel fear. With my soul so close to me, I was catching glimpses of what it meant to be alive, but I couldn’t experience it completely. I remembered feeling something like fear…
It was only at this point that it flickered into my mind again—that idea of mortality. The distant memory that when you were alive, death was something to be avoided. The little Night Elf in my arms was terrified because she would not survive this fall, and what the Helheim had I been thinking? I had lost my mind.
Worst of all, with my soul now trapped in her body, her death would mean mine as well.
Now, for the first time in a thousand years, I felt it: fear, cold and sharp, like ice exploding in my chest.
My hand whipped out, and I grabbed on to the only thing available to me—a gargoyle’s head. Our momentum nearly ripped my arm out of its socket, but I managed to hold on. The problem was that the masonry holding up the gargoyle was cracking, its leering face tilting further down toward the ground. Bits of cement flaked into the air as the masonry crumbled, and the Night Elf’s screams rang in my ears.
I had no magic to speak of, only sheer physical strength.
And any moment now, we’d be falling again. She would die.
Chapter 11
Ali
I could hardly breathe. That had been the most terrifying few seconds of my life, but somehow, the prisoner hardly seemed fazed.
With one hand, the prisoner pressed me to his muscled chest. With the other, he gripped a gargoyle, which was about to rip from the wall. My heart slammed hard against my ribs as I tried to think clearly. We needed something that would grip the stones, something to stop us from splattering across Boston’s streets.
“Skalei.” In a moment, the dagger was in my hand again.
Reaching over the prisoner’s shoulder, I stabbed the side of the wall, plunging the blade into the cement between the blocks of marble.
But too late. The gargoyle’s neck ripped out, and I lost my grip on the hilt. For a split second, we were falling to our deaths again.
Then, like a viper from beneath a rock, the stranger’s arm snatched the dagger’s hilt, nearly dropping me in the process. I clamped my arms tight around his neck, and for the first time realized I’d tightened my legs around his waist as well.
We were sliding down the wall now, the dagger cutting through the stone. Marble debris cascaded everywhere, but at least our descent was much slower than falling freely through space.
Beneath my panic, though, part of me was already thinking about the amazing story this would make when I told Barthol about it later.
I glanced up at the blade as it carved a straight line down the wall. At least he’d understood what to do with it. He wasn’t completely insane, even if he couldn’t speak and had leapt off the side of a tower.
I looked down and watched as the earth rushed toward us, not a hundred feet away now. As the dagger slid through the stone, we picked up speed, frigid air rushing over us.
This was one of the few moments I wished that Skalei’s blade wasn’t quite so magical—on one hand, granite was too strong for her, but on the other, she sliced through marble like it was butter. The ground was rushing for me now, only twenty feet away, ten feet—
BOOM!
We slammed into the earth, and I lost my grip on the stranger. For a moment, I lay flat on my back, catching my breath. Then, slowly, I moved my limbs. Pain