Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,44

remains of her jaw, but no less weighty for it. “If it isn’t Thorn. Back after all these years to finally attend to the wreckage you left behind, are you?”

My lungs constricted. I drew myself up to the full extent my considerable frame would allow. “What do you speak of?”

“Oh, do you not even remember those you fought alongside? You once stood shoulder to shoulder with one I might have called my brother, we came into being so near together and so similar in nature.”

That was what I recognized. In her violet eyes, in her silvery hair, there were echoes of another aspect of the past. My own voice came out quieter than before. “You speak of Haze.”

He’d been one of my closest comrades. I couldn’t count the times we’d fought together shoulder to shoulder. How many times I must have deflected a lethal blow before it could land on him and the same from him for me. Until that last battle when I’d abandoned my post and failed to return in time.

The woman who’d considered him even more than a comrade simply stared at me with her stormy eyes. More words slipped from my mouth unbidden. “I searched for him. If there’d been anything I could have done—”

“You could have remained with us and fought as you were meant to,” she spat out. “Instead you took a coward’s way.”

Not long ago, I might have accepted that judgment without argument. It would only have been how I’d already judged myself. But now, a protest rose up. “I didn’t leave for cowardice. I left because I saw how many of us had already fallen, and it seemed wrong to me that we tore into each other so violently over matters none of us truly understood. I meant to prevent the battle altogether if I could.”

The man guffawed. “Prevent the battle? Are you wingéd or weakling? It was our duty to stand with our brethren and respond to the call to war. That we linger at all is our own shame, but you—those minor scars show how little you paid.”

The comment summoned the sphinx’s harsh remarks from days ago—her accusation that I’d forgotten what I was. From her the suggestion had rankled; hearing the same from one of my own drove it deeper. The stabbing of guilt, my constant companion of many centuries, lanced through my gut as I’d thought it never would again. Had I strayed too far from what I was meant to be?

I swallowed thickly. “What is done is done. I believed it was for the best for us all—including you, including Haze. There is no glory or benefit in dwelling in the shame. We have other wars in which we are needed, where we might see a better outcome for all our kind if we respond to the call.”

What remained of the woman’s lips curled into an undeniable sneer. “Is that what you’re here for? To call us into some new fray—what, so that you can see us cut down even more while you stand back and simply watch?”

She might have summoned up old guilts, but I hadn’t lost my sense of honor. “I have already spilled more blood and protected more of my kind in these past weeks than I’d imagine you have in centuries.”

At her wince, a deeper pang of guilt struck me. That statement had been a blow in itself, one that should have been beneath me. I coughed and fumbled for the right recovery.

“I do not mean to criticize. You have borne a terrible burden, one greater than my own ever was. I respect that. It is simply that we face a far greater threat to all shadowkind than we ever encountered in the ages long past. There has never been a greater cause. I wouldn’t step back from this one even for a moment, knowing how much hangs in the balance.”

“It is our chance to win where we lost before,” Flint spoke up in his hollow of a voice. “An opportunity to make something of the shame of our continued existence, to make it more than a matter of shame.”

There, he could speak their grim language better than I could now. But our two brethren looked unconvinced. The woman worked her fractured jaw from side to side in a nauseating motion. “You betray us all that time ago and now you seek our help? Ha!”

Was clinging to her sense of righteousness more important to her than doing what was needed in this moment,