eyes opened, and in the darkness he could make out the faint outline of his tent. Seconds passed and the scent of fresh snow left him, but instead of taking with it that painful clarity, that’s all it left behind.
In a bed that was large enough to fit three men his size, Lazarus lay alone.
While summer was nearing its end, the sheets were painfully cold in their emptiness.
Lazarus clenched his hands into fists. The souls bound to him fed his fury, but he couldn’t escape them anymore than he could the darkness.
It had been his home once, and now it simply served as a reminder of what he no longer had.
Lazarus shoved the covers aside and sat up. He got out of bed, barely noticing the plush rug beneath his bare feet or how sticks prodded him when he stepped outside. No soldiers guarded his tent. Only the kuras and the wraith. They stayed there, remaining vigilant as he walked out into the night.
Leviathan’s eye was high in the sky and smoke sifted through the wind. The leftover remnants of a fire and food. The rest of his house that had come with were somewhere else, further away. That suited him just fine as he walked into the woods.
Echoes of a dark, sultry chuckle haunted him.
Memories of lavender hair drifted in the corners of his vision.
He knew they weren’t real.
That his dreams weren’t real.
That the things he saw and the occasional scent of her magic wasn’t real.
But it felt more real than anything else.
Lazarus knew he hadn’t lost his mind yet. Not entirely. But it was coming. He was aware enough to know that if he couldn’t dance with Quinn that he’d dance with Mazzulah instead. He wasn’t so far gone as to not see the writing on the wall. Every dark Maji struggled with sanity. For him, he never realized how much he had, until a certain fear twister got under his skin and brought him clarity. She gave him life . . . and then she took it away.
He was nearing his own edge, but he wouldn’t step over the side. There was still one thing to be done. One war to win. One debt to be repaid.
Lazarus stood there in the dark forest in the middle of nowhere and held on.
He took that grief and he held it close through the night. Letting it give way to the anger and the rage. Because fury was easier to handle and hold than the emptiness that filled him in her absence.
He felt nothing before he found her. She stoked a fire in him he thought long buried.
He might not be able to have that fire anymore.
But the fire that burned for revenge was close enough.
Chapter 13
Like Calls to Like
“Darkness does not equate to evil, just as light does not equate to virtue.”
— Quinn Darkova, fear twister, walker of realms, reluctant protector of children
The sounds of screaming chased them from N’skara.
It was only when they stopped to make camp late that night that the echoes finally faded, and silence settled in. But there were other things that didn’t leave them so easily. The smell of burning flesh and timber mixed with sulfur in the air. Smoke drifted in the winds, and it was only after three days that the muskiness it left behind faded too.
Three of the six children had a horrible cough that was slowing them down.
Rations were dwindling, and while Quinn didn’t need food to survive, the rest of them would die without it.
While the cold was but a gentle wind on her skin, she took note of the way they shivered. Their teeth chattered. All six of them had blue fingertips and two had lost feeling in their toes.
They didn’t complain for the most part. N’skaran children, particularly those that were lowborn, were used to the harsh conditions of life. Quinn knew that the hardships were getting to them. The cold, the wet, the lack of breaks, food, and water.
It was affecting all of them, and not for the first time Quinn wondered if it would have been kinder to leave them there. While most of the city and every ship would have burned, they might have been able to make something of it.
But what was done was done. She wasn’t turning back, which meant the only way to go was onward.
In front of her, one of the girls stumbled. Her tiny hands were wrapped tight around the cloak that covered her shoulders. Exhaustion weighed down her