Wicked Saints (Something Dark and Holy #1) - Emily A. Duncan Page 0,40

to notice the cold so she accepted his offer. The jacket was still warm from his body heat. She tugged the sleeves down to cover her hands.

He eyed her before starting back into the woods.

“You should have cut his throat. I’m disturbed you chose to spare him again,” Marzenya said. The thought slid into the back of Nadya’s mind like a suggestion.

Nadya had noticed a distinct increase in Marzenya’s presence, in her interjections and nearness. She found she liked it, comforted by the knowledge her goddess was nearby and watching her. But a small part of her was unnerved by the pressure that came with it. Thoughts like that wouldn’t do for someone chosen by the gods. One of the most important lessons Father Alexei had taught her was to keep her mind schooled, to keep doubts away. While it was perfectly human to doubt, it was not something she could indulge.

As much as Marzenya might wish for it, more death was not what Nadya needed. There was a chance that when—or at this rate, if—she and Malachiasz returned to the church there would be nothing left. Neither of them was willing to admit that.

It would be her breaking point. If it was delusional to hope their flight had saved the others, then so be it, but Nadya couldn’t entertain the notion that her last friend in the world was gone and she had been left with a Tranavian abomination as a companion. Anna had to be alive.

But Nadya couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d abandoned Anna the same way she’d abandoned Kostya. Running to save herself for some greater purpose was a bitter survival when it meant losing everything and everyone with each step she took.

“We won’t survive a night out here,” Nadya noted when they’d stopped in a clearing for a brief respite.

Malachiasz was gazing into the trees with a puzzled expression on his face. “What would kill us first, do you think, the cold or whatever lurks in these mountains?”

“That’s not a question I want answered.”

He smiled softly, turning to where she was sitting on a downed tree.

“And it will be your kind, won’t it? It’s only a matter of time before they find us out here.”

“Does Kalyazin have no monsters?” he asked.

She narrowed her eyes, puzzling over his question, but clearly he meant it as rhetorical because he continued speaking.

“Rozá is arrogant,” he said. “She left Aleks, the Vultures’ best tracker, in Tranavia. She has no way to find us now.”

Nadya ran her hand down her prayer beads. The spell book tied to Malachiasz’s hip was thick. She found it hard to believe the other Vultures couldn’t just cut their arms and find their way there.

He followed her gaze and seemed to know what she was thinking. “Most Tranavians buy their spell books with the spells already written by arcanists, Vultures included. I write my own.”

“But you can’t know for certain Rozá didn’t have someone write her a handful of tracking spells before she came.”

“Of course not. It’s just incredibly unlikely.”

“Which doesn’t make anything better. They could still be at the church. Anna, Parijahan, and Rashid could be dead, and now we’re lost in the middle of the mountains slowly freezing to death.” Distantly, she knew she was panicking. Everything was falling through her fingers and she was powerless to stop it. This wasn’t how things were supposed to happen.

Malachiasz sat down beside her, careful to keep space between them, but she could feel heat radiating off him and it was almost enough for her to lean into him. Almost.

She dropped her head into her hands. There had to be a way out of this. She would risk returning to the church for Anna, she had to. After that, she had nothing. She could continue running, it was apparently all she was good at.

Or she could end this. She glanced at Malachiasz, who returned the look, eyebrows lifting.

“Would killing the Tranavian king destroy the Vultures as well?”

He shook his head. “They have their own king, the Black Vulture.” He caught the disappointment on her face because he was quick to continue. “You can rattle the order, Nadya. You already have.”

“The Vultures destroyed my country’s clerics,” Nadya whispered. And he was one of them.

But he was also sitting quietly beside her as she worked to reassemble the pieces of her shattered life. She didn’t have to trust him, or even like him, but he had ignored the multiple chances he had already been given to kill her,