Page 69 of Scorched
I stab the Stone Court assassin through the shoulder. The god-killer breaks her ward like breaking a window. She screams—a high, thin sound that bounces off the kitchen walls—and staggers back.
I kick her in the chest. She goes down.
The third assassin hits me from behind.
Frost Court.Silent. Cold. I didn't hear the approach—the Frost Court's specialty, sound-dampening magic that turns footsteps to nothing. A blade of ice at my throat, thin and sharp and burning cold against the brand at the base of my neck.
"Don't move," he says behind me.
I move.
I drop my weight. Twist. The ice blade cuts my throat—not deep, a shallow gash across the brand that bleeds hot and fast down the front of my shirt. I drive my elbow backward into his sternum. He grunts. The ice blade retracts.
I spin. Face him. He's tall, silver-pale, the Frost Court coloring—and he has a second ice blade forming in his other hand. The cold magic radiates off him in waves that make my skin prickle, that press against the fire-magic brands on my body the way cold presses against heat.
The brand at my throat is bleeding. The blood runs down over the forge-work geometry of the claiming mark and the Bloodwork harmonic in my blood responds to the wound—a sharp, bright spike in the frequency that rattles every blade in the building.
He lunges. I parry with the god-killer.
The ice blade meets Bloodwork steel and the sound that fills the kitchen isn't metal on ice. It's the sound of two magics colliding—Frost Court cold against Bloodwork heat, the ice cracking and reforming and cracking again as the god-killer's frequency tears through it. Shards of ice scatter across the floor. The Frost Court assassin's face changes. He didn't expect this. His blade was supposed to be enough.
It isn't enough.
The Bloodwork harmonic is rising in me. Not gradually—a tide, a surge, the heritage waking further and faster than it ever did in the Ember Court forge. The cracked rib aches. The cut on my throat burns. The nausea in my belly is sharp and sudden—wrong timing, wrong place, my body choosing the middle of a fight to remind me of the thing I'm not ready to think about.
I shove the nausea down. I raise the god-killer.
I fight.
Not the trained fight—the human fight, the assassin's technique my grandmother drilled into me for twenty years. That fight ended when the Stone Court suppression wave hit. This is the other fight. The Bloodwork fight. The one where my hands move in patterns I didn't learn, where the god-killer sings in my grip, where the heritage in my blood reads the magic around me and responds with a frequency designed to break it.
The Frost Court assassin's wards fail. His ice blades shatter. I press him across the kitchen—god-killer forward, the Bloodwork harmonic screaming off the blade, the dead people's heritageblazing through my hands with a power that belongs to a lineage of eight hundred and has concentrated itself into one.
I put him down with a strike to the temple with the god-killer's pommel. He crumples. The ice magic fades.
The kitchen is wrecked. Table destroyed. Window shattered. Door in splinters. Three Fae assassins on the floor—one bleeding from the ribs, one from the shoulder, one unconscious. I'm standing in the middle of it with a god-killer in my hand and blood running down my throat and a cracked rib pressing against my lung and the Bloodwork harmonic still screaming so loud the walls are vibrating.
My grandmother is in the doorway.
She's holding an old blade. Her hands are steady. Her face is white. She was ready to fight.
"Are you hurt?" she asks.
"Cracked rib. Cut on the throat. Shallow." I look at the three assassins. "They were sent. This was coordinated—Thorn, Stone, Frost. Three courts. They sent a kill-squad for me."
She nods. She doesn't look surprised. She looks the way she looked the morning I left for the Ember Court—afraid and resolute, a woman who's been expecting this for sixty years.
I sit down on the floor. Not from weakness—from the sudden, nauseating wave that rolls through my belly and up into my throat and makes me press my hand to my abdomen hard. The nausea. The tenderness. The sharpened smell of blood in the air that's so intense it turns my stomach.
My grandmother watches me sit. Watches me press my hand to my belly. Her face does something complicated.
"Sophia."
"Don't."
"How far along?"
I close my eyes. The god-killer rests across my knees. Three unconscious assassins bleed on the floor around me. TheBloodwork harmonic is still singing. My throat is bleeding. My rib is cracked. I'm sitting in the wreckage of my grandmother's kitchen with my hand on my belly and the truth I've been refusing to think about for a week is sitting in my body like a coal that won't cool.
