Page 15 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

The mate bond hums in my blood, protective and possessive and old as the earth beneath us. It demands I station myself between her and every dark thing in the world. I know that. I've known it since the moment her blood touched my stone skin and rewrote my instincts entirely.

But that isn't what I feel right now.

What I feel right now has nothing to do with the bond.

She stood in front of a rival Alpha with her heartbeat screaming and her chin up and her voice perfectly, magnificently steady. She didn't have claws or wings or centuries of territorial violence backing her. She had nothing but the particular quality of her own spine, and she aimed it at a monster like a weapon.

She's going to destroy me, I think, watching her tend her own wounds without asking for help.

9

SABINE

Ismell the smoke first. Pine resin burning wrong, too thick, too oily, one that doesn't come from hearthfires or cookstoves. I crest the mountain path and stop dead. The sky above Blackstone Valley is not the sky I left an hour ago. Columns of black smoke spiral upward from the settlement like fingers reaching for something to choke.

My supply sack hits the ground before I realize I've dropped it.

I run.

The valley is screaming when I reach the lower road. Not just people—everything. Livestock tearing loose from broken pens, chickens scattering in flaming arcs across the cobblestones, a cart horse dragging half a burning fence post behind it as it bolts through the market square. Wooden beams crack and collapse in the heat, sending geysers of orange sparks skyward. I push past fleeing villagers, grabbing a woman by the arm as she stumbles.

"What happened? Where did they come from?"

"The sky—" she gasps. "Winged things. Hunting?—"

She tears free and keeps running. I don't stop her.

Gargoyles?

I already know where my feet are taking me before my mind catches up.

Our cottage is on the east side of the settlement, tucked against the hillside where the mountain fog collects in the morning. I have repaired its roof twice with my own hands. I have scraped frost from its windowsills every winter for seven years.

What remains of it is a skeletal frame swallowed in fire.

The roof is already gone. The walls lean inward like a collapsing chest. The smell of burning wool and pine smoke and something sickeningly familiar—our furniture, our stored grain—rolls over me in a wave, and for a moment my legs simply refuse to function.

Leif.

"Sabine."

I spin. Velka materializes from the smoke like she was born in it, crossbow gripped at her side, copper skin painted in soot. Her cottage is three doors down from mine. The roof has already caved. We stare at each other across the wreckage of our street, and no words exist for this, so neither of us says any.

Then a child screams from somewhere inside the burning grain warehouse at the corner of the market square.

We move at the same time.

The heat inside is a physical thing—a wall that pushes back against us as we force our way through the door. Smoke pours from every crack in the ceiling beams. My eyes water immediately, vision blurring to almost nothing. Velka drops to a crouch and I follow her instinct without question, both of us moving along the floor where the air is thinnest.

"Here." Velka's voice is a rasp. "Two of them."

Two children are wedged behind a collapsed beam, small bodies curled together. I wrench the beam sideways with everything I have. The wood is already half-charred and itsplinters under the force, carving fresh lines across my palms. I don't feel it. I get my arms under the smaller child, Velka takes the older one, and we drag them backward through the door into the street.

Outside, I suck clean air in ragged gasps and set the girl on her feet. She is maybe five. She looks at me with huge, terrified eyes and then starts crying for her mother.

"Find the well square," I tell her. "Run. Don't stop running until you reach the well square."

They go. Velka and I straighten together, and it's only then that I hear the screaming change—not panic anymore, but terror with a specific shape to it.