Page 16 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

Something is hunting the people in the market square.

There are four of them. Gargoyles I don't recognize—leaner than Tovian, with wings that angle differently, too sharp, like blades rather than shields. They move through the fleeing crowd with a terrifying leisure, herding people, cornering them against walls. And there—backed against the cathedral fence—Father Corren, using his carved cedar cane to shield the two people crouched behind him.

One of them is Leif.

"No—"

I am already moving when the air changes.

The pressure drops so suddenly my ears ring with it. A shockwave rolls through the square—not sound exactly, but force, a concussive displacement of air that staggers every living thing in the valley simultaneously. The gargoyle hunters jerk upward, heads snapping skyward.

Tovian comes down like the mountain itself decided to fall.

He doesn't land. He impacts. Stone cracks beneath the weight of him. The cobblestones buckle outward in a fractured ring from the point where his feet connect, and the nearestgargoyle scout doesn't even have time to turn before Tovian is already through him.

I have seen violence before. I have seen men brawl and I have seen livestock slaughtered and I have seen the aftermath of what raiders leave behind. None of it prepared me for this.

He doesn't fight the way men fight, with hesitation, with the animal calculation of self-preservation. There is no hesitation in him. He moves through the invaders the way a storm moves through trees—absolute, unhurried, inevitable.

A wing sweep sends two of them into a stone wall hard enough to crack the mortar. A grab and a twist that I force myself not to look away from. The sounds are terrible. The scout I am watching folds in a direction bodies are not designed to fold, and then Tovian drops him and moves to the next one without pausing to breathe.

He is saving them, some rational part of me observes, detached beneath the horror. He is specifically saving them.

Because the scouts are dying in the order they were closest to the people. He is working outward from Leif and Father Corren. He knows exactly what he's doing.

A figure breaks from the chaos before he can reach her— sleek and elegant and pale, wings catching the smoke-thick air with contemptuous grace. A gargoyle female. She wheels above the carnage for one sharp moment and she meets his eyes across the burning square, hers black as polished coal.

“Flora!” He bellows.

The square goes quiet and villagers stand frozen in the ash and the embers. Tovian stands amidst it all, chest heaving, dark blood—his own and theirs—running in rivulets across his obsidian skin. His wings are half-spread, instinctive and territorial.

He looks like every nightmare the valley ever whispered about.

And then she banks hard into the smoke and disappears.

I cross the square before anyone else has remembered how to move. He sees me coming and his posture shifts—still wound tight, still vibrating with the aggression of a fight not fully released from his body—but his wings fold incrementally.

"You're bleeding," I say.

"I am aware."

The lacerations run deep across his side and shoulder, four parallel gouges where a claw caught him. I pull the spare linen strips from inside my coat and press them against the worst of it without waiting to be invited. My hands shake. I notice this distantly and ignore it.

He is very still while I work. Like he doesn't trust himself to move.

"Sabine."

Leif's voice breaks across the square. He is running toward me, face white beneath the ash and tear-tracks, and he pulls up short five feet away because Tovian is standing directly behind me and Leif is seventeen and not entirely stupid.

"You said we were going to leave and you disappeared."

The guilt hits me. I look at my brother and the burning frame of the house our parents left us. I look at the ash coating the stones where families we have known our entire lives just ran for their lives from something we woke up.

"I know," I say quietly. "Leif. I know what I said."

"Then why are we still?—"

"Because I can't." The words come out steadier than I feel them. "I can't leave and not know why this happened. I need to stay and fight."