Page 3 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

She is staring up at me in absolute terror, gray eyes wide and bright in the dark, blood smeared across her jaw and knuckles. Her chest is heaving. She is pinned half beneath rubble and half beneath my forearm, and she looks?—

Fragile. Breakably, impossibly fragile as if she should not exist in a cavern full of collapsing stone.

She picks up a piece of rubble and swings it at my face.

It connects with my cheek.I feel the impact distantly, the way I'd feel a sparrow flying into a cathedral wall. It doesn't hurt.

It surprises me.

I pull back and lock my gaze on her. A rhythmic thrumming like a drumbeat of ancient magic hammers against my ribs, a sensation that has laid dormant for?—

I don't finish the thought because that is when the pale things come.

They emerge from the far passages in a silent, writhing mass—eyeless, long-limbed creatures that have spent generations in the dark evolving into precisely what darkness requires. They move wrong. Joints that bend backward, heads that swivel too far, mouths ringed with translucent teeth. They have been here longer than I have been asleep, feeding on whatever fell through the cracks from above.

They scent the blood.

The female has stopped swinging her piece of rubble at me. She watches the creatures pour from the passage with the kind of frozen stillness that tells me her body has decided there are worse things in the cavern than me.

She is correct.

I step between her and them.

What follows is not a fight. A fight implies the possibility of outcome going either direction. This is demolition. I take the first one apart with my bare hands before it closes half the distance—spine separated from skull, body dropped without ceremony. The second I catch mid-leap by the throat and use it as a weapon against the third. The fourth and fifth scatter. I follow.

My claws rend through calcified hide and alien sinew with the same efficiency I used to bring to territorial disputes hundreds of years ago. No wasted motion. No performance. Just the clean, mechanical application of superior force.

One of the creatures has circled back. The female is on the ground, crumpled against the base of a pillar, a dark smear of blood visible at her temple where the thing caught her with its tail during its retreat. Her breathing is still there, shallow but present. Her pulse still hammers its fragile, maddening rhythm in her throat.

I silence the last one. A guttural, predatory hiss rips from my chest, a sound born of the same dark magic that carved my wings, alien and terrifying even to my own ears."

The cavern settlesinto ringing quiet.

I stand in the wreckage of it, stone dust coating my skin, ichor from the pale things drying on my claws, and I look at her.

She is unconscious. Small and still and profoundly temporary-looking, the way all living things look when they are briefly at rest. The silver markings beginning to ghost across her skin at the wrist are not something I expected. The bond has already taken root in her.

I gather her up. Not gently—I don't know how to do anything gently yet, my hands are still the size of her ribcage and I have been stone for a long time. But I am precise. I tuck her against my chest, her head beneath my jaw, and I carry her away from the great cavern—deeper into the network of chambers where the stone is older and more certain and no one will find her.

The chamber I choose is low-lit and sealed. I set her down on the stone floor and crouch over her, watching the vein in her throat.

The mate bond hums beneath my skull like a second heartbeat. Insistent. Satisfied. Certain in a way I am not yet, but that doesn't matter. Certainty will come.

"You woke me," I tell her unconscious form. The words like gravel being dragged across iron. "Whether you meant to or not."

I watch her breathe.

"You are in my mountain now. In my territory." I lean down, close enough that her exhale grazes my jaw. Close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her skin.

"That means you are mine."

3

SABINE

The first thing I notice is the heat. The kind that presses against your face like an open palm and pulls you up from unconsciousness before you're ready. My eyes open to flickering orange light and a ceiling of black stone so close I could reach up and touch it. I don't. Moving anything hurts.

My ankle is a disaster. The swelling is thick and pulsing, a throb that radiates up my calf every time my heart beats. The rest of me isn't much better. Dried blood has crusted along my left palm and halfway up my wrist, pulling the skin tight. My coat is torn at the shoulder. There's grit in my hair, behind my teeth, probably in my lungs.