Page 44 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

"The ceiling in the lower vault went when the cathedral above it collapsed. The weight was—" He stops. Presses on. "I had my siblings there. Juveniles. Barely grown who hadn't yet learned to seal into stone during a crisis. They were caught in the dark. Beneath the rubble." Another pause, and this one feels like it costs him something structural.

"I was already sealed by then. Already stone. I heard nothing. Felt nothing. And when I woke into your blood centuries later, I knew. I knew before I even fully understood what waking meant."

I realize my hand has found the back of his arm. My fingers are pressed into the stone-rough skin above his elbow. He doesn't move away.

"They were under my protection," he says, and his voice finally cracks on that one syllable. Just that one. Under. "Every one of them. That was the only thing I was. The only thing I knew how to be. And they died in the dark while I was stone, and I could not—" He stops again. His shoulders have begun to tremble. Slight. Terrible. The kind of trembling that comes from a body not designed to shake.

"I couldn’t save a single one of them."

The final piecelocks into place inside my chest with an almost audible sound.

I have been trying to understand him since the beginning. His rage, his possessiveness, the snarl that rises every time I step three feet too far from his line of sight. I called it arrogance. Gargoyle instinct. Alpha ego. I was wrong about all of it.

This is what it has been. This, every time. A leader who lost everything in the dark and spent centuries sealed inside stone with nothing but the memory of it—waking into a world where the threat still exists and now there is one more person he can’t lose and no rational thought in his body is strong enough to override the absolute animal scream of not again, not one more.

He hasn't been controlling me. He has been terrified.

I move before I decide to. One step, then another, and then I am pressing myself against the front of him—both arms going around his torso as far as they will reach, which is not very far, my cheek pressed flat against his chest and my wool coat catching on the rough planes of his sternum. He is cold and huge and jagged at the edges. He doesn't move for a long moment.

Then his wings come down. Slowly, like a burden surrendering its weight after a very long time. They fold around both of us in a heavy, living dark — blocking the dim amber light, blocking the tunnel, blocking the chasm, the cold air, and Vorgrym's steady breathing behind us.

The thud of his heart is right against my ear. It's slower than a human heart. Much slower. But it's there, and it's real, and it is enormous, and something about the sheer size of it undoes me completely.

He makes a sound and his arms come around me.

His wings are a vault around us—sealed, warm, utterly impenetrable—and in the dark beneath the mountain I let him hold me with his whole enormous body and I hold him back with every bit of strength I have, and it is nowhere near equivalent, but it’s exactly enough.

24

TOVIAN

One moment the tunnel holds. The next, the earth above us screams and the passage behind us detonates inward. My wings snap wide on instinct and I spin with Sabine in my arms as a wall of jagged granite erupts through the passage in a cascade of screaming stone and choking white dust, right between Velka and Vorgrym on the other side.

It takes the blink of an eye and the tunnel behind us no longer exists.

"Vorgrym." My voice does not echo. The rock absorbs it.

Silence answers.

I am at the cave-in before I finish thinking, my claws sinking into the face of a boulder larger than a war horse, hauling at it with every muscle and sinew straining. The stone doesn't move. I dig deeper, dragging furrows through granite like it's wet clay, throwing rubble behind me with both arms while the dust burns my eyes and Sabine coughs somewhere at my back.

"Tovian." Her hand lands between my shoulder blades. "Stop."

I don't.

"Tovian." Firmer now. She steps around me and puts both palms flat against my chest, which is the only thing that works, because I can’t move forward with her in the way. "They're on the other side of a ton of granite. You'll bring the rest of the ceiling down."

My claws are bleeding. I hadn't noticed.

I look to the wall of collapsed rock. I take in her face, pale in the dark, lit only by the faint bioluminescent moss growing in the seams of the stone around us. Her eyes are steady even when nothing else is.

"We keep moving," she says. "We find the secondary passage and we reach Leif. Vorgrym knows these tunnels nearly as well as you do."

The secondary passage opens into a chamber that the war above has not touched yet. The ceiling arches forty feet above us, black and glistening with moisture, and the air here is perfectly still.

Sabine stops walking.

I stop three paces ahead and turn. "We can’t afford?—"