Page 6 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

Let them keep their lights. They will not keep the valley.

Then it hits me. A pressure behind my teeth, a vibration in the space between heartbeats. I know what it is before I have fully registered it. Every Alpha does. It moves through rock and air and the invisible current of old magic like a tremor through still water.

Other Alphas. Waking.

Distant. Scattered. But waking.

I count the pulses without thinking. The nearest is far enough that it carries no immediate threat, but it is there, jagged and hungry, and it carries a message. There is blood in the mountain. There is something to claim. Come.

The Blood Bond flares in my chest like a coal pressed against the inside of my ribs.

They sense her. They sense me and what I have become in the span of a single night. A newly woken Alpha chained toa human female is not strength. It is a wound. And predators smell wounds from across entire mountain ranges.

I spin toward the cave in a sharp turn before my next breath is finished.

Vorgrym is standing over her when I drop through the fissure. My oldest commander, gray-skinned and scarred, one eye sealed shut and ruined, his torn wings half-draped behind him like burial cloth, and he is standing over Sabine.

She is still asleep and doesn’t know he is there.

He does not hear me land.

"—pathetic," he is saying, low and to himself, studying her the way he once studied fallen enemies. "A human. He woke to a human."

I cross the chamber and put myself between him and the sleeping woman with every intention I have ever carried as an Alpha pressed into the line of my shoulders.

Vorgrym goes very still.

I know what he sees. He sees his Alpha fully awakened while he is barely standing — joints slow, magic thin, his body still more stone than flesh after years of Stone Sleep. And he sees his Alpha's eyes, and whatever lives behind them right now does not invite conversation.

"My lord." His voice has changed. "I did not mean?—"

"Choose the next words carefully, Vorgrym."

He holds his ground. He is brave for a dead gargoyle. "She is human." He says it like it explains everything.

"They buried us. They sealed the exit and poisoned the air and trapped us in that cavern until we were too weak to claw through the rock. And you—" He stops. "You have claimed one of them."

"Yes."

"That is not?—"

"I will not explain myself to you." I let the silence sit for a moment and then I let him feel the weight beneath it. His wings drop involuntarily and his head tilts. "You will not speak of her that way again. You will not move toward her without my word. Are we clear, Commander?"

Vorgrym says nothing for a long moment.

"Clear," he says finally. Rough. Wounded.

It is the right answer.

That is when I hear her.

The scramble of boots against stone — fast, careless, urgent — and my head turns toward the far chamber wall where a crack of pale gray light now bleeds through a fissure that was not open this morning. Cold air pours through it. She must have felt it while we were distracted.

Clever creature. Stupid creature.

I am already moving.

She is fast for something so breakable. I'll grant her that. She's made it through the fissure and onto the slope outside before I've cleared the cave mouth, and the storm greets her with no kindness whatsoever — blinding white, screaming wind, snow driving horizontal across open stone with force that would knock a human straight off a mountain.