Page 62 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

I close my jaws around his throat.

Not a killing bite. Not yet. I want him to understand first.

"You buried them alive," I say into his neck, and my voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like the mountain. “My family. My warriors. My people who trusted the walls above their heads."

He lets out a raw, torn cry. Defiance or terror. I can't tell which.

I shred his wings.

I want him to fall the way they fell—completely, and with full comprehension of what he has lost. He drops like stone, screaming, and I drop with him, talons locked into his shoulders, and we hit the mountain bedrock below the cathedral ruins with a force that splits the rock beneath us in a starburst of fractured granite.

Silence.

Every surviving gargoyle on every surrounding crag goes absolutely, historically still.

Tharros is broken beneath me. Chest heaving in short, wet gasps. Both wings destroyed. His pale skin is cracked like old pottery.

He looks up at me.

He opens his mouth.

I drive my fist through his chest.

It is the last sound he makes.

I stand and turn my head and find Flora in the crowd by heat signature alone. Watch the exact moment she calculates that the battle is finished, that Tharros is finished.

She retreats into the cloud cover without a sound.

I let her go.

I turn back toward the survivors. The fire in my vision pulses. Forty, fifty heat signatures—cowering, wounded, cornered. Alive. The bloodlust doesn’t care about any of those details. It is very simple about what it wants. It has been simple about it sincethe chains broke and I started moving and it has been fed well tonight and it is not finished?—

Something touches my ankle.

I go still.

A hand. Small. Warm. It presses against my blood-slicked skin. I look down.

Sabine.

She has dragged herself across the frost-rimed stone of the altar platform to reach me. Her collarbone is bleeding. Her face is pale and she is looking up at me without a single atom of fear.

"Tovian."

I don't decide to let it go. It leaves on its own. Pulled out by her voice the way roots are pulled toward water—helpless, instinctive, total. The midnight recedes from my skin in slow waves, gray returning underneath. My talons retract. The earth magic that has been pouring out of me since the chains broke folds itself back, humming down to stillness.

My knees hit the stone.

I gather her against my chest with both arms, guide my wings close around her—around both of us—and the blizzard stops mattering. The rival clans stop mattering. The blood and the crater and the body of the gargoyle I just killed in front of the entire assembled territory stops mattering.

There is only her weight against me. Her pulse under my jaw.

The first tear falls into her hair before I even know it is happening.

My shoulders cave. I press my face into her hair and I weep.

33