“Blast it all into the stone sky, Jolakaia, wake up!” I roared directly into her face. Her eyelids flickered...

Then she slumped back into total unconsciousness.

My knuckles cracked with tension as I gripped her shoulders, my body urging me to sink my claws in and slash. Growling in frustration, I let her go, leaving her on the bench and stalking out into the street.

This far from the city’s centre, and without the moons and stars, the street was bare and black, the buildings shadows. There was space out here – gardens and farmland. The neighbours were far enough away in their homes that none of them seemed to have been woken by me. Yet.

Well, they would awaken now. They would help me, tell me what I needed to know, or curse them all I’d –

“I saw her.”

Rage had been enfolding me so completely, drawing me into the terrible comfort of its smoke, that I hadn’t seen the child in the street. A tiny one, young but clear-eyed. I recognized him, I realized, from that day at the pond. That day with Suvi, my beautiful mate, the little star I could not see.

But he had.

Berserker violence nearly blinded me for a moment, told me to wring the information out of him even if I had to twist the bones from his sockets. I shook my snout, trying to right myself. I reminded myself that he was the only one out here with any information on where my mate might have ended up, and if I hurt him too badly or killed him, he’d never be of any help to me.

I probably should have been more concerned about not killing him because he was an innocent child rather than the fact that he might know where Suvi was, but just then I did not have the capacity to feel that way. In that terrible, Suvi-less moment in the night-drenched street, he only mattered because he’d seen her. I’d just have to stop and feel some shame about that later because right now there was no time or space inside me for anything but fear and fury and finding my mate.

“Where?” I hissed, slamming down onto my knees so I could better look the child in the eye. He wore comfortable cotton clothing, rumpled by sleep, but he did not seem like he’d only just woken.

“I saw her. That kind, ugly female. She left that house.” He pointed behind me to Zev and Jolakaia’s.

I swear to the stone sky if one more water-brained fool of a creature calls her ugly...

“Where did she go?”

“I do not know not know where he took her.”

“He?”

A man. A male. A putrid creature with cocks had come for my Suvi. Took my soft little star from her bed in the night when I was not there to protect her and now I was going to raze this entire city to the ground, kill every male who lived here if I had to, until I found the one responsible. I bellowed, ground-shaking, feral, and now neighbours spilled into the street from properties down the way, sleepy and confused. Many of them, upon seeing me, retreated immediately back into their abodes. A set of adult hands snatched away the child I’d been speaking to. The child wriggled in his mother’s arms, trying to maintain eye contact with my rapidly disintegrating gaze.

Somewhere in my blistering brain, the scent I’d caught on the balcony and stairs suddenly registered. Recognition snapped into place at the same moment the child called out from above the shoulder of the mother who carted him swiftly inside. As if sensing a door was about to slam closed between us, he didn’t bother forming a long sentence. He simply shouted a single word, a name, tossing into the air like a rock skipping ’cross a pond, a toy that I was meant to catch.

“Koltar!”

The door closed. Violence bubbling like acid behind every scale, I launched into the air and aimed my body for the temple.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Skallagrim

The only reason I did not smash my body through the roof of the temple, entirely collapsing it, was because of the chance that Suvi might have been inside. Instead, I landed in the courtyard, my body hurling down so hard that the river stone there cracked outwards from the impact. I rose to my full height, claws flexing and wings beating in time with my rabid heart.

“KOLTAR! Come out here and face me!”

Koltar did not emerge, but Mother’s Claws did, hurrying in their black robes with their odious, impotent little metal tubes aimed at me.

I grabbed the nearest one, wrapping my hand ’round his throat. It wasn’t until a wooden crutch clattered to the ground that I realized it was Nakib.

Oh, good. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to finally kill him.

“Where are they?” I hissed, reminding myself with only some effectualness not to squeeze too hard or he’d suffocate and not answer me. “Where has your foul leader taken my mate?”

“What... are you talking about...?” he choked out, grasping at my fingers.

It took everything I had not to crush his blasted throat. And I could do it, too. With my stone sky blood I was already stronger than any man here. On the edge of a berserker rage, I could squeeze this neck like it was made of soft fruit instead of flesh.

But I didn’t. Not yet. I held on to a glimmering silver thread of sanity named Suvi because if I entirely let go I’d lose my wits and I could not afford that now.

“He took Suvi!” I roared. “And do not think for a second I will believe a lie, so tell me once and tell me true, where have they gone?”

More people were in the courtyard now. Mother’s Seeds and Mother’s Hands, standing behind the Mother’s Claws, the temple and city light warming their red and green robes. Though I was mostly focused on Nakib, I could sense confusion in the crowd. Like what I was saying made no sense to them. Nakib coughed and gagged, and when he gave me no more information I threw him down so hard I might have broken his other cursed leg. The Mother’s Claws looked about, as if waiting for orders. But Koltar was not there and in his absence, one of them decided to take his chances and blast his weapon at me.

I’d give him something – I did at least feel it a bit. A buffet of wind against my front that knocked me back a half a step.

As if encouraged by the first one, the others, more than a dozen of them, let loose a volley of shots from their weapons, energy blasts pinging off of me in rapid succession.

I should have known that questioning any of them was pointless. They were loyal, alright, but they were loyal to Koltar above all else.

Fine. I would pummel my way through the temple, room by room, hall by hall until I found Koltar and my mate and if anyone wanted to get in my way then he could pay the price of that foolishness with blood.

Snarling, I lifted my claws, and with an outward lick of my power I wrenched every weapon from every set of hands and smashed the tubes to metallic dust. My vision smoking over with bloodlust, reason receding into the storm inside me, I raised my hands higher to demolish the body of every Mother’s Claw who stood before me. Thunder clapped, a resounding, quaking smack of sound, and I half thought that I’d produced it.

Just before I brought death down upon the Mother’s Claws’ heads, a voice I recognized spoke, confusing me just long enough to halt me.

“He is not in the temple.”

It was Koraba, oldest Mother’s Hand and someone I’d spent a great deal of time with in the temple at Suvi’s side.

“Get back, Koraba! Do not approach him!” growled a nearby Mother’s Claw, but Koraba waved her off.

“What you seek is not here, Skallagrim,” Koraba said. There was no fear in her face or her voice as she approached me. “If Suvi is missing, we will help you find her. But you cannot come and cause violence here in our most sacred place.”