This was, as far as I could tell, the largest room of the palatial house. I guess it had to be, to store all this freaking stuff. It was at the back of the house, open pavilion-style and looking out over a courtyard with a fountain surrounded by tall grass and reeds instead of looking out over the river. Unlike Koltar, I wasn’t chained. I guessed nobody was worried about the little human trying to escape or using one of the many massive weapons left within my reach. Probably because there was nowhere to even escape to. If I fled deeper into the house, I’d just get lost and trap myself before being discovered. And I couldn’t run outside, because most of Joleb’s army was right there in front of me. They’d made their way out of the feasting area and were patrolling the courtyard and area beyond in small groups, occasionally talking and laughing and looking my way before casting their eyes up to the sky.
I cast my eyes up, too, but the sky was so heavy and dark with clouds I had no way of knowing if it had turned to stone the way I’d seen it do before. There had been a terrible smashing noise from up there, like Skalla’s fist cracking open the door, but before I could get too hopeful the sound had happened again, that time preceded by a flash of lightning in the distance. The warriors had begun grumbling about storms and the rainy season, and I told myself to wait just a little while longer.
I wasn’t the only one waiting.
Joleb walked past Koltar and into the hoard room, threading carefully through wobbling piles until he stood right behind the place where I sat. I hugged my knees to my chest and forced myself to keep staring forward, outside.
“Alas, I am not a patient male,” Joleb said on a sigh. I was aware of him bending into a crouch. Each of his knees jutted out on either side of me. I crunched my body inwards, making myself as small as I could so that I didn’t touch his inner thighs.
“I did not think I would have to wait so long for Skallagrim.”
He pinched a few strands of my hair between his finger and thumb, then tugged. It hurt, but by that point everything hurt. Half my face was like a furnace, my shoulder had stopped bleeding but throbbed venomously, and the nausea had returned with a vengeance. The only thing more overpowering than all these pains was my exhaustion. I didn’t know if it was a pregnancy thing, or if it was just a result of all the stress hormones that had been unleashed in my body tonight, but my bones felt like they weighed double what they normally did. If I weren’t in such a dangerous situation and desperately watching for any sign of Skalla, there was no way I could have stayed awake.
Joleb tugged again, harder, then let go. He let his hands come to rest on his knees, perfectly balanced, his chest a hair’s breadth from my back. He lowered his snout to my ear, his breath stirring the hair he’d just been pulling.
“Maybe he will not come at all.”
“He’ll come.” I kept my voice very neutral, not betraying any of the fear or longing or disgust I felt. I tightened up my body even more, wrapping my arms protectively around my abdomen.
“Hmm. Let us watch for him together, then.” Without warning, he grabbed my shoulders and hauled me to my feet. I cried out in pain when he gripped the place Koltar’s claws had cut me. Fresh blood began coursing down my arm, but Joleb didn’t let go. He merely marched me forward, holding my shoulders firmly and standing far too close behind me as we both stared at the sky outside.
At the sight of their Prince, the warriors became quieter and more alert. They stopped chatting and joking with each other, turning their own snouts upward to stare at the starless night.
But there was nothing. No sign of Skalla, none I could see or hear, at least. And, minute after minute, Joleb’s fingers got harder on me, until I was on the verge of tears, and it was as if he blamed me for Skalla’s absence.
“He’ll come,” I said again, the words barely above a sob, and I wasn’t sure if I was saying it more to Joleb or myself. Joleb’s huge fingers slanted inwards, spanning my collarbones, claws prodding at the tender artery of my throat.
He’ll come.
That time, I only said it inside my own head.
But no matter how quiet the words had been, it was as if that silent vow had fucking conjured him.
Because there he was.
I didn’t actually see him at first. Nobody did. He was too far away, too high up. But when lightning suddenly blistered the sky, illuminating everything, bright as daylight, it illuminated him, too. Just for a second. Not even a second. A fractional glimpse of a spearing shadow with a wingspan that made me dizzy. And then, in the dark that followed, he sped like an arrow, now close enough for me to see the miniscule glowing points among his scales.
Thunder boomed so frightfully loudly I would have slammed my hands over my ears had Joleb not been holding onto me. The murderous explosion of it went on and on and on, only now it wasn’t thunder, it was Skalla, and he was roaring like he’d brought down the very storm himself. The skies opened at that exact moment, rain pouring down in sheets of pure black, obscuring Skalla’s golden, glimmering form until he hit the ground with the force of something that could end the fucking world.
The quake he created slammed all the way into the house, shaking the walls. Directly behind Joleb and me, the great piles of weapons shivered, then fell with a lethal clatter, a landslide that would no doubt have killed me if I’d still been in the room.
Skalla rose in the rain, terrible and terrifying, an avenging alien angel with stars strewn across his wings and murder in his eye. Joleb’s warriors bellowed. They tossed their snouts, stamped their feet, and drew blades. Maybe it was some trick of the rain splattering off of them, but they seemed to get bigger. Like every cell in their bodies was growing, stretching their scales along limbs newly swollen with power for battle.
“Ah. My loyal berserkers. See how they rage for me?” Joleb said. “But Skallagrim rages, too. Let us see what your man can do.”
He was right. Skalla was not anything like himself. He looked the way I’d seen him in his mate madness, like every nerve in his body stood on painful end and wouldn’t lie flat again until it was bathed in blood. He howled. The sound was inhuman, and yes, he’d never technically been human, but this was the ripped-throat call of a monster.
“He cuts through them like a blade through water,” Joleb breathed in amazement, and he was right. There had to be more than fifty men launching themselves at my mate, but one after the other, they fell and fell and fell before the molten weapon of his rage. I watched him kill and kill again, but I couldn’t fear him. He was Skalla. My Skalla.
He’d come for me. He was killing for me.
And I was not afraid.
“I suppose it is time that I go and join the fray,” Joleb said. “Earn my new title of god-killer.”
He finally released me, and it was very hard not to show him how much of a physical relief that was. He stepped in front of me and took two blades from his belt. He must have activated something on their handles, because the edges of the blades began to glow white-hot.
“Stay in here, female,” Joleb called back at me as he stalked out into the storm. “If you die when I kill your mate, I don’t want to have to drag your corpse through the mud and make all that shiny hair dull.”
I didn’t get a chance to answer him, or even really process what he’d said, because a moment later something flew by me, smashing into a nearby wall and creating a massive hole. Turned out that something was an entire, gigantic adult male, dead now, his body tossed by Skalla like it was nothing but a pebble.
Now that Joleb wasn’t holding me in place, I scrambled back into the hoard room, not wanting the next flung corpse to land on my head. It was much harder to get through the room now – there was no longer a path through the mountainous piles. All the treasure had toppled together into one huge mess of metal. I went slowly, sometimes crawling, sometimes wading, careful not to slice anything open on the swords and knives and scimitars strewn this way and that.
