The gryphon, whose name I didn’t even know, ducked her head, as if she were a little bit bashful after “marking” me.
“Why did you walk over to her?” Loukas asked, his gaze moving to me.
“I … I’m not sure.” I rubbed the wound on my shoulder; I could feel my heartbeat pulsing in the cut she’d given me through my blouse. “She seemed … sad. I felt like I needed to comfort her. Like she needed me.” Even as I said it, I realized how ridiculous I sounded.
When Loukas just continued to look at me, without responding, my cheeks grew warm.
The wide door at the end of the hallway slid open and we both turned to see Ederra striding toward us.
“I thought I told you to take my granddaughter to a room where she could rest,” she said without preamble.
“He tried, but I—”
“What happened to your shoulder?” She cut me off, her eyes going to the bloody, torn shirt.
“Er…”
“This gryphon marked her,” Loukas supplied, as though he were commenting on the weather. But there was a tenseness to his stance, a tightness in the way he held his shoulders, that led me to believe he wasn’t as nonchalant as he seemed.
“You must be mistaken.” Ederra looked sharply at the gryphon. “Sukhi’s Rider only died two days ago. For her to choose a new one so fast … and a powerless one, at that … It’s unheard of.”
“And yet, she has both chosen a new Rider two days later, and a powerless one at that.” Loukas lifted one eyebrow, his voice a tad sharper.
Sukhi. My gryphon’s name was Sukhi.
It took half a heartbeat to realize I already thought of her as mine.
Ederra turned her burning gaze on Loukas, her eyes narrowing.
Sukhi suddenly cawed, drawing all of our attention before Ederra could deliver whatever scalding statement she’d been about to make. The gryphon lifted her head up and down twice, short, jerky motions, visibly agitated.
“Sukhi, what is it?” I stepped forward, lifted my arm to try to calm her, and—
Pain exploded in the patched-up void beneath my heart.
I staggered backward, hands clutched to my sternum. Distant voices echoed dully, murky and indecipherable through the pounding of my heart and the darkness that spilled out from within me, like blood pouring from a wound. This time was different; it was sudden and vicious. I dropped to my knees, barely able to draw breath.
Hands grasped my shoulders before I collapsed. An arm slid beneath my knees, and another behind my back. The ground fell away.
Sukhi’s agonized keen cut through the chaos in my head, clearing my mind enough to find her umber eyes in the dim stables as Loukas lifted me into his arms, cradling me against his chest, as though I were a child … or something precious and fragile.
“She needs healers—immediately.”
Loukas’s voice was a low rumble against my cheek where it rested on his soft shirt. I bounced in his arms; it took two laborious breaths to realize he was running. The pain came in waves that broke over me, pulling me under the darkness, sweeping away all awareness of my surroundings, until it ebbed away again. The respites lasted in small spurts of cognizance; flashes of sensation and sight—the sound of Loukas’s boots slapping against the floor of the castle, a glimpse of the green-fire in his eyes darkened to burning moss, the tendon in his jaw flexed from clenching his teeth, Ederra’s voice shouting for a name I didn’t recognize, the softness of a bed but a sudden chill replacing the warm security of Loukas’s arms.
And in between it all was the roiling, starving darkness, eagerly shredding the healing my sister and Raidyn had sacrificed so much to accomplish, desperate to devour … to destroy. And pain. Endless, everlasting pain. It writhed, it clawed, it shredded. Hands pressed against me, pushed me into the soft embrace of the mattress, but everything hurt and I needed to escape, I needed it to end.
I needed to end.
More hands, grasping my arms, pushed against my sternum, burning hands—heavy and hot and powerful. But not powerful enough. I felt them try, I felt a presence enter the darkness, but there was too much and not enough; the pulsing black emptiness tore right through the Paladin flame, dousing it as it hemorrhaged out into my body, my mind, my heart.
I tumbled into the bottomless abyss, falling and falling and falling, where no Paladin power on earth could find me.