I flew downwards, alighting on the balcony outside the small apartment. But the eerie sense of wrongness intensified, got hard and twisty, because the apartment door was open. And my Suvi was not in the bed.
My heart spasmed, my scales leaping along my limbs in a great, anxious ripple. I forced myself to remain calm, because Suvi was probably just downstairs with Zev and Jolakaia. She must have gotten lonely without me, and the last thing she needed to see was me insane and enraged like I’d been the first time we met. If I smashed into the main house, she’d probably be terrified that our bonding hadn’t fully taken hold, which I knew it had. If my long time at the gates of Heofonraed had taught me anything, it was that the mate madness had been entirely cleansed from my blood and body and brain. I needed to be at her side again because I loved her and I missed her, not because my entire being was suspended on the edge of a blade balanced above the abyss.
Though I wasn’t so sure, now, because when I looked into that dark, empty apartment, where her scent was already stale, abyss was what it felt like.
Taking the stairs by foot was too slow. I snapped open my wings and sliced down through the air to the ground. But the abyss grew all around me, because the door to the main house hung open, too. I could smell Zev and Jolakaia much nearer and fresher than Suvi. A sound behind me had me spinning, and there I saw them.
Zev was lying prone, seemingly unconscious. Jolakaia was on the ground, too, but she was not down there to heal her mate but because she also appeared to be injured. She groaned, rolling stiffly onto her side and attempting to rock onto her hands and knees.
In a cracking flash of an instant, I’d wrenched her up. I sat her heavily on the workbench and held her by the shoulders so she would not topple.
“Where is Suvi?”
The time it took for Jolakaia to open her eyes and focus them on me was an eternity of agony. I could feel black smoke gathering all around me, lining the edges of my vision, and it was not the darkness of mate madness but the pulsing tunnel vision of a berserker rage barely held back. Suvi’s scent, especially out here, was faint and fading, and there was another scent, too, one I thought I recognized but couldn’t immediately place as my control grew taut and nearly snapped.
Jolakaia had been good to me and especially to Suvi. I did not want to hurt her. But if she did not wake up to tell me what had transpired, then hurting people would no longer be a mere possibility, but the inevitable outcome of fury that was becoming near-delirious with fear.
I shook her aggressively by the shoulders. She gave a crackly, pained-sounding exhale, trying once again to focus her gaze on me.
It didn’t work. Her eyelids slid shut even as I shook her again. Zev looked like she would be no help – she was even worse off than her wife, still lying unmoving, though I could see that she was breathing.
“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.