Why the fuck are you apologizing? He was going to kill you!
I wasn’t sure if that was Elvi’s voice or mine, but whoever’s it was, it was right.
“Never mind,” I panted, jabbing the sword shakily towards him. “I take that back.”
Koltar moved as if in a fugue, apparently not noticing or caring about his missing hand or fallen axe. He reached his remaining claws for me, aiming for the throat.
But before I had to lift my sword higher to defend myself, he halted so sharply and suddenly it was like someone had shoved against his chest. And the next moment was very confusing, because there actually was a hand at his chest, only it wasn’t attached to a person. I thought that somehow it was Koltar’s own severed hand, only, no, this one had dark yellow-ish scales instead of Koltar’s blue ones. The yellow-scaled fingers were still clutched in death around the handle of a... something. I couldn’t actually tell what the weapon was because it had been buried hilt-deep in Koltar’s chest.
There was no question who’d done it. I doubted Skalla had even seen me in here yet, and even so, he was still saving me. Doing it in perhaps the most gruesome way possible, by literally ripping another man apart and hurling the entire severed hand and weapon like a fucking dart, but still.
Koltar stared blankly down at the fist jutting out from his chest. He lifted his bleeding stump of a wrist, remembered dazedly that his hand was gone, then used his other one to peel the yellow-scaled fingers from the weapon’s handle. He dropped the lifeless limb, then looked as if he was going to try to pull out the weapon sunk into his chest, but he didn’t get that far. He collapsed down onto his knees, then fell forward onto his face without another sound. He didn’t pray. He didn’t beg for forgiveness. He didn’t breathe.
He was dead.
Now that he was no longer an immediate threat I had to fight, horror rose in my throat at the scene before me. I vomited violently, my body heaving and fighting to spew up whatever was left inside me, even though there wasn’t much. The act of retching made my head spin. I kept the sword in one hand, plastering my other against my forehead as if that would somehow ease the pressure inside my skull.
I have to find Skalla.
But in the end, he found me. Not exactly intentionally. He burst through an outer wall into the hallway, his limbs locked around Joleb as the two of them wrestled, frothing with berserker power. Joleb still had a handle on one of his blades, and he wrenched it up, slicing through the thinner skin of one of Skalla’s wings, driving the white glow of the blade upwards until it hit bone. Silver blood poured from the wound, and I screamed.
It was my scream, more than any pain he could have felt, that sent Skalla spiralling into an even more virulent state. His entire frame spasmed and pulsed, his scales jutting outward like spikes on horrifying angles as he locked his fingers around Joleb’s throat and lifted him high into the air with only one powerful hand.
I dropped my sword and smacked my hands over my mouth, sobbing against my sweaty skin, needing so badly to call out to him but not wanting to distract him now. Joleb bucked and swung his blade down onto Skalla’s snout, but thank fuck it didn’t seem to have much of an effect on his scales the way it had on his wing. He was made of stronger stuff than a regular Bohnebregg male – my own experience with Koltar had shown me that a white blade like that should have cut right through his scales.
But it didn’t. The blade bounced off, like a skate not finding purchase against ice, and with a shouted curse, Joleb locked eyes with me.
And then he hurled it.
My hands fell away from my face and it was like they moved through thick honey, because everything seemed to have slowed. The blade rotated end over end, handle over blade. I knew, rationally, that it must have been moving fast, because it looked like a glowing ring and it whistled through the air as it came for me, but still, it didn’t feel fast. Skalla’s maddened eye rolled in his head. He saw me. Saw the blade.
Saw that he’d never make it in time.
There was no time even though that blade moved so fucking slow.
Even my breathing was slow. A calm, deep in-and-out as death hurtled white-hot towards me.
Skalla dropped Joleb and then the slowness winked away and everything happened fucking fast. Like he was punting a hockey puck across the rink, Skalla used his power to send Joleb skidding bullet-quick along the floor. Just when the massive, sliding warrior would have taken me out at the knees, Skalla drove his fist high in the air from the other end of the hallway, and Joleb jerked upwards with a rough movement, his body levitating in the air before me. The unmistakable sound of many bones crunching at the same time rattled my teeth, and then, before I could take another breath, was the jarring thunk of impact. A bright white point appeared at Joleb’s back, right at the level of my eyes. The blade he’d hurled with his own hand was now buried in his guts.
I assumed it would be done then – no one would survive that, except maybe Skalla – but my mate didn’t seem to be done yet. With Joleb limp and hovering in front of me, I couldn’t see Skalla, but I could hear him, his breath tearing from his throat, his steps like the thunder that still boomed outside. More bones snapped, ribs, I was pretty sure, and I wondered if Skalla would break every single one. If he’d keep going even when there was nothing left in Joleb’s limbs but dust. Even when I begged him to stop.
But then Joleb was flung aside. His corpse crashed through yet another wall, and all I could see now was Skalla.
“You came,” I whispered. “I told them that you would.”
I laid my hand against his chest. I could barely see the green or the glow of him now, so slick was he with blood – blackish from the warriors and the silver of his own. But I felt his heart surge beneath my hand, and it was the heart I knew.
Blood-soaked and berserk, with a single burning eye and only one working wing, dragging the deaths of more than fifty men behind him, he was still my Skalla.
I wrapped my arms around the man who’d become my home, closed my eyes, and wept.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Suvi
Skalla didn’t hug me back. Not at first. His breath stuttered hoarsely in and out of him, and he trembled, as if restraining himself because he couldn’t quite trust himself not to crush me. It reminded me with bittersweet nostalgia of when he’d gone into heat before me. He’d been scared to touch me then, too.
“Hold me, Skalla. Please,” I sobbed.
And then, with a great groan of release, he did, his arms closing around me like iron. But even so, I could still tell he was being careful. His hands roamed my back gingerly but frantically, his snout burrowing against my throat, sliding down to my shoulder. I flinched when his scales touched the wound there. He froze, then withdrew, and it made me sad to see that he now had red blood on him too.