CAGED (#3, of Crows and Thorns)

Chapter 121

I'd never witnessed Graysen like this, not even when he'd been fighting the Pelans' small army. This was something else altogether.

There was the barest trace of an iridescent sparkle of aether in the air. The night seemed alight with power, the likes of which almost felt the same as that which radiated from a Horned God. Every footfall Graysen made charged the ground with energy. It was a faint rumble of angry might traveling through the cobblestone, shivering beneath my bare feet to crackle up my legs and bones, electrifying my bloodstream.

The Crowthers' Warband, veteran enforcers, were woefully unskilled in the face of his abilities. The inner courtyard echoed with the deafening clamor of soldiers shouting, the stampede of rushing men and women, the strikes of flesh on flesh, and the startled, pained cries of the wounded.

The fight had been ruthless and savage.

The stony ground was strewn with the injured.

There were moments when Graysen had moved so fast that even I couldn't see him. He was there and gone in a blink and it was impossible to determine where he'd appear next. His powerful body had been like a blade slicing through the air as he reappeared out of nowhere, twisting above the heads of the soldiers to land with a heavy thud amongst the throng, cracking cobbles beneath his boots. He'd become a gauzy blur of lethal tornado kicks, crescent, and ax, his legs and body spinning fluidly as he razed a path through the soldiers. Breaking bones. Knocking a few unconscious. Sending them toppling like dominoes.

I had watched it all with malevolence surging through my veins, the rancor tang of it coating my tongue.

I stood near the whipping post. My skirt was caught up by the blustering squalls, the sheer fabric fluttering around my figure. The wind swirled the loose locks of my hair around my face as icy currents buffered up against my skin, as chilling as the Arctic, as cold as moonlight.

Clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack.

I snapped the long length of my adamere bracelet into my palm, releasing and catching it, just as I'd always done when I was simmering with rage. The beads chinked up against one another in a steady rhythm with the fiendish melody of vengeance that sang in my heart.

I was drunk on retribution. Woozy with the reckoning unfolding before me.

It was intoxicating and I swilled it down, wanting more.

I didn't have my wyrm. I couldn't burn the Keep down and all the Crowthers in it. But I had Graysen. Just as his brothers had arrived at the Keep, it had occurred to me that perhaps there was a way I could twist him to do my bidding.

I continued to dig deep, gathering up my soul, my very being, powering my fury and hatred into it. I let it vibrate and skitter and shudder beneath my flesh like a quake that could shatter a mountain and bring it to its knees. I poured my craving for bloodshed, the scorching need for violence, into the otherworldly threads that bound Graysen to me, and I leaned, using the sway, just as he'd done yesterday. I turned Graysen into a weapon I could wield against his own blood kin.