Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 92392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 462(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 308(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 462(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 308(@300wpm)
One syllable.
And I sat in the dirt of my mother's island with the sound vibrating through my ribs like a bell that had just been struck.
I felt pride.
Hot.
Animalistic.
Unreasonable pride.
The kind that arrived before sense could stop it. The kind that made men walk into fire believing the fire would respect them, instead of burn their flesh away.
Was it dangerous, feeling victory before Akiro and the Fox fell?
Probably.
Yet, hope followed that unreasonable pride the way fire followed a fuse.
And my hope was just as unreasonable as my pride. This was the sort of hope history warned men against. The sort that had walked great armies into the mouths of mountains and called it destiny.
Yet. . .I let that hope come anyway because in the end. . .a man fighting without hope was already half a corpse, and I intended to be very much alive by morning.
“War is right.” I rose from the dirt like a man buried alive who refused to stay down.
Soil covered my palms. I dusted it off and still saw the black lines the ritual had burned into my skin.
Will those lines ever leave?
The dragon-shadow leaned his large wispy head to the side, and his dark voice filled my ears. “No, but our Tiger will not mind them.”
Our Tiger. Not your Tiger. It appears my dragon-shadow is claiming her too.
The dragon-shadow widened his glowing eyes.
I claimed her before you. His voice arrived in my head from everywhere at once, pressing through the skull and settling in the soft corners of my brain.
I am going to have to get used to this.
I swallowed. “When did you claim her?”
In our office and on the first day we ever saw her.
“Hmmm.”
I liked her scent.
“Me too.”
We are the same.
“I see.” I looked around.
The clearing had emptied—red capes gone, torchlights guttering down to coals, smoke rising thin and white where the flames had been. The forest had swallowed the Death Guardian and the Silent Ones the same way the sea swallowed Akiro's scout plane earlier.
Then, warmth arrived in the center of my chest.
That’s Nyomi?
We feel her now. . .because of the bond.
“We. . .do. . .it’s odd but. . .it’s like she is. . .inside of me.” I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and held still. That sensation spread outward through my ribs. It was a compass needle swinging toward a fixed point somewhere behind me, east, below the ground. “She’s in the Bamboo Garden’s building.”
She is.
“Safe.”
Yes.
“But. . .” The emotion traveling through the bond was hot, expanding, and aimed at a target I could not see. “Rage.”
Pure.
Total.
Ferocious.
My jaw locked. “We must go to her.”
She is angry, but she is safe.
I wanted to put myself between her and whatever had lit that fury. And even more, I wanted to hold my Tiger, press my mouth to her forehead, and let her burn against me so she knew she would never have to face anything alone.
She is angry, but she is not afraid.
My dragon-shadow was correct. There was confidence in the rage. In fact, it landed in my chest harder than the warmth had. My Tiger, alone in a basement with a war on the island, had discarded fear entirely and was victorious in her own battle.
The heat of her rage moved through the bond the way wanting her did—low, insistent, impossible to separate from my own pulse.
I frowned. “She’s. . .different, but. . .I don’t know how to explain it.”
It was not only rage.
I had felt rage before. My own. Other men's. The sort that lived in the chest like a coal that never went fully dark. I knew its texture. Its temperature. The particular way it moved through the blood with intention.
This was not only that.
Beneath the rage there was a quiet that was soft and collapsing.
What is that?
I closed my eyes and sat in the emotion.
Grief.
It pressed against the inside of my sternum the way a hand pressed against a door it did not want to open.
Nyomi's grief.
Inside of me.
I opened my eyes.
Grief for Hiroko? Grief for those whom we may lose tonight?
The forest continued around me—wind through the high branches, the distant percussion of the war finding the island's eastern edge, smoke drifting thin and pale through the dark between the trunks.
I pressed both hands flat against my chest and held them there.
I had drunk from a bowl, bled onto a blade, and she had put her mouth to my palm. And our souls had crossed between us. And I could feel her deeply even though I did not have the language for all of these feelings yet.
The ritual had a name.
The Death Guardian had given it a name.
But names were containers, and what moved through me now was too large for the container.
Her soul was not a thing I could hold in cupped hands.
It was a weather system.