I’d never met Tadmir, so I had no way of knowing if it’d been his voice in my head or not.
My nose scrunched.
Then I shook my head.
“There’s really only one way to find out,” I continued. “We’ll just take the stonepecker and, uh, run some spells to find out who sent it.” I grimaced with the words, not liking the idea of playing with a dead animal. But I didn’t see another option, and the looks coming from my mates said they didn’t either.
“You’re the commander of the creatures now,” Kols said. “That makes you closest to them.”
“And you can use my magic to see if there are any messages left within his death,” Shade added.
I nodded. “Great. Okay. I just need to get it from Zimney.”
Take the dead stonepecker out of the beast’s mouth. Right. Easy. Every day task. Yep.
I shivered as I stepped toward him, the metallic scent all wrong. It made my nose scrunch, unlike the pouches I’d drank from a bit ago. Probably because this blood came from a corpse.
“Aflora?” Zeph said. “Do you want…?” Zimney growled as he took a step toward the wolf. “Or, maybe not.”
“He won’t give it to me, either,” Zakkai muttered. “And he’s my familiar.”
“It’s fine,” I said, stealing a deep breath and kneeling before the beast. I held out my hand. “I’ll do”—Zimney dropped the stonepecker into my palm—“it.”
Energy hummed through the air, causing the hairs along my arms to dance.
My forehead crinkled, the sensation leaving me queasy.
“Uh, guys?” I asked. “Do you all feel that, or…?” I started to turn as I spoke, only to realize the room no longer existed around me.
My mates were gone.
Zimney had disappeared, too.
Just the stonepecker remained.
Aflora!Zakkai’s voice echoed through my mind, his presence oddly distant.
Kai?
The stonepecker began to writhe on my palm, causing me to drop it in alarm. Roots shot up out of it as it spun across the dark space at my feet.
“I’d grab those if I were you,” a deep voice said from the shadows.
“What?” I spun around, searching for the source.
Then the stonepecker began to whine and my mates all yelled in my head.
I looked down to see the creature twisting into smoke, the roots the only part left behind.
Except no… those weren’t roots. They’re souls, I realized, recognizing the essence from Shade’s Death Blood magic courses.
The beings twisted in agony, their hums of magic familiar.
I reached for them on instinct—all four strands—then jolted as they shot out in all different directions, their ends securing themselves to the inky walls around me.
What…?
The beings began to stretch, causing me to cry out as they dug their opposite ends into my palms, their roots deep and solid and joining with my being. Again. Like they were always a part of me, and it was the atmosphere around us that had forced me to release them.