Page 22 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers
The scream breaks out of me. “Keeva!”
Footsteps hammer the ground, and the door rips wide open. Moonlight streams in and Keeva’s eyes widen. A strangled noise sounds in her throat as her gaze finds Finn’s.
Keeva collapses.
Our father stumbles past her and falls to his knees beside me in the dirt. “How?” Tears streak down his ruddy cheeks.
Finn’s eyes don’t leave me. The tears gathering in them fall, but she just keeps staring. “No,” she rasps.
And I don’t have the heart to tell her, even as the secret sinks like poison into my bones.
The price for her life wasmine.
At some point in the dark hours before dawn, after the black rot begins to fade from Finn’s fingertips and the heat of her skin cools, I change and let myself collapse onto my lumpy old mattress on the other side of the room.
Sleep brushes milky tendrils around my mind but never fully claims me.
Even from across the room, I can hear Finn’s steady breathing, and it’s the sweetest sound in the world.
But I can’t shake the tightness in my chest or the prickle of dread crawling up my spine.
The same haunting unease that I felt on the street presses up against me as the darkness of early morning fades into the thin violet just before dawn. I strain to pick apart every rustle and creak and whisper of wind outside our shack.
That’s when I hear it.
Soft at first, then louder with every crash of panic in my veins.
The muffled clink of sheathed swords and pebbles crunching under too many boots.
They’re coming.
My brain screams, and I fight to hurl the blankets off me. Rough whispers slither through the slats from outside the door, and terror turns me into stone as I realize—
They’re already here.
SEVEN
The gardai explode through the door.
Terror paints my vision white. Rough hands grab for me, and pain erupts where one of the gardai seizes a handful of hair and rips me out of bed onto the dirt floor.
He yanks me up with a savage growl and shakes me so hard my teeth clack. One catches the inside of my mouth, and blood bursts across my tongue.
How did they find me?
“Let her go!” Finn’s furious roar rips from her side of the room, but a deep cough follows. Blankets go flying, and she stumbles, legs still shaking and weak.
Our father clatters in from the back room, takes one look at me, and slinks back, barring the door to his room behind him. I instinctively look for Keeva, then remember she left to open her stall for the day.
But Finn, she lunges for the table in the middle of the room—and her short sword there.
“Let. Her. Go.” This time, her words are deadly soft.
Her eyes move across the room, assessing the gardai.
My stomach lurches.
Eight against two is a death sentence.
