Page 10 of Bought By the Manticore

“Yes,” Phix replied, just as calm as before. “As long as you eventually go back on that stage.”

A silence settled between the three of us. Below, the harvesters kept working. Aion had reached a long trail of asphodels climbing the wall across the canal. He held his spheres close, and the flowers came apart with the same devastating ease.

Phix turned to watch.

Her forepaws gripped the railing. Her claws extended into the stone. Her wings pressed tight against her flanks, and her jaw clamped shut, rigid and unyielding. She stared down at the unraveling flowers, and the ancient lines of her face twisted into an unguarded grimace. Iaso caught my eye and shook her head.Not now.

I looked away. Whatever Phix saw as the flowers dissolved was none of my business.

Phix exhaled slowly. Then she spread her wings, launched from the railing, and was gone.

I tracked her flight toward the far side of the canal. When I looked back down at the avenue, Theron had moved farther along the street, his sphere carving a path through the overgrowth.

In the Blighted Lands, asphodels had lit a path through the darkness when I had nothing else to follow. They had bloomed ahead of me, steady and patient, the first living things to reach toward me instead of away from me. At the Agora, they had pressed close at the threshold of the stage. And now I stood on a balcony and watched them come apart into light and vanish.

“It’s sad,” I murmured.

If Iaso agreed with me, she didn’t show it. She brushed her fingers against my shoulder. “Come inside. You’ve been on your feet long enough.”

I let her guide me back through the archway. But I looked over my shoulder once at the avenue below. The asphodels ahead of the harvesters bloomed on, bright and stubborn and doomed. I wondered if I was as damned as them.

4

The Petal

Skaros & Ianthe

The meat was trying to keep me away from her.

I could taste Ianthe through the infirmary walls, faint and muffled by stone but unmistakable. All morning, I’d been pushing roots toward the building. And all morning, the two harvesters had been undoing my work.

“He’s at the steps again.” The furry one shook a tangle of stems from his leg and swept his death sphere across the stone. His presence pulsed with the heat of infernal fire, one that carried an unsettling familiarity. “I’ve cleared this stretch three times already.”

“I see him.” The bronze one knelt near the infirmary entrance and held his death sphere close to the cluster I’d forced through the cracks. The sphere glowed, and my asphodels loosened. The petals separated into threads of energy that streamed into the sphere.

It didn’t hurt. The sensation was closer to exhaling, a release that left me thinner, slightly hungrier. Then, the city’s energy fed me again, and the growing started over. Three fresh stems pushed up through the same crack before the bronze one had finished straightening.

“He’s stubborn today,” the furry one muttered.

He cared about what he was doing. I could taste it in his death energy every time he cleared a patch of my flowers. He didn’t tear the stems or rush the process. He swept his sphere in measured arcs and let the blooms unravel at their own pace. Even now, as he kicked a tendril loose from his ankle, there was a gentleness in the gesture that blended naturally with his heat.

“He’s pushing toward Iaso’s infirmary,” the furry one continued, clearing the south side of the avenue. “He’s never done this before. Not like this.”

“I know.” The bronze one moved along the wall, easing my asphodels from the masonry one stem at a time. “Something changed when the woman arrived.”

She was why I was pushing. Ianthe. The woman from the stage, the one who had turned the hunger inside me into somethingelse entirely. My mate was behind those walls, and every root I sent toward the building was a root reaching for her. No matter how many times the harvesters dissolved it, I’d keep growing it back. Because I needed to reach her.

“What are you thinking, Skaros?” the bronze one asked under his breath as he worked. Not to me, and not to the furry one. To the memory of whoever I had been.

Something stirred in me at the sound of my old name in his mouth. That word—Skaros—had meant so much when my mother spoke it, becoming an anchor once I became aware enough of myself to understand its weight. Coming from the bronze one, it was… not exactly the same. But perhaps that wasn’t a bad thing.

A sudden flash brought back what it felt like to have companions who understood me. Once, the ground had blurred beneath me as I ran, as I flew. And back then, this harvester had been my friend. Maybe he still was.

“We have to keep him back from the infirmary, Aion,” the furry one said. “Ianthe nearly died on that stage. If the asphodels reach her and the thorns react the way they reacted to the crowd… the consequences could be dire.”

Aion. The bronze one was Aion. The name settled into place beside Skaros with easy certainty, as if I’d known it all along.

They were talking about my mate. They feared that I could harm her. I wanted to scream at them, to tell them I never would. But I had no voice, no words. And all I could do was grow.