The Covenant
1080 Words
"I need you to trust me for the next sixty seconds," Zayn said.
"You rejected me in front of five hundred people."
"I know."
"Why would I trust you."
"Because I'm asking," he said. "And I don't ask."
From the tree line, shadows became shapes, then wolves, too many to count in the time she had left to count them. Sera's forty had already fanned into a defensive line at the fence, blades drawn, and behind them Sofia could hear Voss's twelve regrouping on the embankment, unsure now whether to fight for their master or simply survive the next five minutes.
Sofia raised her marked wrist. The gold light, no, silver, she reminded herself, silver, pulsed hot against her skin like it had been waiting all night for permission.
She didn't know the words until they were already leaving her.
"I am Sofia, daughter of Mara, heir of the First Blood. I call the covenant into witness."
The mark didn't glow. It detonated.
Silver light burst outward, flattening the grass in a perfect ring, shattering Voss's mirror with a crack like breaking bone, dropping two of his men where they stood. The wave rolled through the crowd of watching wolves, through Sera's line, through the terrace itself, and every torch on the grounds guttered at once before flaring back twice as bright.
Voss stumbled back on the embankment, and for the first time his pale eyes showed something honest.
Fear, real this time, not the flicker she'd caught in the council hall.
Zayn hadn't moved. The wave broke over him and he stood in it, rooted, and in its wake the bond between them turned visible, a silver thread pulled taut from his chest to hers, glowing faint against the smoke and the dark.
He covered her marked wrist with his hand.
"I was wrong to reject you," he said, low enough only she could hear. "Say what you need to about that later. Right now, we fight."
Mordain's wolves broke from the trees, and the night came apart.
Zayn shifted before anyone gave an order.
One moment he stood at her shoulder, solid, human, blood already drying on his collar from a cut she hadn't noticed him take. The next, a wolf the size of a draft horse launched itself at the charging line, and the silver thread between them snapped taut with an audible resonance, a sound like a bowstring pulled past its limit, yanking him backward mid air.
He landed badly, three paws skidding in the mud, and turned to look at her with an expression that was, even on a wolf's face, unmistakably furious.
"You can't be serious," she said.
The amber eyes didn't change.
He padded back, lowered his massive frame, and waited with the specific patience of something that has decided arguing is a waste of the seconds it doesn't have. She grabbed a fistful of dark fur, put one foot against his flank, and pulled herself up before her nerve could catch up to what she was doing.
He moved before she had both hands set.
The first leap covered twenty feet. The landing wasn't gentle, the impact traveling up through his body into hers like a collision with moving stone. He crashed into the leading edge of the charge, shifted back to human the instant his feet hit ground, and the platform she'd been sitting on disappeared with no warning at all.
She hit the dirt on both palms and one knee, gravel biting into her hands hard enough to draw blood.
When she looked up, Zayn was already moving through three of Voss's men, and it didn't look like fighting so much as correction, precise, unhurried, a man erasing mistakes one at a time. He put them down and kept moving, and Sofia pushed herself upright with her jaw set and said nothing about the fall, because there wasn't time to say anything about anything.
Three more circled toward her from the left. No wolf. No weapon. No training that applied. Nineteen years of scrubbing floors had taught her legs exactly one useful skill, staying out of the way, and staying out of the way was no longer an option.
She stood and watched them come, and hated herself a little for the freezing, and couldn't stop it.
Something detonated in Zayn's blood.
He crossed forty feet at a speed that owed nothing to human anatomy, and the three men circling her barely had time to register his approach before he was between them and her.
The first blade caught his shoulder.
The second found his ribs.
The third he saw coming and moved into rather than away from, taking it across his back from shoulder to hip, because the angle had him and he chose to absorb it rather than let it reach a different target.
He put all three of them on the ground anyway.
Then he stood, breathing hard, his back to Sofia, blood soaking warm and fast through his shirt.
Voss's remaining men regrouped. Numbers. Position. Every angle covered except the ten foot stretch of stone railing directly behind her, and past it, thirty feet of dark air with nothing underneath.
Cornered.
"Sofia, the shockwave!" Sera's voice cut through the press of bodies, ragged, urgent.
Sofia looked at her marked wrist. The gold light was gone now, silver again, dimmer than it had been, spent from the covenant and the fight both. She didn't think, because thinking would have stopped her, and stopping wasn't a thing she could afford with Zayn bleeding in front of her and the railing at her back and nowhere else to put the fear building in her chest.
She slammed her palm against the stone.
The mark met the railing and the world came apart.
White light, not silver, blinding and total, detonating downward instead of out. Three hundred years of foundation, never built to withstand a First Blood heir pressing her full mark against it in a state of pure, unfiltered need, fractured along every fault line at once. The stone under her feet groaned, then screamed, then simply stopped existing.
She had approximately one second of awareness, the ground opening, Zayn's hand closing hard around her wrist, the roar of stone giving way beneath them, before the dark swallowed them both whole.
The last thing she heard, falling, was Voss's voice from somewhere above, sharp with the first real feeling she'd ever heard in it.
Not anger. Not command.
Fear.
- Writer
