Chapter 6: Blood on the Stairs

Cassian

Bram's voice cracks through my door at first light. "Alpha. The blade. You need to see this now."

I'm already moving.

Lyra meets me at the top of the tower stairs, pale, hair wild, pointing at the pillow like it's a snake.

"Nobody came in," she says. "The door was locked. Your men were outside all night."

I pick it up before she can stop me.

"Don't," she starts.

Too late. The moment my fingers close around the hilt, cold shoots up my arm.

Click.

I'm on my knees. Blood everywhere. Lanterns burning overhead. My own hand, reaching for a wound that hasn't happened yet, and somewhere close, too close, a blade catching the firelight.

It lasts less than a second. It feels like a year.

I drop the knife like it's burned me, and in a way, it has.

"You felt it," Lyra says. "Didn't you?"

"Everyone. Out." My voice comes out low and hard. The two guards at the door snap straight. "Nobody touches this blade. Nobody speaks of it. Bram, with me."

Lyra grabs my sleeve. "Cassian, someone got past armed guards, a locked door, and a forty-foot drop, and left a murder weapon on my pillow. That's not a warning. That's a message."

"I know."

"To who? Me or you?"

"I don't know that either." I pull free, gentler than I mean to. "Stay here. Bar the door behind me."

"Like that's worked so far."

She's not wrong. I don't have an answer for her, so I leave before she can ask for one.

---

Bram and I take the blade to the armory, wrap it in oilcloth, and lock it in the one vault only the two of us can open. My hands are shaking again by the time the lid shuts.

"That memory," Bram says quietly. "The one in the knife. Was it the same?"

"Yes."

"Alpha..."

"Say it."

"Someone inside this keep can bypass your wards. That narrows the list. Guards on the tower detail. Household staff with tower access." He hesitates. "The Oracle has tower access."

"I know what you're implying."

"I'm not implying anything I haven't already told you to your face."

I don't answer, because he's right, and because some small, cowardly part of me still doesn't want to hear it.

We're halfway down the west stair when the torches gutter out.

All of them. At once. Like someone snuffed every flame in the corridor with one breath.

"Bram..."

The first arrow takes him in the shoulder.

He goes down with a grunt, and I'm already moving, shoulder into the nearest doorway, wolf surging up under my skin before I've even decided to let it. A second arrow splits the wood an inch from my ear.

"Archer," I snarl. "West gallery."

"I see him."

Bram's on one knee, blood soaking his collar, sword already in his good hand. Good man. I'll thank him later, if there is a later.

Footsteps. Not one set. Several, converging from both ends of the corridor, quiet and practiced. This isn't a drunk with a grudge. This is trained.

I count four shapes in the dark. Then six. All armed. All moving with the flat, economical silence of men who have done this before and expect to do it again.

This is not a mob. Mobs are loud. Mobs are angry and clumsy and easy to break. This is a hunting party, and I am the deer.

"They knew the patrol schedule," Bram mutters. "They knew exactly when the torches would be low on oil."

"They knew where I'd be."

That's the part that turns my stomach. Nobody outside this keep could have known I'd be on this stair at this hour. This wasn't planned last night.

It was planned this morning.

The first man reaches me. I break his arm before he gets his blade up, and the wolf does the rest, faster than thought, until he's on the ground and not getting up. The second one is smarter. He goes for my legs instead of my throat.

I take a cut along my ribs for that mistake. Hot. Deep enough to matter.

"Cassian!"

Lyra's voice, from above, sharp with panic.

"Get back inside!" I roar.

She doesn't. Of course she doesn't. I hear her boots on the stairs, and my heart does something violent and stupid, because she is running toward the fight, not away from it, straight past two guards who are too busy holding the stairwell to stop her.

"There's a fifth one," she shouts. "Behind you, above the arch!"

I turn. I see him. Crossbow already leveled, already loosing.

There's no time to dodge.

There's time to grab Lyra, who has just reached the landing, and shove her against the wall, putting my own back to the bolt instead of hers.

It buries itself between my ribs.

The pain is enormous and strangely distant, like it's happening to someone else. My knees go. Lyra catches me, both arms around my chest, and I feel her whole body shaking.

"No," she's saying. "No, no, absolutely not, you do not get to do this."

"Move," I try to say. It comes out as a wheeze.

"Bram!" she screams. "Bram!"

Somewhere above us, the crossbowman is reloading. I can hear the crank. Lyra's hands are pressed flat against my chest, exactly the way I saw them in the vision, exactly the way they were when she was saving me, and some dim, fading part of my brain thinks, ah. There it is.

Then she moves.

Not to run. To fight.

She wrenches the fallen guard's short blade out of his slack hand, plants herself in front of me like a wall, and looks up at the crossbowman with an expression that would make grown wolves flinch.

"Try it," she says.

Bram's arrow takes the man in the throat before he can.

He drops his crossbow. It clatters down three flights and lands somewhere far below. The remaining attackers, three of them still standing, take one look at their dead friend, at Bram advancing with blood-soaked steel, at me on the ground and clearly not finished, and they run.

Cowards. Good. I hate a fight that isn't over quickly.

"Cassian." Lyra's face swims into view above me. Her hands are shaking so hard the blade drops from her fingers. "Stay awake. Stay awake, look at me."

"I'm awake," I grind out. "Bolt's not fatal. Missed the lung."

"You don't know that."

"I do. I've been shot before."

"That is not comforting."

I almost laugh. It comes out as a cough instead, and blood flecks my lips, and her face goes white.

"Bram," she snaps, not looking away from me. "Healer. Now. And someone find out who these men are."

"On it." Bram's already moving, shouting orders down the stairwell, guards pouring in from both directions now, entirely too late to matter.

Lyra doesn't move. She stays exactly where she is, both hands pressed to the wound at my side, warm and steady, holding me together with nothing but her own two palms and pure stubbornness.

"You threw yourself in front of a crossbow bolt," she says. "For me."

"You ran toward six armed men. For me."

"That's different."

"How."

"Because I'm not supposed to matter that much to you yet," she says, and her voice cracks right down the middle. "We've known each other for three days."

"Tell that to my wolf."

She lets out a breath that's half a laugh, half a sob, and presses down harder on the wound, and I watch her face while the world starts to gray at the edges, because it is, without question, the best thing I have to look at.

"Don't you dare," she whispers. "Don't you dare die on me before I get to yell at you properly."

The last thing I hear, before the dark takes me, is her voice, furious and terrified and closer to my ear than it has any right to be.

"Cassian. Cassian. Somebody help me, he's not breathing right."

And then nothing.