Shingles give way beneath Ran’s claws. She leaps from a one story building to an inn, and shutters are torn from the dark wood as she climbs to the third story roof.

Think you could cost the people less in repairs? We’re trying to help Risia, not tear her down.

You try... this… and then tell me how easy it is to traverse the rooftops without damage.

She growls under her breath, sliding down an A-framed building—was that the Governor’s Seat?—and lands in a back alley where two sides of cloaked individuals fight with fist and blade.

I squint, trying to make out the vying factions. The moon glimmers off one body on the ground, and there's a brooch of a water serpent in front of a five-pointed star. And another body has a daisy surrounded by thorns.

Great. Some territory war from the Underground.

This typically stays truly underground, but there are times it seeps up into the actual city. But I can count the number of reasons they may be up here on one hand, and none of them are good.

There is one cloaked individual who sits back and watches who has no brooch, but she seems to be on the side of the thorns. Strange.

Ran plops down right on top of four individuals fighting over an object. The poor things are flattened to the ground and the object goes rolling, clinking into the wall.

It’s gold and it’s metal. And seems to be an important something I don’t want in the wrong hands.

If the Underground Guilds are fighting over it, I need to confiscate it. I duck as a whistling arrow blows over my head, smashing itself to pieces against the wall.

“Well, how do you like that for respect, Ran?” I say.

She growls, and I imagine her lips are pulled back to expose pale pink gums above those six-inch saber teeth. No respect in criminals these days. Remember the good old days when they actually ran when we showed up?

Those were the days, sure enough. We should put some respect in these guys, don’t ya think?

Are you kidding? Which one you want me to sit on?

I point to the archer who is two stories up overlooking the back alley that stinks of vomit, blood, and other things I don’t wish to name.

He pales and fumbles with his bow as he nocks another arrow with trembling fingers.

Ran’s tail wags in a circle before she rears, throwing me off and into a man who was poised to stab my bond from behind.

He lets out an oomph when I crash into him and he cushions my back when we collide with the greasy wall. My body takes over and I shove my elbow into his solar plexus and then crouch and shove my other elbow into his crotch.

He releases a high-pitched squeal and slumps into a fetal position on the ground.

One down, quite a few more to go.

I roll, narrowly avoiding a length of pipe that sends a ringing clamor through the air when it connects with the wall at my back. I pull two daggers from my bodice.

They are the dark blades I took from Silver–the silver-eyed assassin who is slowly worming his way into my life–and they shimmer like liquid darkness in the moonlight. I have grown to love the black blades just as much as my own.

I reach for where Rose was... and then panic when I can’t feel her. Oh… yeah. She’s not with me any longer, for good reason. It’s like a punch in the gut of grief that I must ignore for now.

I feel a tingling in the region she used to be, almost as if she were still there or a hint of her were returning… but I shake my head, focusing back on my surroundings. Wishful thinking doesn’t serve me at the moment.

There are four dark cloaked people on one side and three on my other. A few of them limp, and I imagine there are more bruises beneath those capes.

“You don’t know what you stumbled on,” the one without a brooch says, and I’m surprised at the feminine lilt. It has a musical quality that one would almost beg to listen to. I bet she can sing. But it also has something dark brewing beneath the surface... something cold that all the beauty in the world cannot hide. My empathy flares and brings a coldness seeping from my core that almost seems… familiar. It’s a shocking sensation that blocks me from seeing the other person’s emotions like a slab of ice, but as I try to retreat, it tries to entrap me.

I double over my middle as ice spreads from my chest and out through my fingers. Something hits my knife, and like an amateur, I had a loose grip on the blade and it clatters against the rocky ground. A fist comes for my face, and on pure instinct I grab and twist, bringing his arm over my shoulder and hyper-extending his elbow. I twist my remaining blade in my hand and stab behind me, hopefully not hitting anything too important. I have enough blood on my hands.

He backs away with a yowl of pain as I turn with a snarl as my Gift, thank all that is good, slowly recedes, merely leaving me with a cold pit in my stomach with dread pooling in the depths of my soul.

The woman speaks words under her breath and the next time she speaks, her voice is soft and delicate, reaching into my mind and filling it with soft clouds and fluffy puppies. “You don’t wish to fight us. You came to help, not fight. We need no help here,” she cajoles softly, like a mother speaking to a wayward child.

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“You don’t need any help,” I repeat, her words making perfect sense in the echoing region that has become my brain.

Something hits my head like a sledgehammer, then my ribs, which re-break on impact where they are hardly healed from the large battle with Darshius a few days ago. But I hardly feel it, even though something within screams at me that something is dreadfully wrong.

But all that is hardly relevant. They need no help here. I have nothing more to do.

Something yowls, a mix between wolf and cat, and scratching comes from somewhere in my mind. Then a force barrels into me and I’m shoved to the ground.

I hold my head, feeling like it’s going to burst and as if I’ve eaten an ocean’s worth of chilled sweet keifer. Brain freezes are the worst. “Ow,” I say.

You back? Ran asks, her voice strangely breathless in my mind as she pants above me.

I squint my eyes to see Ran poised over me, her nose inches from mine. She kicks out with a back leg, knocking a person into the wall. They sink down with a groan. My lips try to twitch despite the pounding in my head. She learned a thing or two from the mares she stayed with when the fairies turned her into a horse. She never would’ve dreamed of kicking out like that before.

Her nose touches my mouth and I gag.

What happened? I ask, wincing when my head tries to pound from my skull, but her nose gets pulled from my mouth, thank all that is good. And I thought you hated mouth to mouth?

I sit up. Ran licks my face then steps between me and those dark cloaked individuals, ignoring my questions, I might add. She pulls her lips into a silent snarl and all the fur on her back and mane stand on end, her posture rigid.

Fear and anger thrum in equal measure across the golden thread I always associate with my Bond.

NO ONE HURTS MY RIDER BUT ME! She roars, a sound that vibrates the ground we stand on and echoes against the walls and beyond into the city. Dogs bark and cats yowl in response to the sound. Cracks spiderweb out beneath her paws when she steps forward with her head lowered, the threat clear in every prowling inch of her glistening white self.

The golden ball is right beside me, so I grab it and put it in my cloak. It barely fits in one of the pocket’s grandma sowed with dark stitches. I smile, remembering how she worked so hard on this cloak, day and night. A part of me wonders... if father was Gifted... then was she? It’s theorized Gifts run through bloodlines.

Get your head back on, rider, Ran shouts into my mind as she darts forward to intercept a man trying to throw a knife. Badly, too. I can't throw knifes worth a flip but I'm an expert on how not to throw a knife. And he doesn't know Jack squat about throwing knives.

I shake away the wandering thoughts and roll to my feet. Then I scramble back from a cloaked individual swinging a sword like a mace.

“How—did you—do THAT?” she screeches between swings. She’s like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

I block a dagger and kick out, catching her in the chest. She gasps and stumbles back.

I twirl my blades, grimacing beneath the mask. “I’m just good like that.” What exactly am I saying I’m good at?

I got you out of mind control voodoo, Ran says, sounding highly annoyed that I’m getting credit for what she did.

Ahhh. So this woman did something to my mind. That’s not right. It makes me feel extra stabby.

She points her sword at me, her grip all wrong. “You will not get away a second time.”

I cock my head, then shove her sword aside and kick her once more in the chest, same spot, feeling something give. She stumbles back, gasping for the breath I knocked out of her. Then she screeches, and I’m tempted to cover my ears.

The girl has lungs the size of a dragon.

While she’s busy making my head pound like a drum on top of my already bursting headache, I stab her shoulder.

She made the mistake of letting her anger get the best of her. Life lesson right there.

The screech cuts off in a gurgle of pain, and she looks down at me with eyes that flash gold.

“Think that’ll stop me, little girl?” She pinches the blade between fingernails painted in red, pulling it from her flesh with a sucking sound. She drops it to the ground as if it were trash, blood splattering around the blade in a macabre display as the black blade glistens with the liquid.

Oops. I thought that would take her out.

Ran is much too busy with the rest of the men to help me with a magical mind controller. Looks like this is up to me.

Teeth flash beneath her hood as she smiles. If you’d call that a smile. It’s more a snarl of straight white teeth that are so perfect I’m slightly jealous.

I kick her in the nose. Her head snaps back, and the hood pops off.

“You—“ she goes into a tirade of curse words I don’t wish to repeat. She could make a sailor blush a pretty pink.

Then she whispers something, and already knowing where this is going, I tackle her around the waist before she can utter words that’ll mess with my mind again.

She goes down with a grunt of surprise, and we tumble to the ground in flailing arms and legs.

She pulls back and shoves her hand on my forehead, her face devoid of emotion. I’m suddenly in that place where all the boxes I’d held, all the memories I’d suppressed, were released during my battle with… I shove that out of my mind. That is a sad, terrifying place I do not want to revisit. Oops… seems I’ve created another box.

I’ll need to deal with that before it festers.

The orbs of light and memory float around me in this place that seems to be my soul, shadows drifting within them that are the people that made the memories special. Painful at times, sure. But special people make pain both harder and easier to bear.

But something wrong pounds against my soul, even as I glance at the memories in fascination.

I suck all my memories into a box to protect them from something echoing in my mind, except for one bubble that is pinched between two blood-red, pointy fingernails.

“So this is the Guardian. You aren’t so big and tough, are you?” She tsks, sounding disappointed. Her eyes snap up from my memory that is trying to escape her pincer-like grasp like a fish on a hook, and twin blue eyes pierce me. They are like a glacier on a sunny day, sparkling and slightly see through, but cold as Fifth. “But you followed me here. Can’t say that has ever happened before. What are you?” she asks, sounding a bit delighted and curious.

But it’s the curious delight of a snake strangling a rodent who bites back.

The bubble in her fingers draws my eye, and I see my cloaked face as if from a distance while Silver held me in his arms for the first time.

Disgust spreads through me, making my skin crawl.

“Let. It. Go,” I growl, stepping forward.

She tsks. “Oh, no no. You stay there. This is just getting interesting.” She waves a hand, and something like ice coats me from head to toe, stopping my forward movement. She doesn’t glance up from the memory unfolding before her.

I see Silver speaking in my ear, dressing my hand, holding me. And I shiver with the force I am trying to exert just to move to stop her from seeing the precious memory. I don’t want her touch tainting what Silver and I have.

Her seeing that part of me... that first time I felt safe in only The King knew how long, feels like bathing in tar. It sticks to you and sickens you to your core in a way that’s unexplainable.

I miss Rose.

“This... is... my... MIND!” I shout, pulling on Ran’s sliver of golden sunshine and something in the region of where Rose was that somehow brings a smell of sweetness with it and push a wave of... something out. It explodes around me in a glittering display of bright light, and when it reaches the woman, she grins, her porcelain skin and arched brows making her seem dastardly perfect... were it not for the cold eyes.

“This won’t be the last time you see me, Guardian,” she whispers, bursting into twinkling light and disappearing from my mind.