Fierce Like a Firestorm by Lana Popovic

Author:Lana Popovic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

IT WAS NOT QUITE TIME TO MOUNT THE HUNT.

Before the moment struck, he needed to summon soldiers.

After some sifting through her ingested memories, he had led Vera back to her dwelling place, in a simple cinder-block building outside the blackened walls of a stone settlement. This city they called Cattaro had the savor of the ages to it, the smoky sense of a place well-cured by the passage of the centuries.

And he recognized the craggy mountains well, the ones that reared like the rocky limbs of half-buried titans against the city’s back.

He had climbed them all once to reach her, and soon he would scale them once again.

No one had troubled them on their way, not that it would have slowed them unduly if anyone had. Still, he had preferred finding seclusion undisturbed. Though Vera’s light had momentarily appeased the Lightless’s unslakable hunger, Herron had found that without the sharper edges of its need spurring him on, he was troublingly far from full strength. Some corded weight wrapped around him, invisible. A rope of something clear and cold, like rattling blocks of ghostly ice strung on an equally ghostly chain.

As if the pillar that had once pinned him still partially remained, haunting him like a specter of its former form. It would take at least a week to gain enough strength to make more pet soldiers like Vera, even if he started now on summoning his bannermen.

Now he sat on Vera’s carpeted floor, garbed in clothing she had found for him—things of her time that fit him well enough, belonging to a lover or one of her kin—with a very reluctant calico kitten squirming on his lap. It was the only one young enough not to have vanished into some nook or cranny as soon as he crossed the threshold.

“No need for so much concern yet, tiny sweetling,” he purred at it, fondling a neck barely thicker than his thumb. The cat wasn’t inclined to do any purring of its own; its bright yellow eyes were round as an owl’s, the pupil drowning out the iris. Every once in a while it let out a frantic little mewl, and its heart thrummed so fast inside its tiny chest he could hear it, like the whirring of crickets. “For the moment I am content to simply enjoy the feel of you.”

In response, it hissed and drove its claws into the webbing of his hand.

“Oh, very rude of you, brash creature,” he said, clucking his tongue at it. “And perhaps not so useful in preserving your little life.”

Where the claws had pierced his skin, scarlet welled up, rimmed with pearling, inky black. The tendrils of Lightless strained toward the kitten’s velvet nose, and before he could call them back they had already plunged. The cat went rigid in his cupped hands, back bowed as far as it would go.

Its soul was much less dense than Vera’s had been, light and porous as dandelion fluff, and in moments he had consumed the totality of what it had known and loved.

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