Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

The sap slid down Cinder’s throat like burning honey. She swallowed it hard.

Then her whole body went rigid.

Her coat lit past gold, past white, until the brightness became too much for Aiden’s eyes. He had to look at the wall beside her instead.

Light pulsed from her in waves. The stone slabs ticked and shifted with each pulse. Beneath her, the black glass softened and sank into a shallow bowl.

Her breathing slowed and deepened. Her shoulders lifted. The flares along her spine stood taller than they ever had.

She lay in the back of the shelter, burning as the evolution began.

The heat of her would have cooked a man to the bone at ten feet. Aiden knelt at five, and Solar Plexus held. His core climbed to meet hers. His skin darkened like coal under the heat.

Five seconds.

That’s all I’ve got.

He kept his hand on her neck and watched for the cost.

The evolution had started. So far, the System had taken nothing from him.

So far.

The two worst words I know.

Three seconds passed. The System still hadn’t appeared.

He let go of her neck and ran twenty paces to the entrance.

He kept going. He was all that stood between Cinder and the entrance while she was helpless.

He looked back once more.

"Even if you can’t see me, I’m with you, Cinder." He turned to the cat. "Stay with her."

The cat went within four feet of Cinder, closer than any man could, before he finished speaking.

It stood in front of her, claws ready, glaring down the path.

Don’t burn out trying to go too fast, girl. Slow is fine. Slow keeps you alive.

"Keep her steady," Aiden said. "If she pushes too fast, bring her down."

The cat did not dignify this with a response. It had been doing that since before Aiden knew it needed to.

Aiden went to the entrance.

At the entrance, he found the remains of an old barricade.

The dead harvester had blocked the entrance once. Aiden could see the remains now: old timber wedged between the stones, burned down to charcoal. A one-night barricade, built by a man who never made it to morning.

Aiden put his shoulder to what was left of it and looked down the narrow path.

One way in. Two men wide at the most.

Best odds I’ve had all month. They’re still terrible.

"Nyx. Dark when I call it. Not before. Let them burn their lamps getting up here."

The shadow shifted on his shoulder, then froze when its pale eyes found the giant scaled beast watching them from across the entrance.

I know. We’re not touching it.

Miasma was already in position, at the narrowest point of the path. Spines up. Venom beading at the tips.

Aiden pulled a thread of Acid Weave from his palm.

He strung it across the entrance at ankle height, anchoring it to the leaning slab on one side and a knob of cooled glass on the other.

A man comes through here fast in the dark, he finds it with his shin.

It eats iron in four seconds. It won’t care what a shin is made of.

Then the lamps appeared at the top of the slope, and the planning part of the night was over.

Vane’s men came up carefully, a line of handlers in heavy gloves.

Aiden saw the important thing in the first second.

They had long hooked poles. A folded net between two of them. And behind that, their tamed beasts hauled up the Ice Heart on its cold-iron cradle.

They had no torches to burn the shelter down.

The net and the cradle are for Cinder. They want her alive now. To study how she had evolved when the cold had her on the brink of death.

The poles are for me.

They can’t burn this shelter with me inside. They need me whole. Harken wants me to teach him how I evolved Cinder. If it can’t be taught, he’ll have a cell ready and a flood of beasts lining up outside it for me to evolve.

So they have to walk in. That’s the whole gap.

"Halt!" one of the men in the good coats shouted.

The neat line of Vane’s men halted. They all turned as one toward the enormous beast watching the place they were attacking.

They stayed there for a moment, hands on their weapons, eyes on the beast’s scales and wings. Their beasts tensed at the ends of their leashes.

Or they get scared by the sentinel and leave. That would be good. Too good...

Then their leader waved forward, and the march resumed. "The dragon’s not attacking. Proceed."

"Come on, then!" Aiden said to the boot of the dead man who had held this same door on his own bad night. "You want me. One at a time is all this door gives you."

He didn’t hear what the leader had called the beast. It didn’t matter. He kept his eyes on the handler who reached the entrance first.

The man found the thread with his shin.

The Acid Weave ate through the boot and the flesh beneath it. The man went down across the threshold, screaming.

The two behind him stopped and flinched half a step back.

They stared at their colleague, clutching his leg as steam rose from sizzling flesh. The flesh melted, exposing grey bone that softened and sagged beneath it. The hands clutching the wound began to steam as well.

Half a step was all Miasma needed.

She sprang from the stone and landed on the second man’s gloved hand. She bit into the gap between the glove and his sleeve, then drove her venom into his wrist.

The handler’s fingers loosened around the pole. It slipped from his hand and clattered onto the glass. He staggered backward into the man behind him.

"Now," Aiden said.

Nyx dropped over the entrance and spread across the ground beyond it.

The lamps kept burning. No one could see their light.

Aiden watched a handler lift his own lamp toward his face and fail to find it.

"It’s the same wretched power that blinded at the slope." Someone screamed.

They’ve got numbers. Numbers are worth nothing without organisation.

The line broke.

Nyx moved across the disoriented men, sliding a paw through throats and spines. Bodies hit the ground, and handlers lost their voices midscream.

Then someone commanded, his voice calm. "Don’t panic! Put a hand on the shoulder of the man in front of you. Back out of the darkness."

They retreated slowly. Not far. Just back down the slope to where their lamps caught again.

They regrouped, cursed, and counted who was missing.

Aiden counted too. Six men lay paralyzed on the ground, fewer than he had hoped for.

They’ve already come up with a strategy against Nyx’s dark. That wave was just to test our defenses.

The expensive one is still coming.

Aiden stood in the entrance as Miasma climbed back onto his arm and Nyx settled onto his shoulder.

He let himself have one breath that tasted like winning.

One. He had learned exactly how long to let those last.

They’ll come back with more lanterns. More rope. Men with the patience to keep coming because they get paid either way.

This shelter holds one wave. It doesn’t hold ten.

And the sentinel had not moved.

Twenty feet away, it still lay where it had settled. It had watched men try to enter the shelter while Cinder evolved and done nothing.

It didn’t help. It didn’t stop them.

It’s still watching, and it’ll keep watching until something interesting happens.

I have a horrible feeling I know what it’s waiting for.

Aiden turned back to check on Cinder.

Just as he did, Nyx went rigid on his shoulder.

The old rigid. The one from the ridge and the second shelf.

He turned back to the entrance and looked past the regrouping lamps, down the dark slope below them.

The hole in the golden motes was back.

Cold, in the one country that burned everywhere.

The Frost Wolf climbed the black glass behind the handlers. Vane’s men had driven it back up the mountain. The wound from the grove still burned through its hide. The hunger beneath it had not changed.

The Frost Wolf. They sent it back up the mountain.

Aiden clenched his jaw, his face hard.

Cinder was still evolving, blazing brighter every minute. Light spread at his feet, long and wide through the entrance. She had never held that much fire, and she could not spend a second of it defending herself.

Of course. That’s the second wave. It had to be.

Cinder turns herself into a beacon, and that damn wolf comes straight for her. Perfect.

Aiden watched the cold coming for the helpless light, and understood that the worst part of the night, the part the sentinel was waiting to find interesting, was still climbing the mountain toward his one bitten door.

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