“Storm!” I cry, her name torn out of me without my consent. My hands find their way to her head and I pour in healing magic. The neurons are still sparking. I can still save her!

  I have never concentrated this hard. Never drawn on my healing knowledge as much as now, not even with Kalanthia so recently. Every minute that I remember of biology class, everything I have learned since gaining Lay-on-Hands and then Flesh-Shaping. I use all of it to desperately try to grasp the final sparks of life within my Bound and keep them afire.

  But one by one, they die out, and even all my magic is unable to relight them. There’s a plant-based poison on the spear which resists my magic and slows me down even as it increases the pace of destruction. Her health energy drains out of her – and it was never a very big pool to start with.

  When Storm’s brain goes unresponsive, I refuse to believe it. I keep pouring magic into her body. Her pulse is still beating, she can still be saved! I just need to get rid of this damn poison! I managed with Kalanthia who had a rotten heart and half-rotten brain!

  Yet even that hope dies when her heart slows and then stops before I can even begin to clear the destructive agent. The silence of her unmoving heart is almost deafening.

  I pour in even more magic, doing my best to search for some way of holding her. But if her soul has already gone…. Her soul!

  I reach for our Bond…and arrive in my Core space just in time to see it disintegrate. A gut-clenching feeling of grief goes through me, just adding to the ache that’s still there from Honey’s loss, and I drift back to full awareness to hear a horrible moan rattling in my ears. It’s only when I run out of breath that I realise it’s coming from me.

  I stare down at the body before me. Storm. The cub who I once saved from lizogs. The last litter of her dead pack. The plucky, adventurous cub who has grown into a brave and bold hunter. Sister to Ninja. Precious cub to Bastet. Beloved pack-mate to all of my Core members. She has been part of us for far longer than she’s been old enough to hunt. In fact, apart from Lathani and arguably Bastet, she and Ninja have been with me the longest of everyone. It seems so wrong that that journey should end here. That she would be cut down in such a way.

  The spear is still sticking through her skull – I was so concerned that pulling it out might cause more damage that I didn’t dare remove it. But it doesn’t matter now.

  I grab the spear with one shaking hand and slowly, gently remove it. Storm might be…gone. But that doesn’t mean I want to cause her body more harm than has already happened. It’s illogical, but I don’t care.

  My vision expands a little more. I’ve been so fixated on Storm that I couldn’t see anything else, but now I notice that Bastet and Ninja are both here too. Ninja moves to lick at Storm’s muzzle, practically crying as she desperately tries to make her sister wake up.

  Bastet has moved to lie beside Ninja, her head on Ninja’s back legs and outstretched wing. I feel her hope and confidence in my ability to heal her cub as she looks at me trustingly. The sensation cuts through me like a knife.

  “I’m sorry,” I croak, barely even able to make myself voice the words. I can’t bear losing that trust in me to make everything better, but at the same time, it’s not fair to let her keep believing when all is lost. Storm is…Storm is dead. And I can’t bring her back.

  The loss of hope and her dawning sense of grief is even worse than I expected it to be. I feel sick to my stomach and barely hold onto the contents of it as her mourning crashes into me from across our Bond. Combined with my own grief and guilt and Ninja’s own emotions, it feels like a whirlpool of emotion that’s dragging me down to drown in its depths. This is worse than anything I’ve ever experienced, even my grief after losing my father.

  I can do nothing but stare almost blindly at the three of them, the dead and the living. I want to comfort both Bastet and Ninja, but I’m paralysed by guilt. I feel culpable for them being in this place at this time, and like a failure for being unable to heal Storm. My guilt stops me from offering the two raptorcats comfort, but at the same time, it prevents me from moving away either. I deserve to be here to witness their suffering, to see the depths of my failure as a leader and healer.

  It takes longer than it should for me to realise that someone’s calling my name.

  -arkus, Markus! Can you hear me? Markus!

  I hear you, I reply. Or I think I do. I’m not even sure if my mouth moves, but these days it doesn’t have to in order to speak.

  Your emotions are overflowing! You need to close the Bonds!

  My emotions are overflowing? It takes long moments for my numb brain to process the words, but when I do, my guilt intensifies. The Bonds. So useful for conveying an emotional state, but right now a distraction we can’t afford.

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  Closing the Bonds takes little more than a thought. Abruptly, my mind feels clearer. I hadn’t realised just how much I was being affected by Bastet and Ninja. Of course, I still feel an intense sense of grief and loss, an ache in my soul which happened when Honey died too, but this time it’s significantly more powerful. It’s less overwhelming than a moment ago, though, as is my guilt. I can actually move my gaze away from Ninja, something I wasn’t capable of just before.

  And then I see him. A Warrior, held to the ground by Shrieks and Catch with his hands already restrained behind his back. There must have been a struggle while I wasn’t paying attention, but I don’t care about that.

  I’m sorry, Tamer, Shrieks says with guilt and recrimination clear in his spikes, even if I’ve shut his Bond off like all the others. I had thought that this one was safely confined with the others. He must have slipped out somehow.

  A incandescent rage goes through me, hot enough that I fear I’ve just lit myself on fire by accident. Pushing myself to my feet, an action that had felt impossible only a moment ago, is suddenly effortless. I feel like I’m almost hovering above the ground as I walk towards the Warrior, my steps light and empty of sensation. All my focus is on glaring at the Warrior before me.

  He looks up and the snarl on his face fades. Fear replaces defiance in his spikes and he starts pulling at his bonds frantically.

  “Get off him,” I growl in a voice that even I don’t recognise. I’ve never spoken so calmly, or so coldly. It’s like fire which has become so hot that it feels cold. Or ice which is so cold that it burns.

  Shrieks and Catch take one look at me and then scramble away as if their lives depend on it. I’m glad. Some part of me doesn’t want to harm them, but a dark voice deep inside says that it will be worth the price if only I can take what is owed to me by the Warrior.

  “I surrender! I surrender!” cries the Warrior, his eyes wide and panicked. He scrabbles at the earth with his feet, but with his arms tied behind his back and vulnerable on his belly, all he does is shove himself forwards a little.

  Not long ago, I would have accepted his surrender and put him to work for the village he tried to invade. But that was before he killed Storm right in front of me, when his forces had already been beaten. When he had apparently already surrendered once before.

  Too bad. He made his choice. Now it’s my turn and I realise that I’ve found a limit.

  I’ve dealt with the samurans from my village attacking me, humiliating me and trying to kill me on multiple occasions. I was able to control my emotions and give them the opportunity for us all to win. And my decisions then have benefited all of us immensely.

  I was able to deal with provocation at the Festival and Flying-blade’s attempt to make my village lose face. I played by their rules because it seemed like the best way to get the outcome I wanted.

  And then afterwards when Flying-blade was a sore loser and sought to find any reason for why she lost that wasn’t just that she was arrogant and too weak for her abilities to cash the checks her mouth was writing, I was able to look past everyone she had killed to seek the best for my village. So many dead among my village…yet I knew that the survivors could do more good under my control than buried in my fields. And so it has proven.

  Yet Tree-whisperer couldn’t leave it at that, and brought war to our doorstep again, despite the multiple warnings I gave her. We have fought for our lives and our freedom, but have still shown them mercy when they surrendered despite having every right to continue cutting them down to the last.

  And yet, this has happened. A Warrior has killed one of my dearest companions in front of me. With a poisoned spear that made a mockery of my attempt to heal her, to save her life.

  No. It’s too much.

  No more mercy.

  Perhaps if I hadn’t made it clear that I was willing to accept the surrender of any who offered it, Storm would still be alive.

  No more.

  “Please! I surrender!” the Warrior cries, perhaps seeing his death draw near in the snarl etched across my face.

  “Denied,” is all I say, the word coming out almost garbled from my barely-moving lips.

  And, as if my glare is the sun through a magnifying glass, the Warrior explodes into flame.

  The agonised cries which come from the Warrior’s throat sound more like the shrieking of tortured metal than of anything living, yet my gaze boring into the samuran tells me indisputably that they indeed originate from him.

  The best that can be said about the fire that envelops the Warrior and consumes him from the outside in is that it’s relatively quick. Too quick, perhaps. My fire is white hot and burns through his clawed hands and feet in a few seconds. His eyes boil in their sockets and his muzzle is soon burnt to charred bone. It’s not more than half a minute before his lungs and vocal equipment have been scorched too much for him to be able to cry any longer, and then perhaps that time again before his brain boils too.

  His body is left as a scorched husk on the earth, the scent of charred and burnt meat filling the air around us. Yet even when the flames have vanished, I fancy that I can still feel their heat. Or perhaps that’s just the fire of rage that burns within me even hotter as I turn back to look at everyone else and see Storm’s body.

  The regret, which had started to curl sickeningly within my body as the flames burnt the corpse to charcoal, now vanishes once more, consumed by the fire that flares anew within me. I turn my head to glare at the mountainside gateway to the village, beside which are the other samurans who surrendered.

  I’m not letting them kill any more of my family.

  here!

  here!

  here!

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