Tyrez shook his head, sending his long dark hair flying. “Cara doesn’t know exactly how Isobel is doing it. But there are a lot of species here.” He grimaced as he looked around. “The Watchers will have to analyze this. It will tell us what we might be facing, if Isobel was successful.”
I walked away from him, taking a narrow gap between the Wyvern and another—a Basilisk, I thought. And then, I stopped.
“Legion,” I called.
Tyrez glared at me as he followed. “I’ve told you. I’m not Legion—” he broke off.
Talakai trailed after him, and froze. “Is that…”
The skeleton before us was large but not the size of a Legion dragon. The flesh was mostly gone, although a few scales remained on the mummified skin of the hindquarters. Four legs, and wings—but the wing bones were surrounded by bright feathers, and the naked skull ended in a beak.
“Hellfire,” whispered Talakai.
I shared the sentiment. Bad enough that the witch had killed all these creatures. But what lay before us was as much a thinking, reasoning, speaking creature as any of us.
My eyes fell to the pile of feathers, and my gut tightened. “I’ve seen those feathers before.” The words escaped me before I’d even thought about them.
“What do you mean?” the Legion Dragon asked.
“The Centaur sprouted them. A few times.”
His turquoise eyes gleamed. “Marcus sprouted feathers?”
I glared at him, not wanting to get any more pulled into this. But I’d already blown that by bringing him here. So I nodded. “Yeah.”
Talakai walked up beside him. “Did he change into a Gryphon?”
I transferred the glare to him. “No. He was part Wyvern. But he had feathers, too. And I’ve seen something else in there, no idea what.”
Tyrez exhaled hard as we paced past the Gryphon and saw what lay just beyond it—the contorted wreckage of skeletons caught in the middle of vicious transformations. I saw a long-haired tail in the midst of it, and legs ending in hooves.
I might be a vicious killer, but this was beyond anything I’d ever done. Twisted. Wrong.
Evil.
And this was what had been done to Marcus. Something stirred within me that I decided not to contemplate.
“Over here.” Tyrez had wandered off along the gruesome display of twisted bodies, and now stared at something else.
We came up alongside him, and stopped. Stared.
“What the shards was that?” Talakai asked.
It wasn’t quite as big as a Dragon—at least, not as big as our beasts. The bones looked like they belonged to a heavier creature, with ridges for the attachment of more powerful muscles. The wing bones were far too small to ever hoist a creature that size into the sky.
All around it lay bits of skin and scales. I stared down at them. They were black, with clear spikes in the center.
I’d seen those scales before. I walked right up to the skeleton. The skull lay twisted, the lower jaw knocked askew. I reached to grab a giant spike that crested it.
“Maybe you should leave it for Cara—” Talakai began.
I braced myself, and wrenched the skull clear of the pile. It was fucking heavy, roughly the length of one of my arms, but I hefted it high for the others to see.
We all froze, staring at it. There were spikes up the center of what would be the muzzle, as well as radiating from the top to the jaw. They weren’t bone—they were clear.
“Those spikes almost look like crystals,” Talakai said. “We can bring it back to Cara. Maybe she’ll know what it is.”
Tyrez’s gaze drifted again over the twisted bodies before he met my eyes. “This has to stop.” His voice was so hoarse, the words were barely decipherable.
