The night and empty road stretched out, limitless, treacherous. He needed to find somewhere safe, somewhere he could tend to Zora’s wounds. He refused to think of her as a dead weight. She was injured. Unconscious. He would hunt down a refuge and nurse her back to health. No other option existed. He shut his mind down to anything else. The demons did not give further chase—his one consolation, when all others were gone. Lights flickered in the distance, signs of habitation. Once, he might have ridden toward them, believed they offered safety. He trusted nothing now. Not the promise of security. Not himself. Only Zora. And she lay quiet and motionless against his back. Rage and fear the likes of which he’d never known pulsed through him. The demons had hurt her. Badly. And in the shadow of his ancestral home. The basest desecration. He vowed that he would hunt down the rest of those creatures, flay them as they yet lived, then give them the rare privilege of choking on their own intestines.
