Gilded Serpent by Danielle Jensen (top 10 novels txt) 📕

so she could breathe fresh air. Her shoulders shook with coughs, but the sounds of digging had ceased, whatever she’d rigged filtering enough of the smoke into the wolves’ tunnel to drive them out.

But not all of it. Smoke rose from the stove, the air of the shack a grey haze. Marcus’s eyes burned. His throat felt like it had been scoured by sandpaper, and he wheezed with every breath, an attack upon him although he didn’t think it would be a bad one. Pressing his face to a gap in the boards, he sucked in cold fresh air.

“How long until dawn?” Teriana’s voice was scratchy, barely audible over the wind.

“I don’t know.” It felt like an eternity since the sun had set, but with night stretching for sixteen hours, it might be another eternity until dawn. Sweat cooled on his body, a chill setting into his bones, and Teriana shivered in his arms.

“Will they try again?”

The wolves had eased off in their attacks against the shack walls, and while he could still make out the sounds of motion outside, the pack had grown quiet. “They need to eat. Since it won’t be us tonight, they’ll need to find something else.”

Easing his arm out from under her, Marcus went to the stove and added more wood to the fire, keeping the stove door cracked enough that the flames could breathe without choking the shack with smoke. The faint light allowed him to see how Teriana had rigged the stovepipe to fill the wolves’ tunnel, using something to create an elbow connecting the pieces of pipe.

Wiping tears from his stinging eyes, Marcus reached out to touch the bend, feeling leather beneath his fingers before he recoiled from the heat. Boot leather.

Swearing, he crawled back over to Teriana, finding her naked foot, which felt like ice beneath his hand.

“Cold,” she mumbled.

“I know.” He found the bottom of her boot where it had been discarded after she’d cut off the haft, and replaced it on her foot, then tucked the single remaining blanket around her, eyeing the hanging wolf pelt. That would keep her warm, but he was rushing the process of curing it as it was, and if he took it off the frame before it had dried and rendered it unusable, they were dead.

You’ll both be just as dead if you freeze.

Heat radiated from the stove, but the wind gusting through the gaps they’d made in the wall drove it away. Yet he didn’t dare replace the board with the amount of smoke seeping into the shack, and building the fire up higher for heat would only make that worse.

Adding another piece of wood to the fire, he went back to Teriana, pulling her upright. “You need to get up … and … move,” he said, struggling to get enough air to speak. “If you pass out … you’ll … freeze.”

“Too tired.”

She was nearly deadweight in his arms, swaying on her feet. His own body ached from the chill, his hands and feet numb, only his head warm beneath the hat he’d made from the blanket. Pulling it off, he shoved it down over her tangled braids, the wind biting at his ears. “Come on, Teriana.” A fit of coughing stole over him. It was a bloody miracle this hadn’t killed him. “Stay with me. Stomp your feet.”

Her face rested against his shoulder, cocooned in the blanket he’d wrapped around both of them. She stomped one foot. Then the other. Then she began to cough, and her knees buckled.

“Shit!”

There was no helping it. Lowering her to the ground, he unfastened the wolfskin from the cot’s frame. It was mostly dry and had grown stiff and unwieldy. Pushing the cot against the wall, he rolled Teriana up in the blanket and set her on it, her face near one of the gaps in the boards. Then he curled up around her, pulling the wolfskin over top of them and molding it around their bodies as best he could.

It was so cold. So cold. The world swam in and out of focus, his thoughts fuzzy.

There is no quitting here, only dying.

He had never quit. Never given up. And he refused to do so now.

“Stay awake. Stay awake,” he wheezed, forcing himself up to add fuel to the fire before retreating back to Teriana’s shivering form.

How many more hours until dawn? There was no way to know. But he needed to keep the fire burning until the sun lit the sky.

“Stay awake, stay awake,” he repeated, using all the tricks he’d been trained to use to stay alert on a watch. Except his body was leaden with exhaustion, his eyelids refusing to stay open. The dense fur was soft against his cheek, and the painful burn of the cold slowly receded beneath its weight. Time began to skip, the cold and smoke of reality driven away by dreams where tens of thousands of wolves descended on his men and Titus did nothing but stand there and laugh as they were torn apart.

He jerked awake, half-falling off the cot. The fire was little more than glowing embers, so he added more wood. Outside, there was not even a hint of light to break the darkness.

“There is no quitting.” He climbed back onto the cot. Curled around Teriana and took hold of her hand. “There is no quitting. There is no…”

 43LYDIA

Lydia’s hands turned to ice as she pulled the blight into herself.

As she pulled death into herself.

Then the pain took hold. It burned like acid up her arms, and she clenched her teeth trying to hold in a scream as she fought the desire to pull away from Lena.

Black lines radiated up her arms, her skin turning grey, the agony unlike anything she’d ever experienced. Her heart battered against her rib cage, her breath coming in little panting gasps, but she couldn’t stop.

Because it was working.

Lena stared at her with wide eyes, then seemed to realize what was happening. She tried to push Lydia away, but Lydia dug her fingers