Abaddon's Call

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Kal and Trild continued to take jobs around their daytime activities. Trild explained everything to Kal for many, but some came with the barest of briefings.

Then came the night when the briefing wasn't so much a briefing as a lesson in what not to do. Trild said nothing about their actual destination or the target.

Kal was determined to refuse all future jobs like that.

He grunted under Trild's weight. His sword had groaned two words before he went limp, blood oozing from somewhere, body giving up and parting with a gasping sigh. He grunted again, closed his eyes, and heard something a second before he felt danger coming for him.

They appeared in Trild's study.

It was not lost on Kal that he had moved without purpose, though he suspected their target would attempt to follow them to finish the job. He suspected that feeling had to do with magic, as he was quickly learning that magic had many feelings to it.

This was not one he could describe with any certainty.

Their coming had a distinctive sound, he knew. In the aftermath, he noticed silence returning to the study, though he couldn't pinpoint the source or quality of the sound. He wouldn't recognize it if he heard it again.

The door to the bedroom opened, and Alena stepped out, alerted by the sound. She went pale, and suddenly, fury was upon her features.

Trild was caught in Kal's arms, barely upright and little more than dead weight. Blood was everywhere, but Kal didn't bother looking for it to confirm the damage, trusting his nose to recognize the quantity was too much.

"Bathroom," Alena snapped.

Kal groaned, mustered his magic, and flitted into the bathroom, a place he had never seen.

As he learned more about what a shield was or could be, he learned that sometimes the pair appeared to share memories. They didn't just get along or work well together. They moved as one being in a way that couldn't be explained by years of working together or trauma bonding.

Until that moment, Kal had wondered what trauma bonding had meant. He never thought he would feel such an anchoring of his attachment to another person as he had in those moments when everything went horribly wrong.

Kal's chest felt hollow, bone weary ache setting in. He had a slippery grasp on his magic when he reached for it.

He wasn't certain he could do that again.

Alena stepped in and hesitated. Her head tilted a little as she headed across the bathroom. Every line of her spoke of authority. She motioned for Kal to set Trild on the floor.

"How long have you been bonded?" she asked.

"I don't know, sometime in the summer?" Kal asked.

"Have you had any healing training? Or trauma recovery, they might call it?"

"No."

Alena stopped at the cupboard by the far corner. He saw her shoulders heave a little. He heard a breath heaved out through her nose in annoyance. She snapped open the cupboard and began removing items.

"What happened?" she asked.

"He took something from Lord Lugh," Kal said. "They wanted to give him a chance to be executioner."

"Who?"

Kal knew Alena asked who they had been about to execute. The whole thing had blown up on their faces, quite literally in Trild's case.