Faster than lightning, his hand shot out and she gagged, jolting as he grabbed her tongue between his fingers. She bit down, hard, but he didn’t let go. “Say that again,” he purred.
She choked as he kept pinching her tongue, and she went for his daggers, simultaneously slamming her knee up between his legs, but he shoved his body against hers, a wall of hard muscle and several hundred years of lethal training trapping her against a tree. She was a joke by comparison—a joke—and her tongue—
He released her tongue, and she gasped for breath. She swore at him, a filthy, foul name, and spat at his feet. And that’s when he bit her.
She cried out as those canines pierced the spot between her neck and shoulder, a primal act of aggression—the bite so strong and claiming that she was too stunned to move. He had her pinned against the tree and clamped down harder, his canines digging deep, her blood spilling onto her shirt. Pinned, like some weakling. But that was what she’d become, wasn’t it? Useless, pathetic.
She growled, more animal than sentient being. And shoved.
Rowan staggered back a step, teeth ripping her skin as she struck his chest. She didn’t feel the pain, didn’t care about the blood or the flash of light.
No, she wanted to rip his throat out—rip it out with the elongated canines she bared at him as she finished shifting and roared.
21
Rowan grinned. “There you are.” Blood—her blood—was on his teeth, on his mouth and chin. And those dead eyes glowed as he spat her blood onto the earth. She probably tasted like a sewer to him.
There was a shrieking in her ears, and Celaena lunged at him. Lunged, and then stopped as she took in the world with stunning clarity, smelled it and tasted it and breathed it like the finest wine. Gods, this place, this kingdom smelled divine, smelled like—
She had shifted.
She panted, even though her lungs were telling her she was no longer winded and did not need as many breaths in this body. There was a tickling at her neck—her skin slowly beginning to stitch itself together. She was a faster healer in this form. Because of the magic . . . Breathe. Breathe.
But there it was, rising up, wildfire crackling in her veins, in her fingertips, the forest around them so much kindling, and then—
She shoved back. Took the fear and used it like a battering ram inside herself, against the power, shoving it down, down.
Rowan prowled closer. “Let it out. Don’t fight it.”
A pulse beat against her, nipping, smelling of snow and pine. Rowan’s power, taunting hers. Not like her fire, but a gift of ice and wind. A freezing zap at her elbow had her falling back against the tree. The magic bit her cheek now. Magic—attacking her.
The wildfire exploded in a wall of blue flame, rushing for Rowan, engulfing the trees, the world, herself, until—
It vanished, sucked out into nothing, along with the air she was breathing.
Celaena dropped to her knees. As she clutched at her neck as if she could claw open an airway for herself, Rowan’s boots appeared in the field of her vision. He’d pulled the air out—suffocated her fire. Such power, such control. Maeve had not given her an instructor with similar abilities—she’d instead sent someone with power capable of smothering her fire, someone who wouldn’t mind doing it should she become a threat.
Air rushed down her throat in a whoosh. She gasped it down in greedy gulps, hardly registering the agony as she shifted back into her mortal form, the world going quiet and dull again.
“Does your lover know what you are?” A cold question.