Ironhaven's slums wheezed like a living thing—a gasping, wheezing monster suffocating on its own filth. Kael leaned back against the rusty hull of an abandoned cargo hauler, his hand clasped around a stolen vial of Twilight's Kiss, its neurotoxic shard emitting a soft glow in the smog-muffled moonlight. Ironjaw's laughter thundered somewhere in the labyrinth of cracked concrete and hanging wire, deep and jagged, as though the man's throat was filled with shattered glass.
The Shardbearer was a monster, but not one of unthinking kind. His Adapting Toxins Shard pounded like a festering heart in his chest, an emerald crystalline shard rent and serrated that translated toxin to energy. Kael'd witnessed him outpacing a Black Lung ambush by drinking in the toxin and exhaling it as rifled fog. He'd observed him enduring Fleshrot by sloughing off skin like a snake. But Kael had sensed that lag, too—the half-second pause as the Shard cycled between venoms. A crack of vulnerability.
This evening, he would exploit it.
The ambush was a mixture of pilfered cruelty. A twisted skein of nerve-agent canisters snaked across the floor of the alley. A rusty rain barrel hung overhead, its contents full of a slurry of Fleshrot. Below, water pooled, threaded through with dissolved Twilight's Kiss. Ironjaw's boots pounded through detritus as he swung around the corner, his massive form silencing the refinery's yellow-green miasma.
Kael's heart thudded. Wait.
Ironjaw paused, as ever, to spit a glob of acidic poison onto the body of a stray canine. The Adapting Toxins Shard seared, emerald veins pulsating beneath his skin as it digested the rot. Now.
Kael triggered the tripwire.
The canisters exploded, dispensing nerve gas. Ironjaw inhaled involuntarily—then laughed, the Shard breaking down the poison into a shimmery, acid-tongued breath. But Kael was already in action. He severed the string of the rain barrel. Fleshrot poured down, drenching the Shardbearer. Blistered places erupted on Ironjaw's arms, only to heal an instant later as the Shard broke through the venom.
"Is this all?" Ironjaw derided, biting his fingers into the warehouse wall, his claws scoring smoldering gashes in the metal.
Kael hurled the vial of Twilight's Kiss. Ironjaw knocked it aside, crushed it in his fist, and drank the glass-spike-laden venom off his palm. The neurotoxin hit—muscles cramped, jaws snapping shut mid-snarl. The Shard raged, fighting to adapt, but Kael was already in mid-air, a length of metal pipe gripped between his palms.
He thrust it into the Shard.
The Adapting Toxins crystal exploded, vomiting a fountain of viridian toxin. Ironjaw's roar became a gurgle as his veins darkened and grew taut, his body contorting. Kael tore the Shard free, its rim scoring his palms to the bone. The Bond acted immediately, a serpent's voice speaking in his mind:
"Once every five months, your venom will serenade your most hated foe. They will hunt. You will bleed."
A vision burned behind Kael's eyes: Jarek, his comrade, his traitor, over him in the bank vault, bag of pilfered coins in one hand and smoke grenade in the other. "Good, better one of us alive than both of us dead, eh?"
And the Shard's venom flooded.
Kael collapsed, black bile foaming from his lips. His veins contorted, poisonous green as the Adapting Toxins broke into his sternum, corruption tendrils spreading beneath his skin. Once the convulsions subsided, Ironjaw was gone—shattered to a puddle of filth and splintered bone.
The alleyway reeked of acid and death. Kael sprang to his feet, the Shard's whispers swirling through his mind like smoke. Hounds howled in the distance—a sound too sharp, too ravenous. The hounds of the Inquisition, nostrils sensitized to Shard-corruption.
He sprinted, the venom of the crystal pulsing in rhythm with his heart. Five months. That's all he had before the Bond would burst open, before his poison would scream out into the emptiness and Jarek would arrive.
But first, he had to live through this night.
The hounds' baying constricted like a noose.