I Only Summon Villainesses

Riding a wyvern was supposed to be one of those bucket-list things. Wind in your hair, ground shrinking beneath you, the kind of moment you’d brag about to people who’d never earned it.

This was not that.

This was me, straddling a wingless, one-eyed, thoroughly unhappy lizard, lurching sideways every time it favored its bad leg, with an unconscious pretty boy draped over its back like luggage nobody wanted to claim.

’This is humiliating.’

’You say that like I’m not the one who has to listen to you complain about it,’ Wren said. ’Some of us are just a sword. We don’t get opinions on dignity.’

’You have opinions on everything.’

’Fair.’

The wyvern grunted underneath me, a low, wet sound that I decided to interpret as agreement rather than a threat to buck me off into the dark. I kept one hand fisted in the ridge of scales along its neck and the other on Wren, and I tried very hard not to think about how far down the ground actually was, broken wings or not.

Light hadn’t moved since I’d knocked him out. Good. I intended to keep it that way for as long as possible, because the alternative involved him waking up and trying to kill me again, and frankly I’d had enough of that for one afternoon.

We went deeper.

The smell hit me again somewhere past the first bend, and I braced for it out of habit before I noticed something. It wasn’t the same. Back by the lake it had been a wall, thick enough to taste. Here it thinned out, faded almost to nothing, and then, twenty feet on, it slammed back into me like I’d walked into a wet curtain.

I pulled the wyvern to a stop.

’That’s not how a smell works.’

Smells spread. They didn’t come in patches. Unless something was laying them down on purpose, walking a path, leaving pieces of itself behind the way a slug left a trail.

I looked at the walls.

There were veins running through the rock I hadn’t noticed before, dark and faintly wet, threading between the ordinary gray like something had been poured into the stone and left to set. In places the rock looked soft. Wrong. Like pressing a thumb into it would leave a print.

’This isn’t a cave anymore.’

’It’s a fucking nest.’

The wyvern made a sound low in its throat, and I felt it shift its weight, ears — or whatever the wyvern equivalent of ears was — flattening back against its skull. It didn’t like the veins either. That made two of us.

I nudged it forward anyway. Standing still in a place like this didn’t strike me as an improvement.

It was maybe ten minutes later that I heard Light’s breathing change.

I twisted around fast enough that I nearly slid off. His breathing had gone from the slow, even drag of a man knocked cold to something shallower, quicker, and his sword hand — the one I hadn’t tied down because I hadn’t thought I’d needed to — was twitching against the wyvern’s flank.

”Hey,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say to an unconscious man, but I said it anyway.

His eyes didn’t open. His fingers curled instead, slow, deliberate, like something was working them from the inside. I leaned down and caught the edge of his collar, and where his neck met his shoulder the skin had gone the color of an old bruise, threaded through with the same dark lines I’d just been staring at on the cave wall.

’Oh.’

’That’s not good.’

The wyvern had gone rigid under me. Its head swung around, its one good eye fixed on Light with an intensity that made my skin crawl, and it let out a sound that wasn’t the mournful growl from before. This one had teeth in it.

”Easy,” I said, not entirely sure which of us I was talking to. ”He’s not up. Whatever’s doing that, it’s not him doing it.”

The wyvern didn’t look convinced. Neither was I, honestly, but convincing wasn’t really the assignment right now. I put a hand flat against Light’s chest, half expecting to feel something moving under my palm, and felt nothing but a heartbeat that was too fast for a man who was supposed to be asleep.

I didn’t have a Sculptor’s Gift trick for this. I didn’t have anything for this. So I did the only thing that felt useful, which was to keep moving and hope whatever was happening to him waited until I had a plan.

We found the man maybe a quarter hour after that.

He was propped against the base of the wall where the veins ran thickest, and for a second I thought he was another piece of the cave, gray and still and part of the furniture. Then his chest rose, and I nearly fell off the wyvern getting down.

He was alive. Barely felt like the right word for it. His leg was bent somewhere it shouldn’t bend, and there was a gash across his ribs that had gone past bleeding into something worse, and his breath came in these thin, rattling pulls that sounded like they cost him more than they were worth.

”Hey,” I said again, crouching. Apparently that was just what I said to dying men now. ”Hey, can you hear me?”

His eyes cracked open. They found me first, and something in them loosened, just slightly, the way a person looks at another person instead of at whatever had been about to finish the job.

Then his gaze slid past me to Light, still slumped over the wyvern’s back, and every ounce of relief drained straight out of his face.

”You...” His hand came up, shaking, and pointed. Not at me. At him. ”It got him too...”

”Yeah,” I said. ”I noticed. What is it? What’s it doing to him?”

He laughed, except it wasn’t really a laugh, more a wet exhale that hurt to listen to.

”Don’t let it smell you,” he said. ”That’s — that’s the only rule. Don’t let it smell you.”

”A little late for advice like that, buddy, I’ve been marinating in it for an hour.”

He shook his head, weak, urgent. ”No. Smelling it isn’t — that’s not the same as it smelling you.” His eyes drifted, unfocused, then found Light again and stayed there like he couldn’t look away. ”Once it marks you...”

He stopped.

”Once it marks you, what?” I said.

”...you belong to it.”

The words sat there in the dark between us, and for once I didn’t have a smart line waiting to undercut them.

I looked at Light. At the bruise-dark lines climbing out of his collar. At the way his hand kept twitching against nothing, like it was already reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there.

Then I looked past him, into the black where the veins in the wall got thicker and the smell came from and hadn’t stopped coming from since the moment I’d walked into this place.

’So that’s why you were acting like that.’

My grip tightened around Wren.

’This thing doesn’t kill people.’

I swallowed.

’It collects them.’