The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 17: Chapter 16 — The Hollow March

Read chapter 17 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Chapter 16 — The Hollow March The upper city looked worse in daylight. Cobblestones had heaved and cracked from the blast, creating ankle-breaking gaps every few feet. Gutters were clogged with ash and debris. The mansions that lined the street showed their damage clearly now—shattered windows, scorched doorframes, roofs collapsed inward. Looters had been through already. Doors hung open. Furniture sat broken in the streets where people had dragged it out, taken what they wanted, burned the rest. Yara walked slowly, leaning on the broken spear shaft. Her ankle throbbed with each step, that injury from the initial blast still not healed. Something had struck her leg when the when the wall fell on her. It had swollen, turned purple, then settled into this constant ache that flared every time she put weight on it. The city smelled like smoke and rot. Sweet-sick, like meat left too long in the sun. Under her ribs, the Gem hummed. Counting. Always counting. Two rats fought over something in the gutter. Yara looked closer. A finger. Human. She looked away. The Gem noticed heartbeats. It pulled her attention toward them whether she wanted it to or not. A cellar beneath a collapsed shop—two people breathing down there. A boarded window three buildings down—someone moving behind it. A dog whimpering under a staircase, injured or trapped. Each life registered like a pulse in her chest. Each one the Gem wanted her to take. She'd thought the hunger would have some pattern to it. Something she could predict. It didn't. Sometimes it came back after an hour. Sometimes she could go half a day. She never knew when it would hit. The Scion padded beside her, claws clicking on broken stone. The first Horror limped behind, watching the upper windows with his ruined face. Two monsters following one monster. Hunting through a dead city. A shutter creaked above. Yara looked up. Someone watching from a third-floor window, just a shadow behind warped glass. The shadow pulled back when she looked. Smart. Staying hidden. Staying quiet. The Gem pulsed. There. Third floor. Adult male. Healthy. "I know." Feed. "Not yet." Why wait? Because she was tired. Because her ankle hurt. Because she'd already killed too many people today and her hands still shook from the last one. Because she wanted to pretend, she had some control over this. Some choice. "I'm looking for someone dying," she said. "Someone who'd choose—" You said that last time. And the time before. You still feed on whoever is easiest. The Gem was right. She'd told herself she'd find better targets. Scavengers. Looters. People who'd done something to deserve it. But when the hunger came, she took whoever was close. Whoever was weak. Whoever couldn't run fast enough. And she killed them. Quickly. Cleanly. Because the alternative was worse. She'd tried transforming three times. Made two broken things that suffered and one corpse. The boy's face still haunted her—skin crawling like wax, clawing at himself until the Scion ended it. The girl in the stall, crying with too many joints in her leg, left to suffer because Yara couldn't finish what she'd started. The Gem wanted her to try again. To practice. To figure out what worked. Yara was terrified of what she'd make next. So she killed instead. Fast deaths. No transformation. No binding. No more monsters. It was the only mercy she had left to give. They found the scavenger stand on the broad merchant road, the burned carriages like ribs along the curb, and men in scavenged armor crouched with patched helms and haphazard standards. Someone painted stripes of ash across his face and bellowed a command. Arrows came from the haze, sharp, fast, and two found her before she understood where the sky had split. The first buried itself across her shoulder; the second struck in the thigh. Pain arrived late and hard, a bright star behind the fog. She turned, saw the men, and the confusion on their faces when their volley hit. “Hold fire!” someone shouted. “Take her