Hrazfel didn't attack again right away.
He stood in his diminished form, the green fire still smoking off his shoulder where Ebony's fist had landed, and Ebony watched the exact moment his eyes changed — not with fear, but with the slow click of a man assembling a picture he didn't like.
He looked at the fire on her hands. He looked at the place on her body where, minutes ago, his fist had pulped her organs, and where now there was a girl standing and grinning at him.
The pieces fell into place behind his eyes.
"A Visitor," he said.
He said it quietly, almost to himself, but the clearing heard it. Every trafficker still standing — the humans untangling from Lucian's roots, the dwarves circling — went rigid at the word, the way a room goes still when someone says a thing that changes what everyone is willing to do.
The hunt had been about money a second ago. Now it was about something older.
