Chapter 33 #2
Reave is at least a half-mile ahead of me. I won't catch up to him before he catches up to that dragon, and Sesca knows this as well as I do, which is likely why I can feel her impatience prickling through me like the static before a lightning strike.
I don't have time to fully think anything through.
I rush forward and climb onto her foreleg, hooking a hand around her muscular shoulder and hoisting myself up.
She angles and lifts her leg with surprising nimbleness to help throw me fully into place on her back.
I scramble to find something to hold on to, fingers scrabbling against rain-slicked scales, and eventually finding a bit of feathery mane, while squeezing my legs as tightly as I can manage against her sides.
“Are you sure about—”
She takes three bounding steps and then leaps into the air, propelling us higher with a few powerful strokes of her wings.
My stomach flips and then simply drops away entirely, left somewhere far below us in the dark and the mud as I press myself flat against her neck and hold on.
For a few seconds there's nothing but the shock and blur of it—the ground gone, the wind everywhere, the immensely powerful muscles of the dragon beneath me.
The world tilts and rushes and becomes very large all at once.
I want to marvel, to look down, to look everywhere and just focus on how extraordinary this moment is.
Then lightning fractures the sky ahead of us and I see a scar of downed trees, along with the worrying sight of blackened, dying foliage—the same blackness that ate away at that dragon a few minutes ago—and I'm reminded that somewhere within this forest is an idiotic king with no sense of self-preservation.
I can marvel later; right now I need to focus on finding him.
Sesca begins her descent, serpentining through the upper canopy, branches clawing at the air around us.
I bury my face against her neck, protecting it from lashing limbs and whipping, rain-drenched leaves.
When I find the courage to look up again, we're soaring into a clearing of dead and downed trees that smells faintly of the same sulfurous rot as before.
And there Reave stands, facing the poisonous dragon with his hands lifted, as if he's trying to get it to pay attention, to listen to him.
To reason with it.
The beast doesn't even hesitate.
It lunges toward him, jaws wide, a fresh cloud of darkness billowing from its mouth.
“Sesca!” I cry.
She needs no command beyond this; she's already darting toward them.
She touches down smoothly at the edge of the clearing, putting all four feet on the ground just long enough to allow me to leap from her back.
It's not a particularly graceful dismount, but I manage to catch myself against a tree before my legs fully give out beneath me.
Sesca races onward, powerful legs bunching and launching her back into the air.
She collides with the other dragon as it tries to dart upward and away from her, her body curving so that all four sets of claws latch onto its underside.
She's much larger, and moving with more violent grace than I've ever seen her move with.
The other dragon quickly folds under the force of her, but its smaller size makes it more nimble, allowing it to wriggle free and snake off into the dark tangle of the surrounding trees.
Sesca gives chase, leaves whirling up behind her, several trees falling, tilting and creaking as she bounces off them.
I'm moving to follow her when Reave grabs the hood of my coat.
“Call her off,” he demands, hoarsely.
“What? Why? She’s—”
“CALL HER OFF!” His eyes are wild. Dangerous.
I pull away, shaking my head. “You're not making sense. Something is wrong, you can’t—”
He rushes forward, catching me around the middle and dragging me to the ground. We roll through the mud, grappling with one another until he manages to seize me by the hair and jerk my head back, exposing my throat to a knife he whips from somewhere near his waist.
Panic fully, truly stakes through my heart.
The instant it does, Sesca lets out a sound like the earth splitting open.
She storms back into the clearing moments later, slamming into the ground before us and rearing up on her hind legs, wings unfurling and claws flashing.
Reave takes one look at her and goes instantly still.
He's gotten his wish. I've called Sesca back to me—though involuntarily—and she doesn't even have to bare her teeth at him to make him let me go; he's already taking a stumbling step away.
Then another. He looks at the knife still clenched in his fist as though he doesn't remember how it got there.
An odd, strangled sound chokes out of his throat.
He flings the knife to the ground.
I stare at the mud-splattered blade, trying and failing to catch my breath. “What the fuck is going on?”
He doesn't reply, only bows his head, closes his eyes.
“Why?” I demand. “Why would you let that dragon just fly off and continue threatening your city? Sesca could have dealt with it! Why did you stop her?”
He starts to walk away.
I grab his arm and jerk him around to face me.
Tension ripples through his muscles, and I brace myself for the transformation I've witnessed before—the darkening eyes, the sharpening teeth.
But it doesn't happen, this time.
He remains fully, achingly human.
And then he just…crumples.
He sinks to his knees right there in the muddiest, most flooded spot of the clearing, one hand braced against the ground and the other pressed hard against his heart, like he's trying to keep it in one piece, trying to hold it in, desperate to stop it from falling out and shattering on the forest floor.
Sesca exhales a long, measured breath, settling low against the ground with her wings folded.
She seems to think any danger he might have posed to me has passed.
The forest is eerily quiet all of a sudden, nothing but the sound of the rain pattering against the leaves, the wind dying down to almost nothing.
I don't know what else to do, so I just kneel before Reave, trying to get a clear look at his face, trying to make sense of him, of this.
“Why did you let it go?” I say again, my voice barely a whisper this time.
Still no reply.
I lean a little closer, my hand closing over his in the mud, a fear I can’t explain taking root in my chest.
A lifetime seems to pass before he finally lifts his head a few inches, though he doesn't meet my gaze. The anguish written in his expression is so terrible that it freezes the breath in my lungs.
“Because,” he rasps, “that dragon…was Arlo.”