Chapter 32 #2
For the second time, I pulled the reins with all my strength and stopped the horse before I slammed into her. She was really there, hair wild and all over the place, skin dirty here and there, glistening with sweat, her chest rising and falling rapidly as she brought a finger to her lips.
Rune and I stopped even breathing loudly, and all the questions I’d prepared to ask her died on the tip of my tongue. Then Maera waved her hand to tell us to follow her, and she turned around and went deeper between the trees.
I dismounted the horse as silently as I could, and by the time my feet hit the ground, Rune was there to wait for me, take the reins of my horse and tie them loosely to the nearest branch.
Ashes on the ground, gathered near the tree trunks, atop branches here and there, some floating about in the air without direction.
The silence was haunting. Maera walked ahead, her bare feet against the rough ground, yet she didn’t even flinch or look where she was stepping.
She could have been a fucking ghost if my eyes were closed and I had to rely on my ears alone.
Rune was the same, barely a shadow, indistinguishable from the darkness, but I heard my footsteps just fine.
I heard them together with the wild beating of my heart as we went closer and closer to Maera, and she slowed her steps.
Then stopped, raised a finger to the side, and…
Snap.
I heard it as clearly as I heard my own breathing. Something moved ahead—someone, and when I followed the sound, I found the two figures in the distance, half-hidden behind the trees.
Eyes made of fire locked on mine. For a split second, the world didn’t exist at all.
The roar that followed, coming from somewhere over our heads, made the blood in my veins freeze with ice magic. The figure in the distance, the one with those fiery eyes, moved, and someone else was beside him.
They ran together.
I didn’t even need to think or look at the others before I ran after them.
Rune and Maera, who was still naked, were already ahead.
I pushed myself to keep up, not really thinking I actually could, so imagine my surprise when my legs moved almost with the same speed as theirs.
I was fucking flying through the woods so fast it scared me shitless, and we kept going, following the movement ahead for quite a while.
Until we saw red.
A flash of red—a piece of fabric swooshing ahead of us—and then gold. Golden eyes in a face I knew so well I could paint it in detail. It was Lyall, and my heart jumped even before he disappeared again.
We stopped running, slowed our steps, spun around as our eyes searched for movement, for a shadow, for a sign.
“Where…where…” where the fuck did they go?! Because they were right there some fifteen feet away from us just seconds ago, and now they were gone.
“Illusion,” said Rune through gritted teeth, shooting his shadows forward while Maera growled.
“I can track him. I’m going after him,” Maera said.
“Maera, wait!” I called, not entirely sure why because we did need to track Lyall, but she didn’t stop.
The shifting had already begun, and even in the dark of the forest, it looked painful.
It sounded painful—her bones were breaking, her entire body rearranging itself once more.
It must have been awful to do something like this twice within such little time, but Maera didn’t care.
Her wolf didn’t even look at us before she charged forward, disappearing in the dark like a thief seconds in—and Rune’s shadows had faded, too.
“I can’t find him. He’s hiding,” Rune said, fisting his hands as he took his magic back.
“We can still see him. He can’t keep this up forever.” I moved forward, cautiously now, not running. Prepared for something to pop up around me because this was Lyall we were talking about. He was cunning and sneaky, and he would strike the second we turned our backs to him.
“He can, Wildcat. For hours,” Rune said from beside me, and I flinched.
“We’re still going to search,” I whispered. “Maera will call for us once she finds him. She can smell him.” It was our biggest advantage here, I thought.
“This forest is dangerous,” Rune said. “It’s dragon territory. It’s only a matter of time before…”
My heart stopped. I turned to look at him for a second. “Before what?” I breathed, every inch of my skin raised in goose bumps.
“Before we come across one.” Rune’s eyes locked on mine for a second. No color left in them, and it wasn’t just the lack of light. It was concern. It was fear. It was panic.
Rune was terrified.
“A-a dragon?” I barely choked out.
A short pause, and Rune looked at me again. “An egg.”
The next second, bright light rose from the ground, possibly not fifty feet ahead of us, and exploded in the sky right over the trees like a golden sun rising out of thin air.
That my body still held me in those moments was a miracle.
We could see the light though the canopy—the branches weren’t exactly rich with leaves around here.
Most were…burned, now that I thought about it.
The trees looked burned every few feet, but we saw that wasn’t the sun that had risen in the middle of this forest.
No. It was a fae light, big and bright. A Seelie fae light.
We were running again before we even knew what the hell we were running for. The next few minutes might be the strangest, most terrifying time I’d lived yet, and of course, it was because of an actual dragon.
We heard the roar loud and clear, and then the light was gone, and there was movement ahead of us. A shadow.
One shadow among the trees. One person, not two. No gold or red, just auburn hair, and the terrified face of a man who was looking around himself like he’d just gone blind or like he’d lost something he couldn’t find.
Then he saw us running to him.
It was him, I knew it in my heart. It was the heir, the Unseelie heir, and though there was a part of me that wanted me to be cautious—because this was Lyall, after all, and he could have very well staged this whole thing to fool us—I believed it.
It was him, and he turned around to start running when he saw us approaching, completely disoriented.
Shadows shot forward from my side.
“Stop! Don’t run!” I called with all the voice I could muster, and then the roaring came again.
My God, it was right over our heads. We all stopped, not just the guy. We all looked up and we could see the sky just fine because the trees here seemed to be fewer and farther apart.
“That’s close enough,” said a voice I’d never heard before, and shivers crawled down my back like living things.
The heir was right there, possibly ten feet away from us, hands raised and glowing orange, the light reflecting in his eyes, revealing to us his face for the first time.
Rune and I stopped moving before I realized we’d been taking half steps to get closer as we looked up at the sky, sure we’d find the creature there because it sounded so close.
“Calm down,” Rune said. “We’re not here to hurt you.
” His voice wasn’t as composed as usual, and he was a little out of breath, too.
I was not used to seeing Rune afraid, and it did fuel my own fear even more, too, until I got my shit together.
There was a dragon over our heads somewhere, and Lyall was in this woods, and the heir of the Unseelie Court was in front of us—of course he wouldn’t be perfectly composed.
I couldn’t be, either.
“What did you do to him?” the man said, his hands still burning, and my magic reacted as well. Ice down my arms, gathering in the palms of my hands that had turned completely numb.
“Who?” Rune asked, taking a step closer to him, while the guy took one back.
Another roar, this one a little bit farther away, which didn’t exactly reassure me.
And where the hell was Maera?!
“The Sunny who broke me out. Where is he?” the man said, his voice thick and rough, and he didn’t look…
bad, per se. He wasn’t skinny, and the clothes on him looked old and torn in several places, but his skin was clean and his hair wasn’t messy.
It was long, down to his shoulders, loose around his head, and his face was clean, too.
His eyes focused. His cheeks round. I wasn’t sure why I’d expected him to be skin and bones when I’d first laid eyes on the cages of Ashfall, but I had.
“That’s Lyall,” Rune said, hands up, no light or shadows on them. “The Seelie King.”
A pause.
The orange glow on the hands of the man dimmed for a second. “You must be high on something,” he said.
“Listen to me—we do not have time. He brought you here and set off a beacon. The dragons are close. We must leave before they come—now,” Rune said.
A beacon.
That miniature sun that had appeared out of nowhere—of course Lyall had done it, and…
My God, I wanted to fucking laugh my heart out in that moment. It made such perfect sense! He’d brought the heir here, had broken him out of prison, just so he could set a dragon on him.
Fucking hell, had the man no heart at all? No conscience?
The man smiled. He actually smiled, and it was a mischievous little grin as his hands lit up brighter. “The dragons don’t come here. We had a deal. I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“They do,” Rune said. “Look to your right. There, between the trees.” He raised a finger to point to our left, but the heir didn’t turn. For a good moment, he didn’t turn, like he thought Rune was trying to trick him, get him to look away before attacking.
But at last, his eyes darted to the side fast.
At last, so did mine—and I saw the eggs.
I’d seen Jurassic Park. I’d seen the dinosaurs and their eggs, and fucking hell, they were so similar I doubted my fucking sanity for a moment. The color of them was a pale orange, and there were three of them, all reaching up to my hips. Eggs.
“This is the edge of Santra, where the dragons lay their eggs. The ashes in the Keep come from these trees. They use their fire to heat their eggs and burn the trees in the process,” Rune said, and fucking hell, he was right.
That’s why the trees were mostly burned.
That’s why there were fucking eggs half the size of my body near those trees, surrounded by big pieces of rocks!
Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic, I said to myself, but it was too late. Too fucking late.
The third roar came from over our heads, and this time, we actually saw the dragon.