Chapter 13 #2
He flinched. I saw it—saw the flash of old fear, the instinctive recoil of someone who'd been shouted at by men who meant harm—and the guilt nearly killed me.
But the dragon was already moving, already pressing outward against my ribs, my spine, my skin, and I couldn't hold it.
Not this time. Not with the adrenaline and the rage and the primal, screaming need to protect what was mine from the predator who'd just tried to destroy it.
Cinder scrambled out of the truck. I watched him through the frozen windshield—a blurred shape backlit by late-afternoon sun—and then I threw open my own door and staggered into the empty road.
The shift took me before my boots hit gravel.
It wasn't graceful. Not like Cole's transformation that I'd seen once—that smooth, luminous unfurling of fire and scale. Mine was violent. Sudden. Like something that had been caged too long finally ripping free of its prison.
I felt my spine elongate, felt my shoulders reshape, felt the cold blast outward from my center in a shockwave that turned the road surface white with frost for thirty feet in every direction.
Pine needles froze solid on their branches.
The truck's windows shattered in a cascade of crystallized glass.
The air itself seemed to solidify, thick with ice particles that hung suspended like frozen stars.
And then I was through.
Not Taranis Rees. Not the goaltender. Not the man who'd spent twenty years learning to be small enough to fit inside a human life.
Something vast. Something ancient. Something made of winter and fury and a grief so old it had frozen into the bedrock of my bones.
I felt the weight of my wings—massive, translucent, veined with ice that caught the fading sunlight and fractured it into a thousand cold blue prisms. My talons dug into the road surface, splintering asphalt like eggshell.
My tail swept behind me, heavy and armored, sending a spray of frozen gravel into the tree line.
The scales along my spine shimmered—pale silver-blue, almost white, layered and intricate in patterns I'd never seen but somehow recognized.
The cold didn't radiate from me anymore.
I was the cold. Every breath I exhaled turned the air to frost. Every beat of my heart sent another pulse of winter rolling outward.
And the rage—God, the rage. It filled me like a blizzard, whiteout fury directed at the man who'd dared to threaten my mate, who'd invaded his home, who'd chased us down a mountain road with murder in his eyes.
I wanted to follow. Wanted to launch into the sky and hunt the blue sedan until I found it and froze it and everything inside it into a monument to what happened when you touched what belonged to me.
My father's face flashed through my mind. Three boys on a playground. Bodies that stopped moving.
The memory hit like a physical blow, and I reared back, a sound tearing from my throat that wasn't a roar—it was a keen. A howl. The sound of an animal trying to stop itself from becoming the thing it feared most.
I dug my talons deeper into the road, anchoring myself, fighting the instinct to fly with everything I had. The ice spread further—across the road, up the rock face, into the trees—but I held my ground. Held myself in place through sheer, desperate will.
And then I heard his voice.
"Taz."
Not screaming. Not running. Not the sound of someone fleeing from a monster.
Just my name, spoken with the same steady calm he'd used in the hotel lobby when the cold was spiraling and the reporters were closing in.
I turned my massive head, frost cascading from my jaw, and found Cinder standing fifteen feet away.
He was shaking. His coat was dusted with ice crystals, his breath coming in rapid clouds, his face so pale he looked carved from the same frost that coated everything around us. His eyes were enormous—wide with shock, with awe, with something I couldn't read and was terrified to name.
But he hadn't run.
He was standing in the middle of a frozen road, looking up at a creature that could kill him with a breath, and he hadn't moved.
"Taz," he said again, and his voice shook, but he steadied it with visible effort. The nurse. The professional. The man who walked toward emergencies when everyone else ran. "I can see you in there. I know you're in there."
A sound escaped me—low, rumbling, vibrating through the frozen ground. Not a growl. Something closer to a whimper, if a creature made of ice and scales and ancient power could whimper.
He took a step forward.
My dragon recoiled, terrified of proximity, of what might happen if he got too close. Ice surged outward in a defensive ring, frost climbing the air itself, and Cinder stopped. But he didn't retreat.
"Your temperature," he said, and a choked laugh broke through the words. "This is why. This is—God, Taz, this is what you've been hiding."
I lowered my head. Slowly. Carefully. The way you'd approach something fragile—except I was the dangerous one, and he was the fragile thing, and every cell in my ancient body screamed at me not to get close, not to risk it, not to be my father.
But Cinder stepped forward again. And again. Closing the distance I was too afraid to cross.
His hand lifted.
I saw it trembling. Saw the way his fingers spread—not grasping, not flinching, just open. Reaching. The way he'd reached for me in the dark of my apartment, in the cold of hotel rooms, in every moment when the rational thing would have been to pull away.
I lowered my head because it seemed inevitable, and his palm made contact with my snout.
The cold should have burned him. At this temperature, at this level of uncontrolled output, his skin should have blistered on contact—frostbite in seconds, tissue damage in minutes.
I knew this the way I knew every terrible thing my body was capable of.
I'd spent weeks cataloging the ways I could destroy.
But his hand didn't burn.
It pressed flat against my scales, warm and steady, and the cold.
.. bent. Redirected. Flowed around his fingers like water parting around a stone, finding a path that didn't include him.
My dragon recognized him before my panicked mind could catch up—recognized the warmth, the heartbeat, the scent of eucalyptus and skin and something underneath that was just him—and the ice retreated from the point of contact like it had been given an order.
Mate, my dragon keened. Safe. Ours. Won't hurt. Can't hurt.
"There you are," Cinder whispered, and his voice broke on the second word. Tears were streaming down his face, freezing into tiny crystals on his cheeks before they could fall. "There you are, Taz."
I made that sound again—the low, keening rumble that vibrated through the frozen road—and pressed my snout gently into his palm.
His other hand came up, both of them now cradling my jaw, and the warmth radiated inward like sunlight through ice, not melting me but softening something that had been rigid and terrified for decades.
"You're a dragon," he said, and the way he said it—not accusatory, not horrified, just factual, the way he'd state a diagnosis—made something inside me fracture.
"An ice dragon, I'm assuming. That's why your temperature drops.
That's why the cold follows you. That's why—" His breath hitched.
"That's why. Because what I was seeing wasn't a medical anomaly. It was you."
I couldn't answer. Not like this. Not in this form, where my voice was nothing but wind and frost and the deep, subsonic vibration of a creature too large for words.
But I lowered my head further, pressing my forehead against his chest the way Cole's dragon had pressed against Phoenix, and I felt his arms come up—both of them, stretching as far as they could reach around the massive curve of my jaw—and hold on.
He was shaking. Violently now, whether from cold or shock or both. But he didn't let go.
"I'm not afraid of you," he said, and the words came out fierce—almost angry—like he was daring the universe to challenge him. "Do you hear me? I'm not afraid. You're not going to hurt me."
How do you know? I wanted to ask. How can you possibly know that?
But he answered as if he'd heard me, which was strange, even as he kept his hands on me.
"Because you've been fighting this your whole life.
Every game, every cold snap, every time your temperature crashed and you held it together anyway—you've been protecting everyone around you from something they didn't even know how to manage.
" His fingers dug into the scales behind my jaw, finding the place where the armor was thinnest, where sensation lived closest to the surface.
"That's not a monster, Taz. That's the bravest person I've ever met. "
The rage trickled out of me. Not all at once—the threat was still out there, still a danger, still someone I wanted to hunt through frozen skies until he understood what it meant to touch something that belonged to a dragon.
But the killing edge of it receded, pulled back by the anchor of Cinder's hands and the steady, impossible fact that he was still here.
Still here.
I breathed out, and instead of a blizzard, it was just cold air.
The frost on the trees stopped spreading.
The ice on the road surface thinned, cracking in places as the ground beneath reasserted itself.
My wings folded slowly, the translucent membranes catching the last of the afternoon light before settling against my sides.
The shift back was slower than the shift out.
Gentler. My dragon didn't fight it—just withdrew with a reluctant, protective rumble, pulling the scales and the wings and the terrible, beautiful cold back into the cage of my human bones.
I felt myself shrinking, felt the world growing larger around me, felt the asphalt under my knees instead of my talons.
And then I was just a man. Kneeling on a frozen road somehow still in my clothes as usual, shaking so hard my teeth rattled, with Cinder's hands still on my face.
"Hey," he whispered, dropping to his knees in front of me. His thumbs brushed my cheekbones. His eyes were red-rimmed, wet, enormous—but steady. So goddamn steady. "Hey, I've got you."
"I'm sorry," I rasped. My voice sounded like it had been dragged over gravel. "I'm sorry, I didn't—I couldn't stop it—"
"Don't apologize." His hands moved to my shoulders, then down my arms, checking for injury with automatic precision even as tears continued to track down his face. "Don't you dare apologize for what you are."
"You should be running." The words came out wrecked. "Any sane person would be running."
He just about rolled his goddamn eyes when he should’ve been hysterically screaming. “Yeah, well, no one ever accused me of being sane.”