Chapter 14
Chapter fourteen
Interference - Obstructing a player who does not have possession of the puck.
Cinder
We knelt there on the frozen road for what felt like hours but was probably minutes, his breath still fogging between us, my hands still shaking so badly I couldn't have threaded a needle if someone's life depended on it. Which, given my profession, was a concerning thought.
But the clinical part of my brain—the part that cataloged and assessed and filed things away for later examination—was already working.
Already rebuilding the framework of everything I thought I knew about Taranis Rees and replacing it with something that should have been impossible but felt, in the strangest way, inevitable.
A dragon. An ice dragon, if every fantasy story I’d read was true. Kneeling in front of me on a mountain road with frost still melting in his hair and the most terrified expression I'd ever seen on a human face.
"We need to get off this road," I said, because someone had to be practical and it clearly wasn't going to be him. "Can you stand?"
He nodded, but when he tried, his legs buckled.
I caught him—arm under his shoulder, his weight almost impossibly heavy against my side—and guided him to the truck.
The windows were gone, shattered into crystallized fragments that crunched under our feet like sugar glass.
The dashboard was smashed. The steering wheel had a thin layer of ice still clinging to its underside.
"Can you drive?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"No." His voice was raw. Wrecked. "Cinder, I—"
He didn't argue. That alone told me how far gone he was, and I guided him around to the other side. At least this one had no glass he might hurt himself on.
I settled him in, then jogged back around, brushed the glass off the driver's seat with my sleeve, climbed in, and turned the key. The engine coughed, sputtered, then caught—apparently whatever his shift had done to the exterior, the mechanics had survived. Cold air poured through the empty window frames as I pulled back onto the road, but neither of us mentioned it. After what I'd just witnessed, a little wind was hardly worth commenting on. And oddly, Taz was generating enough heat—or enough cold—to negate the chill. Okay, so that sounded weird. On top of a night where weirdness was off the scale, that almost made me laugh. But it was true. As insane as it sounded, Taz’s coldness almost warmed me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been driving? But I hadn’t banged my head.
I drove back toward the city in silence for the first ten minutes, stealing glances at him when the road straightened.
He sat with his head tipped back against the headrest, eyes closed, arms wrapped around himself like he was trying to hold his own pieces together.
The cold rolling off him had settled into something manageable—still lower than any human should register, but steady.
Controlled. Or at least contained, and the more I experienced it, the more comforting it was.
When we were back on the highway, I spoke. I wanted to try and explain why I wasn't completely freaking out. "I saw one before."
His eyes opened. He turned his head slowly, like the movement cost him something. "What?"
"A dragon." The word still felt strange in my mouth—too mythical, too impossible for the clinical vocabulary I'd spent a decade building.
But I said it anyway, because it was true.
"When I was a kid. I was maybe eight, nine.
We were visiting my grandmother's property in northern Colorado—she had this place up near the Wyoming border, acres and acres of nothing. Scrub brush and sky."
Taz was very still beside me. Listening the way he always listened—completely, like nothing else in the world existed except my voice.
"I'd wandered off. I did that a lot. Danny was just a baby, and my parents were always focused on him, so I'd just..
. disappear into the fields for hours." I swallowed, the memory surfacing with a clarity that surprised me.
I'd buried this so deep, I'd convinced myself it never happened.
"There was a ridge behind her property. Nothing special—just rocks and pine trees.
But that day, something was different. The light was wrong.
Too bright, almost blue, like the sun was hitting something reflective. "
I adjusted my grip on the steering wheel, steadying myself.
"I climbed up. And it was just... there. Lying on the rocks like it belonged there. Enormous. Silver and gold, with scales that looked like they were made of—" I paused, my throat tightening. "Of ice. They caught the light and threw it everywhere. Prismatic. Like looking through a frozen window."
Taz's breathing had gone shallow.
"It saw me," I continued quietly. "Turned its head, looked right at me.
And I remember thinking it should be terrifying.
This massive creature with teeth and claws and wings that could've blocked out the sky.
But it wasn't. It was..." I searched for the word.
"Sad. It looked sad. Old and sad and lonely.
And then it just—lifted off. No sound. No wind, even.
Just rose straight up and disappeared into the clouds. "
The highway hummed beneath us. I kept my eyes on the road.
"I ran back to the house and told my parents.
" My voice went flat here, the way it always did when I talked about them.
Protective numbness, Nancy called it. "My father said I was making up stories for attention.
My mother said I had an overactive imagination and that I should stop trying to be special.
" I laughed, and it came out as bitter as I expected.
"I was nine. I'd just seen the most incredible thing in my life, and they told me I was a liar. "
Taz made a sound beside me—low, pained.
"After a while, I believed them. Kids do that, right?
When every adult in your life tells you something didn't happen, eventually you start to think maybe it didn't. Maybe you dreamed it.
Maybe you were just a weird kid who wanted something magical to be real because the real world wasn't very kind to you.
" I exhaled slowly. "By the time I was ten, I'd filed it away as a childhood fantasy.
Overactive imagination, just like they said. "
"It wasn't," Taz whispered.
"No." I glanced at him. "It wasn't. Because I just watched someone turn into one on a mountain road, and it looked exactly the same. The scales. The light. That feeling of—" I struggled for words adequate enough. "Of something ancient. Something that belongs to the world in a way humans don't."
His eyes were bright. Too bright. He turned his face toward the shattered window, but not before I caught the sheen of moisture.
"Did you know it?" I asked gently. "The one I saw as a kid?"
He shook his head. "No. I don’t know any other ice dragons. But—" He paused, his jaw working. "There are others. Not many. We're... scattered. Hidden. Some of us have been hiding for a very long time." He hesitated, and I knew he wanted to say more.
We. The word sat between us with all its implications.
"The cold," I said, steering us back to something concrete, something I could examine and understand. "When you shifted—when I touched you—it didn't hurt me."
He flinched. "It should have."
"But it didn't. I put my hands directly on your scales, Taz.
At that temperature, I should have had frostbite in seconds.
Tissue damage. I've treated cold injuries enough to know what prolonged contact with extreme temperatures does to human skin.
" I held up my hand, flexing my fingers. "Nothing. Not even redness."
He stared at my hand like it was a medical anomaly. Which, I supposed, it was.
"That's not normal," he said carefully.
I chuckled, wondering if he realized how insane that sounded. "Nothing about today has been normal. But specifically—is that typical? When people touch you in dragon form?"
"No." The word came out rough. "No, it's not. Most people—if they got that close, if the cold didn't drive them back first—it would burn. Frostbite, like you said. I've seen it happen." A shadow crossed his face, old and heavy. "My father..."
He stopped. Whatever memory he'd stumbled into, he wasn't ready to share it. I didn't push.
"So why didn't it hurt me?" I asked instead.
The silence that followed was different from the others—not the comfortable silence of two people who didn't need to fill every moment, and not the raw, wounded silence of someone processing shock.
This was the silence of a man choosing his words with excruciating care, like each one was a door he couldn't close once opened.
"There's a... connection," he said slowly.
"Between dragons and certain people. It's rare.
Extremely rare. When it happens, the dragon's element—fire, ice, whatever it is—recognizes the other person.
Treats them as safe. Protected. The cold won't hurt you because—" He swallowed hard, and even in the dim light of the highway I could see the flush creeping up his neck.
"Because something in me has already decided you're not a threat. You're the opposite of a threat."
I turned that over in my mind, examining it from every angle the way I'd examine a set of labs that didn't make sense. "You're saying your dragon... chose me?"
"Something like that."
"Before you even knew me?"
"Yes." His voice was barely audible over the highway noise pouring through the empty window frames. "The first time you touched me in the training room—when you checked my temperature after that first game—my dragon just... knew."