Chapter 85
“ESSI!”
I fall to my knees and crawl through the sloshy snow, feeling twelve phases old again. Watching Mah walk out across that skybridge, taking a very precise step over the edge as I screamed her name. As I watched her collide with the ground in the fucking Ditch so far below, then never move again.
“ESSI—No …”
This isn’t happening.
THIS ISN’T FUCKING HAPPENING!
Ignos begins to waver, and I look away from the spot where Essi disappeared, too scared of what I’ll see. Her lifeless body in the slosh—ravaged.
Dead.
More Moltenmaws flock the scene, like a thunderous storm churning above. No doubt drawn by the stench of fried flesh, they screech, swooping down to snatch roasted beasts. Some draw so close their barbed tails almost whip me in their haste as I slump to my heels and tear at my hair.
She just—
SHE—
A screeching roar fills the smoggy air.
The hairs on the back of my neck lift, and I look up—
Into the bright-red eyes of a dark-purple Moltenmaw diving at me, claws splayed and ready to snatch. A buck, based on his gargantuan size.
The rhythmic thump of his beating wings bashes air against my skin, tilling ash and embers, fanning the dying flames.
This is it. The fucked-up end I’ve been waiting for since the dae I failed to realize what Mah was about to do.
Since I trailed her through the castle like a rowdy shadow, groaning about an argument I’d had with Dothea, missing the flatness in her eyes that appeared sometimes …
when she fell into thoughts about our younger sister who died too soon.
Until it was too late.
Until she was looking sidelong at me as the wind tangled with her bloodred hair, her foot sliding forward.
Until she was falling away while I screamed for her to come back to me.
I don’t cower. Instead, I tip back and look the Moltenmaw right in those ruddy fucking eyes. I bare my throat, hands fisted as I tense every muscle in my body and scream two blasted words.
“FUCK YOUUUUU!”
Something collides with my internal barrier with such might I jolt from the impact. A flash of panic busts through me before a screeched roar attacks from behind.
There’s a gust of air. A bellowing heave. A flash of yellow-and-gold-threaded plumage, swooping almost low enough to touch.
My heart thunders, then slams to a stop as Maell collides with the beast nearly twice her size, but not before the foreign dragon whips its tail forward and tries to stab me—poisonous barb glinting in the firelight.
Too close.
Claws slash, beaks snap. Orange flames are thrown as both dragons battle for dominance, Maell screeching her wrath to the world while I’m crushed by fear for her safety.
For her life.
She’s too small for this. Too sweet and tender—
“Maell! Retreat!”
I lift my internal wall and scream it through our bond. Get nothing in return, her attention homed in on surviving each blow of flames.
Each pronged stab and open-mawed attack.
“RETREAT!”
The roar comes with a spit of blood.
A second much smaller Moltenmaw with the same purple plumage joins in the smash of flames and snapping beaks—like warring mountains.
Heart racing, I stagger to my feet. “MAELL, RETREAT!”
Their movements become so fast and flurried they’re a churn of wings, stripping into each other with their claws and maws, spraying red across the snow.
Fear rings my fucking neck.
Maell’s never shown interest in attacking another dragon. Has never felled anything other than a pending meal.
More blood splatters, accompanied by a spill of yellow feathers. A sight that mauls me to shreds as Maell’s adrenaline begins losing its edge, her movements growing slower … weaker … the larger beasts dominating the fight with their synchronized attack.
“MAELL!” My face screws up, lips peeling back from my teeth. “RETREAAAAAT!”
A flare of pain in my abdomen has me looking down.
I peel back my cloak to see my shirt slit through. Rip the gap wider and instantly regret it, realizing the purple Moltenmaw didn’t marginally miss me with his tail barb …
He got me. Dug an inch into my gut and whipped it through, diagonally across my abdominals. A gory slash that exposes my innards, now barely contained within my body.
“Fuck.”
One wrong move and I’ll spill everywhere …
Maell screams.
My gaze jerks up, hunting her through the smoke, my heart caught in a clamp that keeps crushing.
I wobble, certain the world’s shaking. My knees punch into the snow as I gasp dense breaths, like I’m breathing past a cloth that keeps gathering more muck.
Which probably means—
Another gut-churning glimpse at the wound, and I notice the red veins of Moltenmaw venom branching from the slash, weaving across my skin.
I groan, imagining what it’s already doing to my organs.
I know I haven’t got much time before I can no longer move. Before my body gives up, leaving me paralyzed but still awake and aware. The perfect meal to be tossed at warbling hatchlings, unable to fight as I’m slowly torn to shreds.
Probably the worst way to die.
Fuck that buck. If anyone’s eating me, it’s Gruffin.
Wind gusts forth, shoving back the Mists. I look up at the wall ahead, my vision wavering, splitting as I hold my guts together and gather the energy to stand.
I stumble through a graveyard of smoking carcasses, haunted by Maell’s shrieks that score me to the bone …
‘Retreat!’ I scream internally. ‘Please, Maell! Please listen.’
A guttural sound drudges out of me, not born from my torn-up gut, but from the squeaking sounds she’s making. The agonized cries to the sky.
To me.
‘Live … Please …’
Only silence echoes back.
My legs stop working.
I keep my arm bandaged around my gut as I topple forward and splash into the brown muck that reeks of dead things, blinded by a thrash of pain. As if someone’s claws are in my belly, tearing me down the middle, ripping a seam wide open.
My vision clears, gaze hones. I hiss wet breath, then cough it back up with a bloody splat.
Teeth gritted, I lift my spare arm, punch it forward, and drag myself through the mud—eyes trained on the wall. Too aware of the eerie numbness working its way through my muscles, swallowing me in increments.
Immobilizing me.
Warm hope drains from my veins, replaced by bitter resignation.
I’m not going to make it …
My next breath is thicker. Barely sufficient to keep the darkness from gathering at the sides of my vision.
Mah died with her face to the ground.
I don’t want to die like that.
I shore myself, using the last of my strength to heave onto my side, then flop to my back, sucking breath past gritted teeth—fast.
Then slower.
Time stretches, twists, and toils as I stare up at the Moltenmaw moons through tangles of thick smoke and luminous silver ribbons …
Even in their death, the dragons are magnificent. Unlike me, withering in the filth. Fitting, given how easily I gave up on Dothea. On a territory that probably needed me, not that I have much to offer.
Still …
There’s a smear of movement to my left, and I tip my head, the entire world jerking with the motion, making my body convulse with a retch. I manage to keep my split guts in check while I scour the inferno I created, right at the spot that took Essi.
There’s a thump. A ripple in the air that makes my heart hitch.
Makes a shiver climb my spine.
The fire begins to writhe, swish, and grow, pulsing with life. Like a hatchling just cracked from the flames, now stretching its wings. Tipping its head.
Releasing a trebled cry.
For a moment, I wonder if Ignos is playing games, shaping himself into big, fluttery beasts.
Realize it’s far simpler than that as the flames gust back to reveal a mythical Elding Bird tossing its wings wide—all blazing red feathers and a golden hooked beak.
A picture torn straight from the pages of my imagination—undoubtedly—appearing just as Mah spoke of them every slumber before she tucked Dothea and me into our pallets and bid us to sleep soundly.
Just as I spoke of them to Roan after he was bastard-born into the family, scurried into the shadows the moment he was cut from his mah’s lifeless body.
Guess the poison’s already made it to my brain.
The incredibly detailed apparition lifts its wings and whips them down as it leaps, bursting from the flames like launching from a nest, gusting hot air against my skin that feels real.
It tears upward in pulsing increments—embers dribbling from its tendrilled wings and tail like drips of lava that sputter before they hit the ground—then pierces through a dense cloud of smoke that churns in its wake.
Gone … as though it was never there at all.
It wasn’t, to be fair.
With little else to do but wait for life to bleed out of me, I stare at the swirling smoke for what feels like forever, crushed by the pained sounds of wrestling dragons.
And I wait. For what, I don’t know.
Maybe for this fuckin’ pain in my chest to stop.
But it doesn’t. Instead, it gets worse as a small, shapely figure sprints free of the smoke-swathed dimness crushing me from all angles. She’s dressed in smears of muck and ash, not that it does anything to mask her long, vibrant red hair.
Not that anything could.
Essi …
Even in my imagination, her beauty is unmatched—rushing toward me in that fluttery way she moves, like she’s made of air.
I can’t help but wish we’d had more time together.
That I hadn’t failed her by passing out on the ground at her feet, sleeping while she was out hunting the plains that’ve already swallowed too fucking much.
She falls to her knees at my side, panic struck across her face as she takes me in through wide eyes.
Even the close proximity of her apparition makes my skin prickle. I can feel that. Meaning I’ll feel myself being eaten if I don’t bleed out beforehand.
Great.
Hands shaking, she reaches up and tries to tuck her hair behind her ears. “Shit-shit-shit,” she mutters, then pushes up what’s left of my shirt, her flesh meeting mine. Too warm and real.
More than I deserve.
She examines my wound. Rips my shirt wider to inspect the rest of me, tracing the lines of those red veins of death with her damn beautiful eyes.
“I’m—s-sorry.”
“Save your breath,” she growls, her attention fixed on my bare torso.
If I had more control over the hallucination, I’d have her looking into my eyes until the very end.
I use the remaining dregs of my strength to lift my hand and cup her face.
She pulls a sharp breath and finally meets my eyes, hers swimming with something I think I searched for my entire life. “Don’t look at me like that,” she bites out, dropping her gaze to my wound. “You’re not dying.”
My hand falls from her face. Energy spent.
You’re wrong there, luv …
Perhaps I say it aloud because she snarls, then straddles me. All the breath shoves from my lungs as I look up into her fierce eyes, wishing all my dreams came true when my heart wasn’t sputtering out.
When hers was still beating.
“I’m not dead!” She snatches my hand, flattens it, then splays it across her chest, right atop her hammering heart that’s pecking at me—hard and fast.
All this proves is that my imagination is being really fucking kind to me.
“Creators,” she mutters, then digs her fingers into my wound, shafting me with a very real lance of pain. Like she just scooped up my loose guts with a flaming spoon. “I’M NOT DEAD, DAMMIT!”
I think I roar, though in truth, I don’t have the breath to make such a sound—staring so hard at her face my eyes start to ache.
I map the freckles on her cheeks, all exactly where they’re supposed to be, her big eyes hardened by a jarring amount of determination.
The same look she gets when she’s working on those damn stones, but more intense.
Finally, I look at the freckle above her lips—too right. Too perfect for me to dream up.
Meaning—
A pained sound moves up my throat.
“But you’ll be dead. Very soon, if I don’t do something to fix you. Your innards are almost spilling.”
“You—F-ffflames—”
Her hand slaps across my mouth, pinning it shut. “Save your energy,” she growls, the urgency in her voice binding me so tight it’s hard to breathe. “I’m going to mend you, but I need you to trust me.”
I don’t think she realizes how much power she has over me right now. She could ask for my soul and I’d put a fucking bow on it.
I manage a nod.
Her eyes cloud with something that looks a bit like shame before she brings her wrist to her mouth and bites deep, pulling back as glossy red wells to the surface of the crescent wound.
She hesitates, mutters a few curse words, then thrusts her hand forward and presses the wound to my lips, coaxing her blood to dribble on my tongue.
Filling my mouth with a metallic spill of warmth that’s tinged with the taste of smoke. Like her essence is … burnt.
I frown. Try to mumble my confusion against her flesh.
“Shut up and swallow!”
Her voice breaks against the command.
Eyes locked with hers, I abide, letting my muscles contract. Her blood moves down my throat like an oil slick catching light as it sinks, becoming hot—
No.
Blazing. Like I just gulped from a bucket of lava.
The fire swells with a fluttering rage until it’s thrashing against the tight confines of my gut, intent on melting me from the inside out.
I open my mouth to ask what’s happening—what she did to me—but all that comes out is a roar.
Essi grips my hand. Cups it to her cheek. Nuzzles my palm as her eyes fill with tears that overflow, stripping clean trails through the ash on her cheeks. The last thing I see before the fire consumes me.
And I fall, flailing into the dark.