Chapter 13
Bianca
One moment, I’d been standing in front of a miraculously alive Kevin, offering him help.
The next, I was in the snow with a face full of wet, cold ice.
A weight was on top of me, but it quickly lifted.
I gasped as I lifted my head, blinking snow out of my eyes, but I still saw nothing.
Utter darkness had descended, like day had turned into night at the flick of a switch.
I only knew it was dark, rather than that I’d gone spontaneously blind, because I could make out my hands in the pale snow and the edge of a tree trunk in front of me.
Noise came from behind—a muffled kind of shuffling—and I rolled to look, squinting and furiously urging my eyes to work better, to pick up something, anything.
Where was ísarr? What had happened to Kevin?
What had happened to the light, period? That was too bizarre, and a bit too much like my dreams. In the darkness, everything reminded me of them: the groaning, the shuffling sounds, the vague sense of movement around me.
Then the whispering noise came, and suddenly, I was back in that nightmare-scape entirely.
Yeah, I remembered those—calling to me, urging me to go outside, to go to them, to let them in.
I didn’t want to, but I rose to my feet on shaky legs and peered around for the source.
Where was I going? Where did they want me to go?
Confusion filled my mind the same way terror did.
The thud of something striking flesh was loud, followed by a moan and then silence.
I froze and listened; the whispers stopped, as if they had done the same.
Tendrils seemed to wrap around my ankles, my wrists, even my throat from behind.
They were there so suddenly that it was as if I’d blinked and, in the next moment, found myself trapped inside a net of vines.
I opened my mouth to scream in horror, and the whispers came again: “Yes, let me in. Let me IN.”
I screamed for Isárr instead, his name bursting from my lips—an explosion of sound and white fog in the darkness.
It felt like everything grew tight around me, but darkness was not corporeal; it shouldn’t have been able to.
I struggled, and my pendant slipped from my coat, glowing a bright blue in the dark.
“Bianca!” ísarr’s voice came from far away, so far away.
I twisted toward it, but the shadows that held me did not let go.
My eyes caught on warped tree branches and thick, looming trunks glittering with ice.
They shimmered with the blue light coming from my necklace.
Nothing looked familiar: not the trees, not the snow, not the slope of the hill I was on.
My eyes caught sight of the tracks I’d made in the snow.
I’d walked here, but how? When? I couldn’t recall.
An answering blue light flared far in the distance.
Like flame slashing through dark, this was ice carving a path through shadow.
The vines that gripped me—invisible bonds of blackness—tightened, and then they withdrew.
ísarr came roaring from the sky, real flame billowing from his dragon maw to scorch the canopy of trees above my head.
I blinked, and darkness bled away, turning the sky first to pale gray and then to white.
The dragon roared, and ice fell from his maw, raining down in glittering shards all around me, but never striking me.
When he landed, trees groaned and broke to make space for him, but the shadow was gone, as if it had never been.
To stand face to face with a giant blue lizard moments after that terrifying experience should have only added to the horror.
It didn’t. No, I recognized those pale blue eyes, knew him better than I thought he even knew himself.
Perhaps not in ways I could put into words, but in the ways that mattered.
He lowered his massive head toward me, his snout softly pressing to my chest and belly.
White spires rose proudly from his forehead, and all over his body, he glittered with azure scales.
He was gorgeous; he couldn’t possibly be real.
He was exactly what I needed to chase away the chill after that harrowing experience.
“I walked away, didn’t I? I walked away from you, and I didn’t even mean to do it.
What the hell is that, ísarr? You sensed those shadows too, right? You saw it go dark?”
“Yes,” he said, not with his mouth, but I heard him anyway.
Something shimmered around him, light but not light, and I thought he was about to change back into a man.
He didn’t, but his claws, huge enough to pick up a car, dug furrows into the snow and earth.
“We are going to the Hollow. Only the Destroyer knows what that is.”
The dragon lifted his head, and it rose, and rose.
He was so freaking tall that he could raise his long neck until he was looking out over the trees.
A front claw came for me, and it was instinct to want to duck.
I wasn’t fast enough, and then he was holding me—lifting me—until I was tucked against a chest as big as a house.
At the very least, as big as ísarr’s lonely cabin.
“The Hollow? Whatever happened to never leaving this mountain again?” I prodded.
My voice sounded weak and shaky to my own ears, as I tried to make light of things when nothing was light at all.
That had been awful, terrifying, and I never wanted to repeat the experience.
ísarr had to be thinking the same thing.
As a dragon, his voice seemed to rumble through the air and vibrate in my bones, while at the same time it made no sound at all.
It felt private, intimate, despite sounding exactly like what a thirty-ton beast would sound like.
“We will come back. A dragon does not abandon his hoard. We are simply...regrouping.” I liked that.
I liked the sound of that very much. It left only one question, but I had no chance to ask it.
My dragon leaped skyward, breaking through the canopy of bare trees and arrowing toward the pale, white skies.
There was no sign of any storm now, just pale fluff that hid the sun.
When I looked down, the ground was dropping away rapidly, but I could still see the circle of blackened treetops and the ones he’d leveled willy-nilly when he landed.
I opened my mouth, beginning to voice a name I was getting very tired of saying, but snapped it shut again.
My eyes caught on ísarr’s other paw, which was dangling lower to my left.
An arm stuck out from it, the orange jacket unmistakable.
So he’d even remembered to bring Kevin, in all this chaos.
It was silly, but it made me want to smile, a little bit of bright hope in the dark.
See, Isárr was a good guy through and through.
He talked a good game, but he wouldn’t kill anyone if he could help it.
He was exactly the kind of guy my mama would love to see at the dinner table during family gatherings.
I saw the town quickly; it was actually, surprisingly close by. Though I knew that as close as I’d been to ísarr’s home, I would not have made it in time for safety when that storm swept in last night. God, was it only last night? I felt like I’d lived a lifetime with ísarr already.
“What if they see you?” I asked, but the dragon only huffed, a real sound that I felt through the thick, hard scales covering his chest. He was laughing, as if that thought were silly, and I poked him against one of those iron-hard scales in irritation.
“What, does the whole town know about you? You can’t suddenly turn invisible, can you? ”
We circled downward, and he still did not reply, so I studied the town instead.
It was small, covered in a thick blanket of snow.
Picturesque. Cozy. But the storm had swept through here, and some trees had toppled, a roof had collapsed, and only a handful of homes had lights on or smoke billowing from their chimneys.
There was a slight feel of emptiness—of abandon—to many of these buildings, but signs of life in others.
The fallen trees had already been cut into smaller pieces and moved to the side of the roads, for instance.
I only had a short time to glimpse the main street, but it was enough to notice that some people were out and about here.
Then ísarr brought us down for a landing on the road leading into town.
I was carefully set on my feet, a claw braced against my back until I was steady.
Kevin was carelessly dropped in the snow, out cold, but still breathing.
Then Isárr shifted, and for the first time, I got a proper look at what that entailed.
Last time, I had not truly believed what I was seeing was real, and much of him had been encased in snow, obscuring the process.
This time, I saw the way he seemed to reshape into pure light, a pale blue energy, the exact same shade as his eyes.
When it faded away, I stood blinking from the brightness, but there he was: two legs, two arms, and that familiar grim look on his handsome face, azure hair in windblown locks around his shoulders, and his horns rising proud and sharp from his forehead.
He caught my hand, pressed a kiss to the knuckles of my icy skin, and then rubbed the digits warm between his fingers.
“Come on, we’ll walk the rest of the way.
I think everyone we need to see was on Main Street.
” He ducked and casually slung Kevin over a shoulder like the man was a sack of potatoes, or perhaps feathers, given how little effort that seemed to take.
Then he took my hand again and urged me with him.
“I want to know what the hell we’re dealing with before we go to sleep tonight, Elskling.
” He said the words with a heated glance that told me sleep was the last thing he had on his mind tonight.
And it was definitely going to be we—and not in separate beds—this time.