57. Eradin
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
ERADIN
Help mine, Selira cried in my mind, the words slamming through our bond so hard my vision doubled. Her terror hit me, the kind that came from recognizing something you’d been running from your whole life.
She’d seen what this was before.
They built mouth. Taught the dragons to walk inside. Called it sacred. No one see teeth until too late.
Her claws carved deep lines into the stone.
It will NOT take Aristus. He remembered himself. He chose. Will not let mouth take what remembered self.
Aristus’s body stopped working. He slumped to the ground, Fen clinging to his spine. He slid down the slope, catching on a ledge below us.
My guttural groan rang out.
Aristus continued seizing, his body convulsing beneath Fen, who clung to the neck spike.
They were going to fall.
My knees were already gripping Selira’s sides, my body moving before my brain caught up.
As she flew down toward them, I reached again for the glowing collar that was killing Aristus.
Selira couldn’t get close enough. The angle was wrong, and I knew it, but I jumped anyway.
For one second there was nothing but open air and the canyon yawning below me, the bones so far down they looked like sand. My body understood before my brain did that this was how people died in this place.
Wind screamed past my ears. My belly dropped into my feet, and I was falling, falling…
Fen’s hand shot out, his fingers clamping around my wrist so hard my bones ground together. Pain cut through my fear. He yanked, and momentum slammed me into Aristus’s side hard enough to knock the air from my lungs.
I couldn’t catch my breath. My legs dangled over nothing.
“You’re safe,” Fen growled, his other hand latching onto my tunic. “I’m not letting go.”
I scrambled up, using his body as leverage. He groaned through clenched teeth but didn’t release me, hauling me higher with his injured arm.
I landed in front of him, my back against his chest, both of us clinging to Aristus’s neck spine while the dragon convulsed beneath us.
The collar burned brighter.
Aristus screamed.
I reached for the metal, intense heat searing through my palms and outward. New blisters formed and popped. The smell of my own burning flesh seared the back of my throat.
But my magic recognized this thing the way it did an infection.
Splinter. Foreign object. Expel.
The scale necklace burned against my chest. One shed scale, warm with something that hadn’t faded since the day she’d dropped it in the mud and waited to see what I’d do with it.
I pressed my palm over it.
Then I flooded the collar with everything I possessed.
Red light burst from my palm, bright enough it hurt to look at. Serpentine lines carved up past my elbows, visible through my sleeves, burning. I bit back a moan.
The collar fought back.
Decades of embedded spellwork activated all at once, runes flaring white. The metal heated under my palms, burning hotter, hotter, until I smelled my own flesh cooking. More blisters formed and burst.
I bit down on a scream.
Through the bond, I felt the collar trying to redirect my magic, to use me as fuel. If it could, it would drain me instead.
My magic pushed deeper, finding the seam where metal met scales, that place where flesh had grown around the collar for so long Aristus’s body didn’t know the difference anymore. I forced my way between metal and dragon, my magic peeling them apart one layer at a time.
The collar shrieked, though it wasn’t a sound I heard with my ears. This vibration rattled my bones and made my teeth ache.
It knew what I was doing, and it did not like it.
Too fucking bad.
My magic stuttered. A slip, the connection between my hands and my power going thin the way the bond had done inside the creature’s belly. The collar seized on that moment and pushed back, and the pain went from burning to something that didn’t have a name yet. I nearly let go.
Aristus’s body arched beneath us, his wings snapping wide. Fen’s arms wrapped around my waist, both of us holding on while Aristus tried to shake himself apart.
I dug deeper, pulling harder, and the metal bulged under my hands. Aristus’s scales heaved from underneath, his body trying to reject what had been killing him for twenty-three years.
One more push.
Just one more.
I shoved healing magic into the collar.
It shattered.
Pieces rained down, still glowing, still shrieking that high, thin sound that jarred through my bones. The pieces hit the canyon wall and went silent.
Aristus slumped to the ground beneath us.
Fen’s terror spiked through the bond.
Fates, Aristus was dead. I’d killed him. He’d collapse and Fen—
Aristus breathed, deep and full, his ribs expanding the way they were meant to, the way they hadn’t since he was a hatchling.
I felt his wonder at air reaching the bottom of his lungs. The pins-and-needles sensation as circulation returned to places the collar had been strangling. The way his magic suddenly had room to move.
And underneath it all, joy pure enough to make my eyes burn.
Free, he shouted through the pack bond. Free. Free. Free.
Fen’s face had come undone. He pressed his forehead to the back of my head.
“This… Thank you.”
Aristus’s wings snapped open, the wingspan broader than I’d ever seen them.
And he sang.
But dragons didn’t sing. That’s what I’d been taught. They shrieked and roared and made vicious sounds during battle.
Yet Aristus sang, and the sound echoed off the canyon walls.
Selira came closer, and the two dragons touched noses. Wild calling to wild, even when one had been caged for most of his life.
My eyelids drooped. I wanted to rest. I’d snuggle in Fen’s arms and sleep for a week. But Reece’s dragon was dying, and there was no time for anything except moving. The collar around his neck blazed so bright the scales underneath had started to blacken.
“Selira.”
She caught me as I half-fell, half-jumped from Aristus’s back to hers.
The world tilted, and my vision narrowed, burning out like I’d stared at the sun too long.
She carried me up to Reece’s dragon, Fen and Aristus right behind.
The dragon thrashed beneath Reece while devastation cratered the older man’s face.
When Selira got close, I leaped from her back, my ankle rolling when I hit the ground. I hobbled over to where the dragon lay on the bone-strewn surface, his sides heaving.
I wrapped my hands around the collar, and pain screamed up my arms.
Magic hemorrhaged out of me.
Quick and steady. The wound doesn’t care if you’re scared.
My mother’s voice echoed so clearly I almost turned to look for her. She’d said those words in every sickroom and cottage bedroom where she’d laid her hands on someone broken and willed them to live.
She’d worn long sleeves her whole life to hide what I was doing now.
And now I knew why.
This collar felt different. Brittle. Stress fractures ran through the metal in spiderwebs, years of compensating breaking the dragon and the collar together.
My vision blurred.
The red lines had reached my shoulders. Each pull came from a well scraping rock bottom.
I made my magic work anyway.
It hit, and the collar burst outward. I controlled the break before shrapnel could shred the dragon’s throat. The metal fragmented under my hands, pieces coming loose, and I had to dig each one out of his neck.
I forced my fingers to keep working, searching for the last pieces by feel because my vision had narrowed to a pinpoint.
Blood welled from beneath his scales and dripped. My palms had turned into raw meat.
Reece’s dragon surged upward as I finished and tumbled backward. Selira’s wing caught me, guiding me onto her back before I could hit the ground.
Keep going, Selira said. Almost done. Almost free.
One more. Just one more.
Lyndie’s dragon lay above us, his movements jerky. The collar around his neck throbbed light in time with a heartbeat that wasn’t the dragon’s.
Selira climbed while white crept into my vision from all sides. The world was too bright and getting brighter, and my hands were shaking so badly I could barely grip her neck spike.
When we drew level with Lyndie, I slid off Selira’s back, stumbling across the open space between us, my hands reaching for the collar.
This one felt elegant. The runes had been woven into layers upon layers of spellwork. High-level magic, if I had my guess. The kind you’d only know if you’d studied it for thousands of years.
But what could I do but try?
I touched the collar, closed my eyes, and reached for the last of my reserves.
I thought of Tolross and Father and Fen and Selira, plus every dragon that had ever died with a collar around its neck.
My hands found the collar.
Cold metal, Selira said. Bad metal.
My palms screamed.
And I pulled.