Chapter 25 #2
He wanted to argue. Every instinct in his body wanted her pressed against his chest where he could feel her breathing.
But she was right. On a single kethral they'd be heavy and slow.
On two they could split if pursued, take different routes to the caves.
She was right, and he hated that she was right.
He threw a saddle on Aethon. No bridle — no time.
He looked across the aisle. November had Shade's halter on.
No saddle. She'd vaulted up bareback, the kethral shifting beneath her in the firelight, her bare legs gripping its sides, her feet still bare, his shirt torn and blood-stained and the scale blazing at her throat.
"Stay behind me. North slope. There's a cave system — I'll signal before I turn."
She nodded. Her face was calm. Her eyes were not. She had decided to be brave and was going to keep deciding it for as long as it was required.
They rode out of the stable at a flat run.
The plateau opened around them — dark and vast, the burning estate falling behind, both stars invisible behind smoke.
The kethral's six-legged gait ate ground with the rolling speed that made them the dominant riding animal on Aelthar's high country.
Wind hit his face and he leaned forward.
The world narrowed to the dark terrain ahead and the sound of November's kethral behind him, close, matching pace, her weight moving with the animal the way he'd taught her.
He heard the wings half a second before the shadow fell.
Something massive. Something that displaced air like a falling building. The scent hit him a fraction of a second after. Drakon. Varek bloodline. The musk of a full shifter, overwhelming even in the open air.
Caeden.
The Drakon dropped from the cloud cover, its wings spanning forty feet, scales black in the firelight, the coiled precision of a creature bred for exactly this kind of strike. He came in low and fast on a trajectory that bypassed Rhaezon entirely.
November.
Rhaezon yanked Aethon sideways and screamed her name.
The Drakon's talons closed around Shade's neck and November's waist simultaneously.
Shade screamed — the high, awful sound of a kethral in mortal terror — and the Drakon wrenched upward.
The kethral's legs left the ground. November's hands lost the halter.
For one impossible second she was suspended between the kethral and the sky, Shade falling away beneath her, the Drakon's grip tightening.
And then Caeden banked hard, and November's body swung like a pendulum while Shade crashed to the plateau surface.
Rhaezon was off Aethon before the kethral stopped moving. He hit the ground running and the shift took him.
His body simply went. The Drakonblood answered the scream in his blood with total commitment — scales erupting across every surface, bones reorganizing, his spine extending, jaw widening, the pain of the damaged wing membrane tearing as the shift demanded what the scar tissue could not give.
He was further into the shift than he'd been in ten years.
He could feel the form waiting for him — the full Drakon, the creature he was supposed to be, wings and fire and a body that could match Caeden in the sky and tear him apart.
He was almost there. The shift was happening.
It was going to work. For the first time since they'd broken him, it was going to—
The blaster bolt hit him in the left side.
Not the shoulder. Not the arm. The side, where the shift had opened the old wound, where the membrane connected to his ribs and the scar tissue had ripped to allow the transformation.
The bolt punched through the gap in his emerging scales and the pain was white and total and the shift collapsed like a building losing its foundation.
He crashed down. Half-formed, half-scaled, neither beast nor man.
His claws gouged the earth. His vision went amber and then red and then grey at the edges.
A Kleotrian soldier stood thirty yards away. Blaster still raised.
Rhaezon lifted his head.
Caeden was climbing. Wings pumping in deep, powerful strokes that carried him higher with each beat. November hung in his grip. She was not screaming. She was looking down. Looking for him. He could see her face, white against the dark, growing smaller.
He tried to stand. His left side wouldn't hold. He tried to shift again, pushing into the change with everything he had, and the torn membrane seized and his body refused and he collapsed again, claws scraping stone, a sound coming out of his throat that was not a word in any language.
She was getting smaller.
The estate burned behind him. Smoke pillared into the sky. Somewhere in the ruins, Davn was down. The staff were scattered or captured or worse. The kethral — Shade — lay on the plateau surface twenty feet away, motionless, and he could not tell if she was dead, broken, or in shock.
November was a dark shape against stars now. Then just stars.
He watched the sky where she had been until watching meant nothing. Until the shape was gone and the wings were gone and the silence of the plateau settled over him with the absolute indifference of a world that had never promised him anything and was keeping that promise now.
She was gone.
He put his forehead against the ground. The stone was cold. His blood pooled beneath him in the dark, black against black, and the scale necklace's warmth — the one piece of himself he'd given her — faded from his awareness as the distance between them grew past sensing.
The soldier was still there. Rhaezon could hear him breathing.
He could not shift. He could not fly.
He could still burn.
He raised his head. Met the soldier's eyes. And let the weapon they had made of him finish the work.
When it was done, he put his forehead back against the cold stone and stayed there for a moment. Just a moment. The plateau was silent except for the estate still consuming itself and the wind moving with its absolute indifference.
Then he got up.