Chapter 16
Grace
The wolf runs, and I let her. Move fast. Get away. That’s the whole plan.
The ground fights us the entire way. Loose rock where I want dirt, trees thinning out when I need them thick. I don’t know this mountain. He does. That’s reason enough to keep moving.
My side burns where the stone ripped it on my way out of the cave. Not deep, but every stride pulls at it, and the cold makes it worse.
Even out here, running for my life, my head won’t let go of Serenity.
Viktor and Jericho may have said they’d find her, but if they think I’ve been lying all this time, will they even believe she’s real?
And if they’re no longer looking for her, that means she has no one now.
No one pushing. Just me. If I can get back to the Syndicate, there might still be something to trade. My silence. Myself. Anything.
There has to be a play.
The last time I ran like this, it worked. I slipped out of a Syndicate facility on a night when one guard looked away at the right moment, and my magic did the rest. Two days later, an old wolf found me on a back road, half-starved, and took me to Aurora. They fed me. They gave me somewhere safe.
Now they’re hunting me too. There’s no one left to run to. Only away from.
My skin starts to crawl.
It builds between my shoulders, that old feeling of eyes on me. I slow half a stride and look up.
High above the open ground, dark against the gray sky, something is circling. Slow. Patient. Wings spread wide, riding the air without a single beat.
This can’t be good.
Whether it’s Aurora or Syndicate, I’m not ready to just hand myself over. I need a plan. And now I’ve run straight out into the open under something that can only be hunting me.
Short grass. Bare rock. The next trees are too far to matter.
I’m exposed.
My magic comes up before I ask for it. It always has.
Fear pulls the trigger and the glamour answers, wrapping tight around me until I’m barely there at all.
It’s the only thing I own that’s truly mine.
It got me out of that facility alive. My mother lived on it, and her mother before her. It’s the whole of what they left me.
I run under it and wait for the dragon to drift wide. To lose me.
It doesn’t lose me.
The circle shrinks. One pass. Two. Each loop pulls in tighter, until it’s hanging almost straight overhead.
Over me.
It’s not flying away. Its huge head sweeps from side to side, picking something up.
It can smell me.
It knows exactly where I am.
I have never felt more visible in my life.
The wings fold.
For half a breath, something ugly in me hopes. If I let it take me. If it carries me back inside, I’m close to her again. I can offer them anything. I can still make a deal.
Then I see the shape of the dive, and the hope dies.
A dive to catch something holds back. Leaves room for the grab. This one doesn’t. It’s flat and fast and aimed to hit, and I understand what that means.
They don’t want me back. They want me dead.
A dead woman can’t talk.
A dead woman also can’t trade, or bargain, or buy her sister one more month of being looked after.
The ground shadow is growing. I have a second, maybe two.
My wolf doesn’t wait to die.
She surges forward and takes over, and we’re moving before I’ve chosen anything. Not away, but in, under the angle of the dive, low and fast. Closing the gap to attack is the only card she has.
The hit takes the world away.
A claw catches my hindquarters, and I’m airborne, then down hard on my shoulder. I roll, come up, and get my teeth into the joint above its foreleg. Not deep. It’s all I have, so I hang on and grind. The dragon shakes me loose like an annoying bug.
I land on rock, ribs first.
The air is gone. My chest won’t work. My torn side is screaming, and the sky above me is all wings and neck and teeth, dropping. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever been under, and I know how this ends.
Out here. Alone. Nobody left to look for her.
I scrabble, trying to find my feet. Even though I know my wolf is no match for a full-grown dragon, I can’t give up.
I’m sorry, Ser. I’m so sorry. I—
Something slams into the dragon from the side and knocks the sky clear.
I don’t see where it comes from. One heartbeat there’s only dragon; the next there’s a bear the size of a bus sending the creature somersaulting backward through the air.
And I know him. I’ve never laid eyes on this beast, but it doesn’t matter. The sight of him feels like it’s been in the back of my mind all my life.
My wolf answers without doubt. He’s here.
I want to argue. Tell her that he took us. That he’s not safe.
He’s more, she insists. He came.
The dragon recovers. Its tail lashes, catching Decker across the chest. He rolls with it, comes up inside the reach again, and drives his shoulder into the softer fold under the wing.
The impact jars the ground. The dragon’s head snaps down, jaws closing on the bear’s ruff.
Blood sprays in a short arc, dark against fur.
Decker wrenches free, fur tearing. He goes low again, under the next strike, and sinks teeth into the same joint I found. Scales split. The dragon roars and twists, fire blooming from its throat in a sudden sheet.
The flame catches Decker full across the back and one flank.
Fur blackens and curls. Skin beneath blisters raw.
He doesn’t release. The reek of scorched hide fills the air.
He drives deeper, hind legs braced, weight pinning the joint while smoke rises from his own burning coat.
The dragon thrashes, talons raking down his ribs in return, opening three parallel furrows that well and spill.
Decker’s roar cuts through the crack of bone.
He shoves upward once more, driving into the chest wall until cartilage gives.
A giant paw slashes in an arc, claws three inches long raking into the crushed chest cavity.
The dragon gives a strangled snarl. Its wings beat once, then falter.
A gaping hole opens it from throat to belly.
I fight down bile, shrinking back. But it’s not necessary now.
Blood floods the grass under both bodies. The larger form sags, head dropping. It settles heavy and stays.
Decker rises to his back feet, breathing in short, wet grunts.
The burns on his back steam. The chest wounds run freely.
He shifts human before I can track the change—skin and muscle reforming around the damage, still bleeding, still marked.
I see it. I hold onto it while everything else starts going soft at the edges.
He turns and closes the space between us. Crouches. Looks me over with the same flat, unhurried face he gives everything. I don’t have the air to speak. I wouldn’t know what to say if I did.
He slides his arms under me and lifts.
I’m back in my own skin, and I don’t remember changing. His chest is bare and warm, and his scent is right there, filling every breath—the same rich, warm scent that undid me in that storeroom. My body curls toward it without my permission. My wolf goes still. Settled. Like the running is over.
Traitor, I tell her. She doesn’t care.
He starts up the mountain, and I start losing time. I focus on my breathing. Cold air in my lungs, the scent of blood, the slope tipping under his feet. Then warmth. His heartbeat. His skin against my cheek.
He’s bleeding. He’s carrying me up a mountain with his chest torn open.
Stubborn idiot.
But his arms don’t loosen. He doesn’t put me down.
I come up one last time, and one thought is waiting for me, clear and cold.
The Syndicate sent that thing to kill me. Not to bring me in. There’s no way back inside, no phone call coming, no deal left to make. The people holding my sister just told me what I’m worth to them, and it’s nothing.
And here I am, wrapped in the arms of the man I ran from, my face against his chest, warmer and safer than I’ve felt in years.
The dark takes me before I have to work out what that makes me.