8. The Soul Bond #3
And I lay in the sand my ancestors were buried in, clawing after the woman who must have bled herself dry for a war I never wanted her anywhere near.
And then agonizing pain took everything.
The moonlight left.
The cold ground left me too.
My Tiger’s face over the red shoulder disappeared from my mind along with the sound of guns booming and the roar of planes.
This pain was not a wound, sting, or sharp slice.
It was fire, and it blazed hot in my gut and climbed, fast, eating its way up through me.
“AHHH!!” It poured down my arms. It ran up my spine. It filled my mouth and my eyes until there was no scream left that could carry it out, and still it burned hotter, feeding on me, taking everything I was made of for fuel.
And somewhere in the heart of that blaze I understood at last what the rite had always meant.
To rise as something else, a man first had to burn.
DEAR GOD!!!!
So I let it take me. Not to win the war, but because my Tiger had sacrificed for this. I would not take her bloodshed and pain lightly.
Screaming, I let the fire have the Dragon.
GODDAMN IT!!!
Then, beneath the burning, something woke.
It had lived in me my whole life, behind a wall I never built, raging at the bars, starving for a freedom I kept it from.
Through the hot pain, I felt the flames eat through that wall, and the wall did not hold.
It came apart from the inside, and the beast roared.
It rose.
Out of the embers of the man I had been.
Uncurling in the smoke.
Pouring into every space the fire had hollowed out.
Climbing my spine.
Flooding my chest.
Pressing behind my eyes until I could feel it looking out through them.
Is that. . ?
My hands stilled in the dirt. The burning stopped reaching for my arms and my legs. It gathered. All of it, drawing into one place, beneath the bone, white-hot, and I could only lie there and feel my beast climb—so vast, fierce, and impatient, lifting up out of the center of my chest.
There. . .my dragon-shadow lifted free of me for the first time in my life.
Oh. My. Fucking God! That’s. . .
This gigantic mystical beast poured up out of my chest in churning, shimmering ribbons of black smoke, and it kept rising, unfurling wider and wider, smoke breaking loose off its body and drifting up to pool against the sky.
Oh fuck! It’s massive!
I had carried this beast my whole life and never once seen it, and now it hovered over me, filling the entire clearing.
T-this is happening! Fuck!!
My mother said it was real and told me stories.
My Tiger said it was real and claimed she saw him.
But oh my fucking God for me to see it myself. . .
Its long serpentine body coiled up into the dark, scaled in shifting black that turned over itself like a storm cloud, ridges running its spine, two horns sweeping back from a huge skull. Wings stretched outward from its sides, wispy, trailing smoke, and blotting out the moon.
My dragon-shadow looked down at me, and its eyes opened.
FUCK! It’s terrifying. . .good. . .
His eyes were two points of fire in all that black, deep gold at the edges and white at the center, the same fire that had just burned through me.
As the beast rose higher, his molten gaze found me on the ground, and those eyes knew me, better than I knew myself.
It worked. Whatever my Tiger did. . .it fucking worked. I can see it.
I stared at the shadow-beast in utter shock. “Y-you’re there. . .I see you.”
The beast blinked and reared back its smoking head, and its jaw split wide, and fire poured out of it—but not real fire. Gold shadow. Wisps of it, curling, weightless, and the same drifting smoke its whole body was made of. Beautiful and soundless, the gold fire spilled across the clearing.
And even though it was probably invisible to anyone who watched, the trees cracked from that unseen fire.
FUCK!
My lips parted.
My beast washed the shadow-fire over another tree line, and the trunks split where it touched them, splintering, groaning. Whole branches tore loose and crashed down into the dark.
The wisps could not be more than smoke, weightless, unreal—and they broke the forest apart anyway, snapping wood like the hand of something that did not care what was solid and what was not.
Can we do that to people?
The beast snapped his gaze back to me and then. . .he nodded its massive head. . .
It hears my thoughts. . .of course it does. . .
My heart slammed in my chest.
O-kay. . .
Gunfire rose on the island.
I knew I had to get it together and rise. “How the fuck. . .am I going to control you?”
My dragon-shadow lowered its great head toward me.
Wispy smoke left its huge nostrils and breathed hot across my face.
I felt no fear of it, only awe and the thunder of my own blood.
And all the hope that with him. . .with him. . .I could fucking win this goddamn war!
Then the beast turned, slow, toward the dark where they had carried Nyomi, and to my fucking shock, a low sound built deep in the dragon-shadow’s chest, climbing, gathering, booming until it tore the night open with the beast’s dark, deranged voice. "WAR!"