Chapter 4
Liz
I’ve known for a while that the strike and water dragons eat the earth dragons.
It doesn’t make it any easier to accept, but right now, the bigger problem is that until now, the earth dragons could at least repopulate.
Thanks to my decision, my choice inside Eyjafjallajokull, there won’t be any more earth dragon eggs.
I hadn’t thought that through.
But that means I inadvertently did what Gideon’s been praying to do since their arrival: I’ve doomed the dragons to die. Once they’ve eaten all their fallen companions, that’s it. No wonder Freya was shocked by my decision. She probably didn’t think anyone could be that stupid.
“No!” I wrap my arms around Gaia’s great neck, shifting the black fur tufts out of the way, and I squeeze. She’s such a stunning creature—like a massive black, Chinese dragon. When I get no response from squeezing, I pound on her chest. Something has to revive her.
What’s she doing? Azar asks.
Plumeria clearly has no idea either.
“Her heart stopped,” I explain. “If we can restart it—”
Gaia’s gone, Azar says. She’ll help our people in a new way now.
She can’t. This can’t be it. “No.” I shake my head. “She was fine. She was strong. Surely there’s something we can do.” I pull both swords out of the scabbard strapped to my back, ready to threaten him into getting creative. “What else can we try?”
You can’t possibly think to hurt me, Azar says.
“Why not?” I lift my chin. “You trained me to fight dragons yourself.”
I don’t have time for this, Azar says.
He’s more right than he knows. When I think about Gaia’s death and what it means for the blessed, and how it’s all my fault.
. .I start to cry. Again. It’s so horribly embarrassing.
I’m every bit as whiny and pathetic as all the humans Azar encountered before meeting me that first day.
Since the moment I sprang from that cursed volcano, I’ve literally done every single thing that repulses him about most humans.
And I’m about to be forced to watch him mate with Asteria. I’m not really sure what exactly that entails, but it’s not something I can do, obviously. Watching Azar marry someone else is. . .
Well, my life’s become a living nightmare.
Why do her eyes leak all the time? Azar asks.
They’re called tears, Plumeria says. She was fond of Gaia and is now sad about her death. Humans leak whenever they’re sad.
“What about you?” I need to think about something else, or I’ll keep leaking. If I’ve gotten good at anything in the past few months, it’s compartmentalizing. Grief over Gaia later. Deal with pressing stuff now. My eyes scan Plumeria, who looks. . .weary to me. “Do you need to eat?”
I won’t eat Gaia, Plumeria says. We became friends.
“What about Gunnar?” Liz’s swords drop. “It’s not our way—I hate it, but I don’t want you to die. You did work on the fountain, and like Gaia, you were still recovering from our escape. You should eat. . .something.”
Plumeria frowns, but she moves toward Gunnar.
I’m the one who told her to do it, but I still can’t watch.
“I’ll just. . .” I wander back toward the ocean, hoping the sound of the surf will drown out the noise.
While I stare out at the ocean, the wind clawing at my exposed skin and making my goosebumps return, I shiver. How did my life turn into this?
It’s like every moment since the blessed came and Ocharta bonded my mom has gotten worse. The few moments of good—all of them with Axel or Azar—only make me sadder. Now I’m starting to question my basic premise from the moment I left the volcano.
Was I right to lie and say I’d lost my memory?
I’m withholding information I would normally have shared with Axel immediately, so that I have something with which to negotiate.
But that’s not something I ever did before.
From the start, I was honest. I told him what I was willing to do, and I meant it.
Should I just tell him what happened? Should I tell him the decision that lunatic Freya forced me to make?
What if he hates me for it?
I knew the old Azar and the old Axel. I trusted him.
I don’t know anything anymore. It’s like I walked out of the volcano and onto quicksand. A sound awfully close to human retching draws me back toward Plumeria. Is that how dragons sound when they eat? I really hope it is.
I don’t want to look, but I can’t help myself.
Plumeria’s, unfortunately, not eating Gunnar.
She’s puking him back up, along with a strange greenish goo. When she straightens, she looks at Azar, and neither of them look pleased. “What’s wrong?”
Something’s changed, Plumeria says. I can’t keep that down either.
This is bad, Azar says. Very, very bad.
My guilt intensifies. “We need to talk,” I say. “I’ve. . .remembered something.”
Azar’s head whips my way. What?
She means you should go somewhere with less of an audience. Plumeria’s actually a delight—smarter than I realized.
“Yes,” I say. “Thank you for interpreting. Maybe you should come with us.” I can’t help glancing around at all the other dragons who have gathered. They’re all looking at the telltale neon green puke piles.
Where would you like to talk?
Before I can answer, Asteria flies overhead, circling in search of a place to land.
Clearly we’ve been absent too long. Her royal silverness is starting to bug me.
She gracefully accepted that Axel cared for me before, mostly, but now that he’s forgotten me, she’s a little too delighted to take advantage.
“Too late now,” I mutter.
Why? Azar looks genuinely baffled.
“I need to tell you something that happened in the volcano, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.
” I try pushing my thoughts at him—just him—like I used to.
I’m not sure how it’ll work without the bond.
It was always hard for me, but now? Your people might be upset.
I’d rather talk to you without Asteria or anyone else if possible.
At first, Azar just stares at me.
My message must not have gone through.
But then, just as Asteria lands next to us, he snatches me with one talon again and launches into the sky, mach ten, straight at the place the sun used to be. I’ll be back later. I have to talk to the human.
I don’t consider myself to be a smug person. Usually, I try to be fair and reasonable. But watching Asteria’s startled expression as we disappear is quite satisfying.
How far do I need to go?
We’re high enough now that I can’t breathe, and one of my swords is digging into my right wing hard enough to make me wince. “You can let me go.”
He doesn’t.
“I have wings, remember?”
My people are all going to die.
Apparently, we’re doing this here. A million and one miles in the sky, while I’m held in his claw like a tasty squirrel. Sideways.
“I can’t breathe up here.” I slap his foot as hard as I can.
His head curls around, one enormous eye meeting mine. In no way does he acknowledge me or my discomfort, but he does wheel downward slowly. Now?
“I. . .” I swallow. I’m not sure how to start this. “I lied before,” I blurt.
Clearly, I’m amazing at this sort of thing.
“I didn’t trust you,” I hurry to explain. “The Axel I knew was gone, and. . .I thought knowing what I knew might be the only defense I had to keep my siblings safe.” My breath catches, even as we go lower. Thinking about how Hyperion threatened to chuck them into the volcano still makes me sick.
You care about them a great deal.
“I do.”
You love them?
“Yes,” I say without thinking. “Very, very much.”
More than anything else?
I’m not sure I can answer that, not with the painful ache in my heart around Azar. “But when I was in that volcano, I met someone. Her name was Freya.”
The blessed oracle?
“She was human, or at least, she looked human to me.” I shrug, or at least, I try.
It’s hard to shrug when bands that are stronger than steel are binding your shoulder blades together and holding you at a forced sixty-degree angle.
I slap his foot again. “Can we please land on the ground? This is really uncomfortable.”
When he snorts, tiny flames shoot out, but he heads down in a tight spiral, and then he nosedives.
I forgot how much of a punk he was before our bond strengthened and he started feeling what I felt.
It almost gives me hope, recalling how much he changed, but not really.
Most of our breakthroughs came when he was in human form—a form he can no longer take.
“I made a mistake.”
He slams into the ground, the rocks underneath his feet compressing with a terrible groaning screech. Most of this island’s just a pile of lava rock in some stage of breakdown. We’ve clearly found a more-rock-than-dirt area. Explain.
“When I slammed into the volcano, Freya appeared and fished me out to talk. Meanwhile, you, Gordon, and Rufus stayed trapped. Those creatures—the horned ones—were eating you.”
Azar frowns.
“Can you shift to Axel?” I know it’s stupid for me to ask.
You prefer him? His expression’s strange. Guarded, maybe?
“It’s not that I prefer him. You’re the same—I do know that. I don’t much care what color your scales are, but you’re so big as Azar that I can’t see your face well from down here.” I can’t help my half-smile. “I really miss human-sized Axel.”
I was never that small.
“Oh, but you were,” I say. “When you first came to Earth—when you bonded me, in fact, you were in human form.”
He blinks.
“As an earth dragon, you could and did shift. Often.”
I shifted into human form frequently? He arches one incredulous eyebrow.
“Well, maybe not often, but fairly often.”
He stares at me for a moment, but then he shifts. He’s still way, way bigger than I am, especially since his upgrade, but he’s not towering over me by quite so much. As if he actually cares what I think, he drops down on the ground, his enormous head actually below mine. Happy?