Max
The alarm blared and blared, a hard metallic pulse that drove through the floor and into my teeth.
We all knew the drill.
My heart pounded. Worry for the heirs, for every soul packed into this fortress, clamped down on my chest.
Around me the room came apart at the seams. Over half of the first-years jumped to their feet at once, chairs scraping, breath going short and shallow.
I could read it on every face: the instinct to run, to hide, to be anywhere but a building the enemies were about to come down on.
A girl two rows over had gone white to the lips.
A boy gripped his desk like it might hold him up. Every one of them wanted to bolt.
“Discipline!” Lieutenant Vesper shouted, and the whole room flinched. “You’ve been trained for this.”
She ordered them to the underground shelters—every major building had one, for cadets and civilians.
Their training held. No one screamed. No one shoved. The cadets filed out in tight rows and funneled toward the shelter. They weren’t ready for the fight coming. Green cadets in a battle like this one would only get underfoot, and the officers wouldn’t waste a single one of them for nothing.
I skated the other way, hard and fast, away from the shelters. Lieutenant Vesper came after me.
“Cadet Max—”
I lifted my arm. The Coldiron armguard peeled off my wrist and flew apart into two chakrams, their edges glinting.
Her eyes went wide.
“I’m joining the fight,” I said.
She gave me one short nod and turned back to herd the rest of them underground.
I shot out the doors, and Bryn fell in at my side.
“You need to go with them,” I started.
“Not a chance,” she said. “I go where you go. I’m on the drill roster now, remember?”
One day on the roster, and she was already bragging about it. But I nodded anyway. “Stay sharp.”
“Always,” she said. “And I’ve got your six.”
I skated flat out, and she kept pace. Barely, but she did. All that training she’d ground through while I was deployed had paid off.
It was disciplined chaos.
Soldiers poured into the rear of the fortress, slotting into formation even as they ran. Out past the walls, dark specks raced in from the far sky, swelling by the second, and the sound arrived a beat behind them—the heavy thud of wings, and under it a chorus of shrieks that scraped down the spine.
So many of them. My blood went cold.
I had a sinking certainty they’d come for the academy, the soft belly of the fortress, where the unblooded cadets and the civilians lived.
The vampire army held the ground to the east. But it was high noon, and at high noon vampires were at their weakest. Whoever sent this horde had chosen the hour on purpose.
It changed nothing. The vampire warriors were already up on the defense walls, trading their strength against the brutal sun, skin reddening where the light found it, holding the line regardless.
Nikolai led them, the one among them the noon sun couldn’t touch, his voice cutting cold and clear over the rampart. Archers angled their bows at the sky. Volleys nocked and ready.
Shit. I should have forged a quiver of Coldiron arrows, but I’d been hoarding the metal for the Haven. Who’d have guessed the next strike would land this fast? Drakken’s voice cracked through my head, an old drill-yard bark. War waits for no one, cadet.
I cut into the center of the training field. Drakken was already there, barking orders into the melee until his generals and commanders peeled off to run the ground defense.
I set myself ready. Bryn planted herself at my shoulder, her spear angled at the sky. We’d ended up among the Spartans, and no one told me to clear out. They knew me. And because Bryn stood beside me, no one barked at her to leave either.
Jeeps tore back and forth across the field. Elite Fae, shifters, and hybrids poured in from the south and west to thicken the line.
Then Drakken shifted.
It happened between one breath and the next—his body folding outward, bone and shadow stretching long, gold scales pouring over him like spilled coins.
The air cracked with heat. Where the man had stood, a dragon rose, black and gold and enormous, wings unfurling wide enough to throw the field into shade.
He settled in the heart of the chaos, and his molten gaze swung around and found me.
Somehow, I could read him, the want in him passing to me without a word. His beast and I ran more in sync than the man and I ever had, which I tried not to think about too hard.
The dragon wanted me on his back, the way it had gone at Greyhold, where we’d cut through the mutants together and made a good team.
I stripped off my skate shoes, pressed them into Bryn’s hands, and told her to shadow the Spartans. She’d never stood in a real fight, however many drills she’d logged. Today she’d get her first taste of one, but not on the front line. I wouldn’t have it, and the Spartans wouldn’t either.
Then I ran, leaping higher than I had any right to, startling myself, and came down cleanly on the dragon’s back.
Maybe my demon passenger had a point about me. Despite all I’d mastered with Coldiron, I’d never reached for the rest of what lived in me. Fear had its grip on whatever else I could do.
I shoved the thought aside and locked onto the coming fight. The specks were close now and closing in, near enough to resolve into shapes—leathery wings, lashing tails, jaws cranked wide around deafening shrieks. Their numbers had blotted out the sun.
A howl tore up from the ground, all rage and battle lust, and dragged my eyes down. A gray wolf ripped into view, larger than a warhorse—Caspian, in his beast form. I gave him a nod from the dragon’s back, then swept my wary gaze to the coming wyverns.
Blood pounded in my ears, and a war drum beat in my veins.
All three heirs were here. Though I had a feeling Aelindor wouldn’t join us aloft. He’d hold the front and center of the fortress, even with the worst of the battle back here, in case the mutants wheeled around or their reinforcements struck somewhere else.
The wolf bunched his muscles and sprang for the dragon’s back. The mighty dragon grunted a warning, smoke and sparks spitting from his snout. He didn’t want a wolf’s claws up there.
But Caspian was already shifting mid-leap, a feat barely any shifter could manage, and came down on two feet, square in the middle of the dragon’s spine.
I couldn’t balance up there the way he could. The wolf shifter stood tall, gloriously naked and not giving two shits about it, and flashed me a grin. My pulse tripped. I fought to keep my eyes on his face, which took more effort than I’d ever admit.
He had no business distracting me like that with a fight bearing down on us. Then again, I couldn’t fully blame myself. I liked to think I was hard to rattle, or at least I looked it, but I was still a red-blooded woman, and only the dead could look at Caspian like that and feel nothing.
The dragon was already climbing. I dropped low and wedged my feet under the broad scales at his shoulders, anchoring against a fall. His heat soaked into my legs, and the great roll of muscle beneath me shifted with every beat of his wings.
“Back-to-back, Max.” Caspian’s grin widened; he knew exactly what he did to me. “Don’t worry. I won’t let a hair on your head come to harm. Just follow my lead.”
I looked back over my shoulder and worked to keep my eyes nailed to his.
“You can’t promise that, prince,” I said.
“The wind alone will take a few hairs, whether you like it or not. And we’re flying into a battle—nobody comes out of one without losing something.
Last of all, I can’t just follow your lead.
We fight back-to-back. We cover each other’s blind side.
I’d be a sorry excuse for a soldier if I spent the whole fight watching you instead of holding my own. ”
Caspian blinked. The dragon huffed, and it sounded like a laugh.
“Well said, Max,” Caspian said. “I knew you had it in you.”
“You forgot your weapon.” When he shifted back and forth, nothing survived the change but the Coldiron armguard I’d made him, still locked to his forearm. “Toss me the armguard.” I set my chakrams on my lap. “I’ll shape you a sword.”
“No need, sweetheart.” He winked and snapped his fingers.
Dark armor unfurled out of the air and sealed over him like a second skin, fitting like it had been poured on. He hadn’t had it the last time. And it came armed—a sword hilt jutting up over one shoulder.
“The mages built it for me, after watching you shape metal,” he said. “Blood magic. They made you a set too. Still testing it.”
“Then you should’ve put it on the second you landed,” I said.
He opened his hand, and a stack of death cards flicked into his palm.
“And rob you of the view? Cruel.”
Was he serious? In the middle of a fight?
At least he hadn’t called himself a ten again, or I’d have left my post to go strangle him for making me live that down thrice over.
“I can’t believe—” I started, my face going hot.
The dragon came to my rescue. He swung his head and blew a thick stream of smoke at Caspian—just smoke; the beast knew better than to scorch his own battle partner. He wasn’t pleased that the wolf was flirting with me.
“This hot thing between us has to wait, Max,” Caspian said, as if I’d been the one throwing myself at him. “Into the battle we go!”
And just like that, the grin fell away, the predator coming out from under the playboy.
The death cards stilled between his fingers.
Below us, the field shrank, formations small and orderly, and ahead the sky darkened with wings.
I tightened my grip on the scales, chakrams ready, and let the roar of the coming fight rise up to meet me.
The dragon flew high and hard, set to drive straight into the horde of mutants and break their rank.