21. Lucy
Lucy
The first frost belongs to the dead. Do not walk on it before noon, or they will assume you have come to join them and make room.
The woman inside me grieved the cage, even when she couldn’t remember its bars, but something within her longed for the familiar gaze of a beast. The fog broke and I soared through it, wings carrying me east because east was where the pull said to go.
I didn’t think about it. I just went. One mind. One mission. The Ash spread below but the resonance was ahead and everything else was irrelevant until I found it. I could not fail this time.
When I banked again, following the pulse wrapped around my neck, a purple dragon filled my path; massive and still, wings spread and beating in perfect rhythm.
Her beast. He’d come for her. Or was it me?
I jerked back. He couldn’t have me. Throwing my wings out to keep from plowing into him, I roared, diving low.
He matched it. I turned left and he was already there, cutting off every angle before I reached it, like he had memorized the way I moved before I knew I was moving. Frustrated, I pushed harder and he matched it again.
I struck, driving my full weight into his shoulder, claws first. He rolled with it and came back alongside me but he didn't retaliate. I hit him again with a snarl. He took the impact and didn’t blanch at the rip in his scales.
Those amber eyes kept finding mine each time I looked.
He wasn’t being aggressive, but that was his mistake.
I went for his neck as my collar squeezed and squeezed until I couldn’t breathe.
He caught my forelegs and pulled them against his chest, his body wrapping around mine, his tail at my hips, his wings folding over us both.
The pull to hunt, to escape him, stopped.
Just stopped. As did the choking of my collar. I went still.
He held me against him on the slow beat of his wings and I could feel his heartbeat through the contact between us. I recognized that rhythm and didn’t know why. I didn’t try to work out why. I just felt it and went quiet. My eyes closed.
Something surfaced that I had no name for. Not a memory. More like what memory leaves behind when it goes, the outline of a before, the shape of having been someone with a self. I couldn’t reach it but I could feel that it was there, built within the peace of the purple dragon’s hold on me.
I pressed closer. My claws had stopped trying to find purchase and started trying to hold instead.
The shift hit me without warning.
Bones. Wings. Scales. All of it collapsed inward, until I was falling in human skin.
The ground was a long way down and I had no wings to catch myself with.
I couldn’t scream beyond my panic as the wind stole my breath and every memory I ever had came rushing back to me.
I was Lucette Varrow. And I was about to die.
The beast that’d dropped me was already moving, diving, a look of panic on his face as he raced closer to the cliffs.
The change was still running through him when his arms closed around me, scales becoming skin, dragon becoming man.
I squeezed my eyes shut, lost in the rush of fear as we dropped, hitting the ledge of a cliff.
But the landing barely registered. His arms stayed where they were. Holding me against a solid chest.
Nothing clicked until I looked up at his face.
Dark hair threaded silver. Sharp features. Beautiful golden eyes staring down at me with relief so profound it made my heart stop.
I knew him. I knew that face. “Riot?”
There was a moment where he just looked at me, and I felt it in my soul. Something that went deeper than words, deeper than the confusion flooding through my mind.
Then he set me down, still nearly pressed against me.
My words tumbled out. “How did I get here? What’s happening? Did you free me?”
I moved to step away, needing space to think, to understand—pain ripped through me.
The collar tightened so violently my vision went white. My body began shifting without my permission, bones cracking, scales erupting. I stumbled backward, too close to the edge, and the ground disappeared beneath my heel.
“Lucy! Shit.” Riot lunged forward and grabbed me.
Everything stopped.
The pain. The shift. The compulsion. All of it went silent the second his hands found mine.
I gasped, my body trembling with the effort of staying human. I took his hand and gripped it like it was the only thing keeping me from drowning. “I don’t know why or how you’re here, but don’t let go.”
“I won’t.” His grip was steady and sure. “I promise. If you hear nothing else before you change back, hear that.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head, fighting the urge to put respectable space between myself and this man I’d hardly known, but clearly needed.
He stepped closer, swiping the stray, wind-battered hair from my face. “What happened to you? In the cave?”
I swallowed. “I don’t know. We were attacked and I shifted, because I had to and…
I fell or no—Something pulled me out of the cave.
I woke up in a city called Luneth Hollow.
It’s hidden in the fog. Furies, Riot, you have to listen to me.
It’s not poisonous, there’s a warded city in there.
I don’t remember how I got there. But there’s a healer who saved a boy with a broken spine.
And a jeweler who’s trying to help me with the Ossira, and an apprentice, and there’s a sport they play on the ice, and I can’t remember how I got there. I can’t—”
“Lucy.”
He didn’t ask another question. He just closed the last of the space between us and pulled me into his chest, one hand spreading wide across my back, the other cradling the back of my head like I might come apart if he didn’t hold the pieces together. “I’ve got you now.”
I went stiff. Every instinct I had screamed to step back, to put space between us.
“Breathe,” he said quietly, the word low against my hair. “Just breathe. The rest can wait.”
And maybe it was the exhaustion, or the collar gone silent, or the simple fact that I’d been holding myself together alone for so long I’d forgotten there was another way, but I stopped fighting it.
I let him hold me.
I breathed.
For a moment I let myself stay in the quiet his hands gave me, until my heartbeat stopped racing and my thoughts stopped tripping over each other. The panic ebbed enough that I could think instead of just spill.
I kept losing pieces of myself. Whatever was happening to me stole my memories a little at a time, and there was no telling how long this clear-headed moment would last before it slipped away too. If I only had a handful of words before I forgot again, they had to be the right ones.
I pulled back just far enough to see his face.
What was most important to tell him? Aside from everything I’d already rambled? “There are other dragons. So many of them. A whole city full of them living like it’s the only world that exists amongst the scorched.”
He stared at me, disbelief in the way he drew back, brows raised. “That’s not possible.”
I bristled. “I’m telling you what I saw.”
“I don’t mean to discredit you. But there are only… There are three Guardians, Lucette. Three Guardians… and two Furies left.”
I froze at the deep sorrow in his voice. The way it cracked on the word “two.”
I asked as slowly as I could manage. “Where’s Aureth? What happened?”
His grip on my hand tightened. “Aureth saw her end coming and let it happen. She had her own agenda and would never share it with me. Only warned me that her time was coming.” His gaze fell to the cliff edge behind me as he took a deep breath.
“We both always knew that was her final journey. That she’d die in Dyssara.
But she never told me whose hands would be responsible and I never learned. ”
I could see the weight of it crushing him.
“I honored her last request even as it broke everything I believed in. Everything I was for so much of my life. There was never a time when we weren’t bonded.
It was my job to save her. To protect her.
And I knew the moment Corvus turned to dust, she was gone.
That I’d failed, even if letting her go only meant honoring her wishes. ”
“You don’t have to tell me. If you need time—” but he was already lost in his own memories, likely not even the ones he’d been recounting, but rather the ones at the Oracle’s side.
Still, he continued, sad as his words were. “Pip left with Silas. And I left to find...” He swallowed hard. “The body.”
I could barely breathe beneath the weight of his grief. “Did you find her?”
His fingers gave mine a squeeze as he cleared his throat. “I did.”
I thought he was done, that he’d have no more to say and we’d stand on that cliff until the end of time, him anchoring me, while lost in his grief, but eventually he spoke, that dangerous timbre to his voice so forlorn and lost. “I thought after she was gone, and everyone else was too, maybe that was it for me. My purpose was gone.” His eyes met mine.
“But you were gone. And the only thing keeping me going was the mystery of your disappearance. How maybe I hadn’t been able to save Aureth, or Syneca, or Pip.
But I could save you.” He pulled me slightly closer.
“And I’ve been hunting for you ever since. ”
The breath left my lungs. Of all the people in the world, and all his freedom, why me?
“There’s something else you should know. You’ve been out here every night but you don’t seem to recognize me.”
I stared at him. “What?”
“You leave the fog right around sunset and you’re hunting until dawn. I’ve been tracking you, trying to reach you, but you don’t remember me when you’re a dragon. At first I thought maybe it was the shadows that cloak you, but they don’t seem to make a difference.”
That’s why I’d been so tired. Why I woke up exhausted every morning with gaps in my memory I couldn’t explain. I’d been flying. Hunting.
The realization scared me more than anything else he’d said. “I can’t remember it. Any of it.”
“I think it’s that collar.” His eyes dropped to my throat. “I saw you almost kill a group of people several nights ago. Oddly enough, some lycan and nymphs traveling together.”
Horror washed through me. “You have to help me get this thing off.”
“Gladly,” he said, reaching for the Ossira. “Where’s your Life Rune?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t have it when I woke in Luneth Hollow.”
“We’ll get you a new one.” His fingers brushed the metal and he let out a hiss of pain but didn’t pull away, not even when I could smell something burning. Could feel the collar heating.
“Riot!” I jerked away from him entirely to make it stop, to keep him from hurting himself.
“No, Lucette, don’t. Please don’t shift. You don’t remember me when you’re a dragon. You don’t—”
I looked him square in the eye as bones began to crack, as my body started betraying me again.
I winced through the pain. “I’m not sure I even remember myself.”
Fear filled his eyes as he said, “The shift is not supposed to hurt.”
But agony ripped through every nerve as my body reshaped itself against my will. I tried to stop it. Tried to reach for—
For who?
The man’s face turned white with shock as he looked behind me, something desperate in his eyes. “Lucette! Go! Go now. I’ll find you again. I swear it.”
Confused, I spun, leaping from the rocks into the air.
A massive blue dragon aiming for a fight came racing toward the cliffside, wings beating hard. Teeth bared. Two more landed behind it, talons scraping against rock as they surrounded the beautiful, demanding man. All of the dragons wore collars like mine.
The compulsion pulled as it always did. East and away.
But I had to… I needed to…
My wings beat faster. Whatever was happening on that cliff didn’t matter. I had a mission. To hunt. Still, I looked back over my shoulder. A purple dragon appeared from where the man had been standing. His roar shook the mountains, echoing over the world.
And somewhere deep inside where the woman used to be, something screamed his name.