56. Lucy
Lucy
Speak kindly to what you intend to kill. The dead repeat your last words to them, and a curse echoes longer than a comfort.
Hold on. Riot’s voice was barely there. Lucy. Stay with me. Keep talking. Keep fucking talking.
I wanted to.
My mind wouldn’t clear enough for words. The Ossira had gone past burning, past pressure. It was killing me. I dug at my neck again, but couldn’t break the necklace.
Tell me something. He was desperate now. Ragged. Anything. I don’t care what. Just don’t stop. Breathe.
In.
Couldn’t.
Out.
The edges of my vision went soft and dark and I pressed my forehead back to the floor because it was the only thing I could still feel properly. The cold. Just the cold. Just that.
Lucy?
I’m here, I managed. Still here.
The wards behind me exploded.
Not broke. Exploded. It rolled me sideways, and Baylor stood in the entrance with his expression serious.
“Emrys?” I rasped.
“Is going to be fine.” He crossed to me without stopping.
“He sent me the second he could stand.” He glanced once at the altar behind me as he hooked an arm below mine and lifted, practically dragging me out of that room.
“This wouldn’t have happened if the thirteen had come down.
The dragons would still be celebrating. Nobody would have been waiting for you.
You have a greater destiny than dying in a mountain because your own kind turned against you. ”
I didn’t have time to acknowledge him. Nor to ask questions as the change took me completely, dragon bursting from human skin, the Ossira screaming with relief instead of demand. I let it out in a roar as I left the city behind.
I saw him below, surrounded by a cluster of people, and then he saw me and everything happened at once.
He shifted before he’d fully cleared the group, purple scales erupting, wings snapping wide.
He launched from the ground with a single powerful beat that sent everyone around him staggering backward.
He came straight for me. We collided mid-air.
Not gently. The impact rolled through my bones and I grabbed for him. He grabbed back, his tail finding me immediately, wrapping once and tightening, his wings folding around us both as we spun through the night together.
His voice filled my mind, wrecked and warm and entirely his. I have you.
I pressed into him and held on.
I have you, he said again, as if trying to convince himself I was here. I thought I’d lost you.
I couldn’t answer that. Just held on while the mountain air screamed past us and his heartbeat thundered against my scales.
We landed hard on the mountain path and Riot pressed his forehead to mine before either of us had fully found our footing, the shift moving through us until we were standing in human form.
He kissed me before I could say a word.
Desperate and consuming, both hands tangled in my hair.
I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him back because I’d been dying in a cave minutes ago and nothing else mattered as much as this.
As much as him. As much as the solid certain reality of his mouth on mine and both of us breathing. And alive.
When we broke apart his forehead dropped to mine and we stayed there for one more second.
Then I remembered we weren’t alone.
Syneca Black stood ten feet away with an expression caught somewhere between relief and trying very hard not to smile. Pip sat on her shoulder with her chin in her hands looking entirely delighted. The griffin stood slightly apart from the group, massive and still in the dark.
I cleared my throat. “Hi.”
The witch didn’t wait. She crossed the distance and grabbed me and I held on harder than I meant to, my face in her shoulder, and for a moment neither of us said anything because our friendship was new, and distant now, but still there.
Pip hit us from the side like a small determined dart, arms around both our necks, wings beating enthusiastically against my ear.
“You’re alive,” Syn said into my hair. “Your dragon over there had me convinced you were about thirty seconds from dead. No idea he was so dramatic.”
“I was closer to twenty,” I said.
She pulled back and looked at me, reading my face the way she always had.
“When did that happen?” Pip’s voice, bright with curiosity, her eyes moving between me and Riot. “You and him. When did you fall in love?”
I opened my mouth.
Closed it and looked at Riot.
His voice settled warm into my mind. From the moment you pushed me off a cliff.
I pressed my lips together and looked back at Pip, hanging on the words he hadn’t said. He loved me.
I managed to smile at the sprite. “It’s complicated.”
Syn’s incredibly brooding griffin stood on the mountain path, massive and still, and then the air shifted and folded and a beautiful man stood where the beast had been.
I grabbed Riot’s arm before I stumbled. “Who are—”
“It’s complicated,” Syn answered.
Riot had gone very still beside me. He was looking at Silas, brows tilted down. Then something shifted in his expression. “I knew it. I knew it was you. Aureth swore it couldn’t be. Those fucking eyes though. I knew it.”
“I’m guessing there are plenty of things Aureth was keeping hidden.” The man glanced at me and I finally took him in properly. Warm skin, features as dark as the wings he’d just folded away. The marks on his throat.
“You’re a demon,” I breathed.
“You have a lot to catch up on,” Syn said, nudging me with a shoulder.
Then Silas spoke. Not in any language I recognized, the words moving between him and Riot like something ancient and specific, sounds that felt older than anything I’d grown up hearing.
Riot answered in kind.
I looked at Syn. She was watching them both with sharp careful eyes, reading what she could from expression and posture since the words likely weren’t familiar to her either.
My Tilouri’s words were beautiful and quiet. “Vaelorin seith vara, Sorelias.”
“Na veyr en drathis morven. Celestara vi elyth… ma venari Lyric,” Silas answered and nodded. His eyes moved to Syn briefly.
Riot said nothing more. Just looked at the demon for a long moment before whatever had passed between them settled into something that looked, if not like trust, then like a temporary understanding.
I was still trying to work out what I’d just witnessed when movement came from the dark behind them.
Calder.
I didn’t think. I just ran.
He caught me mid-stride and spun me once, his arms solid and certain around me, and I pressed my face into his shoulder and felt something I’d been holding since the cave finally, finally release.
“There she is,” he said quietly. “And in your own pants this time.”
I smiled against him. “It’s good to see you too.”
I’ve known Silas for a long, long time. Riot spoke into my mind. We can trust him. But not his company. Speak no words to the demons, my Tilouri. They are clever bargainers. And if you break a bargain with a demon, if the pain doesn’t consume you first, you become a member of the Underworld.
I managed a glance at the other two beautiful men when Calder set me down.
One stepped toward me, but I inched away.
His eyes flicked to my feet before showing both palms as his accent wrapped around his words.
“I’m not going to hurt you, love. They call me Dez. And that’s Ramiel. You must be Lucy.”
“Lucy?” the other asked. “The friend that trapped Syneca into this ridiculous hunt?”
I had no idea what he meant by that, but it didn’t matter because Calder confirmed it, and I wouldn’t be speaking to them anyway.
Not until I had a better grasp on the situation.
But the one that’d spoken last was immediately distracted, his eyes glancing over the fog and back to me and back to the wall several times as we returned to the others like he was working something out.
Then he stepped away from the group entirely. He walked along the wall with his hands clasped behind his back.
When he reached out to touch it Pip screamed, “No! It’s poison, Rami. We don’t touch poison.”
He jerked his hand back. Looked at his fingers. Then kept walking along the wall anyway, studying it from a respectful distance. “It’s not poison,” Riot called out to him. “That’s just a rumor.”
Syn appeared at my side and pulled me close, her voice dropping immediately.
She was watching the demon that had walked away as she spoke quickly.
“We need to find the fourth Guardian. My life and the veil between here and the Underworld depend on it. We know he was in the Sleeping Ring twenty-seven years ago. Have you seen him in there? A red dragon?”
I drew back. “I’ve never seen anything but blue and green dragons behind the wall. How do you know it’s been twenty-seven years?”
She glanced at Riot. Then back at me. “I don’t know an easy way to tell you this.
Twenty-seven years ago, Aureth brought an infant to your parents’ door.
She told them the child wasn’t safe where she’d been born…
or hatched? She brought you from the Sleeping Ring, Lucy.
You had Lyric’s scales with you when she delivered you. ”
“And the ring,” Pip said, looking down at my hand. “Hey, where is it?”
I was practically numb as I answered. “Ring? I used to wear one but they took it before the Mortalis.”
“Oh, yeah. That makes sense. They took my stuff too,” Pip whispered. “I wonder if we can get that back? I was wearing my favorite button that day.”
I barely heard her over the ringing in my ears.
I was a dragon. A real dragon. Not a shifter anomaly, not a mistake, not the thing my parents had spent my entire life training out of me.
They kept this from me my whole life. Made me believe I was an abomination.
And somehow that wasn’t the part that mattered.
Because I’d hoped, in the quiet parts of myself I’d never said out loud, I’d hoped without knowing how it could possibly be true.
I wasn’t a shifter. I wasn’t even theirs. All of me was exactly right.
“A Guardian freed me?”
Syn’s hand found my arm. “Yes and I know he’s in there.” Her eyes were steady on mine. “I have to find him. Wait.” She pulled away, eyes narrowing. “Where did you get that necklace?”
Ramiel interrupted, shouting from the wall, “It’s mine. Or a variation, anyway.” He walked back over to us. “The fog is an illusion.”
Riot was suddenly so still, nothing else seemed to matter. “Can you bring it down?”
The demon shrugged, rubbing his hands together. “I can try.”
Riot moved toward him. “And what will the cost be, demon?”