69
Fate’s Reckoning
Melody
It feels like falling through a vacuum.
But Aris’s momentum keeps us drifting, and I swear there are stars around us, glittering and glimmering. Watching. Judging. And then—
The air turns scorching hot.
Volcanoes surround us, spitting lava that runs in thick, languid streams, so hot Aris has to fly higher to keep it from burning us. The stone is red, and so is the strange twilight.
When I glance back, a thick, dark-red moon glints in the sky, eerily similar to the blood moon in Caryan’s kingdom.
“Where the hells are we?” Blair mutters, eyes wide, her nails still digging painfully into my shoulders.
“More like which hell,” I say. “And could you please remove your claws from my flesh?”
“Sorry,” she mutters, loosening her grip as we glide over the strange, unreal terrain.
“Where are we going?” I ask down the bond to Aris, who flies on in silence.
“You tell me, little one,” he counters.
Only then do I understand.
I can find Blair’s wyvern.
I throw out my talent, and it immediately tugs me toward my target.
“We need to go right,” I tell Aris.
Suddenly, the volcanoes give way to real mountains, jutting up like fangs in a monster’s mouth. Their peaks are snow-capped, and if it weren’t for Aris’s magic keeping us warm and the wind at bay, I know we’d freeze to death.
Aris steers toward one mountain, and I hear the warning screech of a dragon closing in from above.
But when I look up, there are only thick, treacherous clouds.
My heart starts to race.
“Stay calm and hold on very tight,” Aris orders, a second before he tilts his enormous body.
Blair drops with a sudden scream, plunging into a thick layer of snow.
Aris doesn’t pause. He tucks his wings tight to gain speed, the dragon from before screeching again—so close behind us I hear something beating the wind.
Wings.
It stops giving chase when it spots Blair.
“Aris! We can’t leave her here!”
“Trust me,” is all he says, snapping his wings open again.
I duck low against his hot scales as we veer and turn back, just in time to see the most beautiful dragon I’ve ever seen spearing straight for Blair.
She’s gotten up, staring at the creature racing toward her, her jaw slack, teeth sharp and dangerous.
The dragon’s luminous, rainbow-scaled body shimmers in the strange light like the moon itself.
“Blair!” I scream in warning. “Aris, it’s going to kill her!”
I scream in a warning, but Blair just stands there, as if waiting, eyes wide and shimmering with tears.
But, at the last moment, the magnificent creature that I now realize is a wyvern—with three large plumes as a tail—snaps her wings out.
The blast hits Blair, blowing her hair back and snow into her face, but she never breaks eye contact with the beast.
The creature hovers, screeching.
My heart stutters when I spot three sharp, glinting daggers hidden in the wyvern’s plumes as she curls her tail, ready to stab and shred like a scorpion.
Still Blair doesn’t move. Instead, she drops to her knees and starts to weep.
For a long moment, nothing happens.
Then the creature takes flight and circles above her, one eye fixed on us before landing right behind Blair. I hold my breath when it unhinges its massive jaw. Blair doesn’t turn.
And then—
It closes its mouth and nudges her gently with its broad snout.
Blair whirls and throws herself at the beast, wrapping her arms around its scaly neck, her body draped over the dragon’s head.
Finally, Aris lands a healthy distance away from the wyvern, and I slide off his back.
Blair cries silent tears as her hands stroke the wyvern’s scales. Then she pulls away and glances at me briefly before looking back at her wyvern, as if afraid she might dissolve into mist at any second.
A smile tugs at my lips when I see Blair’s aura brimming with undiluted love, while my mind struggles to catch up with the reality of what we’ve found.
“If there’s one wyvern here…”
“There are others too. Correct. We need to go. It’s not safe here,” Aris says, scanning the sky.
“Blair, we need to go,” I say gently.
She nods once and walks to the back of the scaly beast, mounting in a trained, elegant motion that makes me embarrassed by how clumsily I always climb onto Aris.
“We’re working on it, don’t worry,” Aris soothes when my shields slip.
I roll my eyes. “Out of my thoughts!”
“Not my fault when you were practically screaming them at me,” he says smugly.
I’m glad we can still laugh—even now, with everything falling apart.
We take off, Blair’s wyvern screeching viciously as she takes flight.
Aris growls when she flies slightly above him, rearing his head and snapping his jaws shut dangerously close to her throat.
“Aris!”
“She needs to know who’s the leader,” he growls back. “Dragon business.”
“Not very gentlemanly.”
“Why would I need to be a gentleman?” he scoffs, smoke billowing from his snout and mouth in thick curls.
Clearly another show-off.
Come to think of it, he might even be flying with his back more arched and his wings stretched wider than usual.
“Because she’s pretty,” I offer.
“I’m ancient. I’ve seen plenty of pretty.”
He roars furiously when Blair’s wyvern suddenly swoops down from above and lets her plumes graze his deadly morning-star tail—just barely. No knives out, though.
Blair flashes me a silvery grin—the widest I’ve ever seen on her—and shrugs before her wyvern dives and spears ahead, impossibly fast. She whoops as she circles elegantly between the fire-spitting volcanoes.
“How dare she! If I catch her, there will be trouble.”
“If?” I tease.
“When!” he roars down our bond with fiery determination.
“Good. Then maybe fly a little faster, old man.”
He snaps our bond shut right in my face.
We cross back through the rip, spending a few suspended, magical moments drifting between the stars, through the universe, wrapped in balmy, uncanny silence, before we’re suddenly back in Avandal.
The sun is just about to set, and I can feel the veil waiting.
Just as I lift my hands to part it, Blair’s wyvern screeches.
A warning.
We look up just as a whole coven of witches on phantom wyverns bolts through the air.
Aris drops sharply, plummeting to dodge the fiery orange witch-magic slashing toward us, and my thoughts scatter.
My stomach lurches into my throat as we fall.
“Fuck!” I breathe when a lash of magic cracks against the shield I throw up around us and nearly shatters it.
My eyes scour the horizon for Blair as sheer panic claws at me, threatening to drag me under. Because Blair has no magic to shield herself.
“We need to get through the veil behind the wards!” Aris commands.
“No! Not without Blair. If we leave her, she’s dead.” I know it in my bones, my gaze darting between the darkening sky and the wild coven on our tail.
Wyvern screeches tear through the air as they give chase—massive phantom beasts roaring and cutting through the wind. The witches grin as they close in, their silvery teeth and claws catching the last light of the sun.
“We don’t stand a chance!” Aris growls as we skim near the ward wall.
“But if we go through now, they’ll follow us. Some of them will slip through. They’re faster than I can close the veil again. I can’t lead them straight to the campus.”
Desperation floods me, my throat tight with fear.
For Blair. For Aris. For all of us.
Raw, undiluted fear.
“Call Caryan!” Aris commands, banking hard to the right and nearly throwing me from his back.
Invisible tendrils of his magic lash around me, anchoring me to his body as he suddenly drops like a stone, makes a sharp one-eighty, and sends us flying back toward the veil.
“Help us! Please! I need you!” I scream down our bond, ripping it wide open, tearing down every wall between Caryan and me—just as another wave of witch-magic slams into my shield.
Shattering it.
One wyvern sees its chance and breaks formation.
Aris roars as it sinks its teeth into his side, ripping viciously, refusing to let go, only digging deeper and deeper. His pain blinds me for a heartbeat before he severs the bond.
Wild, white fury floods me until my skin crackles with lightning.
The witch on the wyvern’s back leaps for me, a mad grin on her face, silver claws flexing.
With a scream, I unleash my lightning.
The bolts spear the witch through the heart and strike her beast in the head.
She falls.
The wyvern’s jaw slackens and releases Aris’s flank.
I don’t know if they’re dead.
I can’t make myself care. She hurt Aris. So she can bleed. And die.
Aris’s deadly tail slams into a few of them, and they scream and roar before plummeting, wings shredded and bones shattered.
Blood fills the air, spraying my face and hands. Desperation claws at my throat.
Is it Aris’s? I reach down the bond—and slam into a wall.
My eyes scour the sky, begging to see that beautiful white wyvern.
Blair! Where are you?
Witches flank us from the left and right now, cornering us. My newly formed shields buckle under the lash of their magic, and I tremble from the strain of holding them up while clinging to Aris’s back.
Rivulets of sweat run down my body. I don’t have long. My magic is burned to the dregs. Aris is hurting—wounded—and it nearly drives me mad. The next assault will finish us. Aris and I will fall, burning like a torch.
I might be powerful, but not against a horde of bloodthirsty witches.
At another wave, my shield buckles. Then falters.
My eyes widen in horror as one brown beast unhinges its jaw, its teeth lunging straight for Aris’s neck.
“Aris!”
I resist the urge to squeeze my eyes shut.
No. No.
Lightning cracks along my skin, but I’m too slow. Too slow to stop the fatal bite.
Time stands almost still as the massive beast closes its teeth around Aris’s neck, a second from clamping down. The brown-haired witch on its back gives me a wild grin, her eyes brimming with murder and delight.
But then the beast roars with pain.