Shadow Bond (Dark Flight #3)

Chapter 1

ONE

ZYPHON

The dead don’t ask questions.

I stare at the message crumpled in my fist, the ink already smearing from the sweat on my palms. Brotherhood contact. Urgent. A woman asking questions about the dragon guardians. Hunting them, some say.

The description stops my heart.

Pale white skin. Long black hair. And eyes—

My shadows surge without permission, slithering across my knuckles, cold and hungry. They’ve been worse lately. More demanding. Coiling beneath my skin at odd hours, pressing against the inside of my chest until I can barely breathe.

One purple. One pink.

Heterochromia so distinctive, there could be no mistake. In five centuries of existence, I’ve never encountered another soul with those eyes. Never seen that particular arrangement of impossible colors staring back at me from any face but hers.

Nasyra.

The name tears through me. A blade I’ve been falling on for three centuries.

I scattered her ashes myself. Watched them catch the wind and disappear into nothing. Knelt in that clearing until my knees bled and my voice gave out from screaming. She’s dead. She’s been dead for three hundred years.

The dead don’t ask questions. They don’t hunt. They don’t come back.

But the dead also don’t have mismatched eyes that I’ve dreamed about every night since I failed to save her.

I leave within the hour.

No word to my brothers. No explanation. Drayke would insist on coming, his protective instincts making him impossible to dissuade.

Rurik would turn it into an adventure, crashing through the shadow-territories with all the subtlety of a forest fire.

Auren would demand reconnaissance, intelligence, a plan.

I don’t have time for plans. I don’t have time for anything but the desperate, clawing need to see for myself.

The fortress corridors stretch before me, torchlight flickering against ancient stone. Most of the Brotherhood sleeps at this hour, their quarters dark behind heavy doors. My boots make no sound on the worn flagstones—a skill the shadows have given me, payment for everything else they’ve taken.

My quarters are sparse. A bed I rarely use, the sheets cold and untouched.

A weapons rack bearing blades I’ve carried through centuries of battle.

A single chair positioned by a window overlooking the garden I’ve tended since her death.

Moonlight spills across the pressed flower on my wall—a moonflower, perfectly preserved, its petals still holding a faint shimmer.

She loved moonflowers.

The thought comes unbidden, as they all do: Nasyra in the garden at midnight, her face tilted toward blooms that glowed in the darkness. Her laugh when I told her they’d been impossible to cultivate. Her fingers brushing mine when she showed me how to coax them into opening.

I shove the memory down. Lock it away with all the others that threaten to drown me if I let them surface.

The darkness inside me writhes, feeding on the grief I can never quite bury. It pulses against my ribs, sends tendrils of cold spreading through my veins. Three centuries of this. Three centuries of something eating me alive from the inside out, and I still haven’t learned to make peace with it.

I take the eastern passage out of the fortress.

The corridor narrows as it descends, the torches growing sparse until only my shadows light the way—a faint luminescence that shouldn’t exist but does.

The hidden launching platform waits at the end, carved into the mountainside far from the main gates where guards might report my departure.

Not that they’d stop me. I’m the Brotherhood’s executioner. I go where I please.

But I don’t want questions. Don’t want to explain why I’m flying toward the shadow-territories in the middle of the night, chasing a ghost who shouldn’t exist.

The night air hits me as I step onto the platform. Cold. Sharp. The wind carries the scent of pine and distant snow, cuts through my leather armor and raises goose bumps along my arms. Stars blaze overhead, indifferent to the desperation building in my chest.

I want to see her.

Even if it’s impossible. Even if it’s a trick, a trap, a manipulation designed to break me. I want to see those eyes one more time.

The shift takes me fast and hard. My human form tears apart as the dragon surges through—obsidian scales erupting across skin, wings unfurling from shoulder blades, bones reforming into something ancient and terrible.

The shadows come with me, as they must. Veins of darkness crack across my scales, visible evidence of the centuries of poison that’s been eating me alive.

My brothers call my shifted form unsettling. Even Drayke, who fears nothing, has admitted that watching me transform makes something in his dragon recoil. I’m wrong, somehow. A dragon shaped by shadow rather than birth, my darkness deeper than it should be.

I push off from the platform and let the wind take me east.

Days of flying.

The wind screams past my wings, cold enough to numb even dragon scales.

Below me, the landscape transforms—green valleys giving way to rocky highlands, then to forests so dark, they seem to swallow light itself.

The air grows heavier the farther east I travel, thick with magic that tastes of ash and old blood on my tongue.

The shadow-territories. Home to the clan that turned me into this thing I can barely recognize in reflections.

I’m banking around a mountain peak when Drayke’s voice cuts through my mind.

Brother. The word carries the weight of command even across the telepathic link. Where are you?

I consider not answering. The link between Brotherhood dragons allows communication across vast distances, but it doesn’t compel response. I could simply... not.

Zyphon. Drayke again, sharper now. Your quarters are empty. Your weapons are gone. Don’t make me hunt you down.

I sigh, the sound lost to the wind. Following a lead. I’ll be back when I know more.

What kind of lead requires you to vanish in the middle of the night without telling anyone?

The kind I need to handle alone.

A pause. Then Rurik’s voice crashes into the link, as subtle as always. Oh, this sounds interesting. What are we hunting? Is it something I can set on fire?

We are not hunting anything. I inject as much finality into the thought as I can manage. I’m following up on intelligence. Alone.

That’s what you said before the thing with the blood mages in the northern wastes. Rurik sounds entirely too cheerful. You came back missing three scales and smelling like sulfur.

The scales grew back.

Not the point. Drayke cuts in. Where are you headed?

I hesitate. The shadow-territories aren’t forbidden—nothing is forbidden to the Brotherhood—but they’re dangerous in ways that make even Drayke cautious. If I tell them where I’m going, they’ll insist on backup. Possibly show up themselves, which will make everything infinitely more complicated.

East. I offer finally. Investigating reports of someone asking questions about us.

Someone asking questions isn’t unusual. Auren’s voice joins the link, cool and analytical as always. People ask questions about us constantly. What makes this one worth a solo flight into hostile territory?

I don’t answer. Can’t answer. How do I explain that the woman being described has eyes that belonged to someone I watched die? That I’m chasing a ghost because the alternative—accepting that she’s truly gone—has never been something I could do?

Zyphon. Drayke’s voice has softened, the command replaced by something closer to concern. If you need us—

I’ll call. The lie comes easily. I won’t call. Whatever waits for me in the shadow-territories, I have to face it alone. Don’t wait up.

I close the link before any of them can argue further. The silence that follows feels heavier than the wind, emptier than the sky stretching in every direction.

I’m not avoiding them because I don’t trust them. I’m avoiding them because this is something I have to face alone. The woman who might be Nasyra. The impossibility that shouldn’t exist but apparently does.

If she’s real—if some dark magic has dragged her back from death—I need to see her without the Brotherhood at my back. Need to understand what’s happened before I involve anyone else in a ghost story that might destroy me.

I land in a clearing as dusk bleeds across the sky.

The shift back to human form leaves me aching, muscles protesting days of flight.

I roll my shoulders, feeling the shadows settle beneath my skin—a cold weight that never quite goes away.

The air here smells different. Darker, somehow.

Thick with magic that makes my head ache and my skin prickle with awareness.

The forest presses close around the clearing, ancient trees stretching toward a sky that’s already losing its light. Their bark is black, absorbing what little illumination remains. No birds sing. No insects chirp. The silence is absolute, oppressive, broken only by my own breathing.

I make camp without fire—flames would announce my presence to anyone watching—and eat cold rations that taste like nothing. The ground beneath me is soft with centuries of fallen leaves, but sleep won’t come. Every time I close my eyes, I see her face.

Nasyra in firelight, her mismatched eyes bright with laughter.

Nasyra in my arms, her warmth a counterpoint to the cold that had already started spreading through my veins.

Nasyra reaching for me as her brother drained the life from her body, her lips forming my name even as the light left her gaze.

So many years of guilt so heavy, I can barely breathe around it. Of wondering if I’d flown faster, fought harder, been less concerned with the clan’s forces and more focused on reaching her—

You were too late. The shadows whisper it, a truth I’ve never been able to escape. They curl against my chest, press against my ribs, remind me of everything I am and everything I failed to be. Too late to save her. Too late to stop them. Too late for everything except vengeance.

The vengeance had been satisfying, at least. Balroth’s face as I tore him apart, piece by screaming piece. The terror in his dying eyes as he realized his sister’s dragon had come for him at last.

Not enough. It would never be enough. I could kill everyone who’d touched that altar and it wouldn’t bring her back.

Except.

The shadow-territories earn their name.

Light itself seems afraid here. The sun barely penetrates the canopy, and what illumination reaches the forest floor is thin and gray, leeched of warmth.

Mist curls between the black-barked trees, moving in ways that have nothing to do with wind.

The air tastes of old magic—bitter and metallic, coating my tongue with every breath.

I move through the forest in silence, my boots finding solid ground without conscious thought. The darkness parts for me without resistance, recognizing something of itself in what I’ve become. I’m an intruder here, but I’m also kin.

Two more days of tracking. Finding traces of her passage—footprints pressed into soft earth, branches broken by someone unfamiliar with moving quietly through undergrowth.

A scrap of dark fabric caught on a thorn, the weave fine enough to suggest someone who once knew luxury.

She’s not trying to hide. Either she doesn’t know how to conceal her trail, or she doesn’t care who follows her.

Or she wants to be found.

The traces lead deeper into Shadow Clan territory.

Closer to their stronghold than I’ve ventured in decades.

My shadows stir with something that might be recognition—this is the direction the altar lies.

The clearing where they killed her. The place I’ve never returned to, not since I burned it to slag and collapsed the trees and tried to erase every trace of what happened there.

Why would she be heading that way?

Unless she remembers.

The possibility hits me harder than a physical blow. If this woman is truly Nasyra, does she remember the altar? The brother who betrayed her? The dragon who arrived too late?

Does she remember me?

I move faster. The shadows part before me with increasing eagerness, sensing my urgency, feeding on the emotion I can’t quite contain. Cold spreads through my chest, my arms, my hands—the darkness inside me responding to the desperation building in my blood.

Closer. She’s close now. I can feel it in the way the air changes, the way the darkness seems to lean toward something ahead. A presence I haven’t sensed in three hundred years.

And then I feel it.

Magic.

Not Shadow Clan magic—I know that signature too well, have tasted it in my own veins for centuries. This is different. Changed. Familiar in a way that makes my blood freeze and my shadows surge with desperate recognition.

Fire-Bringer.

But not the pure flame I remember. This fire has been touched by shadow, twisted into something that burns darker than it should. Shadow-flame. The same essence that pulses in my veins, that feeds on darkness and breathes destruction.

Nasyra’s magic was pure once. Brilliant and fierce and full of warmth that could reach even the coldest parts of me. This... this is her signature, unmistakably hers, but wounded. Altered. Changed by the same darkness that changed me.

I stop breathing.

She’s real.

Somehow, impossibly, after centuries of ash and absence and grief that carved itself into my bones—she’s real. She’s here. Her magic is singing through the darkness, a beacon that calls to my shadows with an urgency I can’t ignore.

And she’s hunting me.