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But then he told Kai, “Reach out to me. I will teach you.”

“Teach me what?”

He gestured with his free hand around the vault and smiled,“Everything.”

Kai was so stunned that he didn’t know what to say for once in his life.

All he managed was a nod of confirmation.

And that was all I could stand, before I was pulling him out of there with me, my skin itching like crazy. Like something crawling beneath it.

I needed out of here.

I needed out of this form.

I just neededout.

15

~Ariana~

“He needs you, Ari.”

That was what Kai had communicated through our mind-link just after I’d finished up erecting that special perpetual ward to protect the Chief Sanctuary Zone.

We walked side-by-side through the corridors of Maven Academy.

“It’s been hours,” Kai was uttering, his worry for Vorzyr coming through painfully.

I was right there with him there.

It wasn’t like our dragon at all.

He’d grown so close to us that it was no secret to me that he couldn’t stand to be away from us for very long. Certainly not hours at a time if it could be helped.

That was how much of a state he was in after what he’d viewed in Grandfather’s lab through the Stone of Recollection.

Kai had told me all about it the moment I’d teleported to the gates of Maven Academy to meet him, the place where he’d been casting a tracking spell in a bid to find Vorzyr.

And it was fucking brutal what had been revealed.

What Malrik had done… and with Draco, no less… betraying his own kind and altering the Titanus bloodline in such a way… it was beyond heavy.

“He’s here now. I can feel him,” I reassured Kai, slipping my hand into his.

“Me too.” He winced. “His power is pulsing from within. Volatile. Unstable. On the verge of all-out raging.”

We reached Vorzyr’s dorm room, and Kai knocked.

But then a strained,“Leave me be, Kai,”sounded from within.

“Leave him be?” Kai muttered, eyeing me incredulously. “After I’ve been searching him out for hours? After he’d cloaked himself, making it impossible for me to find him with a simple tracking spell? After he’d left that vault in a highly worrying state?”

“I know, baby,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze.

But it wasn’t quite enough to calm him after it had been building up for hours. And he eased from my grip, then called his magic and thrust it at the door.

It flew open, almost ripping off its hinges in the process, and then he was across the threshold and storming right on in.