Page 14
Alina
ALL I CAN HEAR ARE Lyra’s words ringing in my ears.
Would you mind if I try him for myself? she asked in class, and without meaning to, I almost threw her across the room with a burst of air magic. Then, in the library, He watches you like he wants to eat you.
The thought that Raelan Ashvale might want to eat me makes heat pulse between my thighs.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been so confused about someone—about anything —in my life. He barely speaks to me, seems to avoid touching me or being alone with me whenever possible, and gives me curt one-word answers when I ask him questions, yet he scared my male acquaintances away and dragged me from the dining hall because he thinks Tristan is a threat ? He makes no sense. And maybe I make no sense. Maybe he’s just as confused about me as I am about him .
But I have to know. I can’t spend the rest of this schoolyear wondering if his glances mean something or if I’m just imagining the heat in his stare. And after that tarot reading in my divination class the other day, I haven’t been able to get this silly idea out of my head.
The idea that I need to see if there’s something actually here, something brewing between us, or if I’ve just deceived myself all along.
The hallway is dark and quiet. No one is here to see us. A voice inside tells me, It’s now or never.
So in a moment of foolish recklessness, I close the distance between us and press my lips to his.
I brace myself, prepared for him to push me away, to tell me how inappropriate it is for a guard to be kissing the princess he’s sworn to protect. And at first, Raelan goes tense, his lips hard beneath mine.
And I think I’ve made a mistake. A horribly embarrassing mistake.
But between one breath and the next, everything changes.
His hands come around my waist to grasp me in a firm hold, and he whirls me around, making me gasp as he presses my back against the cool brick wall in the dimly lit corridor. On mine, his mouth softens, working my lips like he’s done this a thousand times.
Maybe he has , I realize. Maybe he’s had a hundred women, has lain between so many thighs that he can’t even remember the faces that go along with them. Maybe I pale in comparison, being so young and naive and inexperienced.
The growl he lets out as he presses his hard body against mine makes me hope I’m wrong.
I’ve kissed boys before—in the gardens back home, in quiet drawing rooms after escaping from stuffy waltzes—but no boy has ever kissed me like this. Raelan kisses me like a man. And I feel myself melting for him, becoming soft in his hands, pliable and easily molded.
His mouth ceases its ravishment of mine, and I catch my breath as he tips my head back and moves his lips to my throat. My heart gallops in my chest as his tongue glides across my skin, making me tingle in places I’ve only ever touched myself.
But now I want Raelan to touch me there too.
I know now I’ve been lying to myself over these past few weeks. The first time I saw Raelan in Grandfather’s study, with his dark eyes and cold stare, I thought he’d just be yet another emotionless guard, someone to hold doors and scan courtyards before I passed through them. He was handsome, but it meant nothing.
Then he started appearing in my dreams, and then in my waking thoughts.
And I’m wondering now if he thinks about me as often as I think about him.
With heated abandon, I grab Raelan’s hand and move it to the junction of my thighs. He doesn’t resist. His hand cups my mound through my school skirt, and I let out a gasp.
Please, yes , I think, tipping my head back against the wall.
I want this. I’m not confused anymore. I know for sure .
Around me, the hallway falls away until all I can think about is him, his touch, his hand between my legs and his mouth exploring my neck. I start to open my thighs for him, seeking more of his touch, wishing for him to discover me, to teach me what to do.
But then Raelan recoils from me as if I slapped him, as if I drove a dagger through his chest. In the semidarkness of the corridor, his dark eyes look almost black, and I think it must be a trick of the light when his pupils contract, thinning into slits so narrow I can scarcely see them. They’re almost... reptilian.
It sends my heart skipping a beat. What the . . . ?
He’s breathing hard, gasping for breath, his skin glistening with perspiration. He winces and squeezes his eyes closed, doubling over in pain.
Something’s wrong. I know this even before he turns and stumbles down the hallway, headed back the way we came.
“Raelan!” I yell after him, but he doesn’t respond.
What’s going on?
I chase him into the grand hall, arriving just in time to see him throw open one of the massive double doors and fling himself outside into the storm. My shoes tap across the marble floor as I follow after him. I step into the open doorway, a small gasp slipping from me as icy wind and rain lash my face.
The storm is intensifying, the sky overhead darkening with clouds and distant thunder. Fog rolls through the courtyard, thick and almost impenetrable .
And collapsed upon his knees in the grass is Raelan, a dark form hunched beneath the weight of the rain.
I run to him, ignoring the cold rain as it strikes my face and causes my vision to blur.
“Raelan!” I yell over another roll of thunder. My robe snaps wildly behind me, and the wind tears at my hair.
He doesn’t turn as I approach.
On his knees, he bends low, fingers digging into the soft grass and soil, forehead pressed to the earth. His body is shaking.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, sinking down next to him. But when I reach out to touch his shoulder, he flinches away, acting like my touch is scalding fire.
His body puts off steam in the cold air, drying the rain so fast that he’s barely even damp. At the same time, the chain he wears around his neck starts to glow with strange white-blue light. Like magic.
Raelan screams, and I start, my stomach twisting violently.
I want to help him, want to fix this. But I have no idea what this even is. Is he sick? Hurt? Is the chain doing something to him?
My eyes cut toward the castle, but the fog is so thick now that I can’t even see the stairs leading to the entryway. The towers that usually look down upon the grounds are lost in the clouds above. It’s just us out here.
Breathing heavily, heart racing, I turn back to Raelan.
As his muscles strain, the chain shifts on his neck, revealing what look like burns etched into his skin .
Maybe that’s the problem—the chain is hurting him, though I’ve no idea why or what it is. Could it be cursed?
Raelan screams again. I can’t believe no one else has yet come to see what’s happening. Perhaps they can’t hear us over the wind and thunder and lashing rain.
No one else is coming. I have to help him. I know if it were the other way around, he’d help me.
So I push to my feet, coat my hands in a thin layer of frost to prevent any burns, and reach for him. He’s too distracted by his pain to pull away from me this time. My fingers close around the clasp holding the chain taut, and with one movement, I have it open. The heavy metal links come away easily in my hands, slipping from Raelan’s neck and into my palms.
The chain stops glowing. Raelan ceases screaming.
Pride goes through me. I helped him. I took his pain away. I—
Raelan’s body starts to contort, moving in ways that look anything but natural. His back twists, his arms straining like they’re about to be wrenched from their sockets.
Chain still gripped in my hand, I take one step back, eyes widening while nausea roils in my stomach.
Something is very wrong.
As thunder rumbles and the rain intensifies, casting more mist and fog across the courtyard, Raelan... changes .
His body writhes, his bones breaking, and I don’t know how I remain standing as he becomes something I’ve only ever heard whispers of, something that is said to be so rare it might as well not exist at all. Something from a time long past.
The creature rises up, rain pelting its onyx scales, and its eyes—dark as pitch and flecked with shimmering gold—meet mine.
Terror shoots through me. It tells me to run .
But the grass is wet from the rain, and when I turn to flee toward the castle, I slip, falling hard. The chain snakes from my hand and coils onto the rain-soaked earth, no longer aglow. My hair sticks to my face, impeding my vision of the creature looming over me. I whip around and use a muddy hand to push the hair from my face. And when I do, my breath freezes in my lungs.
Because the dragon is gigantic, the single largest living thing I’ve ever seen. It’s taller than the outbuildings dotted through the courtyard, and when it spreads its glossy wings, they block out the dim light from the stormy gray sky, leaving me trembling in deep dark shadow.
Its black-gold eyes home in on me, and its lips pull back into a snarl, exposing lines of glistening white fangs.
I know I should run, should try to escape, but I can’t move. My body is frozen there on the wet earth, my knees coated in mud and grass from falling.
The dragon extends its head toward me, its neck long and sinuous in its movements. A single ridiculous thought goes through my head: Lyra was right. It exhales a steady stream of smoke, dousing my body in heat. I’m shaking so hard now that the songbird pendant my mother gave me is thumping against my chest with the sharp movements.
Just when I think the dragon is going to shred me with its razor-sharp teeth and swallow my ragged body whole, it rips itself away from me and gives a powerful downstroke of its wings, then another. The wind it creates buffets me, making me hold up a hand to shield my eyes from the rain and dirt and grass tearing through the air.
And then the dragon lifts from the ground, fog swirling around it, and with another few strokes of its wings, it rises into the misty gray sky and is swallowed up by the clouds, vanishing from existence almost as quickly as it appeared.
For a moment, I can still hear its wings beating the air over the sound of the howling wind, but after a short while, even that fades into nothing.
Now I’m in the courtyard alone, soaking wet and covered in mud. The rain continues to fall, only intensifying.
My whole body trembles fiercely, shaking so hard my teeth clack together.
What . . . was that?
It was Raelan.
Then it was a dragon.
A dragon .
Raelan is a . . . a . . .
Beside me, the chain I removed from Raelan’s neck lies in the grass. My hands quiver as I reach for it, take it into my mud-smeared fingers.
“Alina!”
I clench the chain and cast my gaze to the stormy sky as two sets of feet pound toward me, splashing through the puddles and the mud. Then Lyra and Maeve are kneeling on either side of me, their faces scrunched in concern as they reach for my arms.
“What happened?” Lyra asks, raising her voice to be heard over the storm. Her red curls are already turning a deeper shade from being soaked by the rain. She glances around, forehead furrowing. “And where’s Raelan?”
They pull me to my feet, but my knees can scarcely hold my weight, and I stumble. They catch me, but just barely.
“I . . .” I whisper, searching the sky again. “He . . .”
But the dragon—Raelan—is gone, vanished into the storm above.
My gaze flicks to the ruined clothes and boots scattered across the courtyard, then to the chain grasped tightly in my shaking hand, and I realize that I may have just made a terrible, terrible mistake.
“Come on, we have to get you inside,” Maeve says. Rainwater runs down her forehead and cheeks, causing her long dark eyelashes to clump together.
She and Lyra help me through the mud and grass and back up the stairs to the castle, where Poppy is waiting for us, holding the door open. We all stumble into the grand hall, dripping rain onto the marble floor, and Poppy shoves the door closed with a heavy thump.
“You’re freezing,” Lyra says. She rubs her hands together, creating a tiny flame, then gently blows on the flickering ember, sending heat washing over me. It feels amazing.
But my body is still shaking—just not from the cold, like Lyra thinks.
All I can see is the way Raelan moved, the gold in his eyes, the sheen of his glossy black scales.
“You should sit down.” Maeve helps guide me to a comfortable couch in the corner of the entrance hall. She sinks down beside me while Poppy and Lyra sit on the couch opposite us .
Finally, I start to get my wits about me.
“H-how’d you know where to find me?” I ask. “The fog...” It was so thick, I could scarcely see ten feet through it.
“I had a dream,” Poppy says softly. “Last night, I dreamt we’d find you in the courtyard after dinner.” She clasps her hands in her lap and regards me with a worried expression. “And we did.”
Her dream magic. That makes sense.
But what still doesn’t make sense is what I saw. Is what Raelan became.
There’s a stained glass window behind Lyra and Poppy, depicting a witch in a long blue robe. Rainwater runs down the glass, making it look like she’s weeping.
“Did you dream of anything else?” I ask, still staring at the witch in the glass.
What if she knows about Raelan? Will she say anything? Should I say anything? Something tells me no, to keep this secret until I have a chance to talk to him.
Assuming he even comes back.
Poppy cants her head and twists her lips to one side. “In the dream... there was a figure watching you. But I couldn’t see their face. They were just a shadow.”
“Uh, that’s super creepy,” Lyra says beside her. She wrinkles her nose and leans her weight onto the curved armrest. “Are your dreams always accurate? Because I didn’t see anyone.”
“Not always, no.” Poppy reaches up to fiddle with a strand of her hair. “But they always mean something.” Her eyes meet mine, and a tingle goes down my back. “I’m just not sure what to make of that one yet.”
As long as she didn’t dream of a dragon, I don’t mind mysterious figures in the fog.
I flick my gaze back up to the stained glass, trying to see past the witch and into the sky beyond, but all I can make out is diffuse gray light.
Yet I know that up above the clouds somewhere, soaring through the storm, there’s a dragon.
And I’m the one who released it.
Table of Contents
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- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14 (Reading here)
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- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
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- Page 43
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- Page 46