Page 110 of Boundless

Another roar, this one a little bit farther away, which didn’t exactly reassure me.

And where the hell was Maera?!

“The Sunny who broke me out. Where is he?” the man said, his voice thick and rough, and he didn’t look…bad,per se. He wasn’t skinny, and the clothes on him looked old and torn in several places, but his skin was clean and his hair wasn’t messy. It was long, down to his shoulders, loose around his head, and his face was clean, too. His eyes focused. His cheeks round. I wasn’t sure why I’d expected him to be skin and bones when I’d first laid eyes on the cages of Ashfall, but I had.

“That’s Lyall,” Rune said, hands up, no light or shadows on them. “The Seelie King.”

A pause.

The orange glow on the hands of the man dimmed for a second. “You must be high on something,” he said.

“Listen to me—we do not have time. He brought you here and set off a beacon. The dragons are close. We must leave before they come—now,”Rune said.

A beacon.

That miniature sun that had appeared out of nowhere—of course Lyall had done it, and…

My God, I wanted to fucking laugh my heart out in that moment. It made such perfect sense! He’d brought the heir here, had broken him out of prison, just so he could set a dragon on him.

Fucking hell, had the man no heart at all? No conscience?

The man smiled. He actually smiled, and it was a mischievous little grin as his hands lit up brighter. “The dragons don’t come here. We had a deal. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“They do,” Rune said. “Look to your right. There, between the trees.” He raised a finger to point to our left, but the heir didn’t turn. For a good moment, he didn’t turn, like he thought Rune was trying to trick him, get him to look away before attacking.

But at last, his eyes darted to the side fast.

At last, so did mine—and I saw the eggs.

I’d seen Jurassic Park. I’d seen the dinosaurs and their eggs, and fucking hell, they were so similar I doubted my fucking sanity for a moment. The color of them was a pale orange, and there were three of them, all reaching up to my hips.Eggs.

“This is the edge of Santra, where the dragons lay their eggs. The ashes in the Keep come from these trees. They use their fire to heat their eggs and burn the trees in the process,” Rune said, and fucking hell, he was right. That’s why the trees were mostly burned. That’s why there were fuckingeggshalf the size of my body near those trees, surrounded by big pieces of rocks!

Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic,I said to myself, but it was too late. Too fucking late.

The third roar came from over our heads, and this time, we actually saw the dragon.

thirty-three

A dragon.

An actual dragon with wings and claws and fangs and spikes, its skin black, its eyes wide and dark, its throat orange.

Withfire.

The three of us ducked down and moved back on instinct, farther away from the eggs, and I wasn’t sure if I screamed or not, but if I did nobody heard it from the sound of theactual dragonlanding on the ground in the middle of that small opening.

Just when I thought I’d seen it all, I was looking at a beast at least ten feet tall, with a large tail that seemed to go on forever, tipped with spikes as big as my entire hand.

It all happened so fast.

Rune shouted, “Run!”and we turned to do just that. The three of us made for the tree line, except the dragon must havejumpedor something because the ground shook like a fucking earthquake just hit it, and the three of us lost our balance at the same time.

We fell. I wasn’t sure how I turned and how I got back up to my feet, how I came to find myself staring at the monstrouscreature with large, bat-like wings on its back, but the image would be imprinted in my mind forever. Rune was between us, shadows spilling out of his hands while the throat of the dragon turned an even more intense orange, like burning coal in a fucking fireplace. Then its long jaws opened, and I saw all its teeth clearly. They were bigger than my fingers, and the roar that came out of it shook the entire world.

The ground groaned. The shadows coming out of Rune’s hands began to spin around the dragon like a vortex, taking him out of our view. It must have been a scene from a horror movie because no way was this real. No way was that creature, surrounded by burned and skeletal trees, engulfed by a tornado of shadows, standing there possibly not ten feet away from us.

Then Rune turned and our eyes locked before he shouted again, “Go!”