Page 32 of Dragon Fires Everywhere (Witchlore #4)

“Georgie—”

But I’m not listening to Emerson or anyone else who calls my name just now.

I immediately fly across the river to the cemetery. Most of the coven are right behind me, but Emerson has to stay and deal

with an angry mob. I’m sure I’ll feel bad for ditching her and leaving her to it later.

Maybe.

I land outside the cemetery with the determination to do something pounding in me—

But I stop short.

Because just behind the iron gate marking the entrance to the cemetery, where there are usually a few trees, there is now

a giant dragon statue. As if he’s guarding the entrance to the local dead, and it’s suitably terrifying. It’s a gigantic display

of stone, showing off towering teeth and sharp claws.

It is meant to terrify.

“Those assholes.” But there’s barely any heat behind it. That’s how truly outraged I am.

Zander lands beside me and shakes his head. “That’s a bit much.”

“A very purposeful bit much,” I return darkly. “I can’t believe...”

But I don’t have words for all the things I can’t believe. I want to cry that he’s stuck again. Cursed. Because he revealed himself to save me, which feels like a kind of deep echo inside me, like he’s done just that before.

Then, as now, because people want to see the worst in him.

And in everything, no matter how much we work to try to make things better.

Because, in this time, the damned Joywood makes sure of it.

Even now when they shouldn’t be any kind of a factor.

I move toward the statue then. But before I can put my hands on it, the mass of stone... shakes a little. Like it is having

its own quiet earthquake.

And then Azrael, in man form, appears at the side of the stone.

Relief swamps so deep, my knees almost give out. “You can get around the spell.”

“Not exactly,” he says, pausing at the cemetery gates. “The statue isn’t my confinement. The cemetery is.”

His eyes are gold and on mine in a way that feels like a touch. I take a breath. Then I make myself take stock. Not of what

I feared across the river, but what is happening here . Azrael can’t leave the cemetery grounds. That’s not great, but it’s better than being stuck in a statue, unable to communicate.

I’m clinging to whatever silver lining I can.

Until this moment, I don’t think I knew how much I have come to depend on this man. My dragon. My newel post confidant brought to beautiful life. It isn’t just the book. Fate.

The lure of other lives, hard losses, and a love so deep I sometimes imagine it’s threaded into my bones.

I just like him.

I really, really like him. This man who is funny and irreverent and so dangerous—while always being a safe place for me. This man who pretended to be a human and helps us whether we want it or not and happily took his place in our coven—in our lives—before we knew he belonged here.

This man who taught me how to fly like a dragon, and that was only the beginning.

Like doesn’t begin to cover it.

I can’t remember him through other eyes. I’m glad I can’t, because I like this view so much.

This dragon is definitely worth being tied to throughout time.

“Did the Joywood fail to imprison him in stone on purpose?” Frost asks in a musing sort of tone, his icy-cold gaze moving

from the statue to Azrael and back. “Or is this because their power is fading?”

I don’t care. I launch myself forward, through the gates, directly at Azrael. And he catches me. He’s sturdy and warm and

here .

He wraps his arm around me and holds me like no one’s cursed or ever could be. And I can feel that he is holding on to make

sure I am okay, the same way I am holding on to make sure he is.

Like really isn’t the word.

“I’m betting on the latter.” Azrael looks out over the stones, and the statues of familiars. “Though I wouldn’t trust that

the power fading will last.”

“How would they get it back?” Zander demands.

“Destroying you lot.” Azrael looks down at me. “Something attacked her, and then me. They have power somewhere, still. Black

magic, at a guess.”

“I tried to reach out to everyone,” I say.

“They blocked you. Isolated you in the hopes of picking you off.” Azrael looks at me, his eyes gleaming with that hot gold.

“The usual Joywood playbook.”

“If she couldn’t reach out to us, how did you get the message she needed help?” Rebekah asks him, her eyes narrowing in suspicion.

But I already know the answer. I look down at the ring on my finger. “What you gave me are the only crystals on my body that

didn’t burn me.”

Frost frowns at that. “The burns weren’t from the water?”

“No.” They hadn’t been on my legs, where I was getting sucked in. That was bad but didn’t burn . That had been the crystal I was holding, the crystals in my pockets and on my body. The necklace I always wear—the prehnite

from my mother at pubertatum—but not the crystals on Azrael’s necklace. There was only one burn on my neck, right between

my collarbones. “It was my crystals.”

“Take them off,” Azrael says darkly. He has taken his arm away from me. He points to the ground, then grunts in frustration.

“My magic does not work here.”

I pull the crystals out of my pockets. Take the prehnite necklace off. Hold them out in my hands. I stare at them. They look

and feel like crystals. How could they burn me? How could someone get to crystals I have cleansed and charged and worn?

“Put them in something,” Azrael orders me. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him like this. Darkly furious, but with a very tight

lid on it. I want to reach for him, but clearly the focus is on the crystals, so I magic myself a little bowl to put everything

in.

Azrael nods toward Frost. “Take the bowl outside the cemetery. Destroy them.”

I don’t know what to think about the fact that Frost does this immediately. He doesn’t question it, either. More telling,

he doesn’t balk at Azrael giving him orders. He doesn’t even shoot the dragon one of his I’m the first Praeceptor glances.

Like this is so serious nothing else matters.

Rebekah and I exchange a wide-eyed look.

Frost strides through the cemetery gates and keeps going, almost to the path that leads through the woods and down to the river.

A few crows sit on a branch and seem to watch him.

He mutters a spell, and there’s a small explosion in the bowl.

A flash of light, a loud, crackling kind of flame, and then dark smoke billows up.

When Frost comes back through the iron gates, he holds the bowl out to the rest of us.

My crystals are shattered into violent shards. All of them.

And something oily and black oozes out from each of the broken pieces.

I’m not the only one who recoils.

“Black magic,” I whisper. There was a vile, nasty blackness in the middle of my crystals, and I didn’t even know . Then it dawns on me. “Those are almost all new crystals. I got each of them in the places I traveled to find the keys. I

thought it would give me luck in the archives to wear crystals I got while gathering the keys to access them, but—”

“They were traps,” Frost says, not unkindly.

Which is actually deeply kind, for him, and yet...

I feel small. Stupid. They set a trap and I fell right into it. They knew I would find the keys. They banked on it. I thought

I was so smart and all the while, they wanted me to find those keys. They know me and my love for crystals. They knew exactly what they were doing.

And what I’d do too.

And I did it.

But it’s not Azrael whose arms come around me to comfort me. It’s another rare show of affection from Ellowyn. And I need

it so badly I don’t even make a joke of it.

I can’t even think of something to say to release all this tension. Because my dawning realization is worse.

It wasn’t only the crystals I picked up on my travels that were the problem. It was the necklace my mother gave me at pubertatum, and I suppose it became a habit to wear. A weird lifeline, if I think deeper about it. Maybe if I wore it enough, I could finally be what she wanted me to be.

And instead it’s been infused with black magic for all these years.

Before I can really delve into how I feel about all of this, Emerson and Jacob appear. They both look grim, and that’s before they take in the dragon statue, Azrael standing apart from it. A pile of crystal shards with black magic oozes in the bowl

Frost is holding.

There is no battle gleam in Emerson’s eyes, and that’s unusual. She looks tired —and that’s almost unheard of—as we catch her up on what we’ve discovered.

“What was it like with all the pitchfork-bearing villagers?” Rebekah asks. “I mean, our friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens?”

Emerson shoots her sister a quelling look, which is at least more normal. “People are uneasy. We need to explain what a true

coven is and the role of the fabulae that’s been kept from us all too long.” She nods as if she’s come to a decision. “We

simply need to put together a presentation of the facts.”

“It will not work.” Azrael says this with no heat. Just a grim kind of certainty.

“How do you know?” Emerson asks him. “I don’t think you understand the power of a good presentation to change minds and hearts.”

“It’s a passion of hers,” Jacob says to the dragon. Deadpan.

This is one reason we love him.

Emerson is winding up to give one of her speeches, but then it dawns on me. “The fairy tale.”

Everyone looks at me.

“That book?” Emerson asks. “What about it?”

“There are two crow armies in the story. One with the good crow leader, honest and true.” Just like Emerson, the more I think about it.

“She’s defending the fairies, and she has a bunch of crows on her side.

But the other side won’t listen to reason about the fairies.

She tries and tries. They refuse to listen. ”

“It’s just a story,” Zander says. “I know it had Ellowyn’s Revelare stuff in there, but it’s still not a historical text.”