Page 4 of Gemini Hunted (Dark Witch Academy #5)

Zara

I’ve never been this close to Cleo in her sea dragon form.

I mean, until a few days ago, I didn’t even know my ex-bestie has a sea dragon form.

I know her favorite champagne and the type of oyster she pairs it with.

I know the cons that always work best for her when she grifts and how to use her shady skills to my advantage whenever we’d run a heist. I know how to massage her aching feet after those endless hours she spent walking the runways during Paris Fashion week, while I burgled high-end hotel safes to finance our living-on-the-edge lifestyle.

I know how to make her laugh and I know how to make her moan.

What I don’t know is what happens next.

With my heart jackhammering against my sternum and my mechanical breath rasping fast and noisy in my ears, I stare through my visor straight into oblong golden eyes the size of serving platters.

In the blinding glare of my flashlight, as a school of tiny purple fish darts between us, the protective membrane drops over her orbs.

Her pupils constrict to menacing vertical slits.

My throat closes in dread. I angle the flashlight out of her eyes and let it play warily over the rest of her.

Sweet Jesus. She’s massive.

She’s a monster.

Nostrils pinch closed over a wicked muzzle split by rows of needle-sharp teeth.

Snaky tendrils of crimson sea dragon crest undulate like eels in the tide.

The slow rhythmic flare of gills opens and closes behind her vast jaws.

The sinuous coil of her body glimmers—merlot with glints of copper—in my wavering light.

My hand is so unsteady, with the adrenaline rush flooding every synapse, I can barely hold the flashlight.

My own inner dragon has never confronted another queen, except those scrawny ferals on Avalon who always cringe and defer to her. In any population, my dragon has always been the dominant queen.

If not the only queen.

Now she’s snout to snout with a rival who’s older, bigger, possibly stronger than she is.

And she really doesn’t like it.

While my agitated dragon trumpets and batters her wings against the fragile shell of my human skin, I’m holding off my shift by my fingernails.

You can’t breathe underwater, showgirl, I remind my inner queen, teeth clenched around the mouthpiece of my respirator so hard my jaws ache. And you can’t swim either, remember? If we shift down here, we’re shark meat.

My dragon emits a frustrated whine. But she eases back (a little) on that forced shift bullshit. Of course, like any diva, she resists and resents the hell outta every inconvenient shred of logic.

But it’s still the truth.

With my flashlight angled considerately away from her eyes, Cleo’s pupils dilate. But her optical membrane stays down—for protection. A trickle of tiny bubbles leaks through her razor teeth. Suddenly the water flowing past my icy limbs heats like an eddy of shower spray.

All dragons have breath weapons. Mine is lightning. Max’s is flame. Zephyr’s green dragon (who doesn’t shift) breathes acid.

And Cleo, very clearly, breathes a scalding steam.

My ex-bestie is capable of melting the flesh from my bones like soup stock with a single pissed-off breath.

My dragon thrashes against the bars of her mortal cage, both frantic and enraged. My human vitals are going haywire, pulse rabbiting, skin prickling, the pit of my belly shrinking to an ice cube of elemental terror.

Yet I’m also… powerfully… intrigued.

Cleo + Zara.

Once upon a time, my ex-BFF tattooed our names in tiny letters on her inner forearm—right down the vein—in Sanskrit.

We were lovers and roomies and partners in crime for over a year. What kind of strength and guile and sheer stubborn grit did it demand from her to hide this monumental secret?

Slowly, so slowly, my free hand drifts out and up. Cleo’s sea dragon pupils squeeze to slits. A warning trickle of superheated bubbles squirts between her scimitar teeth.

Barely even breathing, I hold her gaze with mine.

I’m too terrified to blink.

Yet, somehow, I muster the resolve to graze the very tips of my fingers along Cleo’s muzzle, just above those ferocious teeth. Under my careful fingertips, her wine-colored scales are sleek as suede. She’s not cold like a fish. Like the hide of an air-breathing dragon, she’s banked heat.

Her yellow irises pulse and shimmer like a furnace.

But she doesn’t bite my hand off.

Not even when my open palm settles gently against her cheek.

A slow shuddery exhale hisses through my respirator. The fist of terror clenching my guts, very slightly, eases its grip.

I don’t know if she’s a telepath—because, clearly, nothing I thought I knew about her was true. But I’m a telepath myself, a good one, and Ronin has been honing my skills.

I gaze into the glowing lanterns of her eyes and breathe Ciao, bella.

A resonant rumble rises from the vast coil of her body. To mortal ears, that rumble sounds like a menacing growl.

But I’m no mere mortal. I know dragons.

This one… Cleo…

She’s…

Purring.

A lightning bolt of new ideas dances through my cerebral cortex and lights up neural pathways that have been clotted with betrayal and grief for months over her bitter treachery. What was it she said to me, the night of my birthday bash, when we met and clashed on the royal yacht?

You do not wish to be queen, no? Cleo’s perfect teeth sank into the violet matte of her lower lip. But I—don’t you see—I was given no choice.

I can hardly wrap my head around the fucked-up electric insight that’s sparking and crackling through my stunned brain.

Obviously, I wasn’t given much choice myself.

Lucius and Ronin kidnapped my ass in mid-heist from a Singapore penthouse and dragged me through the wards to the Icarus Academy by force.

It took me months, but I finally accepted this whole ball-and-chain queen gig.

I had to.

Had to accept.

Had to act to save the witching world and reverse our slow extinction.

Is it so hard to believe another witch, blessed (or cursed) with powerful recessives and a pedigree as royal as mine, could also feel… compelled?

I’m trying to wrestle my chaotic thoughts into some kinda order, with one hand resting on the sea dragon’s muzzle and the other limp around my flashlight, when a shadow flickers across my peripheral vision.

Suddenly I remember the shark.

Fuck.

Alarmed, I swing my flashlight up. It’s not the shark, but a sleek black diver who darts into view.

For a sec, I think it’s Ronin. But rather than sporting a long ribbon of sable ponytail, this guy’s head is encased in a hood.

He’s narrower through the shoulders and hips than Ronin’s powerful frame.

This diver, he’s rapier slim. He’s speed and stealth instead of muscle.

He darts through the sea like a barracuda.

His fist drives forward with a flash of serrated dive knife.

I barely have time to suck in a breath of precious oxygen before that knife slices through my breathing tube. A last wisp of air slips between my lips. Followed by a sudden flood of seawater, salty and bitter as brine.

I spit out the useless mouthpiece and clamp my mouth shut to preserve that last precious lungful of air.

Last time I checked, I was forty feet down.

I need to surface.

Fast.

But the flashlight I’m still clutching plays over the game bag fastened to the diver’s weight belt. Through the cloudy mesh, I make out a gleaming crescent of gold.

My clairvoyance—that new gene that got switched on when I became Zephyr’s queen—sparks to life. The flaring curve of a cornucopia, swirling with arcane glyphs for fertility and abundance, encrusted with the jeweled symbols of the twelve witching houses, dances in my mind’s eye.

The Horn of Ceres.

That’s the magical artifact that’ll win the Dean’s Challenge. Another diver—one of Cleo’s, damn it—has clearly gotten there before me.

Fuck.

Me.

Sideways.

Through the shield of our visors, my eyes lock with his. The rival diver. A jolt of recognition steals half my oxygen. Those eyes are hauntingly familiar, almond-shaped and tilted like Vasili’s—but chocolate gold instead of arctic blue, divided by the narrow bridge of an aristocratic nose.

I’m staring at Nikolai Romanov.

Vasili’s Russian oligarch dickwad of a dad.

Nikolai’s been Team Cleo since Day One.

Behind him, the sea erupts in a violent explosion of bubbles. Water churns under the powerful convulsion of a massive merlot body. As my beam dances wildly over the scene, the sea darkens with a sudden cloud of green dragon ichor. Cleo writhes in a spasm of agony.

The slender shaft of a barbed fishing spear sprouts from her long throat.

At her anguished periphery, I glimpse the broad-shouldered frame of another diver, still gripping his speargun at the ready. An inky swirl of ponytail floats around his head.

Ronin .

Nikolai spins to combat this new threat. As he does, my hand drops to the sheath at my belt. A heartbeat later, my dive knife slices through the fragile mesh of Nikolai’s game bag.

The torn fabric floats aside. Gently, the Horn of Ceres tumbles into my hand.

A bubble of elation swells my chest like a mushroom cloud.

I have the Horn.

It’s way more than a contest prize. This ancient thing is an enchanted object. It’s powerfully bespelled for fertility.

This is the magic I need to save my fellow witches, whose bloodlines are so diluted we’re practically sterile. This Horn will help the whole witching world make babies to restore our dying races.

But this is no time to rest on my laurels.

The aching pressure in my lungs demands relief. I need to surface.

Like, now .

Clutching the Horn under my arm like a football, I swing my flashlight over the chaos to find an escape route.