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A Fury of Wings & Darkness

NYX

I had imagined what it would feel like to fly countless times in my life. But as Glorious’ leathery wings beat through the air like thunder, my stomach sank in a way that rearranged my insides. Not even my wildest dreams could have conjured this feeling up.

All I could do was hold on and trust him.

He roared at the stars as we made our way to them. They twinkled triumphantly, hidden constellations peeking through the velvety abyss to watch our first flight. Wind blew my hair straight back, and water filmed over my shifted eyes, but they adjusted instantly.

I had never felt more alive.

I was on a dragon’s back. My dragon. A mythic, golden beast with ethereal blue flames. He had guarded me and hunted me and chosen me .

It was too surreal.

I held onto his hot spikes, relishing in the steady drum of his heart that I could feel under my legs.

He’d seemed so massive before when he was hunting me. As we ascended, though, and his muscles strained to climb into the sky, I realized he was still small—for a dragon, anyway. He must have been just large enough to bear my weight. That wasn’t saying much, at my five foot nothing. A normal-sized person couldn’t mount him.

Good.

In the distance, the City of Angels twinkled like a cluster of crystals charging under the full moon. Sorrowful nostalgia swelled in my heart as I admired it. From up here, it looked so magical. It was almost too easy to forget what a dark, depraved place it could be.

Glorious banked to the left. Started soaring toward the city as if he knew where I wanted to go. Of course he did.

“Yes,” I whispered.

I prayed to the Goddess that this wasn’t a dream. If I woke up to this not being real, my heart would break irreparably.

The canvas of stars faded the closer we got to LA. Rumbling, dark clouds conjured over the city. The wind carried a sharp, metallic scent that instantly made me think of—

Solaris.

Glorious faltered, his wings missing a beat as he sensed the way my heart dropped and spilled panic through my veins.

I’d been so high on adrenaline and my new dragon bond that I’d forgotten about my dream.

I leaned forward, urging my dragon to fly faster. My urgency bled into him, and his wings cracked harder against the air, which was growing more and more dense as we approached the storm.

Lightning struck.

A massive, electric blue bolt zapped the city. With an ear-shattering BOOM , Los Angeles went dark.

Glorious whined, sharing my panic. I swallowed and forced my spine to steel itself. I held on tighter and willed him to fly straight into the black clouds.

A rush of darkness charged us.

The shadowy mass broke out from the storm before we could reach it. Glorious veered out of the way, spiraling as we plunged low. I screamed, tucking my head in against his scales, locking my thighs in a death grip.

The dragon rolled through the air and I thought we’d lost control but he straightened out again—and he was fucking pissed . His wrath filled me, smoke seeping from my nostrils.

What the fuck was that?

We soared below the dark clouds, my head tilted back, searching for the thing that dared to try and assault us.

The sound the wind carried didn’t make sense. It sounded like—

Horses.

Glorious’s roar rattled with pure savagery as he turned us around. Facing us toward the stampede of horses in the sky that were coming for us. Their bodies made of billowing shadows, their eyes hellfire red. They shrieked, the conjoined sounds distorted and demonic.

Glorious was unfazed, snarling in anticipation as he vaulted straight for them.

Thunder and lightning crashed.

I braced myself for the attack.

Glorious unleashed a torrent of furious blue flames as we collided with the nightmare horses. His fire engulfed us, robbing me of sight and coherence.

Another scream tore from my throat and we were rolling again. If it weren’t for the strength of my shifted hands, I would have fallen from my mount. A blur of sapphire flame and howling shadows became my only reality for a moment that seemed to stretch forever.

When the fire faded away, we were flying alone, the sky eerily silent as Glorious straightened out.

Breathing hard and ragged, I searched for the shadow creatures, but they were gone.

Glorious chortled, the sound purely smug.

“What the fuck just happened?” I rasped.

We circled under the black clouds. The dragon gathered his strength, his mighty heartbeat telling me we were nowhere near done.

Something black darted past my peripheral vision.

A shadow falling from the clouds.

I watched its formless body plummet toward the Earth and out of sight. Then another. And another.

I tilted my head back, my pulse ravaging my chest.

“We need to go higher,” I said, tasting blood on my tongue. “We need to go above the clouds.”

Glorious hissed. But his body slanted as he obeyed. I tightened my hands and thighs, my jaw clenched hard enough to shatter my teeth. The black clouds robbed me of my vision but I kept my eyes open, commanding my heightened senses to adapt so I could scour our surroundings.

The dragon banked sharply away from a vein of lightning that struck too close to us. Thunder shook me to my core. Storms were wild enough when you experienced them from the sanctity of solid ground. Flying through one, though? There were no words. Every inch of me was electric, my heart galloping like the stampede of nightmare horses.

Glorious’s wings beat harder, propelling us up. Once, twice. Then the clouds ended, the world going startlingly clear and quiet. The moon and stars glistened. Still, we found no respite.

The figure of darkness that hovered above the storm ripped the heart from my chest.

His wings cracked harshly, working hard to keep him flying on the spot. He was larger than life, shadows billowing off of him like a cloak and clutching the Sword of Oblivion. The sword had been infused with shadows so the blade was obsidian black, which he used to slice at the sky to—

Tear a hole in it.

I must have cried out because he suddenly turned. My eyes locked with his pitch-black ones. His lips tore back in fury, his body angling around mechanically toward me.

His voice screamed into my mind. YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE!

I leaned left, and Glorious followed, veering away and then dipping back to circle Solaris.

It all made sense. Clicked into place like the last missing puzzle piece. The dragon had been granted two moon cycles to molt into a mountable beast so that we could be here, now.

This was predestined. This was our fate.

I am exactly where I need to be.

But I leaned in the opposite direction, coaxing the dragon to fly away from Solaris. He hesitated before he complied. His fury burned through me, and I almost laughed—not because anything was funny but, of course, my dragon had anger issues. He wanted to obliterate Solaris without a second thought.

“Are we sure about this?” I murmured. “It’s our first flight. Should we really head straight into battle with— him ?”

His answering roar made the stars themselves tremble. As if we could turn away.

Glorious swerved sharply back around without waiting for my signal.

Solaris, drenched in shadows and rage, regarded me and my dragon with pure arrogance. The dark elemental force possessing him didn’t believe we would dare try and interfere with their diabolical plan.

It was a gut punch, the sight of him. There was nothing familiar about him, and that wrecked me. Solaris had never been a good person, but he wasn’t this .

He had an agenda, a focus—he wanted to drive out the true filth in this world. His methods may have been morally ambiguous and downright irredeemable at times, but I knew in my heart he was not a world-ender. I’d seen glimmers of something in his silver eyes, something wholly vulnerable and emotional, something I’d pushed down and ignored and swore couldn’t be real, but it was .

For me, for Jedidiah, he had unconditional…affection.

He had a heart and he was not this thing in the sky seeking to unleash hell.

My skin burst into flames. Fire so blue the ocean would weep in envy. And I morphed. Like Glorious bursting through his old skin. I shattered myself once again, transcending my humanity to become a feral, protective force that would stop at nothing .

The shadows could not have him.

He was… mine .

In a way, I didn’t understand, but it was no less true.

My hesitation only bloated the shadow’s ignorance. He’d turned away from me again, the sword raised, ready to deepen and expand the rift in the sky. It was unfathomable—a literal tear in the fabric of reality. A black fissure in the night sky that bled darkness. Formless creatures escaped in droves and fell to the dark city below.

The constellation of stars behind the rift glimmered extra brightly, almost unnaturally bright.

As my eyes feasted upon it, the revelation hit me, and my stomach hollowed out.

It was Scorpio— which was fucking impossible. The Scorpio constellation wasn’t visible in the night sky at this time of year.

“Oh my Goddess,” I whispered. My heart was hammering out of control.

Solaris had summoned the stars of Scorpio and was opening a rift inside of it.

The Luminary’s words played in my mind. “The entire collective unconscious is stored in the deep, dark waters of Scorpio. All our fears and nightmares and discords live there, and from them, grew monsters…”

Fuck. This was bad.

With Solaris’s back to us, Glorious sensed my terror and seized the moment. He shot at him. The dragon shrieked and released a blast of flames that hit Solaris’s enormous feathered wings. My chest caved in as he faltered, looking as if he were about to fall out of the sky. The fire triggered a roar of fury and pain that sounded like a hundred voices in one, and he whirled around—his face straight out of a nightmare.

The blue flames caught in his wings shrunk and fizzled out, leaving them unscathed.

Shit.

Glorious skewed back, giving us a safe distance away from him.

If it weren’t for the sheer adrenaline pumping through my veins, I might have cried. Or thrown up. Perhaps both.

This is your last chance to leave , Solaris’s echoed voice warned. He flew on the spot, watching us through those soulless eyes, his chest heaving.

I’m not going anywhere , I promised. Not until I banish you and free Solaris .

His lips pulled into a sneer. Fine. Have it your way.

And then he rushed us.

A fury of wings and darkness collided with scales and flames. The impact of Solaris crashing into us sent us spiraling down. Blue fire spewed aimlessly. I tightened my legs around Glorious’s shoulders and tried to keep track of what was happening, but chaos was reigning now.

Amid the blinding inferno and the thunder of wings, my senses were robbed on all fronts.

I pushed my legs up, daring to lean over the crest of the dragon’s back. Solaris was wielding the sword—trying to stab my dragon . Screaming intelligibly, I attempted to blast fire at him with my hands, but I couldn’t let go of my mount long enough to land a hit. Glorious was snarling and snapping his jaw and spitting fire. It seemed like the dragon had Solaris trapped in his back talons, but I couldn’t be sure.

We were all tangled together, falling from the sky as shadows slipped through the open rift above.

SOLARIS! I screamed into his mind. I know you’re in there! Do something! Don’t let them win! Fight back! FIGHT BACK!

He growled and broke free of the dragon’s grasp, instantly propelling back up toward the rift.

Glorious couldn’t catch his balance, and we plummeted back into the storm clouds. The world went dark and streaked with lightning. Lightning that nearly pierced me. “No!” I howled. “Straighten out! Straighten out!”

Tears threatened to burn down my cheeks, but I swallowed them back with a snarl. I could not cry. The time for tears was over. I had emptied my well enough. I was a dragon rider now. A—

Drakiana.

The word in my mind made Glorious roar, and his body suddenly flattened as if my revelation was his saving grace. Our descent ended abruptly, his senses gathered and restored, and he wasted no time in taking us higher, out of the storm clouds, to face the shadows.

We broke through the darkness, both of us shrieking with fury, rocketing at Solaris with no mercy.

He looked down at the last second, but he was too late. Glorious’s savage jaw snared him by the arm and yanked him away from the rift. Solaris’s answering wail was deep and demonic and fucking irate. The black sword sliced the air beside my head, a gasp tearing from me as I dodged it.

Glorious ragdolled Solaris and then tossed him, sending him hurtling back down into the storm.

My heart had never thrashed like this. I could feel it in every inch of my body. The pain in my chest felt like a broken rib.

“Hurry!” I cried, knowing we did not have long before he was back.

Glorious banked around, and we were soaring back to the rift. A deep, bone-chilling sound emitted from it. Like a hum. A monstrous hum—a ballad of death and ruin.

We stopped in front of it. Being this close felt wrong. So fucking wrong. My skin was a mess of chills and shivers, every cell of my being begging me to run. Darkness slipped through the baleful opening, most of it formless, but some looked like creatures or things—and some noticed us.

Blaring red eyes locked with mine, and a shadow in the shape of a hound broke out off the rift and lunged for me.

I screamed, and instinct took over, my hands leaving the safety of the spikes to blast fire at it. Blue flames devoured the hellish creature as it shrieked and shrunk and turned to nothing. But then another emerged, and another—until a whole pack of them was coming for my throat.

My dragon answered with scathing outrage, his front scales rippling and turning black. His protectiveness was palpable as he reared back and drenched the shadow hounds in the sapphire flame that obliterated them in seconds.

The terror inside me waned, but I didn’t have time to revel in the sanctity.

Glorious soared away from the rift so we could recoup, but I knew we didn’t have time for that. I leaned the other way, urging him back, urging him to finish this. “We need to close it!”

And somehow, as the moon bathed us in her silver-blue light, I knew exactly how to do that.

Glorious took us back to the ominous opening in the sky. A disgusting creature made of black smog with a crooked spine and elongated limbs crawled out, dropping toward the Earth before we could vanquish it.

Holy fucking Goddess.

All these creatures were going to be roaming the city. Even if we closed the rift, so many of them had already gotten through.

“Fire, Glorious!” I declared, and my dragon was more than eager to comply.

He unleashed his ethereal inferno at the rift. A chorus of distorted screams erupted from inside it. He did not relent, the stream of flames spewing endlessly from his throat.

Mounted on my dragon, high above the clouds, I found myself entrapped in the magic of—

Moonfire.

A unique, other-worldly element. The sapphire flames latched onto the rift, burning the edges until they started to shrink and close. My heart rocketed, and my lips parted in awe. The light from the blaze made me squint, and the heat blew my hair back in the wind. The dragon’s fire was dissolving the rift.

Glorious’s sudden ear-piercing cry shattered the sky and cleaved my heart in two.

Impact slammed us from below. Pain scorched through me as blood spewed through the air. Glorious was still shrieking, the sound high-pitched and devastating. His control gave out, his wings beating erratically as we started spiraling. Hot blood pelted my face. I grunted in confusion, holding on for dear life. We were falling again.

We told you to leave , Solaris’s distorted voice growled in my mind.

Fear coiled around my throat like a cold wire.

He was there—flying after us, enraged and enormous and possessed by unfathomable darkness.

“Come on, come on!” I cried to Glorious as we spun downward. “Straighten out! Please!”

He did, but he was unsteady, the beat of his wings uneven and overcharged.

Because his right wing had been stabbed. A guttural cry left my lips as I saw it. The vengeful tear in the fleshy membrane.

We couldn’t afford this! Glorious was only just strong enough to hold my weight. With the tear in his wing, air sailed through, and even with him straightened out, he couldn’t ascend. We were going down slowly.

A furious growl rumbled from deep in my chest.

“SOLARIS!” My scream was savage and louder than the thunder that crashed below. “WAKE UP! YOU HAVE TO WAKE UP !”

The thundering clouds enveloped us. I whimpered and gasped, ducking low to dodge a bolt of lightning. Glorious was crying out in anguish, not from pain but frustration that he couldn’t steady himself, couldn’t fly us out of the storm cloud. We were going to have to land. We were going to have to leave Solaris and—

Something struck my ribs and dislodged me from my mount.

I screamed, my hands clawing for purchase, but free fall claimed me.

I could hear my dragon shrieking. Felt the thunder rupture in my chest. Rapid, icy wind had me in its ravenous claws. I couldn’t see or think or decipher where Glorious was. I hurtled toward the dark city, leaving the storm behind.

Solaris dove after me.

I caught sight of him in the same second as he grabbed me with one arm. The abrupt halt in my fall had my jaw snapping agonizingly. Solaris cradled me, still holding the sword in his other hand. He started flying—back toward the mountain? I couldn’t tell, but there was no fucking way I was letting him do away with me.

We warned you , his wrong-sounding voice reminded me.

His blacked-out eyes bore into mine. I couldn’t see any traces of him. None. Nothing.

I bellowed an intelligible cry. Slammed my palm into his chest and unleashed a current of Moonfire straight into him.

His jaw went slack. His skin lit up with pale light.

And his eyes flashed silver.