Page 29

Chapter 29

Caspian

Kit was still standing at Rachel’s desk, looking like someone had just told him the solstice was canceled.

Like he’d just found out the whole world was doomed.

And with a sudden bit of clarity, I knew what he’d found.

We’d get no help from that quarter, even though he’d certainly been trying to give it.

That’s . . . almost sad , Mella said, and despite the light words, she actually sounded like she might cry, her voice in my mind trembling and weak.

These things were different for stones, I thought. Humans were all too aware of mortality. Someone you loved could be there today and gone tomorrow, hit by a bus when they went to cross a street. But that wasn’t so common with stones. They could survive things we couldn’t possibly, and they didn’t die of something as simple as a few decades of age.

It is sad , I agreed. And it’s going to be a mess to figure out what comes next. But we don’t have time to think about that right now. We have to handle Rachel first .

She’d grown since the last time I’d seen her in bear form, or maybe it just seemed that way because of the fact that she was threatening me personally for the first time ever. After all, even if she’d never liked me, she had been Aunt Rachel . It had never occurred to me to find her threatening.

Victor Berents’s scarred face flashed through my mind, and there was no doubt she’d left those lines as a reminder. It probably hadn’t even been a real fight, to leave a scar like that but not kill him. She had just wanted him to live with her presence on his face for the rest of his life.

That was who she was.

She was also making a show of it now. Going slow. Like she wanted to savor the murder of me. She wasn’t being slowed by Frost trying to stop her. He was wholly focused on me, and his mother was giving him a speculative frown, like she knew he wanted to interfere. Like she would stop him if he did.

I could hardly blame her.

Delta Moonstriker thought the law was more important than the people involved. That upholding it was more important than who lived or died. It wasn’t as though she particularly liked me and would lose someone she cared about if I died. I wasn’t sure if she would break the law even if it were Frost in the duel. She seemed the type to be sad but carry on and tout her own strict adherence to the law to explain why that was an acceptable behavior.

I couldn’t do that, I realized. Not ever. Sometimes, the law was wrong.

Well then we’ll change the law , Mella said. After we beat her. No more dueling .

Deal , I agreed. And now would be a good time to tell me just how the hell we’re going to do that .

I could feel Mella’s coy amusement as Rachel postured some more, making a show of sniffing the room and growling over at Kit. Did you look it up?

That was . . . Did I look what up?

And now she was put out. I told you. Crimson tiger’s eye. That’s not the only name they gave us .

And actually, I had. I’d long become used to Mella hinting at something but making me look into it myself, instead of just spoon-feeding me everything I wanted to know. She always wanted me to do my own research, so that I would know the truth, not just know what someone had told me, even if that someone was her.

Yes, of course , I agreed. But that’s . . . I mean, they’re fiction. Bears are real. Panthers and wolves and coyotes are real animals you can find in the wild .

She made a tinkling little scoffing noise. Man carries a magic rock on his wrist every day and he’s worried about what’s fiction and what’s not. Your boyfriend can literally freeze things in time. Besides, dire wolves don’t exist in the wild anymore, either, but Nausa has made the Sunrunner into one for generations anyway .

Okay then , I told her. Let’s do this. Surprise me. Surprise everyone, dragon’s eye .

And she fucking did.

I’d been watching people shift my whole life, and everyone’s shift was different. Aunt Rachel’s shift was an ugly thing, painful and awful. Some people actually bled. On the other end of the spectrum, I’d had an acquaintance in high school who became a sea otter, and it was a matter of two seconds and a puff of smoke. This felt like something in between.

The next breath I took in seemed to last forever. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but there was an odd sort of pressure, as though someone was trying to fill me up like a balloon. The colors around me swirled and went super sharp, like someone had increased the contrast on the whole world.

And everyone around me got smaller.

Or something like that.

A moment later, my head was brushing the ceiling, which . . . I had never seen anyone do in my life.

Sunrunner Palace had been built huge, open and airy precisely because of shifting. Well, and air movement, I supposed, which was good to have in the desert, but mostly because for centuries, millennia, even, some members of my family had turned into a dire wolf that could barely fit into an average-sized room.

But this was one of the sitting rooms—one of the biggest rooms we had. The ceiling was nearly twenty feet high, and I didn’t even have to stretch to reach it. In fact, I was slightly hunched to fit beneath it.

I was reasonably sure I’d flattened a few chairs, and I had one leg perched atop a wicker-based couch that was creaking ominously. I stepped off it and used that leg to shove it away, and the rug and a coffee table went along with it, smashing into the wall, and I was reasonably sure at least one of them was broken. Maybe all of them.

Oops. This size and strength was going to take some getting used to.

Another reason we didn’t just go straight to dragon when we bonded , Mella said, implicit agreement in her tone.

Below me, Ember burst into wild laughter. She was pressed fully against the wall, clearly afraid for her life, but also highly amused.

Probably because Aunt Rachel had just pissed on the floor.

Damn it, that was going to take the poor staff ages to clean up.

“Didn’t see that coming,” Kit muttered, and he seemed mildly surprised. It was fair, since he’d clearly been expecting almost every other thing that had happened to us. Heck, he’d even packed our stuff for the road trip in weatherproof packs, before we’d gone off the road into a river. It had been almost uncanny, when I thought about it.

But no. I didn’t need to think about Kit and his ability to plan for every contingency, even if it was impressive. I had to handle Aunt Rachel.

Whatever happened, I couldn’t let her go to continue wreaking havoc on my people. So I reached down with one enormous, clawed hand and wrapped it around her middle. She was child-sized, to my current body, which was . . . surreal, since she’d been a fucking huge bear a minute ago.

No, she still was a fucking huge bear. I was just bigger than her now.

That meant she could still hurt the people I cared about, if I didn’t stop her. I had to hold her still, keep her away from Frost and Kit and Ember and . . . hells, everyone.

“Severed,” I said aloud. I turned to look at Frost. “I’m going to have to have her severed, aren’t I? Can I do that?”

Delta cleared her throat, stepping forward, and to her credit, she didn’t seem the least bit shocked or frightened of . . . well, I assumed I was a giant fucking talking lizard. My hand, the one holding Aunt Rachel to the floor, was deep crimson red and scaly.

“Technically you have to defeat her first,” Delta said. “Until she concedes or dies, the duel isn’t over.”

I . . . well, if I’d made the gesture as a human, I would’ve lifted a brow at her. I didn’t know what that looked like as a giant red dragon. “You think she’s got a choice?”

“She does,” Delta agreed. “And if you knew anything about this kind of person, you’d know her choice is going to be forcing you to kill her.”

As though to prove Delta right, Aunt Rachel roared and swiped a hand down the arm that was holding her in place. When I instinctively let go, she lunged at me. Lunged at a dragon. What the fuck?

Did she want to die?

Force me to kill her, Delta had said. Did Rachel think I wouldn’t or couldn’t do it? She had always called me weak, and . . . well, I didn’t especially want to kill her. I didn’t want to kill anyone. I’d never been bloodthirsty.

But I wasn’t going to die in order to avoid it.

So when Rachel roared and swung her paws out at me, I roared back.