Page 4 of The Dragon Queen (Ember: Queen Of Dragons #6)

I've never wanted so badly to punch something in the teeth.

To be fair--I want to punch things in the teeth pretty regularly. But right now? Standing there on that cliff, watching Ember go to pieces? Feeling her pain, her loss, her fucking insecurity?

My hands clench into fists so tight my knuckles hurt.

But you can't punch magic. Or fate. Or whatever the hell forces tore that damn bracer off her arm.

Inadequacy pours off of my mate in waves, and I have no idea what to tell her, except that I'm with her. We all are.

No matter what.

"Sorry," she murmurs, swabbing at her face.

"You have nothing to apologize for." The words come out too fierce, but I can't help it.

She flinches at my tone, and Jianyu shoots me a withering glare. He goes to join her on the rock, dropping to sit beside her. As much as the guy drives me nuts, I'm grateful to him in that moment. Taking her by the hand, he shakes his head. "Rafe's right."

"Are you okay?" Storm asks.

Obviously, she's not. It's plain to see, just looking at her, and what's more, we can feel her distress in our bond.

She doesn't seem to mind the fucking obvious question, though. She shrugs and smiles at Storm. Why she has such a soft spot for the guy will never make sense to me, but if he makes her happy, I'll put up with anything.

"I just needed a little space. Time to think, and to..." She swallows, touching the bare skin of her wrist where the bracer used to be. "Run a little experiment."

The words are so bitter, the tug on our connection so dark, it makes me wince.

Voice level, Malik asks, "It's truly gone, then."

What is with these assholes?

Nodding, she bites her lip, and fresh tears stream down her face. "I can't--I don't--" She shakes her head. "The magic is just gone."

"We'll figure it out," Jianyu says, stroking her hair.

"How?" she asks. "We don't have time."

"But we don't have to figure it all out tonight," Malik says quietly.

"It's not even tonight anymore." She glances at the horizon, where the red ball of the sun is casting warm rays over the valley. I can feel its fire in my bones. "I wasted an entire day sleeping--"

Storm shakes his head. "You needed the rest."

"I need my magic." There's an edge to her voice, a thunder in her eyes. It's not exactly like the time she called our meeting to order, back at Rhiannon's house, but it's not unlike it, either.

I share a glance with Jianyu, then Malik and Storm. We all hear it.

She may claim her magic is gone, but there's still a spark of it inside her.

Huffing out a breath, she deflates by a fraction. She pulls her knees up to her chest and hugs them tight. "I just don't know what happened."

We're all quiet for a second, waiting to see if she'll go on. There hasn't been a second to talk since the battle. The bracer shattered, and the Shadow King's forces retreated, and the next thing we knew, we were evacuating a city. She and Rook expended so much energy, creating that portal. They both crashed hard afterward.

While she slept, her other mates and I did everything we could to get the people of Unity settled in the castle. Malik revealed the magically preserved stores of food and other supplies, but even with everything we needed at our fingertips, we were hard-pressed to help hundreds of people land on their feet. We ended up crashing almost as hard as Ember did.

When we woke up, she was gone--making this honestly the first chance we've had to hear her side of the story.

All we knew was that she walked through a conflagration of black flames, and then her dragon was Emerging, soaring into the sky and raining down purple hellfire on the invaders.

And then she was falling.

Impatience wells up in me, but I'm not going to be an ass and earn another one of those looks from Jianyu. Exhaling deeply, I move to sit across from her. I gently touch her ankle, and a shiver of warmth zips up my arm. As calmly and evenly as I can, I invite her, "Want to tell us about it?"

Chuckling darkly, she pushes her hair out of her face. "Not really," she says, but she's lying. Something's bubbling just under her surface, and if she doesn't let it out, she'll explode.

"Please." Malik manages to entreat her without any kind of expectation, which is a goddam feat of heroic strength.

And it does the trick.

"Just--" She throws her hands up in the air. "One minute I was this freaking goddess. I did everything I was supposed to--embraced who I am, got in touch with my inner Shadow Dragon, harnessed all the elements, yada, yada, yada. And then bam." She claps her palms so hard the sound echoes across the valley. "It's all ripped away. The bracer, like...rejected me."

At the word 'rejected', she huddles in on herself, and Storm flinches. Whatever she's feeling vibrates his end of her mate-bond with a force that resonates in mine, too.

It hurts.

"I don't think--" Storm starts, but Ember isn't having it.

"I know what I felt. I can't explain it." She shakes her head. "When it first chose me, there was this embrace to the way it molded itself to my arm. And when it broke, it was recoiling."

She shudders, the pain a physical force I can feel in my own wrist.

I don't know if she's right, but she believes what she's saying with her entire heart.

Her eyes mist over, and her voice dips, cracking. "Apparently, I'm not good enough to be the Shadow Queen's heir."

A growl escapes me, and the other three men flinch and make their own sharp sounds of disapproval.

"Impossible," Jianyu says fiercely.

"If anything, the bracer wasn't good enough for you," I tell her, and that doesn't make sense. None of this does.

And yet I'm standing by it. The bracer gave her power and confidence. It protected her--and for all we know, it led her to us in the first place, so I can't regret her coming into its orbit.

But it always cast--for lack of a better word--a shadow over everything. It was sneaky, hiding in plain sight, impossible to see until a person knew that it was there. Her decision to hide it from me and Jianyu nearly threatened to drive a wedge between us all.

She sees its loss as a devastating end to her magic.

But what if it's just the start?

She looks down at her wrist, her eyes watery. Guileless, she confesses, "I thought it was my destiny."

Storm is the one to speak up this time. "The only one who decides your destiny is you, Ember."

She lifts her gaze to his, and their history adds a heaviness to the air.

Then she looks away. "But Rook and Rhiannon said it themselves--only an object of huge magical power can allow a Shadow Dragon to create portals, or do any of the kind of stuff I've done."

"Are we sure the Bracer is beyond repair?" Jianyu asks.

She lets out an ugly chuckle. "It seemed pretty shattered to me."

"We should have Rhiannon take a closer look at it," Storm counsels her.

She nods. "You're right. And Mariutza and Delaynie." She frowns. "Rook, too, maybe. Though I'm half-afraid to show it to him." She looks from one of us to the next. "After all of this, I guess I should trust him, but..."

"He's sketchy," I agree. "He was the Shadow King's right-hand man for how long?"

She takes her lower lip between her teeth. "His entire life, as far as I can tell."

Malik taps his chin, his gaze going to someplace in the distance. "There are scholars in each of the kingdoms. If our Shadow Dragon friends can't fix the bracer, perhaps one of them might be able to help."

"Uh, not sure if you recall, but we're kind of persona non grata in all four of the kingdoms at the moment," I remind him. "What with the Shadow King having infiltrated them and all."

"But if we can't fix the bracer..." Ember frets, worrying her hands.

"We don't need it," Jianyu insists.

Storm's brows furrow--like he doesn't disagree with Jianyu, but he's not sold on our being able to defeat the Shadow King with the power of our sheer awesomeness alone. "There has to be something else. Some other way to tap back into your abilities."

And he's right, the motherfucker. Of course he is.

"The Crown Of Cinders." The words are out of my mouth before I can even think about whether or not it's a good idea to speak them.

But I feel the rightness in my chest. The fire.

Everyone turns to look at me. Jianyu frowns. "We don't even know--"

"If it's real?" I laugh. "Everything that's happened so far here has been straight out of legend and myth. Why not this?"

"We also don't know where it is, or how to access it," Malik reminds me, as if I've forgotten.

I shrug, projecting confidence. "We'll figure it out."

We've been running for too long, always reacting. It's high time we had a real quest. A real goal.

"It's a good idea," Ember allows, a small spark of hope kindling in her eyes.

"It's a great idea," I promise.

Despite my reassurance, the spark in her gaze dwindles. "But even if we knew where it was, or how to get to it, that doesn't change the fact that I'm all out of magic." She snaps her fingers, and absolutely nothing happens. Her face falls even further, her voice wavering with grief. "I can't conjure darkness, or cast protection spells, much less make a portal. The Crown has to be protected somehow. If we have to fight our way through anything, I'm going to be dead weight."

Malik crosses his arms over his chest. "Hardly."

Jianyu has a calculating look in his eyes. He lifts a brow. "We haven't tested everything you used to be able to do."

A tiny flicker of heat shivers through our bond, and my eyes widen.

And okay, yeah. Juju's not wrong. The first time Ember and I managed to set ourselves on fire, it was right after the hottest, sweatiest, most outrageously passionate sex we'd ever had. She said the same thing had happened with Jianyu and Malik, and we all saw her and Storm literally floating a half dozen feet in the air at the end of their reunion bang.

My mouth goes dry, arousal flaring up my spine. "I'm game if everybody else is."

Ember's own desire takes mine and redoubles it, the echoes on an infinite feedback loop through our connections. But as hot as she is, she curls in on herself. "But what if even that doesn't work?"

I open my mouth, about to remind her that we'll never know until we try.

But even I'm not so insensitive as to realize that she really needs a win right now.

"Then we deal," I assure her.

Jianyu glares at me, again, but I ignore it.

"What?" I ask. "We do."

"Rafe," Malik admonishes.

I shake my head. I'm learning to respect all of these guys, but I'll still never understand how I ended up with such a pile of Debbie Downers.

Not that it matters. If I'm the only one willing to look on the bright side, then I'll do it on turbo mode.

My dragon is just as eager to cheer up my mate as I am, and he rises in my chest.

And then it hits me--my dragon is a freaking genius.

As he blazes his way toward the surface of my consciousness, I feel a warm hum in my connection to Ember. It's one I've only sensed once before, but I recognize it.

Her dragon hears mine.

And she's rising.

Hope isn't just a spark--it's a hot flame.

"You lost the bracer," I state flatly, shifting to stand. I flex my shoulders, the itch of broad wings rippling against my spine. "And that sucks--a lot."

I shoot a glance at Jianyu, assuming he's getting ready to reprimand me again.

But his dragon hears mine, too. The cold stone of his exterior softens, revealing the hard dragonscale underneath.

A hint of wind stirs the air, and in the distance, clouds form from nothing.

I pay them no mind, all of my attention on my mate.

"But you gained something, too," I remind her.

Lines of confusion appear between her eyes, as if she doesn't have a clue what I'm talking about--but she does. On the most primal level, she understands.

Serpentine slits appear in her eyes.

"You called forth your dragon." A faint roar echoes in my breath. "And she answered."

Ember needs a win. And what in the world could possibly be a bigger victory than this?

"So?" she asks, trembling.

"So?" I taste the bite of a burning flame. "Before you decide everything is hopeless, let that dragon out." My own dragon eclipses my senses, my entire being erupting with heat and need and power. "And let's see what she can do."