Page 50 of The Dragon Wakes with Thunder (The Dragon Spirit Duology #2)

Thirty-Four

There is none more jealous than a spiteful spirit, for even a spirit wishing to be free of its human vessel will still be reluctant to share it with another. Never enter into a bargain with a spirit lightly, for once you choose one, you can never choose another.

“Sky!” I screamed again, before eyeing the distance between us, wondering if I could make the jump from a three-story building.

But Lei read my intention and held me back. Quick as a thief, he withdrew a throwing star from his sleeve and threw it into the wind in the opposite direction.

“What are you—”

The miniature blade caught the gale and curved, reversing course and striking the great bird directly in the back of her neck.

She shrieked in pain, her wings rising involuntarily.

Sky seized her moment of distraction to crawl away in search of his sword.

But the spirit seemed to steel herself, falling upon Sky once more.

Both of them went still. From this high up, I could not see Sky’s expression, but I could sense the surrender of his posture.

Was she speaking into his mind? I wondered. Was she offering him a bargain he could not refuse?

I could not abandon him to this fate.

Remembering the lixia texts I’d read, I withdrew my knife. I didn’t even pause to draw a breath—I simply sliced open my arm.

“What are you doing?” Lei roared, grabbing the knife from me.

I faltered as blood dripped liberally down my arm. Lei grabbed me, bracing me against him, before ripping a piece of his cloak to stanch the flow. But before he could bandage the wound, I stopped him.

“No,” I said. Was blood always this black, or was mine so tainted with lixia that it resembled ink? “Like flies to honey,” I recited, “so too are spirits to qi.”

Lei swore under his breath but left me to my madness. He withdrew both curved blades from his back, moving into a fighting stance. Far below, the giant spirit bird raised her head and shrieked, before lifting her wings and soaring into the sky.

Toward me. The way she flew was overconfident, as if she believed me to be easy prey. Keeping my gaze fixed on her, I took a few steps back, anchoring my energy.

“What in the twelve skies—” began Lei. As the bird loomed closer, I took a running leap—and crashed onto her.

My momentum lent me more force than I’d intended, and I collided into her with such impact that we both plummeted from the sky.

Scrambling to hold on for dear life, I grasped at her feathers as she squawked and tried to shove me off.

Desperate, I found her neck and clung to her like a child to a mother, so close I breathed in the particular scent of her lixia.

How strange that she was corporeal, this spirit that did not yet belong to the human realm.

It weakened her, I could tell, being here in this foreign place. And that was why I stood a chance.

We landed hard in the dirt, though her wings involuntarily cushioned my fall. I skidded off her, rolling into a crouch. I winced at the trail of blood I left in my wake, quickly tying a makeshift bandage.

“Meilin!”

I looked behind me at the heap of rubble, remnants of a fallen building that had not survived the quake.

“Here!” The flash of movement caught my eye; it was Sky, half-hidden in debris. He gestured for me to come hide with him. I shook my head. The spirits had already scented my blood.

But I’d forgotten the one I should fear. In my distraction, he’d broken through my mental shields.

“ There you are ,” said Qinglong.

I’d never before heard his voice like this—both in mind and body.

I covered my ears with my hands but it did nothing to stop the sheer impact from racking through my bones, the vibrations of his voice seizing me like a fly in a spider’s web.

I fell to my knees, shaking at the reverberations of his words.

There you are. There you are. There you are.

The Azure Dragon was so colossal he towered over the nearby trading posts.

The air around him seemed to freeze as he descended, and even the great bird of prey went silent at his suffocating, exhilarating presence.

Despite my terror, it was impossible to deny his beauty.

The radiance of his gold-flecked eyes, like stars; the impossibility of his cobalt scales, which captured and held the light, so that gazing at him felt like staring into the heart of the sun.

I was drawn to him, just as he was drawn to me.

Like two mirrors searching each other’s reflections, unable to find the other, our combined ambition knew no limits.

Just as I could not accomplish my goals without him, he could not accomplish his without me.

But he no longer had need for me, now that he could freely enter the human realm. And so I was reduced to an obstacle in his path.

He laughed coldly. “ I do not view you as my enemy, Hai Meilin ,” said the dragon. “ On the contrary, I view you as my kin. ”

I shook my head repeatedly as his voice burned into my bones. He lies , I told myself. He lies.

“ I am doing this for the both of us ,” he continued, and this close, his voice hurt me like a gong sounding in my ears.

“I don’t want to die,” I whimpered, like a child in my fear.

“ Then don’t ,” he said. “ There is another way. You can live forever—through my power. But you must give your will to me. ”

Which would you choose? A long, easy life without agency, or a short, difficult one—with freedom?

I recalled the young woman who had endeavored to change her fate—who had joined the war simply for a chance at independence. And I knew my answer, always.

“Never,” I said aloud, before my eyes darted to the bird of prey, who cowered beside me beneath the Cardinal Spirit’s aura.

Before she could guess my intent, I whirled toward her and seized her beak with my bare hands.

I felt her resistance but forced her beak open, never mind that her razor-sharp jaws cut into my palms. The blood drove her into a frenzy, so that she could not protect herself when I reached into her mouth and withdrew her pulsating jade seal.

“ Look how she dares defy you ,” I said to the dragon, but this time, I spoke with compulsion. “ You would let her take me from you? ”

My instincts had not led me astray: both the bird and the dragon flew into an uproar.

The dragon’s jealousy swept through the air like a tidal wave.

Even if he was enraged at my disobedience, I would belong to no other spirit.

He bellowed and lunged for the bird, who escaped in the nick of time, flapping her wings and soaring into the air.

Qinglong followed in hot pursuit, as I’d suspected.

The bird’s frantic cries resounded in my mind. “ Help me, help me, help me— ”

Gritting my teeth, I focused my qi and returned silence to my thoughts. Then I crawled toward the rubble, searching for Sky in the shadows.

“Sky?” I hissed. “Where are you?”

I shoved aside a wooden plank and caught sight of a pale face crouched behind the debris. It was like seeing a ghost from the dead.

“Tao?” I said hoarsely, incredulous. I had not seen him since the day I’d been thrown in jail.

Firm hands grabbed me from behind. I screamed.

“It’s me!” said Sky, as I tried to wrestle free from his grasp. Twisting, I saw that it was indeed him—his sharp jaw, his messy hair, his scarred palms. But my heart still raced wildly.

“I thought I saw…” I glanced back; there was no one there.

Shaking my head, I let Sky guide me to the entrance of a partially caved-in bunker.

“Is it safe?” I asked, eyeing the murky opening dubiously.

Sky nodded. “The bunkers were built during the Wu Dynasty to ward off spirits—they’re reinforced with iron.” He urged me forward. “Winter is down there already.”

I took a tentative step into the bunker. Still dazed from the dragon’s brilliance, I tripped on a shard of rubble, but Sky caught me before I fell.

“What you did,” he said, clearing his throat, “that was incredibly foolish.”

“The usual compliments from you,” I retorted, before glancing back at him, remembering the state in which we’d left things. As if he was following my train of thought, his hands tightened around me, and I wondered if I’d inadvertently made myself his prisoner again.

How easy it was to slip into former habits.

“ Lei? ” I asked silently, searching for him in my mind’s eye. I felt silly, not quite knowing what I was doing. “ Can you find me? ”

Silence, and then: “ Yes. I’m coming. ”

It was, unmistakably, the feeling of him. I felt relief crash through me, followed by terrible fatigue. If Sky brought me to the Anlai warlord now, there was nothing I could do to protect myself. And if I tried to run from him in my current state, Sky would most certainly catch me.

“Don’t,” said Sky, and the catch in his voice surprised me. It was hard to recognize his expression in the half-light. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

His voice dropped. “Like you’re afraid of me.”

I met his eyes then, flickering against the dark. I understood how I’d hurt him, just as he’d hurt me. Foolishly, I wished there were a way to erase this broken history between us. How was it that we hurt the ones we loved the most?

“ But then, with your power ,” my mother had said, “ you hurt others. You became what you once feared. ”

“Sky,” I said, overtaken with weariness. “I don’t want to be your prisoner.”

He swallowed thickly. I could feel him struggling to rein in his emotions, his insistence that he was right, that his way was the right way.

He had imagined a future for us, and in doing so could not conceive of a different path beyond that one.

And how could he—when everything had always gone as planned before?

But perhaps people could change, for he released me and said, “Then what about a friend?”

I exhaled, cruel hope surging in my chest. “I would like that very much,” I whispered.

His eyes were pained. He hated this, I could tell. He did not want this conciliation. But he hated my fear more, and so he would give me this.

“All right,” he said, more to himself than to me. “All right.”

Walking in silence, we listened to the intermittent screams overhead, which were all the more jarring because of their sporadicity.

The aftershocks from the quake had mostly ceased, though the earth still shuddered with a sort of restless agitation, as if struggling to find its balance once more.

The longer we walked, the more frequent my stumbling grew. At last Sky stopped me.

“Get on my back,” he said.

I squinted through a migraine, its intensity sharpened by the oppressive weight of iron. “But—”

“Meilin,” he said. “You can hardly walk.” Then he checked my bandaged arm and swore. “You tied this yourself? I thought I taught you better than that.”

Grumbling under his breath, he redid my tourniquet. Then he crouched and I silently climbed onto his back, too tired to argue, letting my head loll onto his shoulder. I was exhausted, and everything about this night felt surreal, as if we were only acting in a theater production of nightmares.

“Sleep,” he said. “You’re safe with me.”

Sky had never been one to lie. Still, I couldn’t understand why he was being so kind to me, after everything that had transpired between us. How could he have forgotten all his prior animosity toward me?

“Why?” I asked, closing my eyes at the pressing fatigue. I had humiliated him, dishonored him—even tried to kill him. “I-I’ve—wronged you.”

He did not answer for so long that I began to drift into sleep. “I love you,” he said at last. Then, so quietly I wondered if I was dreaming: “I wish I didn’t.”