Page 23 of Twisting Twilight (Homesteader Hearth Witch #9)

“Pfft. Of course. They’re quite stupid for something so big. In fact, so long as you pounce ’em from behind—” His words cut off as a jolt of excitement raced through him.

“Oh, look at that!” Kian exclaimed, pointing. A swarm of turquoise dragonflies had risen from a swath of flowering sawgrass. “Did you know that draigfly spawn are often watched over by their maturer kin, the lu?—”

Kian choked on his lecture as Sawyer shot into the air, swiping after the dragonflies.

The little cat’s face was bright with the thrill of the hunt, tail flicking madly.

The clever little thing had used his manus dilitare spell, and oversized paws easily caught a lagging dragonfly and scooped it towards his mouth.

This time as blue juice stained his chin, a scent lifted into the wind.

The smell of rotting corn, reminiscent of the secretion of a disturbed ladybug, had us all wrinkling our noses and pushing forward into fresher air.

The junior scholar cursed in Faerish, waving his arms frantically as he charged Sawyer’s position.

“Sawyer,” I shouted, not wanting things to escalate to the point I needed to intervene with magic. “That’s enough.”

My words were drowned out as the sound of the swarm changed. The dragonflies no longer hummed and zipped; the cadence of their wingbeats sounded more like the roar of rampaging locusts.

“Is that normal?” Daphne shouted, hands clapped over her ears at the noise. I only barely heard her, trepidation rising. I swung my gaze to our guide.

Kian had abandoned his charge after Sawyer and was now running towards the Fire Grove. He jabbed his finger at the forest, yelling something we couldn’t hear over the drone of wings, but the message was clear: Run!

The Redbudians did not need to be asked twice.

Twig-like Cody grabbed Emmett’s sleeve and the two old men ran through the grass like high-stepping storks.

Daphne and Shari linked hands and followed in their wake, Flora clinging to Daphne’s braid and shouting words at me I couldn’t possibly hear.

I bent to scoop up the rope they’d abandoned then twisted in the direction of my oblivious familiar.

Something brown burst like a missile from the red leaves of the Fire Grove.

Leathery wings snapped out from its lithe body with a whip-like crack.

Membranes the color of apple cider stretched taut between the coffee-dark skin over its bones.

At the end of its sinuous tail was a bulb of thorny barbs like a freshly burst thistle.

A-a dragon?

“Luachra!” Kian yelled. “Its spurs have venom!”

All at once, Ardgal’s History of Draig and Kian’s interrupted, off-handed explanation clicked into place in my mind.

Those hadn’t been different dragons on that painted scroll—they were the different life cycle stages of the draig.

They were like frogs or butterflies: turquoise draigfly tadpoles, winged brown dragonet froglets (luachra, apparently), fat orange wingless creatures (whose name to be later supplied by Kian, no doubt) that pupated (maybe?) into massive red dragons.

And ‘ draigfly spawn are often watched over by their maturer kin.’ Like crows, who formed family groups where some of the older generation stuck around to help watch over the next brood of chicks.

And Sawyer had just attacked this crow’s younger siblings.

“Sawyer!” I bellowed down the bond.

The tabby tomcat jerked midair. The dragonfly he’d pawed limped higher into the sky as he dropped down into the grass. Above, the luachra snarled and tucked its wings for a dive.

Kian tackled me to the ground.

“Get off me!” I shouted, using all my self-control not to hurl him into the sky. Green vines had already coiled around his hips, chest, and throat to do just that.

“That luachra hasn’t called for reinforcements yet, but attack it with magic and it will!

” Kian evaded my punching fists and used his greater weight to keep me pinned.

“Then we’ll all be dead. Right now, it’s only after that infernal beast. He has a chance if he stays hidden in the grass.

It’s so thick it can confuse even a luachra’s sight. A-according to Ardgal.”

“Hide,” I told my familiar frantically. In the same breath, my vines shoved Kian off me. But not into the air. We both scrambled to our hands and feet and stayed crouched as the adolescent brown dragonet circled the prairie. My hand shot to Faebane’s hilt and waited.

“Meadow,” Sawyer whined.

“Don’t move! Kian says the grass is thick enough to hide you.”

The luachra was a wretchedly patient and vindictive thing.

Even though the draigfly spawn had flown away, the brown dragonet lingered.

It circled above the trampled grass Sawyer had left behind from his many pouncings, silent as a shadow.

Its head twitched this way and that, sharp movements like those of an eagle.

Sawyer’s fear radiating through our bond was like bile pooling in my mouth. “I’m right here,” I soothed. “I won’t let it take you. We’re just going to wait it out.”

Just then, a maw as long as my forearm snapped open and released a piercing, ear-splitting roar.

I knew from watching hawks that they would use that cry to startle prey into breaking cover and running, but this was the cry of a dragon .

My blood turned to sludge in my veins. A chill rippled down my skin and left goose bumps in its wake. An ancient fear, the kind knitted into you at birth, made the hair on the back of my neck rise and my bladder want to void itself.

Beside me, Kian’s teeth chattered. Dimly, I heard a low whimper—Fiachna, hidden in Kian’s overcoat.

“Meadow,” Sawyer bawled.

His terror activated my second sight. The radiance of Elfame spread before me, every blade of grass like a sliver of green light, every crawling thing in and on the soil like a tiny fire-gold beacon.

Sawyer illuminated a dozen yards in front of me, crouched up tight, an amber thread connecting us.

Three threads led to the Fire Grove to my right, one cobalt thread to the south where the portal was.

There were scents this time, sweet hay for Sawyer and springtime flowers for Daphne, fertile soil for Flora and woodsmoke for Shari, old-growth forest for the cobalt thread.

Elfame was amplifying everything the more I dug into its magic.

The luachra outshone everything, making me squint.

The white contrails left behind each flap of its wings glittered like crushed moonstone and dissipated with the gusting wind.

At its heart was something so pure it smoldered bright and hot like the center of a forge.

It was white and opalescent, just like my primal magic.

I quickly looked away before the effects of this sparkle vision could sear my senses.

“I’m here,” I reassured my cat. Thank the Green Mother I didn’t have to use my actual voice to communicate with him. Nothing could get past that boulder of fear that had lodged in my throat. “Stay calm. It’ll abandon the hunt soon enough. I’ve got you, little cat. Just ? —”

The luachra roared again and snapped its wings with a thunderous boom. The downdraft flattened the grass, and though I couldn’t see it, I knew from the spike in Sawyer’s terror that his cover had been blown. The dragonet released a triumphant shriek and arrowed through the sky like a falcon.

“Here!” I screamed, popping up out of the grass like a gopher from its hole.

Sawyer leapt into a sprint, his enlarged paws digging deep and shredding grass with every stride.

Battle magic sprang from my cuffs and thorny vines like horned vipers raced across the prairie.

I would call the earth to drop out below my cat, hide him in a hole too deep for the luachra’s long, sinuous neck to strike. I would call the wind to rise and break its wings in a tornado. I would?—

The dragonet was impossibly fast, and I was sabotaged.

Kian hit me around the middle again, knocking my vines off-course just as bronze talons cinched tight around Sawyer’s chest.

The cat screamed.

His blood-curdling cries were like knives shredding me from the inside out.

Vines threw Kian off me at the same time they hauled me to my feet, but the dragonet’s pumping wings already had it and my cat so high into the sky.

Faintly, I felt a drain on my magic—how was Sawyer pulling it through our bond?

—and a crackling net of electricity appeared over his striped fur.

There was a concussive blast and a burst of white light and the pained shriek of a dragonet.

One leg was nothing but a stump and the entirety of its underbelly was scorched black.

It screeched over and over like a fire alarm with a faulty circuit, completely disregarding the smoking cat that dropped out of the sky like a stone.

“Meadow!” he yowled, somersaulting tail over whiskers as the prairie rushed up to meet him.

The ground beneath me surged, heeding my call to launch me in the air, but a hand caught that stupid tow rope around my waist and yanked me onto my back. I hit the turf with such force, the wind tore free of lungs with a pained whoosh .

My cat was falling and I wasn’t going to catch him.

Up from the tall grass shot a feathered black dart.

Dimly, I remembered Sawyer remarking how something was stalking us and wondered if it was finally revealing itself.

It moved faster than the luachra ever had, but it had no competition.

The brown dragonet had abandoned its prey and banked towards the Fire Grove, keening.

The small black creature intercepted Sawyer halfway through his fall with an audible whack .

Shiny wings of the purest jet stretched out for all they were worth, fighting to grab an updraft.

It found one, feathers fluttering once before snapping taut.

This second aerial menace banked away with my cat in its clutches, no better than a hyena stealing a lion’s kill.

“Misty,” Kian pleaded. The male had the audacity to tug on the tow rope, urging me to follow him.

“Touch me again, and I’ll kill you.” My cat was being carted off by who knew what after possibly being impaled by luachra talons and injected with venom and I wasn’t there to help him because of this fae idiot who had thwarted me at every turn.

Inside, the opalescent oak tree bypassed the ivy-green color and went straight to onyx.

The malice in my voice made the large fae male shrink back, but he didn’t retreat. His clamped down on his trembling lips, swallowed, and said in a shaky voice, “A faelene’s got him now. And that luachra is no longer alone. Look.”

Above the fire-red leaves of the forest, four brown dragonets flew from the interior towards the prairie. They called to the injured one, who answered with a mournful wail.

Kian rose, his eyes pleading for me to do the same. “We must get to the grove and hide before they discover us. These ones don’t breathe fire, but they have other ways of killing us just as effectively. And the mirror…”

The Samildánach. Marten. Arthur.

Sense told me not to waste another second and run for the cover of the trees immediately, but sentimentality wouldn’t let my feet budge until I’d looked for Sawyer one last time. A black dot, so tiny now, was the only smudge against the blue sky of the west.

No.

First Arthur, now Sawyer. Death’s Sword did not want pragmatic logic. It wanted blood, vengeance.

“Misty,” Shari pleaded from the trees.

Shari. Thought of the quiet crafter and her tortured mind snapped me out of my darkness. The Tree of Life returned, seeking to shield and protect. I stole a moment to breathe, to focus on that life-giving aspect of my magic, not the entity hidden in the depths of the oak tree.

“Go,” I barked at the junior scholar. My knees unlocked and I loped after Kian a second later, but only because, through the bond, I could sense Sawyer was alive.

For now.