Page 17

When I finally get to the end of the path, I find my foster house.

It’s still standing. That’s a good sign.

I haven’t been back for a few days because I didn’t want to be in the forest around the bonding time unless I had to be.

All four of us grew up here for the most part, and it made us close.

No one wanted to take in four male dragon shifters—especially, not with our well-known fiery temper and lack of control over our magic while aging.

Granny Dubois took all four of us in without a second thought and we were little shits.

I don’t think there is a day where I understand how she kept going, kept looking after us while we were all grieving and angry.

That woman taught us how to be men, how to fight for our people, and not to believe any of the bullshit the witches try to teach.

I would be dead if it wasn’t for her. Vale calls her Hope, and I hate him most of the time, but I agree with his nickname for Granny Dubois.

She is hope. Her house has always been full, before and after us, because she fosters anybody that needs help.

In this war, there are always fucking orphans that need someone to be kind and take them in.

I get why hardly anyone else takes them in when they are just another mouth to feed.

Two kids, twin rabbits who are about eight years old, are sitting out the front playing with a withered checker set that I used to play with too.

They look up, but they don’t say anything to me.

They don’t speak and haven’t done since they were found as babies in the forest, covered in their parents’ blood.

The witches didn’t bother to make up a reason about what happened to them.

They just knew it was one of their students and they didn’t care. “Good afternoon.”

They look away and go back to their game. Another foster kid, Romano, is leaning against the wall, his red hair shaved. He’s coming up to the age of being ready for the academy. Seventeen, one more year to go for him.

“You’re bonded now.” He says it like a question.

“I am.” I lift my chin and look into his eyes.

Challenging me. I know it’s normal for wolves to try to dominate everything they come across, either by staring it down or peeing on it, but I’m a dragon.

He would be a snack for me and my dragon holds the gaze with a silent warning.

He looks down at the ground. “You alright, Wolf-boy?”

“No. I have less than a year before I become you.” He snarls at me before storming off into the forest, shifting at the last minute into a brown wolf.

I know his mother was bonded and died two years ago, but his father didn’t claim him or step up.

I’m not sure he even knows who his father is—if anyone does at all.

We all know what that feels like to be a kid and drowning in pain.

How to push the boundaries with everyone that cares.

I feel nothing but rage sometimes and that rage began years younger than he is.

It shaped who I am, and I try not to let it take over.

Rage for how the witches treat us, rage for the fact that we are nothing but slaves that they put shiny collars on and drag into a war to protect them.

They don’t look at the elderly and young in the villages as they suffer.

If I don’t go to my classes and don’t keep up the leaderboard, they don’t get food sent here.

They don’t get any help with supplies and medicine either.

It would be so simple if magic worked right in the village and the forest, but it didn’t then and it doesn’t now.

Even now, with the boost from the bond, my magic is dancing around my body like a frayed electrical wire.

It’s too dangerous to attempt to use it.

“She’s inside. She’s on one today.” A girl hops out of the front door. I don’t remember her name and she is one of the neighbors’ kids, I think. “She’s speaking a lot.”

Brilliant. I hope she has been taking her medication, but there is a good chance she isn’t.

There’s a smell of cinnamon in the air when I step in and shut the door behind me.

She might be making cinnamon bread, and she mostly makes it from things she plants in her garden.

The soil isn’t good in the village, so most things do not grow, but somehow, she gets her herbs just right.

Cinnamon is an easy one because there are five trees in the village, all spelled to survive the weather, and everyone shares.

I turn around the corner and I find that she has four loaves that are on the counter, steam rising off them into the air.

She’s in front of the old stove, two candles lighting up the room from the counter at her side.

The table is in the middle of the room with a pot of daisy flowers and other little potion bottles of her medicine.

They are empty, and my heart hurts. She ran out, and she didn’t say anything.

Dubois is slightly hunched over from a spine condition and her long grey hair falls off her shoulder.

She never wears anything, but her once bonded uniform of Bloodstone Academy—black clothes that are now not tight anymore, they’re withered and hang off her frail form.

I’ve offered to get her clothes from trading at the academy, but she refuses.

She never speaks about her bonded, or her time in the war, but sometimes I see her looking out of a window or in a mirror like she is remembering another time. Something precious to her.

She turns when the floorboard creaks under my foot, and there’s a kind smile on her face as she sees me. “My boy Maz!“ She always sounds delighted to see me, and it makes me feel good about myself. “Come sit. I’ll cut you some bread up. I know it’s your favourite.”

“No, please don’t.” I walk over and touch her shoulder, where her bones stick out. “They feed me at the academy, remember? You need it. Children need it.”

She huffs like I’ve annoyed her, and she pours me a glass of water, with a drop of lemon in it, and comes to sit with me at the table.

We always sit around the table when we need to talk, when I’m not sure what to do.

Kane is always sitting with her. Black rarely does because he bottles his life up and Vale?

I’m not sure. If he did sit here, he wouldn’t tell anyone.

“I took in another one this morning. Just three and traumatised.” She looks at me from the other side of the table.

“The sweet darling is upstairs napping right now. Keeps asking for mum and dad. Both dead, I presume, they haven’t come back from the war.

She was with her uncle, but he went missing.

” She leans in. “I checked in with my friend and her mother’s witch has been confirmed dead.

Had a big fancy funeral a year ago. Don’t know what they did with her mother’s body, but you know they don’t send us our dead back.

We don’t get to bury them.” There’s a bitterness in her voice, one that I grew up listening to, one that fed my very thoughts, until they became my own too.

“I look forward to meeting her.” I send a silent prayer to any god or goddess who might listen to it for that sweet girl to know peace.

“You will, she’s nice. Talks a lot, even at three.” She looks at me like she is waiting for me to explain why I need to talk. I’m not sure how she always knows, but she does.

“I’m going to keep up with all the classes. Make sure enough food is sent here to help.” I offer. I’m beating around the bush when I need to fucking jump into it.

“I know all four of you do as I’ve raised you to be honourable men. The fucked-up parts of you are unfixable.” So blunt sometimes, but she is right. “How is your bonded witch? Tell me she isn’t a brainwashed fool?”

I clear my throat. “Her name is Juniper Daygan. She has no relatives left in the Daygan clan. She’s the last one and I don’t think she is stupid.”

“So you have something in common.” Dubois seems pleased.

“That’s one way of putting it.” I rub my face. “Vale isn’t coping with this. He threw her off the roof of Bloodstone Academy.”

She waves her hand to shoo me away. “He was just testing her witch skills and spells. Any decent witch will know a basic hovering spell.” She clicks her tongue.

She never tells Vale off for most of the shit he does.

Vale is her favorite by far. Even though he’s a complete asshole to everybody, he’s not to her.

“He punched me in the face so I couldn’t stop him.” I try adding that.

“Then I’ll talk to him. You know I don’t like fighting between you two.” I almost smile. He might have knocked me out, but he is so fucking dead when he sees Dubois next. There isn’t much I’m scared of anymore, but Dubois telling me off? Fucking terrifying.

“The cards are now in play.” My smile drops as she speaks in a voice that’s deeper, stranger than usual.

This again. I swear her eyes almost glaze over when she goes into this strange place, a place I can never quite get her back from.

Dubois reaches over and grabs my hand tightly in her grip.

“Listen, it’s repeating. The cards are in play. You must stop it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe I need to get you some more medicine.” I scratch my head. “I will take on extra classes. Pay for the medicine through the academy somehow... I’ll speak to the headmaster.”

“The cards in play, but the gold will save. The goddess—" She stops mid-sentence. “There are three faces to the goddess, after all. One face is always in our favor.”

She worships the goddess. Everyone does. The witches do too, but I see her as someone that cursed our race to be slaves. I’ll never worship her fully like they do. What goddess forces her people to be slaves?

“I have to go back to class.” I cover her hand.

“I just wanted to check in on you.” It seems to work because she blinks and then smiles, like nothing happened.

Dubois never remembers what she says in her episodes, and the healer we saw just once at the academy, because I wad fucking her, told me that her mind is spiralling to a point of no return. I won’t accept that.

She covers both our joined hands. “I’ve never been prouder of you, and this is meant to be.”

Nothing about my new bonded is meant to be. She is only meant to tempt every unholy, sinful part of me until we both shatter.