Page 21 of WitchBorn
“Are you fireproof?” he asked.
Another beam fell, this one a flaming stretch across the living space that left us only a few inches of space to move, heat rising, and smoke choking.
“Fuck, you better be right behind me,” Finn cursed, crawling out the door and shoving at it as he went. He waited until I slid into the space too, shoving and holding the opening, then reached back to yank me out as he popped free.
We both tumbled a few steps from the door, a wave of fire and heat lapping at the open space we’d crawled through, the entire cabin engulfed and blazing. Finn swallowed hard enough for me to hear and gripped my arm, gaze upward. For a half second I thought the trees had caught flame too, but it was worse than that.
“Please tell me that’s another form of our kitten friend,” Finn said face inches from the snout of a dark dragon with more teeth than a shark, and shadows dripping from its scales.
Sixteen
WESLEY
This was the beast that had broken free from the Winter court ice and devoured the fae, ripping me free from that nightmare and into this one. I shoved Finn behind me and stared up at the dragon wondering if this was where it all ended. Other than the nightmare of the slime eating the forest, I hadn’t had a vision in ages.
Where had the man the dragon had been gone, the werewolf king as Sebastian thought of him. Turned to darkness? I met the dragon’s gaze with defiance, unwilling to become a slave again to another nightmare will not my own. The Summer king could make demands, but I learned to avoid him, which would negate any commands he wanted to give.
A trick of the modern fae or something more? Perhaps running from them would have always saved me from their madness.
“You brought me here,” I told the beast. “Now you try to kill me? Why not end me in the Winter court like you did so many others? What do you want from me?”
The heat of its breath warmed my face like a late summer breeze, thankfully without any stench of death or rot. It couldhave opened its jaws and swallowed us both whole. I glared at it with defiance, tired of the cat and mouse game.
The dragon growled a nearly undistinguishable word, “Mine.”
“Uh,” Finn said. “Did that thing talk?”
“Fae,” I said again. Maybe? My lifetime of visions fed me glimpses of this monster, and the man trapped in stone, but I couldn’t recall anything specifically pointing to the beast being fae. “Are you fae?” I asked the dragon.
“Yesss,” it hissed, and then “No.”
“Well, that’s clear as mud,” I grumbled.
“Mine,” the beast growled again.
“Articulate. The mortal is mine. Okay? How about you let us go and we’ll all have a better day.”
The beast narrowed its gaze, focus on Finn who huddled behind me. The cabin crackled and snapped with the fire eating away at it, heat blazing at our backs. Contained to the cabin, as none of the brush touching it caught.
“Mate…” A dark ripple of shadow slid free from the dark, a leathery wing with hooks on the edges reached for me. I flinched, taking a half step back, which made Finn stumble and wrap his arm around me from behind to steady us both. The dragon snarled, and I expected an attack, but it huffed and reared back, then vanished into a poof of shadows as if it had never existed.
My heart raced, the final word of the dragon weaving a thousand ideas, none of them good. Of course, fate sought to fuck with me. Centuries of doing their bidding and now they had mated me to the Autumn king?
“Bitches!” I screamed. “Heartless witches! Manipulating my life like this. I don’t want it!” The forest stood in silent eeriness around us. The crackling fire of the fallen cabin snapped and popped in the otherwise soundless woods.
“Did that thing say you were its mate?” Finn asked.
“Yes,” I said as I ripped myself out of his grasp, and stalked away from him. With the cabin gone, once again I’d have to find shelter or change forms. If there had been any glimpse of daylight or warmth, it vanished with the departure of the dragon, leaving the sky overcast with clouds. Rain spit down on us, landing in large fat droplets warning of a downpour. “Dammit!”
Finn followed close behind. I wanted to be away from everyone and everything. Cry in the rain or run from the nightmare, but it wasn’t fair to him. This was my nightmare, my curse. Why was he even here?
“And why won’t you fucking show me anything?” I shouted at the sky. Centuries of brutal visions, to now being blinded to my own future.
I found the stream as water began to rain sheets around us, the chill etching through my skin and deep into my core. “I’m going to change,” I told him, pausing to glance back. His wide eyes made me freeze. The sound of his racing heart muffled beneath the rain. “It’s fine. My other form generates more heat.”
“Mate…. Not like the Australian mate?” Finn asked hesitantly.
“Like bound by the hags of fate to be tied to a monster!” I yelled at the woods, which didn’t answer. Bad enough I’d served Winter for a time, survival forcing me to bow and simp for Zephyr who treated me like he preferred to have me shackled at his feet. My dreams of saving the Summer king and finding a final peaceful rest away from the nightmares had shattered.