Page 7 of Ashborne: Defiance

Grace yelped and scrambled back.

I instinctively shouted at my dragon. “Kham! Watch out for the girl—”

But, both dragonfuries went preternaturally still.

I’d frozen, waiting, assessing, measuring the distance to Grace and whether I could ease past the dragons if they fought—only to see my dragon’s ears prick forward and his wings vibrate… in excitement?

‘Kham, what’s going on? Do you know this dragon?’ I shoved the words at him in the link, stunned by the feral dragon’s sudden shift.

I caught Grace turning toward me in my peripheral vision and raised a hand to stop her.

“Don’t… move…” I said as quietly as I could and be sure she still heard me. “Just—”

‘Mate?’ Kham’s voice in my head was an impossible tangle of fear, and stunned delight.

‘What?!’ I gaped at my dragon. He couldn’t mean—?

The only warning was a low, hungry, half-whine, half-growl in my dragon’s chest. Then the feral dragon tossed her head high and bugled to the clouds, flapping her great wings and throwing herself aside as Kham lunged.

But she was huge and the trees were thick here. One of the tall pines took the full brunt of her shoulder as she whipped around to lead my dragon—her mate?!—on a flirtatious chase.

The earth shuddered again, and Kham crowed as the pine cracked, splintering, branches shaking.

‘Mate. Mine.’

A burgeoning bond, two massive dragons, not enough space. And Grace standing, frozen in fear as the female’s tail lashed out in a twenty-foot circumference to balance her swift turn, and slammed into the tree just feet above Grace’s head.

There wasn’t time to think.

The female whistled and tore into the forest, trees creaking and branches snapping with the force of her passage.

With a wordless cry of warning, I sprinted toward Grace whose eyes were wide with awe, hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her to me, throwing us both behind the trunk of the massive tree where I’d pinned her just moments ago as leaves, twigs, and branches rained down, and the trunk of the tree the female had hit with her shoulder began to creak and groan.

Grace grunted with the impact of my weight as we hit the ground. My back sang with pain. But there was no time. I couldn’t assess which tree would fall, or how many branches were being torn from their trunks.

I pulled Grace to my chest and curled myself around her, arms over her head and snarled at her to tuck as tightly as she could, praying I’d gotten us positioned under the thickest of the ancient tree’s branches for shelter, as a massive snap echoed somewhere overhead.

Grace startled and her head rose instinctively.

“Keep your head down and pray!” I growled, and to her credit, she did, tucking her face into her knees and keeping herself in a ball, while I cupped a palm over her head, the other around her arms.

The nearby forest was a chaos of dragon calls and roars, the snap and creak of broken trees, and the vibration of the earth under us with each dragon’s footfall—and the shocking impact of trees falling.

But moments later, the sounds grew more distant, and though an unidentified tree nearby continued to groan and creak, only leaves fell, drifting through the air to settle on us, and the forest floor.

Cautiously, I raised my head, my chest heaving, and stared, stunned, at the face of a huge branch that must have been torn loose by the female’s tail as she fled. Only strips of bark kept its thick end propped against the tree over our heads. The rest had fallen and now spread over us like a lean-to.

The smell of sap and wet wood was sharp in the air. The leaves on the branch still shivered.

I swallowed hard at the near miss, my heart pounding in my chest so hard that Grace must feel it against her back.

“We’re going to stand up—slowly,” I whispered to her. “You stay at my back until I’m sure they’re at a safe distance. But don’t relax. They’ll circle back, and they’ll be reckless,” I said, my stomach tingling and equally sick at the thought. “They may hurt us by accident. Kham’s bond will draw him back to me. He’ll chase her to me. But then he won’t want us close, and he’ll fight his own instincts. It will get messy.”

Mouth dry and my skin humming with something I couldn’t identify, I pushed to my feet and took her hand, helping her upright, then pulled her with me as I crept out from under that branch, keeping a close eye on anything that might have been damaged above us and waiting for the smallest excuse to fall.

To my relief, Grace didn’t argue. She gripped my hand as tightly as I gripped hers and followed me.

We could hear the dragon’s thundering path through the trees—more trunks creaking and snapping, the rush and thunder of trees felled by a passing dragon’s weight. But even though they were still distant, I knew it wouldn’t be for long.