Page 127 of Feralheart

It bypassed my ears and dove straight into bone. The vibration crawled up through my jaw and settled behind my teeth until they ached. My skull wanted to crack open to let the pressure out.

The commons dragons felt it worse.

Reece’s dragon reared, its wings snapping wide, talons gouging at air.

The blue scarf around his wrist caught on a stalagmite jutting up from the water.

The fabric pulled taut.

Reece turned, realizing what was happening. Horror flared in his eyes, and he tugged, trying to pull the scarf free. The mist surged toward them, eager to bite.

I cued Selira hard left, my thighs clamping, my weight shifting before my brain caught up. She tucked her wings and dove so steep my stomach tried to stay behind.

A creature in pain doesn’t care about your fear. It only knows its own. My mother’s voice echoed in my mind. I’d heard it while standing over a trapped dragon in the elite forest with the bonewailer screaming not far away. I heard it now the same way.

Reece’s fear was loud enough to feel the scrape of it across my skin. It would kill him faster than the mist would.

I started humming. Just a thread of sound, barely audible over the wind.

Selira responded before I’d finished the first note. Her awareness flooded through the bond, a focus so sharp it cut. She’d heard my mother’s tune before, when I’d released her from the trap and treated her wound and inside the cave. She knew what it meant.

Trust me.

We cut between Reece’s dragon and the mist tendril reaching for it.

Our wings nearly touched. I smelled the fear-sweat on Reece’s dragon’s hide. The creature jerked sideways, away from us and the mist.

Good, Selira said, satisfaction humming through the bond. Song works on broken things.

“Not broken. Surviving.”

Same thing, she sent back, but gentler.

Reece’s scarf tore free.

It fluttered down in lazy spirals, blue against silver-black, landing on the lake’s surface. Silver liquid lapped at it. The fabric dissolved, erased.

Reece’s face slackened.

He knew what I’d done, that I’d seen the disaster coming and moved without asking. His wife’s scarf was gone now, dissolved by a mist that ate everything it touched. There would be no getting it back.

My chest caved in. That scarf had been his wife’s heartbeat in fabric form, the only thing tethering him to home while we flew through death.

And I’d saved him by destroying it.

I saw what I’d cost him on his face and in his eyes. The scarf had been a promise he’d carried that he’d bring something of himself back to her. That if he died, at least she’d have the fabric he’d touched. The last thing that connected them.

His throat worked, and he looked away first.

We flew up toward the ceiling, darting toward the distant shore.

Lyndie swooped in close, her dragon moving with a precision that didn’t match the bumbling commons rider act she’d been performing. Hidden skill bled through when she thought no one was counting.

I was counting.

She banked her dragon right, tracking something in the water I couldn’t see, aiming for a section of lake that looked darker than the rest.

Reece’s dragon lurched sideways, the scarred creature’s damaged wing catching a downdraft wrong. They dropped toward the mist layer again.