Page 155 of Feralheart

We swam together, running our hands along the dome, sharing the dwindling air of the pearl, and let our magic pour free.

Red met blue and recoiled, but I sensed this wasn’t the dome fighting us.

It was us.

The colors slid off each other, spitting, refusing to braid, and I felt exactly why. I was still holding onto the distance between a commons and an elite, and I didn’t quite dare hand my trust over.

Cooperation, I could do; I’d done it for at least twenty passes of the pearl. But I sensed the magic wanted more than teamwork. It wanted me to let him all the way in, and some old animal part of me threw the bolt on the door out of habit.

The magic guttered and died between our palms.

The dome didn’t so much as flicker.

And behind me, stone ground against stone.

Lord Callix’s eyes glowed. His stony face split into a slick smile. He lowered his outstretched arm.

All around us, the drowned lords and ladies were dragging their stony feet through the sand, stirring up bones and dropped weapons.

They turned rabid smiles toward the only two warm things left in the lake.

Us.

CHAPTER FORTY

FEN

The dead came for her first.

I put Eradin’s body between my own and the nearest of them. Her small frame, her healer’s hands, and a stone blade torn from a dead man’s fist the only weapon I had, because the magic in these borrowed hands mended and would not kill.

Callix swung a stone arm that would’ve taken my head off if I’d still had my height. I ducked under it on legs shorter than I was used to and drove the blade into the seam of his petrified throat. It did nothing, because you can’t stab a thing that’s already dead and turned to rock.

Blue fire lit the dark beside me.

Eradin, in my body and my skin, threw my killing magic in wide, cold arcs. The drowned nearest her cracked and crumbled from the blast. She’d never held a weapon like that in her life, and she wielded it like she’d been born to it. Some part of me that should’ve been drowning wanted to watch her do it forever.

A stone hand caught her across the arm and dragged a gash with its nails.

Callix took advantage of my distraction and gouged out with a blade, catching me across the ribs. Pain bloomed hot and blood shot into the water. Hers. Mine. Ours. I’d stopped being able to tell.

The lake tasted of iron now, and it only brought the dead faster.

The pearl had dissolved to almost nothing. A sliver of a moon behind my teeth, one breath left in it. Maybe two.

An impact struck the dome so hard the water shuddered.

Aristus.

He’d found the backward rune, and he hit it, and hit it, the collar at his throat flaring white and stabbing him every single time. The thing killing him screamed down our thin bond. He threw himself into it anyway, because I was on the other side of the wall and he’d decided I would not stay there.

Some might suggest he was the weakest dragon in the race. My mother’s records had a word for creatures like Aristus.

Culled.

He hit the rune again, and the dome cracked. Water punched through the fracture in a plume.

The pearl was so small in my mouth, I could barely feel the life-giving air it shared.