Page 205 of Feralheart

No. No. No.

The rest of us had been reaching toward what the thing showed us. Lyndie was refusing hers. I’d swear she’d been refusing it from the first breath.

I grabbed her arm and squeezed hard enough to bruise.

She came back all at once, a full-body flinch, gasping. Her dragon lurched beneath her, and she nearly went over the side.

I held on until she found her seat. When she looked at me, her eyes were red-rimmed and furious, the kind of fury that lives alongside grief.

“Don’t,” she said.

I released her, and she grabbed onto the saddle horn.

Selira’s scales heated under my thighs, going from warm to scalding. She made a sound I’d never heard before, a half-shriek, half-song.

There.

She’d found something real buried inside this false offering.

A prickle across my skin told me something was watching us.

Waiting.

“Do you feel that?” Fen asked.

I sensed it had been here long before the trials. Before the realms. Before humans rode dragons at all.

The space around us held its breath. Then it inhaled. The walls, if they were walls, pressed inward, and the fake Tolross opened his mouth and made a sound that wasn’t my brother’s voice at all. It was older. It came from the same place as the hunger in Selira’s mountain, the thing that had been sleeping before we stumbled into its belly.

Selira screamed back at it, blasting flames into the void.

The scale at my throat flashed hot enough to burn, and I grabbed it, clutching it to my chest. The red lines blazed up my arms.

The ancient thing turned its gaze my way.

It had tasted Fen and me in the drowned dome. It was still deciding how to eat us.

It slammed against the bond between Selira and me, trying to chew its way through. Break it.

Selira’s presence vanished from my mind.

The bond went dark. Gone, the way a lantern goes out, and I was alone in my own skull in a way I hadn’t been since I’d walked into her cave.

Time stretched while I floundered.

Selira jolted back into my mind so hard I groaned.

Her fury churned through me. She shot fire into the void again, in a long, sustained shriek.

Mine, she said, though not to me.

I pushed the warmth back down before it could answer the thing’s pull. It fought me all the way.

Eyes closed, I breathed, focusing on a place of peace, not on Tolross still crying beside me.

Selira’s relief coursed through the bond. She’d been afraid the vision would be too much. She’d been holding her breath since Tolross appeared.

Stone makes copies, she said. Knows what we love. Knows things that break you.