Page 64 of Feralheart

The dragon’s ears jerked backward. His breathing didn’t steady, but it softened, trying to match my rhythm the way Mother’s patients used to while she treated their wounds.

He flew forward. Heat seared the air. My skin.

And the second turn was coming too fast.

I mistimed it. Flames erupted as we were passing through the gap, fire blasting from both sides.

Heat slammed into my left leg. My boot sole melted into my flesh, and I bit back a scream. The heat kept spreading, climbing up my calf, an alive thing that was going to consume me. My skin blistered under the leather, a burn that would scar deep.

Lykor shrieked but didn’t falter. His wings beat harder, pushing us through.

I pressed my palms against his neck. Heat woke in my hands, spreading up my arms in lines glowing faint red.

His breathing evened, and we kept going.

My left leg throbbed where the boot leather had melted. Each time I shifted my weight in the saddle, the fabric stuck and pulled.

The third turn rushed up to us, narrower than what we’d traveled through so far. We’d have to fly fast, and Lykor would have to turn halfway toward the ground to make it through.

Scorch marks and dark stains coated the wall on the right.

Flames shot out in pulses, a pattern I had to read while flying.

We flew toward where Marda had died.

Instead of pulling on the reins, I shifted my weight, leaning into the turn the way I’d seen riders do at the aerie. Trusting this dragon to follow my body instead of the harness digging into his jaw.

Lykor banked.

We cleared the gap.

And another turn. Another gap. They kept coming, and we kept making it through.

The final approach snapped open ahead of us, wider than the others. But the runes had been positioned differently here, lining both walls, staggered so flames would erupt from three sides at once.

As we flew closer, I counted the seconds between eruptions. Five where we could fly through. If the timing was right and Lykor’s wings held.

I cued him forward.

Flames burst from the walls and floor. I counted, trying to time this perfectly.

He froze mid-flight, then shot toward the mesh. He slammed into it with his right side, his groan of pain echoing around us. Current zapped through me, making my hands go numb and my teeth snap together.

We dropped, and he tried to turn back toward the entrance.

Heat blasted across me as fire erupted on our right.

I couldn’t make him fly through the gap. His trauma was bigger than my voice, my hands, and my desperate need for both of us to survive.

The heat from the scale turned to agony. I gasped, my hand flying to my thigh. It burned through fabric and skin, searing into muscle. Into bone.

But the pain wasn’t mine. It was so much bigger than mine.

A presence slammed into my mind, something too vast for thoughts. Stone surrounded me, old stone that held cold and dark and safety. Hunger, days of it, gnawing at my bones. The ache of a wounded wing-membrane.

And underneath everything, a certainty that vibrated through my teeth:

Mine.