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“Because that’s where we need to go,” Killian said. I squeezed his hand underneath the table, grateful for his defense.
He squeezed back. He knew I didn’t want to talk about it.
This was just something we were going to have to do.
Conversation eventually drifted onto other things, such as what kind of specialties the others were going to pursue.
Jasmine and Vern had mostly been training students between battles, but even I’d noticed that they’d stayed close to campus.
Jasmine worried about me, and Vern worried about us all. He’d grown into a member of our little family. Although, he was a quiet type. That suited Jasmine well.
He brushed his fingers through his dark hair, which had only grown darker in the past few years. He glanced over his shoulder at his onyx dragon toying with Jade, the emerald dragon bonded to Jasmine.
They tousled together as they played tug-of-war with a bone. A loud snap sounded when it broke and Vern’s dragon preened while Jade gnawed out the marrow.
Like their dragons, Jasmine and Vern were quietly fond of one another and it didn’t surprise me when Vern handed Jasmine a bite to eat. She licked the morsels off his fingers, making me sigh.
Everyone seemed to be cozying up to their bondmates. Lily had told me that it was common for bond ceremonies to take place after graduation—something like a wedding.
When I looked up at Killian, he smiled fondly down at me, but there was still something that was strained between us.
Perhaps it was the near-death experiences we’d both suffered, or the fact that we hardly ever had a moment alone together.
There was always an urgent battle to join, or a life to save.
And when my train of thought went down the route of my dark nightmares, the rare sensation of my goddess blood burned in my veins and the mark on my arm burned to life.
And for the first time, my dreams came to me while I was fully awake. I clutched onto Killian’s arm as my spirit fell into the darkness with Solstice’s mind following me like a beacon into the bottomless pit.
CHAPTER 3
“Vivi!” Killian screamed, but he couldn’t follow me here.
Maybe that was because we weren’t truly bonded. Meaning we’d never been intimate with one another in the traditional sense.
But Solstice had no trouble keeping up with me as I fell.
She kept me calm as her protective sensations washed over me like a blazing light. She spread her ethereal wings and allowed me a soft place to land as she slowed my descent.
She showed me pictures of a gate opening. I recognized the spiral bars as Dragonrider Academy’s boundary.
She wanted us to go home, but I didn’t know how.
And something had called me here for a reason. My goddess blood had been finicky lately. Perhaps the battle at Avalon had burned it out. I wasn’t sure if it was something I could regain, or if my power was a limited pool and once it was gone… it was gone forever.
Yet its tell-tale power had brought me here. I was sure of it.
Looking around the darkness, Solstice’s golden glow offered enough light to see by. It filtered through dense fog, revealing the dark clouds of a storm we were on top of.
I shivered. If I had kept falling, I would have dived right into it.
Lightning spread out like long, snaking fingers and burned the sky. Silence deafened my ears, making me frown.
I couldn’t hear the lightning, which meant there wasn’t enough atmosphere here to carry sound. Or… there was something sucking it up from below.
Who knew with the Malice Realm.
“Find a place to take us down, girl,” I whispered to Solstice.
