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“Dark?” I peer at the crater, but it doesn’t look dark. Just deep.
The energy around it is dark, the water dragon says. Do you not see it?
It must be like the ‘bright’ thing. They can sense something about us, and here, they can sense the opposite. It’s not promising.
There’s no way to make a saddle for a water dragon. They can’t shift forms and create one, so I’m stuck scrambling up her silky smooth scales, slipping and sliding a half dozen times before I finally grab the ridge on the top of her back. I’m not sure I could ride her very far, which makes me wonder what they do with their bonded, but when she starts to move, there’s no room for me to think about anything but holding on.
And then we’re at the edge, and when she stops, I nearly go flying over into the enormous hole. As it is, I slide off her back and fall to the ground below, my hands landing along the edge of the burned and blackened lip of earth.
Inches from my hand, there’s a bright red scale, crusted with something sticky and brown.
“No!” My shout’s sharp and almost involuntary as I clutch the scale to my chest. Tears stream down my face again, and I have trouble breathing. “No.” I shake my head. “No. No, no, no!”
I think I accepted that he was dead in the tunnel. As much as I’d clung to hope, I knew in that moment, that if he had been alive, he would have come for me.
And he didn’t.
Still, seeing the red scale, the impenetrable red scale, alone and bloody, makes it real in a terrible, horrifying way I can’t yet fully process.
“Elizabeth,” someone behind me says.
I shake my head. “Just leave me for now. Please.” I know the earth dragons want to get back. I know they have people to report things to, but. . . “I just need a minute.” I squeeze the red scale so tightly in my hand that it begins to slice the skin of my palm, and the pain actually feels good.
I deserve it.
I deserve all the pain in the world for my idiotic mistake—leaping down among the humans and trusting Gideon. Wanting to be the one who brokered peace between the two worlds. It was hubris. I was practically begging for this to happen.
“Liz.” This time, I hear the urgency in the voice, and I realize that it’s a voice I know. I turn slowly, not quite sure how it can be. . .
But it’s Axel, in his human form, standing in front of me.
Healthy.
Whole.
I’m covered with grime from riding a hundred miles in a tunnel. I’m exhausted and weak and nearly frozen to death, but I’m here.
And so is he.
Alive.
“You have to leave.” He beckons for Gaia. “Take her back to the edge of the human encampment, immediately.”
22
Axel
The worst has happened.
Liz has returned.
“Absolutely not,” Liz says.
Apparently dying didn’t change a single thing about her.
“You can’t stay here,” I say.
She struggles to her feet, and seeing her so weak, so dirty, and so very cold breaks my heart. “Why not?” Tears are streaming down her face, leaving dark runnels through the dirt that’s coating her entire body almost uniformly. She looks like, well, like she’s been burrowing through earthen tunnels, which I assume is how she reached me.
