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“Fine. We come back after we make sure everything’s all right,” he commanded.
I nodded my head, and patted the side of Mace’s neck. “Home, big guy.”
Mace lifted up with a rush of wind, the force of the move pushing me down into his back as he moved faster and faster away from the place we’d just been.
You have more. I told him.
I do not wish to discuss it.
He’d found her DNA. He’d realized that she was there. Was being the operative word.
New DNA looked different from old DNA. Fresher, more vibrant.
I knew he knew with everything I had. But something was keeping him away. Something was telling him to turn back, and I trusted Mace more than I trusted anyone other than Wink. If he said we had to leave, we had to leave. There were no other options.
It was when we were five minutes out from the sanctuary that something in the air changed around us.
Something sinister felt like it was on the horizon, and I knew that whatever it was was going to be bad.
And my fears were realized moments later when one second we were flying through the air as usual, and the next we were plummeting to the ground at an alarming rate of speed.
I, like most other dragon riders, was taught when we initially started riding that the first thing we do in case of an emergency is get to our dragon’s feet.
So, I climbed down his neck, and jumped.
He caught me in midair, almost like we’d practiced a million times before, even though we’d never once done it, and he gripped me tightly in his claw.
When we were going through training with Keifer, he’d taught us what his father had taught him. Dragons were large beasts that used their entire bodies to get airborne. However, when a rider was on a dragon’s back, they didn’t use the full force they were capable of so as not to hurt the rider with the wind shear and drag of their wings rising and falling.
So during an emergency with the rider secured in the dragon’s feet, they were able to use all the power of their bodies to gain maximum speed, which was the reason riders were trained to move.
My heart was sprinting at a million miles an hour, and I watched as the ground came at us, faster and faster.
Just when I thought we were going to hit hard, something changed in the air, and suddenly Mace was able to fly once again.
I looked over just in time to see Jean Luc pitch over sideways.
“Catch him!” I bellowed, my stomach dropping when he started to go down in what felt like slow motion.
Keifer was one step ahead of me, reaching out with one long arm and latching onto Jean Luc’s unconscious form before he could make it to the ground.
While Keifer was busy catching Jean Luc, Mace was working at pulling us back up, cloaking us both with invisibility that would shield us from everyone else, even the other dragon riders.
My eyes went around to the others, and one by one, each pair of dragons and riders disappeared behind their own cloaks of invisibility.
Keifer was the final visible rider to blink out, and with one last look behind him, he and his dragon were cloaked.
My eyes returned to the horizon, and I swallowed.
“I think we need to drop down,” I pointed at Mace. “Just in case that fucker uses those powers again.”
I obviously wasn’t the only one with that thought, because the moment we touched down on the ground, I heard the others talking.
“It’s another skin walker,” Jean Luc assured us. “There’s nobody else on earth who has those kinds of powers.”
I ignored them, continuing the walk to the sanctuary without waiting to see if they followed.
I’d just stepped over the line that denoted the boundary of Dragon Rider territory when I felt it.
Something was not right.
What’s going on? I sent my thoughts to Wink.
I don’t know, Wink growled. I just know that something is happening. Something. There are other dragons everywhere, but they’re not doing anything but flying around.
I made my way to the clearing ahead, and froze when I saw the dragons flying over the sanctuary. There were at least two hundred of them.
At least.
“He can’t control them,” Nikolai murmured at my side. “The way the shield works is that all powers can’t be used inside the boundary lines. Well…ours can. But all outsiders can’t. I worked everyone’s blood into the shield. He might’ve made it through, but there’s literally nothing he can do to us, power wise, besides be in here and do any physical damage he’s capable of. Look.”
He gestured to the boundary line I could see, and I watched as one of the dragons who’d been unfortunate to re-cross the line was struggling to get back into the boundary.
