“Like what?” Bianca asked, and I realized she had not seen him yet. I swooped a little lower and pointed, warning her to stay quiet as we did. My senses were tingling with unease, something dark settling in the back of my mind. This wasn’t right. We should be out here looking for a body—sad as that was, perhaps—but there was no way he could have survived the storm without shelter. He was not close enough to any shelter I knew of that made sense.
Hillcrest Hollow lay farther south. I was the only one who made their home on the north ridge—for good reason. There were no caves, and the hollow with the thick brush that would haveprovided shelter from the wind was in the other direction. I also smelled no smoke on him or anywhere in the vicinity, and he would have had to make some to survive.
“No,” Bianca whispered. “Kevin is not the most savvy outdoorsman, but I’ve never seen him move like that.” She sounded horrified, which came through perfectly even in her hushed whisper. I glanced once at her face to see her wide eyes, glinting like chips of ice. I felt the first stirrings of worry for this guy myself, wondering if he’d encountered what we had in our dreams.
I was this close to turning for my cabin to drop Bianca off when the male abruptly tumbled face-first into the snow. She squeaked in worry, and I was arrowing down and landing in the clearing up ahead in response before I could think twice. Whatever this was, surely I could either freeze it or burn it before it could ever harm my Elskling.
The woods were quiet, save for the creak and moan of the branches overhead. It felt like the cold stuck to my skin in an unnatural fashion. I did not get cold; it was impossible. Bianca shivered in my arms, and it took me a moment before I could order my arms to let her slide to the ground and put her on her feet.
“What is that?” she whispered, her blue eyes shifting from my face to scan uneasily around her. She clutched the front of her jacket and huddled, cold, but not cold. I was still drawing the iciness from the air near her body; she should not feel the cold anymore than I did. I shrugged because I wasn’t certain, I just knew that every instinct in me warned me to get us out of here.
Screw that hapless mortal in the snow ahead; he was not worth the risk to my mate. I pulled her back into my arms, tightening my muscles in preparation for a launch. Bianca’s hands clutched at my bare chest now, failing to find purchase against smooth skin and muscle. Her blunt nails didn’t cause any harm against my thick skin either, but I felt the sharp bite of them anyway. In all the time I’d known her, which was, admittedly, short, she’d never smelled of fear quite like she did now.
He came around a tree with a groan, arms around himself as if braced against the cold. His face was pale, lips dark purple, and his nose and ears dangerously white. I paused because he looked exactly like I expected him to after a night out—miraculously not dead. Covered in frost, severely hypothermic, at risk of losing anything that stuck out of his clothes.
“Aaaaah, help, please,” he moaned as his eyes lit on us. There was no sign of any recognition in his face, not even when he looked right at Bianca. He didn’t respond to my appearance either, even though I had my wings out and wasn’t wearing a stitch of upper body clothing. The helmet I’d fashioned into a crude disguise dangled from my belt, and I had not even thought to reach for it. It wasn’t needed; this guy was in no state to remember any of this later—if he lived. At least he was in the right place for survival, barring the risk of accidentally freezing him entirely. I could help him.
For Bianca, I would. She was already forgetting all about her fear from moments ago and stepping out of my arms to rush to the male. “Kevin! Oh no, come on, here, take my hat.” She’d taken the bigger black one off to offer it to him, her hands reaching forward without hesitation—kindness and concern her only motivation.
I saw the flicker of change and lunged in the nick of time.
Chapter 13
Bianca
One moment, I’d been standing in front of a miraculously alive Kevin, offering him help. The next, I was in the snow with a face full of wet, cold ice. A weight was on top of me, but it quickly lifted. I gasped as I lifted my head, blinking snow out of my eyes, but I still saw nothing. Utter darkness had descended, like day had turned into night at the flick of a switch. I only knew it was dark, rather than that I’d gone spontaneously blind, because I could make out my hands in the pale snow and the edge of a tree trunk in front of me.
Noise came from behind—a muffled kind of shuffling—and I rolled to look, squinting and furiously urging my eyes to work better, to pick up something, anything. Where was Ísarr? What had happened to Kevin? What had happened to the light, period? That was too bizarre, and a bit too much like my dreams. In the darkness, everything reminded me of them: the groaning, the shuffling sounds, the vague sense of movement around me.
Then the whispering noise came, and suddenly, I was back in that nightmare-scape entirely. Yeah, I remembered those—calling to me, urging me to go outside, to go to them, to let them in. I didn’t want to, but I rose to my feet on shaky legs and peered around for the source. Where was I going? Where did they want me to go? Confusion filled my mind the same way terror did.
The thud of something striking flesh was loud, followed by a moan and then silence. I froze and listened; the whispers stopped, as if they had done the same. Tendrils seemed to wraparound my ankles, my wrists, even my throat from behind. They were there so suddenly that it was as if I’d blinked and, in the next moment, found myself trapped inside a net of vines. I opened my mouth to scream in horror, and the whispers came again: “Yes, let me in. Let me IN.”
I screamed for Isárr instead, his name bursting from my lips—an explosion of sound and white fog in the darkness. It felt like everything grew tight around me, but darkness was not corporeal; it shouldn’t have been able to. I struggled, and my pendant slipped from my coat, glowing a bright blue in the dark.
“Bianca!” Ísarr’s voice came from far away, so far away. I twisted toward it, but the shadows that held me did not let go. My eyes caught on warped tree branches and thick, looming trunks glittering with ice. They shimmered with the blue light coming from my necklace. Nothing looked familiar: not the trees, not the snow, not the slope of the hill I was on. My eyes caught sight of the tracks I’d made in the snow. I’d walked here, but how? When? I couldn’t recall.
An answering blue light flared far in the distance. Like flame slashing through dark, this was ice carving a path through shadow. The vines that gripped me—invisible bonds of blackness—tightened, and then they withdrew. Ísarr came roaring from the sky, real flame billowing from his dragon maw to scorch the canopy of trees above my head.
I blinked, and darkness bled away, turning the sky first to pale gray and then to white. The dragon roared, and ice fell from his maw, raining down in glittering shards all around me, but never striking me. When he landed, trees groaned and broke to make space for him, but the shadow was gone, as if it had never been.
To stand face to face with a giant blue lizard moments after that terrifying experience should have only added to the horror. It didn’t. No, I recognized those pale blue eyes, knew him better than I thought he even knew himself. Perhaps not in ways I could put into words, but in the ways that mattered.
He lowered his massive head toward me, his snout softly pressing to my chest and belly. White spires rose proudly from his forehead, and all over his body, he glittered with azure scales. He was gorgeous; he couldn’t possibly be real. He was exactly what I needed to chase away the chill after that harrowing experience. “I walked away, didn’t I? I walked away from you, and I didn’t even mean to do it. What the hell is that, Ísarr? You sensed those shadows too, right? You saw it go dark?”
“Yes,” he said, not with his mouth, but I heard him anyway. Something shimmered around him, light but not light, and I thought he was about to change back into a man. He didn’t, but his claws, huge enough to pick up a car, dug furrows into the snow and earth. “We are going to the Hollow. Only the Destroyer knows what that is.”
The dragon lifted his head, and it rose, and rose. He was so freaking tall that he could raise his long neck until he was looking out over the trees. A front claw came for me, and it was instinct to want to duck. I wasn’t fast enough, and then he was holding me—lifting me—until I was tucked against a chest as big as a house. At the very least, as big as Ísarr’s lonely cabin.
“The Hollow? Whatever happened to never leaving this mountain again?” I prodded. My voice sounded weak and shaky to my own ears, as I tried to make light of things when nothing was light at all. That had been awful, terrifying, and I neverwanted to repeat the experience. Ísarr had to be thinking the same thing.
As a dragon, his voice seemed to rumble through the air and vibrate in my bones, while at the same time it made no sound at all. It felt private, intimate, despite sounding exactly like what a thirty-ton beast would sound like.“We will come back. A dragon does not abandon his hoard. We are simply...regrouping.”I liked that. I liked the sound of that very much. It left only one question, but I had no chance to ask it.
My dragon leaped skyward, breaking through the canopy of bare trees and arrowing toward the pale, white skies. There was no sign of any storm now, just pale fluff that hid the sun. When I looked down, the ground was dropping away rapidly, but I could still see the circle of blackened treetops and the ones he’d leveled willy-nilly when he landed.
I opened my mouth, beginning to voice a name I was getting very tired of saying, but snapped it shut again. My eyes caught on Ísarr’s other paw, which was dangling lower to my left. An arm stuck out from it, the orange jacket unmistakable. So he’d even remembered to bring Kevin, in all this chaos. It was silly, but it made me want to smile, a little bit of bright hope in the dark. See, Isárr was a good guy through and through. He talked a good game, but he wouldn’t kill anyone if he could help it. He was exactly the kind of guy my mama would love to see at the dinner table during family gatherings.
I saw the town quickly; it was actually, surprisingly close by. Though I knew that as close as I’d been to Ísarr’s home, I would not have made it in time for safety when that storm swept in lastnight. God, was it only last night? I felt like I’d lived a lifetime with Ísarr already.
