“Do you hear her, Shar?” Emmeric kicks the dragon, but he still doesn’t move.
“Stop that!” I scream, and I try to run at him with my sword, but Stesha holds me back as Emmeric laughs. As I struggle to free myself, a hot, sick sensation plunges down my body. A splinter of a memory stabs through my mind. A day long ago that feels like yesterday, when I was weak and sore and tired, and Iwasn’t able to protect Minta. Emmeric was there, and someone else was as well. An Alpha with white hair.
Oren.
Why was Oren there?
Then I remember. The Alpha soldier was on his way to the southern towns with word of the king and queen’s assassination when Emmeric found me. He was… Oren tried to…
I make a choking sound as the memory washes over me. Oren, dead on the ground, a gaping wound in his chest, dying as he tried to protect me. Emmeric watching with a nasty smile on his lips.
And then he killed Minta.
I fall to my knees with a ragged cry as the memory slams into me. Emmeric paralyzed my dragon with a spell, and then he cut her open from throat to chest while she screamed in agony. As blood poured out of her, he reached inside her chest and pulled out her soul core. He was saying something about experiments with dragon magic. More power. Better power. I wasn’t listening. My dragon was dying. She was calling out to me with her mind to save her, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I felt all of Minta’s pain and terror through our connection. I can feel it now. She was dying, and the moment she slipped away from me felt like my own heart was being ripped from my chest. My own soul dragged out of me with white-hot pincers.
And then my mind just…snapped.
My hands are pressed against the dirty ground, and I rock back and forth as I take shuddering breaths. Distantly, I hear Stesha’s voice. The ring of metal on metal, and an angry gasp of pain. There’s a flare of light, and then everything goes silent.
Then there are gentle hands on my shoulders, helping me to my feet. Stesha’s scent is coppery with blood, but I’m blinded by tears. For a moment I’m afraid he’s hurt, but I know his scent and the blood is not his.
Cool fingers caress my face, wiping away my tears. “Zenevieve, we must leave,” Stesha says gently.
“But Shar. Don’t forget about Shar.”
“I’m sorry, Zen.”
“What do you mean?” I open my eyes. Shar is lifeless on the ground, as still as stone. A sob rises up my throat. “No, Shar. Please, you can’t die.”
I fling myself to my knees beside the dragon, but there’s no spark of life. His chest no longer rises and falls. The beautiful dragon is dead.
A wail of pain is ripped from my throat. “No,” I cry, wrapping my arms around his neck and sobbing onto his cold scales. “No, no,no.” I scream in anger and despair at Emmeric and all the senseless pain he’s caused. There’s not a mark on Shar. He shouldn’t have died. Why did he die?
I feel a warm hand on my back as Stesha kneels next to me. “I’m so sorry, Zen.”
“What happened to him?” I manage to choke out between sobs.
Stesha caresses Shar’s scales. “Emmeric kept him in chains for too long. Shar was too weak, and the spell was too careless.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and bow my head. To treat his own dragon this way. I already knew it after everything he’s done, but Emmeric truly is a monster.
“I remember everything,” I finally admit. “Emmeric didn’t hurt me like he hurt Mirelle. I know you were scared about that. He found a different way to destroy me by killing Minta. She died in pain. She was so afraid, and I felt it all. It was too much, and I blocked all my memories out. Seeing Emmeric standing over Shar with that knife brought it all back.”
“I’m so sorry, Zen,” Stesha whispers, taking me in his arms and pressing my face to his chest, one large hand supporting the back of my head. His scent grows stronger in his attemptto soothe me, but for once, it doesn’t work. The pain and anger inside of me is a well that runs too deep, and I’m tumbling into it as memories pour over me.
After Minta died, I was like the living dead. I didn’t speak. Didn’t react. Emmeric seemed to lose all interest in me after he realized he could no longer torment me. I think he put me away not long after that, discarded me into another realm the same way he trapped the dragon army. He didn’t wake me up until he needed someone to spy on them.
With Shar dead, I’ve lost all hope that I’ll ever feel like myself again. I sob in Stesha’s arms, wishing that I’d never remembered Minta’s terrible, blood-soaked fate.
27
Stesha
In the days and weeks that follow, Zenevieve and Zabriel suffer under the weight of their failures. Zabriel has his mate to comfort him, and he has lost nothing but a battle, so I have no doubt that he will pull himself together. It’s Zenevieve who I’m worried about.
When I look in her eyes, they are dull and empty. Even in the days after she lost her parents, she was never as devastated as this. Loss has piled upon loss. Pain is heaped atop pain, and I don’t know how to ease her suffering. A rider grieving a dragon is grieving a child, a parent, a sibling, and a dear friend all at once, and Zenevieve is grieving both Minta and Shar. Her pain is an open, aching wound. The flare feels her grief, particularly Nilak. My useless words do little to comfort Zenevieve, but Nilak approaches her whenever my former ward is on the dragongrounds and nudges her toward the center of the flare.
Destrin’s grandfledgling has no dragon. We will all be her dragon, Nilak tells me later when I ask her why.
