The next few rounds blurred. He was everywhere, above, behind, at my throat, sometimes bashing, sometimes parrying with such precision I wondered if he’d lived this moment a thousand times. He drilled my footwork until the muscles in my calves sang with lactic acid, hammered my ribs every time my guard slipped, and each correction was the same.
Dead.
I lost count at ten, maybe twelve. By then, my shirt was stuck to my body, sweat running down my spine. My breath came in shallow gasps, hair plastered to my face, and the side of my torso where Corvus kept tapping his damn claw was already bruising beneath the skin.
Were vampires supposed to be able to bruise? Eff if I knew, but it felt like I was.
At one point, I caught my reflection in the obsidian walls. I looked wild, feral, eyes wide and teeth bared. It didn’t even look like me anymore. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
Above, Jax had closed the gap on his pursuers. He waited for them to corner him near a break in the wind shear, then doubled back, slamming into the lead with a move so fast I barely tracked it. The other dragons scattered, then regrouped, this time wary, recalibrating their formation. I grinned. My man.
Corvus noticed. He let me watch, just for a second, as Jax dove through a rolling current and came up behind one of the warriors, catching them completely off-guard. They spiraled together, but Jax held position, and the other was forced to yield, dropping altitude in a controlled stall.
I had time to be proud for maybe half a breath, which was all the time Corvus needed to exploit my distraction. He swept my legs from behind, dumped me flat on my ass, and hovered a claw half an inch from my throat.
“Dead.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The shock, the sweat, the total humiliation, it all broke at once, and the sound bounced off the cliffs like a challenge. I was sure I was going to hear the word “dead” in my sleep for the next century.
“Better,” he said, with the faintest possible smile.
I rolled to my knees, pushed myself upright, and picked up the blade again. My arms felt like jelly, my sides on fire, but I wasn’t done. Not by a long shot.
“Again?” I asked, the word half growl.
Corvus’s eyes lit up. He leaned in, lowering his head to my level, teeth bared in something that was either encouragement or a promise to eat me for breakfast. He was enjoying this a little too much. And if I was being honest, so was I. A little.
“Again.”
We reset, and I forced the fatigue down, forced my brain to absorb every lesson it could. This time, when Corvus lunged, I twisted, ducked the first feint, and managed to touch the blade to the soft inside of his elbow before he could react. He stopped, considered the strike, and nodded. It wasn’t enough to kill, but it was enough to wound. He touched the spot with his free claw, then looked at me with new interest.
“Live,” he said.
I sagged in place, knees barely holding, but a surge of pride pushed through the exhaustion. Every bruise, every ache, every warning registered from my body to quit. I ignored all of them. Above, Jax let out a sharp, victorious call. The sound was raw and real, and every dragon in the air responded in kind, even the ones who had just been bested by him. Corvus watched me watching, then rumbled a low, approving sound.
“Again,” I said, the word barely more than a whisper.
He grinned, and the real training began.
After training, every muscle below my neck voted to secede from the union. My arms were still trembling, but my legs had made a secret pact to refuse service entirely. Jax and I, both of us in our human forms, made our way back to the great hall together, neither of us talking much.
The castle’s great hall was a cauldron of noise and color, full of the electric hum of young dragons. We stopped in the archway, both of us half-expecting a welcoming committee of guards, or at least a herald. Instead, what greeted us was a rolling dogpile of hatchlings, scales glittering, claws harmlessly sheathed, allwrapped around a single, shrieking bundle of energy at the center.
Flint, in his boy form, was king of the heap.
His laugh was so wild and unfiltered that it gave me a surge of energy and joy. He pushed off of a wedge of orange-scaled dragons, then went tumbling backwards across the floor, bare feet skidding. He wore nothing but a pair of ill-fitting shorts and a halo of sweat, and his cheeks were so red I thought he’d explode. When he righted himself, the nearest hatchling, slate blue, the size of a Shetland pony, lowered its shoulder, and Flint climbed up, bareback.
They took off in a lazy loop around the hall, the little dragon moving at a careful, almost parental pace. Flint locked his hands around the ridge along the dragon’s spine. His eyes widened, then he squeezed them shut in pure joy. He’d ridden on my back before, but this was different. This was... Belonging.
The other dragons bunched below, their voices a chorus of encouragement. Flint whooped, and the blue dragon trumpeted in response, spiraling upward, then gliding down so gently that Flint barely bounced when he slid off. For a second, my heart bottomed out. The drop in my gut came, the cold at the base of my ribs. I tried to smile, but the muscles in my face wouldn’t cooperate.
Jax felt it. I knew because he stopped, just behind me, and slid his hand into mine, his grip warm and careful. I kept watching Flint, not trusting myself to look away.
“Looks like he’s found his people,” Jax said, his tone soft.
“Yeah,” I said. My throat clicked when I swallowed. “He has.”
Flint scampered back to the pile, but when he saw us in the doorway, he detoured. He ran straight at me, arms wide, and I crouched. He hit me at full speed, wrapping his arms around my waist, face buried in my shirt.
