Bálint snorted out a choked laugh. “You don’t mind spiders. You don’t like James’s Spider Blaster 5000.”
“I no like James,” his dragon snapped.
Another snort of laughter escaped Bálint. His dragon was still sore about losing a game of tag due to getting caught when James, Amber and Jade’s little brother, shot him with his newest invention at the Tag Team Adventure. James had been smart—maybe too smart—when he made the threads dragon-fire proof. Bálint had been stuck for almost an hour before he was rescued.
He twisted his neck to look around—his wings and legs were tangled in glowing, iridescent webbing stretched between two colossal trees. The silk pulsed faintly, tightening every time he moved.
“Well, this is fantastic,” he muttered, struggling to lift a claw. The web twanged with a threatening hum, responding like a living thing.
His scales shivered.
Not good. Definitely not good.
He took a steadying breath and called out with everything he had left.
“Adaline! If you can hear me… I could use some help!”
But only the wind answered, rustling the elemental trees.
He was alone.
Trapped.
And something in this strange, living world was waking up.
And it had noticed him.
Adaline clung to Bálint like he was the only solid thing left in a world dissolving into chaos.
The dizzying streaks of light blazed past them—threads of magic unraveling like frayed ribbons. Energy snapped and sizzled beneath her feet, alive and volatile, humming through her bones like a song she didn’t know the words to.
Her hands fisted into Bálint’s shirt. She felt him tighten his arms around her, grounding her, anchoring her to something that wasn’t spinning wildly out of control.
“Can you hold it together?”
She shook her head.
Her voice when she replied was steady, but inside… she was unraveling, too.
The energy was too erratic. It slipped through her fingers like water—no, like oil—coating her, clinging to her, but never obeying. It twisted around them in colors too bright to name, pulsing like it had a heartbeat.
“I’ve never felt anything like this. It’s alive,” her voice was tight, barely audible over the rushing void.
But what she didn’t say—what she couldn’t say—was ‘I don’t know how to control it.’
She thought of Alice. Confident. Brilliant. In complete command of her abilities even when chaos raged around her. Was Alice struggling too?
No. No, of course not.
Alice could do anything.
Unlike me.
Alice had grown up on Curizan, surrounded by instructors and power and acceptance. She had been allowed to stretch her abilities, to train, to shine.
Adaline had been hiding in a tiny apartment on Earth until she was seven—afraid to spark, to shimmer, to be anything other than normal.
Even her mom hadn’t known what she was capable of— Not until her father, Adalard, returned with them to Curizan, a world where their people could harness the surrounding energy. Her dad was like this huge, mythical hero—okay, maybe not that dramatic, but close enough for her—who had appeared one day to claim her and her mother like a storybook come to life. An alien prince in shining armor.
