On the mouth.
In front of Alice.
Alice gasped behind him. “Are you kidding me?!”
Bálint flinched as a look of hurt, sharp and quick as a knife, flashed through Alice’s eyes. The thought made him want to growl a primal, jealous retort: ‘If you can kiss Geoff, why can't I kiss someone else?’ before his better judgment intervened. A wave of incandescent rage washed over him, the heat making his face flush. Instead, he shoved his hands in his pockets and clamped his lips together.
Leanna, with a determined stride, had already covered several yards. With a slight smirk playing on her lips, she paused, turned, and called back, her voice teasing, "Well, are you coming or not?”
Alice huffed as she stalked past him, her braid swinging like a whip. “Unbelievable.”
Still rooted in place, Bálint turned a stunned look toward Geoff.
Geoff was grinning like a fox who’d just watched the henhouse explode.
“What… just happened?” Bálint muttered, dazed, blinking like he’d been hit with a branch.
Geoff clapped him on the shoulder. “When you figure it out, let me know. Girls confuse the heck outta me.”
As the group started down the winding path, Bálint trudged behind them, his head spinning.
His dragon growled low inside him. Now we gotta roast ourselves! You bad! Alice! Remember Alice!
I didn’t even kiss her back, he told himself, as if that changed anything.
His dragon moaned. No, but you like!
You liked it, too. She thinks you’re cuter, he said in defense, as heat rose along his throat to his cheeks.
He groaned. “We need to find Adaline fast… before I crash this entire school break into a volcano.”
By kissing Leanna? his dragon snickered.
Shut up! We are so not going there!
For once, he was glad his symbiot wasn’t there. The darn thing would probably roast both him and his dragon—and start an intergalactic war!
The village of Lake Mist felt like something out of a dream. Even the villages she’d known—on her home world and on Valdier—were nothing like this.
Adaline followed closely behind Breeze and the others, her boots barely whispering over the stone-lined path that wove like a ribbon through the heart of the quaint, picturesque town. Around her, pale mist clung to the edges of thatched roofs and flower-draped windows. The homes—round, soft-edged, and brightly colored—looked as if they’d grown straight from the land, not been built upon it. Vines twisted up over curved doorways, blooming with blossoms that turned toward her as she passed.
Everywhere, people paused to watch.
Their eyes weren’t suspicious, just curious—cautious, even kind. An old man watering glowing mushrooms in a window box tipped his chin toward her. A group of children floated past in half-solid forms, laughing as they flickered between states of mist and flesh like candlelight in a breeze.
Adaline slowed, her heart skipping with awe as one woman knelt beside a bubbling fountain. Her hands were solid as they cupped the water—but as she rose, her body shifted. A swirl of translucent white lifted from her shoulders, dissolving upward in a graceful spin before it folded inward again and became her hair.
Adaline’s breath caught.
She turned and walked backward, mesmerized, as a man walked past carrying a net full of shimmering fish—except… the net wasn’t real. It was part of him. His entire body was a rolling cloud of pearlescent fog, and as he gave a little shake, three silver fish flopped from his side and into a nearby bucket.
Her mouth dropped open.
“That’s… amazing,” she whispered, just as a strange tingle rippled down her spine.
She shivered, her shoulders stiffening.
The pull wasn’t painful. It was electric. Prickly. Like the air before a lightning strike. Something inside her stirred—like a part of her that had been sleeping had suddenly yawned and stretched.
