I pressed my forehead against the warm scales between his shoulder blades and breathed.
The heirs must’ve thought that we stopped the mutants from reporting back. But the thing behind the lead wolf’s eyes hadn’t needed a messenger.
It had seen me.
The dragon returned to camp.
A low rumble vibrated through his body. He was telling me to get off.
I jumped from over ten feet. Aelindor’s magic caught me, a cushion of wind easing me to the ground. My knees buckled but held.
Drakken shifted back then. The dragon dissolved in a burst of dark golden light, and the man emerged—naked, blood-smeared, breathing hard, standing in the aftermath without a shred of self-consciousness.
I tried not to look at him.
I looked.
Briefly. Involuntarily. Then I jerked my gaze away and focused on turning a chakram back into an armguard. My face was flushed from the battle, from the wind, from the adrenaline. Only from those things.
“Don’t get used to it,” Drakken grated, his voice rough from roaring.
“Get used to what?” I shot back, trying hard not to look at his glorious nudity again. “I don’t even like riding a dragon.”
That was a lie. It had been the most exhilarating experience of my life—the speed, the power, the world spreading beneath me like a map. And denying the pull between me and the manwho’d carried me into the sky felt as hollow as the words coming out of my mouth.
Murder is fun!Coldiron chose that moment to chirp from the armguard, bright and cheerful.
Shit!
Do not go on a killing spree,I said sternly.
Shit! Killing spree,Coldiron whispered, the words sliding through my awareness with a gleeful, singsong cadence.
I stared at the armguard. The metal pulsed once—warm, happy, sated.
And I’d never been more worried.
Chapter 11
Max
Adozen armored transports and a platoon of infantry crested the northern ridge at full speed and found nothing left to fight. Their tires skidded in the blood-soaked dirt.
Mutants’ corpses littered the ground, among them four Spartans and eight soldiers. I learned the number before I learned the names. Men and women who’d trained for years to earn the Spartan designation, who’d survived the gauntlet and the trials that broke ninety percent of candidates. Elite. Irreplaceable. And now they were cooling on the ground, their blood mixing with the blood of the beasts they’d killed.
Victory always came with a price. Raw grief permeated the air. I saw it in the set of the warriors’ jaws as they moved through the field, checking bodies. In the way a scarred sergeant knelt beside a fallen woman, straightened her armor with careful hands, and closed her eyes. In the silence that replaced the banter. No one spoke unless they had to.
I stood at the edge of it all and felt useless. The armguard sat warm against my wrist, Coldiron finally quiet, dozing like a predator after a full meal. I wanted to carry the dead, clean the weapons, haul the wreckage. But every time I moved toward atask, a Spartan would glance at me and shake their head. Not unkindly. Just a look that said?—
Not this. This is ours.
I understood. In the mine, when someone died, the crew handled it ourselves. We carried our own. We mourned our own. And we didn’t let the overseers and the guards touch the bodies, because the dead deserved better than the hands that had killed them.
So I stayed out of the way and tried not to think that these mutants had come for me, costing those warriors their lives. Guilt and worry were a hook in my gut that wouldn’t come out.
Greyhold’s medical team was busy in the field: stretchers for the wounded, body bags for the dead. The earth mage sat beside the fire mage while a medic packed his gash with spell-treated gauze, her hand on his shoulder.
Colonel Karrik, who had arrived with the reinforcements, ordered one mutant corpse preserved for study. Two more were tagged for transport to our base in Denver. The rest—over a hundred carcasses scattered across a quarter mile—were dragged to the southern edge of the field and piled.
