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If I didn’t stop it now, it would destroy more of Chicago. More people, more sups, would be injured and killed. More homes and businesses destroyed. The apocalypse would continue.
But if I jumped, if I took flight with it, I’d have to face my fear of heights, and I’d have to face it alone. I’d have to fight the dragon without Mallory, Catcher, Jonah . . . or Ethan. I’d have to fight him alone—just me and my steel—in a place of his choosing. And then I’d have to find my way back.
I’d have to face the risk of losing, of dying on whatever field it chose for the inevitable battle.
For a moment, I was back in the green land, with the child’s laughter echoing across the hills. The laughter, I thought, of a happy little girl.
Yes, I thought, as tears blossomed again, we might never know her. Or worse, we might know her and lose her, as my parents had done with their first Caroline. But if there was a chance I was to be a mother—her mother—she deserved more than fear and bravery. She deserved a Sentinel of her own, someone who would fight for her father, her family, her city.
Gabriel’s test, I realized, wasn’t about triumph or victory. It wasn’t about winning. It was about bravery. It was about trying, and persevering. It was about staying the course even when things seemed desperate, even when all seemed lost.
That left me only one choice.
I ran toward the dragon and jumped, gripping for purchase with my nails one of the ridges that lined his spine and climbing up his leg.
NO, it screamed, furious at the contact, but didn’t have enough rotation in the limb to shake me loose.
Its scales were pitted and cracked, giving me handholds to climb the relatively short distance from leg to neck, then throw a leg over its side, settling between two ridges on its back.
Our fates were bound together now. Either the dragon would live and die by my sword—or we both would.
“Merit!”
I wasn’t sure whether Ethan screamed the word aloud, or silently for me. But it ran through the air on a current of fear and grief and fury that I’d offered myself up.
Too bad. I was Sentinel of my goddamned House.
I love you, I silently said, and hoped that he could hear me.
The dragon banked sharply, lifted, and I pressed my face into its scales, the scent of chemicals and city, of tears and anger, of sweat and fear.
“Don’t fire!” Ethan yelled, his voice in the earpiece Luc had handed out before we’d left the House. “Don’t fire! Merit’s on the dragon.”
The dargon turned and banked toward the heart of downtown Chicago.
I considered my options. I didn’t think I could finish the magic in the air. I had to wait until it landed and we were both on solid ground. Otherwise, it would disappear beneath me, and I was pretty sure falling a thousand feet wasn’t the same as jumping a few hundred.
So I held on, and felt guilty about the exhilaration of soaring over Chicago, soaring over glass and asphalt as the wind whipped my hair into tangles. I shouldn’t have reveled in the feel of flight, shouldn’t have closed my eyes in the warm breeze. But it wasn’t often that a girl who loved fairy tales, who spent her childhood dreaming of princesses and haunted woods and dragons, got an opportunity like this.
But the exhilaration faded as we moved closer to the river, as I saw what the dragon had done to the city of my heart.
It was an apocalypse. Limited to Chicago, but severe enough that it would take months, if not years, before the city was the same.
The dragon plunged down, zeroed in on the top of the Towerline building. But then again, it was hurt, it was angry, and it felt it had been tricked and betrayed. The magic that created it had begun at Towerline. It had apparently decided this was the place to heal.
I screamed into my comm unit but wasn’t sure if they could even hear me this far away. “We’re heading to Towerline!”
The building’s large roof, still scarred by the magic we’d used before, grew larger and larger in front of us, and I closed my eyes against the rising vertigo.
The dragon hit the roof hard, skidding across the gravel and debris and throwing me off. I made my own sliding roll across rock and asphalt, my momentum only stopped by one of the building’s remaining HVAC units.
What was a little concussion between friends? I thought, closing my eyes for a moment to give my head a chance to stop spinning.
The roof shook beneath me, and I reached for my sword before opening my eyes.
The dragon’s foot—as big as a hubcap—loomed above my head.
“Shit!” I said, and rolled just before the hubcap came down and smashed a divot into the roof. I climbed to my feet, but the dragon caught my foot with a talon and brought me down again.
