Page 119 of The Immortal’s Mark

“I’m watching your back!”

“You’re watching my—” She pivots, blade slicing across a cultist’s throat. Two more fall in the space between her words. Her voice does not even waver. “We’re having this conversation later!”

A sword comes for my head. I parry, riposte, feel my blade find flesh. The merchant’s clothes are wrong for this—too loose, too likely to catch on something—but my body knows how to compensate. Twenty-two years of war and assassination attempts since the dragon chose me.

Left!

I drop and roll. A blade whistles through the space where my neck was. I come up already swinging, and the cultist crumples.

I turn. Block. Strike. Turn again.

They keep coming. More than seventeen now—reinforcements through the broken gate, a seemingly endless supply of bodies to throw at us. My arms are burning. The sword grows heavy in my hands. A blade gets through my guard, slicing a line of fire across my ribs—not deep, but bleeding.

“Ren!” Lián’s voice, sharp with something I refuse to name.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“It’s superficial.”

“It’s distracting.” She cuts down the cultist who wounded me with a savagery I have not seen from her before. “If you die, I will never forgive you.”

“Noted.”

Tianlong manifests.

Not the eight-inch lizard who has been riding in my collar these weeks, complaining about dignity and the fundamental unfairness of having to share space with a cat. The full dragon. Ancient and terrible, scales like hammered gold, eyes like twin suns. He fills the temple with his presence, with a weight that presses against my chest, and when he opens his jaws, the world turns to fire.

Cultists scream. Cultists burn.

It costs him. Even as the golden flames consume our enemies, I feel the strain through our bond—a stretching, a fraying, a bone-deep exhaustion that is not my own. He shrinks back almost immediately, collapsing to his small form, coiling around my arm and trembling.

“Don’t do that again,” Lián snaps. She is breathing hard, splattered with blood that is not hers, alive and furious and magnificent.

“He was in danger.” Tianlong’s voice is faint.

“You almost—”

“I would burn a thousand times for him.” The dragon’s golden eyes find her, and there is nothing of humor in them. Nothing of the sardonic companion who has been commenting on my romantic failures for three weeks. “And for you, little dawn. Whether you like it or not.”

Lián stares at him. “Did you just call me ‘little dawn’?”

“It seemed appropriate.”

“Is this a dragon bonding thing? Should I be concerned?”

“You should be grateful, little dawn.” A pause. “The last mortal I named took three centuries to earn it.”

“Wonderful. I’ve been adopted by a reptile.”

“I am a dragon.”

“Same thing.”

“I will remember this insult.”

“You’ll remember everything. That’s your tragedy.”