Page 4 of Dream Reaper

Oh, flames, it was going to smother her! It was going to— Was it going to eat her?

She tried to bite the hand smashed against her mouth, blocking her nose. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t…

The hand against her mouth only pressed more firmly.

“If you want to live, lass,” a deep voice rasped into her ear, the threatening tenor freezing her in place, “then lie still and— Skadi’s frost, stop biting me!”

CHAPTER 2

JERRID

The stifling canopy of trees closing in blocked him from the sun, from the sky… Uneasiness churned in his gut, making Jerrid Chrysalis wince. He’d been inside this wretched forest too long already. He shouldn’t be here.

It was driving him mad.

He couldn’t breathe down here. Dragon riders weren’t meant to be on land beneath the trees. They were meant to soar above the rippling treetops, one with wind and cloud and sky.

One with their dragons.

Jerrid choked on a bitter laugh as he climbed over a fallen log covered in a slimy dark substance that stuck to his trousers as he slid over it. He rubbed at the legs of his trousers with rough, angry strokes.

There was something wrong with this place, anyway. It was in worse shape than he was, more graveyard than woods. The longer he spent breathing the foul air down here, the more he feared he would become poisoned by the same nameless toxin killing the trees.

Heat billowed in his chest, stirring restlessly, but he clamped it down with vicious intent. It fluttered against his rib cage, rebellious.

If that restlessness inside him got out of control again… His da should have known better than to send him on this hopeless mission to rescue one of the dragon-loving dark elves who’d thrown them into the dungeon.

Granted, the young healer he’d been tasked to find hadn’t been the one to chuck him into a cell, but she was an elf, just like the rest of them. He had no doubt where her loyalty lay.

She cared nothing for him, for his dragons, for his people.

He ran a hand over the top of his head, clamping down on his irritation. To be fair to his da, Carr had volunteered himself to go on this ridiculous mission, but Jerrid had been to too noble to allow his father to put himself in harm’s way like this.

Carr was in charge of their dragon flight, and it was only right and fitting that he delegate dangerous missions like this to his subordinates.

Behind him, the dragon chuffed irritably, stomping through the undergrowth with the finesse of a rock troll smashing through a field of boulders.

“Easy, girl,” he called back to the dragon behind him. “We’ll be out of this soon enough.”

She growled, shooting a puff of smoke around him. He batted it away with a muttered curse, spinning off the narrow trail and into the ferns alongside the path while her putrid breath dissipated. Echo tramped up to him, embers glowing inside her seething nostrils.

“None of that. This wasn’t my idea, and you know it.”

She met his gaze through narrow, glassy eyes. After hours of trudging through this putrid forest, she was in no mood to play nice.

“Fine. So, I did sort of volunteer us for this. I know you’re mad, but it’s not my fault, and we need to tough it out until we find the flame-loving lass who went and got herself lost.”

Echo huffed again, a threatening plume of smoke snaking toward him.

“Stop it!” He bit out the command with an angry swipe of his hand. “If you set me on fire again, I’ll leave you in your pen for a month and find myself another dragon.”

She hissed and bared her fangs, the angry glint in her eye speaking the words her serpentine lips could never form.

He’d already betrayed her to another dragon.

And while he would have liked to argue that it wasn’t true, that he’d always been loyal to her…he knew she had every right to be mad at him.

About the other dragon.