Page 81 of Dream Reaper

“What are you talking about?” Talos demanded as he faced her.

They’re both idiots.

Yes, she rather agreed with that sentiment.

“You made a mistake,” Ava said as she cracked the knuckles of her left hand, and then her right, enjoying the way Talos watched the movements with growing alarm. “You both made a mistake.”

“How do you figure that?” Talos asked.

Jerrid focused only on her now, completely ignoring Talos, his stomach twisting as he began to realize what he had done. What he’d forced Dragon to do.

“Yes,” Jerrid echoed, his voice haggard, “how do you figure that, Ava?”

She relished the warning tone in his voice, the fear. Because for the first time in her life, she felt like more than herself. She felt powerful.

“You both forgot about me.”

And me.

“Us,” Ava corrected. “You forgot about us.”

Then her veins began to burn, and she wondered if she had just made the biggest mistake of her life when her skin crackled like corn in a pot over a raging flame.

She ground her teeth together to hold back a scream as the heat in her chest blazed as hot as a blacksmith’s forge.

Was Dragon trying to kill Talos…or her?

CHAPTER 20

JERRID

The air left Jerrid’s lungs, squeezing out, out, out until nothing but a single prick remained at the very center of his chest.

No. It wasn’t possible. Of all the shade-eaten mistakes he had made in his sorry life, he hadn’t made this one. He hadn’t done what he feared he’d done. Not to her.

Not to Ava.

But something gleamed in her eyes when she fired a grin over her shoulder at him, a gleam that wasn’t her own. A fire that wasn’t hers. It wasn’t cool and blue like elf fire.

Instead, it was a brilliant scarlet, like dragon fire.

What did you do, Dragon? he thought, a void yawning in his gut as he stared at the strange creature before him, at something that shouldn’t exist.

At something that shouldn’t be possible.

And yet there she stood, living proof that the unthinkable had become a nightmarish reality.

He’s very clever, your dragon. The shadow laughed from the recesses of his thoughts, where he had been watching and lurking since the moment Jerrid realized he was there. That’s the thing about parasites… We can always find a new host.

No, no, no…

Jerrid tried to call him back, to drag Dragon to himself by force. He could feel the tether running from him to Ava—to Dragon—but when he yanked on it, he discovered the other end tightly secured. How had Dragon bound himself to Ava? How had they done it?

And why the raging, dragon-lit blazes had she allowed it?

“I’m sorry,” Talos said, his cold voice cutting into Jerrid’s internal screaming, “but I really don’t understand what’s going on here. Why should I even care about you?”

Jerrid swiveled his head to stare at the dark elf as he glowered down at Ava. She now crouched a few yards away, one arm held back behind her in a pose Jerrid recognized all too well. He’d used it often enough himself.