Page 4 of Ignite the Infernos

This is it.

This is when my planning either prevails or all of it comes crashing down around me.

The human loads the two vacutainers into a machine, and with the press of a few buttons, a steady whirring fills the quiet office. Omari doesn’t say anything as we wait for my blood to be classified and registered. If I felt exposed before, I now feel completely flayed and defenseless. Adrenaline hijacks my system, and I suddenly feel hot while my chest grows tight. My heart becomes a steady mallet against my ribs, each walloping beat igniting the magic in my veins until it’s white-hot and searing.

Shit. I need to calm down.

I try to control my breathing, to tell myself that everything is fine, that I’m okay, but my reveal is pressing against my bones, like my insides are all at once several sizes too big. Magic greedily attempts to claim space inside of me even though I have none to spare.

No. Not here. Not now.

A strange and yet familiar force builds in my center, and I beg the beast within to wait, to give me more time. But my magic doesn’t care about the consequences, it gives no fucks about what’s at stake, and before I can do anything to stop it, my dragon surges forward, battering and thrashing against my desperation to deny the shift. My jaw locks in a painful clench and every muscle in my body follows suit. I grip the armrests of the chair so tightly they threaten to splinter, and I bow my head in supplication as I fight my intrinsic nature.

The irony of this moment isn’t lost on me. I’ve spent my life wishing for this and doing everything I could to reveal. Now, it’s finally happening, and I’m battling it with everything I have. I hate it with every fiber of my shattered soul, and yet if I don’t stop this, my dragon is about to ruin everything.

Chapter 2

Aeson

“THEY’RE DEAD. THEY’RE ALL DEAD,” Commander Drazyn announces, and everyone in the ops room goes still.

Shock suffuses the already-tense assembly, and my mind whirs with the implications of what this means. Each scenario I come up with is worse than the last. Commander Ventis leans forward, shaking her head like the movement will dispel what we all just heard. Her blue eyes narrow on the holoscreen displaying Commander Drazyn, and not one strand of her salt-and-pepper hair dares to sway with the movement.

“That’s not . . . how? What do you mean?” she falters, and that reaction from the normally unflappable leader has a few of the others sitting around the table fidgeting with discomfort.

“Are you sure they’re not just hiding?” Commander Zeir counters, disbelief etched across his face.

“No,” Drazyn answers, his bronze gaze unsettled but his tone firm. “We used the latest register to track every Relacour listed, but it might as well have been a hit list for all we found. Every single Relacour we located was dead. The entire line is gone.”

Several of the commanders and trusted advisors look around as though they’re hoping someone else will make sense of what’s happening. Even the dragons carved into the white stone walls of King’s Keep feel like they’re watching intently and holding their breath to hear what happens now.

“I don’t understand, Your Majesty, how could all the Relacours be dead? An attack on that scale is unfathomable,” Commander Zeir argues, and all eyes turn to my father.

King Noctis’s face is carefully blank, but I can tell by the way he’s tapping lightly on the table that he’s more disturbed than he’s letting on. Foreboding skitters down my back, and I sit up straighter in my chair.

Was Ever’s treachery worse than I thought?

We suspected there might be other Syphons, that she wasn’t as alone as she claimed. But to have the ability, the reach, to kill that many Arcs in one night is a different kind of threat altogether.

Instead of answering Zeir’s question, my father focuses his attention on the holoscreen floating in the middle of the table. “Thank you, Commander. Return to Four Tiers and await new orders,” he asserts calmly . . . too calmly.

My stomach drops and I realize my father is not in the dark like the rest of us. We may not know how an entire bloodline of magic died in one night, but it’s clear that he does.

The holoscreen displaying Commander Drazyn blinks black and then disappears altogether. My father leans back in his chair and turns to Commander Zeir.

“I have my suspicions about what happened,” he confesses. “But I need to meet with the other Matrons before I can address anything. Until then, we won’t speak about this further.”

Unease swirls through the assembled advisors and commanders, but King Noctis’s word is final. Frustration ferments my insides, but outside, I show nothing but staunch support for my father and his orders.

“Any changes in the status of the gate?” my father asks after a beat, pivoting to the holoscreen framing my brother’s image.

Lorn has his obedient-scion mask in place, but I know my brother, and his gaze tells me he’s just as pissed and desperate to understand what the fuck is happening as I am. His white hair is more disheveled than he normally allows, and his scale armor is dirty, I’m sure from digging through the rubble of the downed barracks in an effort to unearth answers we still don’t have.

“No,” Lorn replies. “All tests and systems checks have come back within normal ranges. Aside from the Matron’s death, Ever made no additional attempts on the security of the gate . . . and she could have; the opportunity was certainly there.”

Several gazes flicker over to me when Lorn says her name. I force myself to ignore it. I won’t let them see how affected I am by something so trivial. It’s just a name. A collection of letters and syllables that meant nothing to me before I met the Syphon, and should mean nothing to me now. Nobody needs to know that I’m clenching my jaw to the point of fracturing it in order to stifle the growl that wants to escape every time I hear her name.

“Have you been able to identify the weapon or magic she used to incapacitate the entire base camp for forty-two minutes?” Khalil, my father’s second-in-command, asks. His magenta scale armor is bright against his copper complexion, and his dark gaze misses nothing as he studies my brother.