Page 122 of Feralheart

I counted breaths to keep from screaming. One. Two. Three.

As she flew, Selira’s talons scraped across stone. The tunnel walls were closing in or we were expanding. My throat tightened along with them. The darkness had weight, pressing down on my chest until breathing became a choice I had to deliberately make.

Four. Five.

Selira’s certainty pulsed through the bond. She’d flown in darkness before. Wild dragons didn’t need torchlight to hunt.

Six.

The ceiling expanded, disappearing upward to an impossible height. I could feel it more than see it, the way sound ricocheted off a smooth surface and kept going and going until it faded into something older than sounds should be.

Silver light bloomed ahead.

We burst onto a shore made up of black sand littered with chunks of white. Ahead, a lake stretched impossibly wide, its surface as silver as a mirror, reflecting nothing.

Selira landed on the shore, her claws gouging deep into the sand. The others crowded around us, their dragons blasting flames and clawing at each other in agitation.

Feels wrong, Selira said.

Lord Callix didn’t slow. He and his dragon abandoned their team, racing from the shore, skimming above the water. His dragon’s wing-tip kissed the surface, and something below moved, peeling away and snapping upward. It oozed up the dragon’s black scales in a silver frost. Except frost didn’t crackle and creak.

The dragon’s wings locked mid-beat. Its mouth opened, but instead of flames or a roar, nothing came out. Everything that made the creature alive had stopped.

Lord Callix angled sideways to fling himself off the dragon, but the lake was faster. The mass crept up his leg, his torso, reaching his face as his mouth opened to release a scream that never came.

They fell, hitting the surface, sinking without a splash, sucked down.

The lake smoothed over and stilled.

Silence descended on the shore as we gaped at the area where Lord Callix and his dragon had lost their lives.

My breakfast crawled up my throat, but I swallowed down the bile.

I couldn’t look away from where they’d disappeared. Couldn’t stop waiting for them to surface, even though I knew dead things didn’t swim.

Selira watched the other dragons. All broken. Teeth on inside instead of outside. Her nostrils flared. No fire. Cold, not heat.

Forty-four elite riders now. Four commons.

While the rest of the elites clustered on the right side of the shore, my team urged their dragons closer to Selira, our eagerness to survive overriding any urge to cross. Instinct knew death when it tasted it.

“We stay together,” Reece said. “Watch each other’s backs.” His voice came out steady even though his hands twitched enough to make his reins click together.

“Good idea,” Lyndie said from my right side. “We’re a team.” She urged her dragon closer to the elites, her smile ghoulishly bright. When her head cocked, I realized she was listening to their discussion. Spying.

Kerrel kept jerking on his dragon’s reins, to the point the beast backed into the wall we’d emerged from. His face had gone green-gray, and I imagined mine looked the same.

The elite teams didn’t wait long. It was a race, after all, and they hoped to win prizes at the end of this first leg. They pushed forward in groups, perhaps hoping to overwhelm the lake with numbers and speed.

A ruby dragon and rider took the lead for her team, flying high.

Mist swirled off the lake, rushing up to meet them. The silver liquid that had killed Callix had aerosolized. It hung above the surface in droplets fine enough to breathe. The dragon’s nostrils flared, pulling it in deep the way dragons did before flaming.

I could almost see the liquid hardening inside the poor creature.

Stone took the dragon from the inside. The rider’s scream died before it started. She yanked on the reins, and magic flared in the runes etched along the harness’s surface.

“Fly,” she bellowed, trying to force her dragon to keep going.