Page 133 of Feralheart

The third hit a stone spike jutting up from the lake.

They fell, dragons and humans, landing in liquid that sucked them down.

Selira’s fury crashed over me. Waste. All waste. Could live if⁠—

“You’re right,” I whispered against her neck. “I’m sorry.”

My hands blazed. Heat poured from me into Selira, or from her into me. The lines were climbing, red serpents crawling up my wrists. I could feel them reach my elbows, moving under my skin, a living thing.

Magic called to the mist, and it surged toward us.

I wanted to suppress it, but I’d never learned how.

Selira banked hard left, and I shifted my weight before thought caught up. A tendril lashed through the space where we’d been.

An elite team tried to follow our path, riders crowding each other. Their dragons’ rune-marked tack glowed bright while the creatures screamed.

The mist tracked the light, and all four went down.

Selira’s wail started deep in her chest, vibrating through her body into mine.

I stopped counting the dead when my tally passed twenty. The numbers didn’t matter. They never had. Each death was another name I’d never learn, another family who’d wait in an empty doorway, and another body the system would grind up and call it worthy.

In the Scorching, bloodlines didn’t matter.

Ahead, Fenian and Aristus wove through gaps that closed seconds after they passed. Fenian flowed with his dragon, the reins loose along the dragon’s neck.

A massive thing moved beneath the surface. Bigger than the mist. Older than the lake. It lived here. I sensed it was patient and endless and hungry.

And it hunted.

A ridge of silver-black breached between the bulk of the riders and the far shore.

Fenian and Aristus flew closest to where it surfaced.

A tendril snaked up, snapping toward Aristus’s back leg, reaching for him.

“No,” Fenian bellowed.

He leaned forward, releasing the buckles with the speed that came from doing something so many times, your body knew the pattern even when your brain was screaming.

He shoved the harness off Aristus’s head.

The rune-marked leather dropped away, tumbling through the air, spinning as it dropped toward the silver death below. It hit the mist and dissolved. Years of conditioning, gone in a flash.

Aristus’s body convulsed. His pupils blew wide, then contracted, then widened again like he was remembering something he’d forgotten existed. The tendril near his leg dropped away.

His wings caught air in a new way. The hitch faded, and his flight smoothed into something that looked like joy wearing dragon scales.

Heat burst through my chest.

A few elite riders saw what happened, and they pulled away from him.

Lady Severine flew past him and kept going.

By the time we reached the distant shore, only a few fractured elite teams remained. Twenty-three dragons dead. Twenty-three collared and broken and fed to a watery death because the court demanded it.

And we had to do it again.