Page 239 of Feralheart

Aristus started seizing beneath me.

My father’s ghost would have to wait.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

ERADIN

Help mine, Selira cried in my mind, the words slamming through our bond so hard my vision doubled. Her terror hit me, the kind that came from recognizing something you’d been running from your whole life.

She’d seen what this was before.

They built mouth. Taught the dragons to walk inside. Called it sacred. No one see teeth until too late.

Her claws carved deep lines into the stone.

It will NOT take Aristus. He remembered himself. He chose. Will not let mouth take what remembered self.

Aristus’s body stopped working. He slumped to the ground, Fen clinging to his spine. He slid down the slope, catching on a ledge below us.

My guttural groan rang out.

Aristus continued seizing, his body convulsing beneath Fen, who clung to the neck spike.

They were going to fall.

My knees were already gripping Selira’s sides, my body moving before my brain caught up.

As she flew down toward them, I reached again for the glowing collar that was killing Aristus.

Selira couldn’t get close enough. The angle was wrong, and I knew it, but I jumped anyway.

For one second there was nothing but open air and the canyon yawning below me, the bones so far down they looked like sand. My body understood before my brain did that this was how people died in this place.

Wind screamed past my ears. My belly dropped into my feet, and I was falling, falling…

Fen’s hand shot out, his fingers clamping around my wrist so hard my bones ground together. Pain cut through my fear. He yanked, and momentum slammed me into Aristus’s side hard enough to knock the air from my lungs.

I couldn’t catch my breath. My legs dangled over nothing.

“You’re safe,” Fen growled, his other hand latching onto my tunic. “I’m not letting go.”

I scrambled up, using his body as leverage. He groaned through clenched teeth but didn’t release me, hauling me higher with his injured arm.

I landed in front of him, my back against his chest, both of us clinging to Aristus’s neck spine while the dragon convulsed beneath us.

The collar burned brighter.

Aristus screamed.

I reached for the metal, intense heat searing through my palms and outward. New blisters formed and popped. The smell of my own burning flesh seared the back of my throat.

But my magic recognized this thing the way it did an infection.

Splinter. Foreign object. Expel.

The scale necklace burned against my chest. One shed scale, warm with something that hadn’t faded since the day she’d dropped it in the mud and waited to see what I’d do with it.

I pressed my palm over it.