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“No, no!” she wailed, crouching lower with every press of the bell.
“Wesley,” I called. “Is everyone out?”
Ding! Ding!
He nodded and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Just those left in the cellar!”
Good. That was good. I caught Zee’s gaze and held it.
Ding! Ding!
This was it . . . the moment of truth.
Zee nodded, poofed onto the stairs, and grabbing Wesley’s arm, dragged him around the wailing, crippled Stephanie and out the front doors.
Now it was just me and her.
Dragon and fae.
Fire and ice.
She was down, kneeling, panting, but it wouldn’t last.
Exhaling hard, I teetered on the edge of control . . . and then dropped all the reins, shifting out of my human skin. Power sizzled. Ice steamed. The foyer shrank around me, closing in, crushing tight like the ducts I’d crawled through. Wood and brick snapped. The chandelier shattered over my scales, and its glass rained off my neck.
Stephanie got smaller and smaller as I grew taller and larger, filling every available inch.
“How dare you, dragon! How dare you come into my home. You are just like the others, just like all of your kind. Selfish, vicious bullies—”
I’d heard enough.
Snorting through my nose, I summoned heat inside my chest, stoking it, holding it back under pressure. Hotter and hotter it burned as she raged and accused me of all the things my kind were known for. And she wasn’t wrong. But I’d stopped caring when I’d learned she’d tricked us. I’d stopped caring when I’d realized the truth of her, and how she’d been imprisoning people for centuries. She’d even wronged her beloved. True love wasn’t trapping someone in ice, it was letting them go when it was time.
Her kind gave Lost Ones a bad name.
And her hotel didn’t deserve a single star.
“Do it,” Tom Collins said from somewhere nearby. I couldn’t see him, but he’d be in the wires somewhere. He’d be fine during what came next.
The fire churned and boiled and Stephanie flung her fist into the air, shaking it at me, cursing me, even as her ice wilted around her.
She might have been the Frostweaver, but I was Mydros, the last of my kind . . . sort of, and Hero of San Francisco. I would not walk away from anyone needing help.
I opened my jaws and unleashed a blast of flame.
CHAPTER 16
As I’d said to Zee, as dragon I was not a precision weapon. Fire consumed everything in front of me. The blast of heat and flame tore off the front of the hotel and flung it, scorched and burning, across the snow-laden street.
Then I kept right on burning until all the air in my dragon lungs was gone and I could be sure Frostweaver was ash.
When I stopped, a strange, soft kind of peace fell over the hotel and me. A few broken floorboards fell from above and clattered to the scorched hotel tiles. With a huff, I plodded through the giant hole I’d made, shook bits of glass and debris off my scales, and searched for my friends and partners.
There, gathered together in a small group down the street, stood the hotel guests, with Zee and Wesley among them.
“Whoohoo!” Zee cheered.
The others chimed in too, and my withered dragon heart swelled. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t the bad dragon my whole family had made me out to be. Maybe I’d always been the only good one, and that was why they’d all wanted me gone.
