He thought he had me. He thought he won.
I swallowed hard, fighting down the fire that threatened to escape. It was like that. Always. The fire alive, working inside me with a will of its own.
I struggled, writhing beneath him, attempting to buck him off. His hand wrapped around my thick braid that coiled like a serpent in the dirt where I sprawled. His grip tight on the rope of my hair, he banged my head once, twice, against the ground.
My vision flashed with spots of varying colors. For a moment the world went black, and I lost view of his face. I blinked, clearing my sight, fighting for focus.
He was certain he had beaten me. I saw that in the fiery gleam of his eyes, the smug curl of his lips. He was wrong.
I was not the same whipping girl who had first joined them.
I was many things I wasn’t a year ago.
I was tougher. Smarter. Pain did that to you. Loss. It taught you things. You either withered away and died or survived it. Grew. Got better. Stronger. Became hard where you once were all soft underbelly.
I went limp beneath him, my arms falling slack at my sides, fingers opening like the unfurling of petals. Delicate. Vulnerable. A tender throat exposed to the rushing blade.
The rigidity eased from him, the heavy weight of his body letting up. His hold on my hair loosened, his grip no longer a vise.
“You got her!” the girl crowed from somewhere nearby.
He chuffed in triumph, sitting back, still atop me but not quite so crushing.
I sprang then, flipping him off me as I bounded to my feet.
The girl gaped, and I sent her to the ground with a kick to the face before she could think to react. A collective groan went up from the onlookers.
I turned to finish off the boy, but he was already on his feet, fists clenched in vibrating fury. His eyes flashed fire, pupils thinning to vertical slits, and it was signal enough for me. I knew what was coming.
I dove out of the way as a stream of fire erupted from him, exploding past my head, incinerating wisps of my hair that had floated loose from my braid.
I hit the dirt and rolled, the fire still coming for me, a hungry, devouring serpent, a ceaseless, blasting stream on the air, singeing my flesh. My face stung, my ear blazing hot.
Suddenly a new body was there, a streak of wind bursting into the ring.
Gasping, I rolled to a stop, the heat gone, no longer blistering the air—or me.
I watched as an even bigger body collided with my attacker, knocking him off his feet, dousing his fire with a sudden rush of icy mist that rolled off him in waves. Then he was bending over the boy on the ground, the long strands of his moonbeam hair pulled back into a single leather band, offering an unfettered view of his brutally handsome face, the sharp line of his jaw, the frosty gray of his eyes stabbing cold.
Damn it all. That face. Fell’s face. And yet not. But so alike. The resemblance crashed into me, a punch to the gut, robbing me of my breath every time I looked at him. I hated it. Hated it.Hatedit.
Not Fell.
Vetr.
“Enough,” he proclaimed, the word a thunderous shout, reverberating off the cave walls all around us.
Vetr was formidable even without the title of alpha. He was a shader. Like Fell. Not that Fell had ever realized that. He had not been given a chance to explore that side of himself, to know he possessed the ability to shade air and minds alike.
The fog that always seemed to be around Fell and his warriors in the Borg—even in the chamber with us during our bedding ceremony—had come from Fell. It was him all along.Hispower,hisdragon talent. Magic was in our blood. Every dragon possessed it—some more than others.
The boy on the ground suddenly didn’t look quite so large and intimidating, cowering in the shadow of the pride’s alpha. “W-what did I do, Vetr?”
Vetr seized him by the throat, leaning down until they were nose to nose. “I said there would be no fire. Did you not understand my instructions? Was I not clear, Nayden?” Vetr swept his glare over everyone then—a dozen spectators avidly watching the unfolding drama.
They had all been waiting for the match to end so that they could take their turns in the ring, but this current display captured their attention. Everyone nodded in response to the question posed to Nayden. Even Kerstin, still breathing heavily with exertion, now sitting up on the ground where I had kicked her down. She patted her nose as though verifying that it was still there on her face, and then she sent me an audacious wink that seemed to say:You got me good. Nayden glanced around wildly, his normally copper-hued skin burning bright red, almost the exact shade of his hair—a reddishgold not so very unlike my own hair. Clearly the lack of support from the rest of the pride embarrassed him.
“It is not fair,” he cried, sounding very much like a lad of fifteen then. Perhaps he was even younger. I was not certain. There were twenty-nine members of the pride, but I had not committed their full biographies to memory. “Why can we not use our talents? Should we not use everything available to us? All our abilities in a fight?”
