Pain and power wracked his body, and Valentine gripped the earth as claws burst free from his hands. Owain shouted something to Emyr, but he couldn't hear them. His vision was awash with red and black threads of power. His scream turned into a roar, and wings burst free from his back.
"Follow..." he growled out to Owain and let the dragon take control of the shift. A ridge of spikes burst along the spine of his serpentine body, and he opened his mouth and roared as loudly as he could in a final burst of pain and rage.
Valentine's mind cleared and focused. He rose into the air, wings beating, and his black scales making him almost invisible in the dark sky. His glowing red eyes could make out the connection still binding him to the female dragon, the one he needed to find.
He wouldn't fail her. He would free her from her cage.
And then he would kill every single creature that laid a finger on her.
Through ice,blood, and bone, the dragon that was Yelena felt the echo of Valentine's first change reverberate through the magical currents of the world.
Her pale, frozen lips twisted slowly into a smile.
They had wanted the black dragon so badly, and now, they would get exactly what they wished for.
9
There was fire and fury and magic. Valentine barely held on to his mind as the dragon hunted with senses he didn't understand. He didn't need to. It wanted freedom, and he was too tired to fight it anymore.
He could still feel the binding sigil holding in places, but it wasn't time to let the magician in him examine it. The dragon had only one goal in its head, and it wasn't going to stop until it got satisfaction.
Owain and Emyr were trying to communicate with him, their warning attempts bouncing uselessly off the walls in his mind.
Valentine could smell blood in the air and too many bodies camped together. Lights were burning beneath him. The dragon dove, a dark shadow, death from above. It landed in front of the gates of the fortress and blasted the doors with fire. Arrows and spears pinged uselessly from his scales, and he tore the smouldering mass of wood and stone apart.
Emyr swooped into the courtyard and plucked Avallach and the post he was attached to clean out of the ground and flew him to safety. Valentine unleashed fire bomb after fire bomb on the courtyard, ripping tents and toppling towers.
He flapped his wings and landed on the walls. A fae was trying to pull an unconscious, frozen woman from a cage. Valentine's razor-sharp claws snatched up the fae male in one quick swipe.
Magic burned his paw as the fae changed into a bear, then a wolf, then a snake. Valentine squeezed until it became a fae once more. He lifted it and sniffed. There was a rotting hand hanging by a piece of rope around its neck. Valentine knew who it had once belonged to.
He snarled, and his jaws closed around the fae. Bones and blood crushed against his teeth until the screaming stopped, and he swallowed.
We need to get her out of that cage, Valentine prompted the dragon. Without having to beg, the dragon let go, and they shifted back into the form of a man. His clothes hung off him in useless scraps, but he closed in on the cage. It was the same as the one he had seen in his dreams.
Threads of Valentine's magic curled around the spelled bars. The wards on them tried to fight back, but they were useless against his single-minded fury. The bars of the cage door melted away, and Valentine tore them free.
The body was still covered in ice, but he knew she was only sleeping.
Valentine's hands heated with the dragon inside of him, and he lifted the female from out of the cage. She was frozen, but her limbs weren't in a state of rigor mortis.
"I'll have to ask how you do that," Valentine whispered. He ignored the cold burning his arms and chest as he carried Yelena down the ruined stairs of the walls, through the still blazing courtyard, and out of the hole he created in the walls.
Owain and Emyr had shifted to their fae forms and were freeing Avallach's unconscious body from the post.
"We need to get them to the healers," Emyr said, carefully avoiding eye contact with Valentine.
He growled and held Yelena closer. "Mag Argatnél is not safe for her."
"It will be if you are there," Owain tried to reason. "They both need help that we can't give them out here."
Valentine stepped back from them, cradling the girl closer to him.
"Listen, you dumb lizard, we aren't going to take her from you!" Emyr snapped. "How about we get them to Mag Argatnél, and then Charlotte can come and help us heal them? We can keep them safe, and you trust your sister, don't you?"
Valentine's human side pushed the dragon down a little further. "Only Charlotte. We go now."
He held out a hand, and the threads of his power burst from his fingers. They wove an archway, and with a push from his dragon side, the gap between it tore apart. The white and gray halls of the dragon stronghold appeared between its pillars.
