“Rude!” Dair called after her. “I was taking care of it!”
“I don’t mind,” I said shakily.
He grinned at me. “So how do you know Fear?”
His eyes were a striking shade of purple, wide with black slits—dragon’s eyes. Then he blinked, and his pupils looked like mine though his irises were still that startling purple.
“Who?”
“The one who brought you to the dance?” he asked, pointing toward where Fieran fought. His wings were still out, flying and fighting the wyrms. He was the only one who’d half-shifted. “Our leader? Fieran?”
“He rescued me,” I said.
“Ah.” He looked disappointed, but barely. He winked at me as if in apology for his reaction. How did he want Fieran and me to know each other? “Well then, I promise you’ll stay rescued.”
“Stop flirting with my mortal and get back in here!” Fieran shouted, landing lightly on the ground between several wyrms.
Dair backed away from me with a mischievous grin and spread his arms wide in a shrug. “What did you do to him, mortal? I have never seen him so possessive.”
Then he was running, launching himself into battle alongside Fieran. He made another impossible leap over the gaping maw of a wyrm who was very interested in eating him, and the two of them closed up back to back, fighting together effortlessly—as if being surrounded by wyrms was part of their strategy.
More wyrms were coming—wriggling through the forest, bursting into the clearing, as if they had all been called here. The ground vibrated under my feet with their movement.
A few of the wyrms launched themselves up, flying toward us. The two dragons soared to meet them, fluttering their powerful wings to hold themselves suspended in the air as they aimed blasts of fire at the wyrms.
“Az, on your left!” Fieran shouted in warning.
The other dragon—this one deep black, bigger, with silver horns curling from his head—was moving before Fieran even finishedspeaking. Several wyrms tried to barrel into him, their mouths open to rip at him, but they couldn’t find purchase on his scales.
Still, they pushed him through the air with the force of their bodies. They were too close for him to breathe fire. I cringed, feeling the shadows of all those enormous bodies crossing over my fragile mortal life.
“Anayla! Get them away from him!” Fieran shouted.
A woman with a scar across her jaw and throat and an elaborate plait of blue hair ran toward where Az was writhing in the air, trying to get the wyrms off him. Maura was brutally dispatching every wyrm who dared leave the ground. I ducked away from half of a falling body, and suddenly Fieran was there, lifting me up in the air.
He’d distracted me—and so had the bits of wyrm raining down around us, thanks to Maura—and so I was surprised when I turned back to the battle to see Anayla riding on Asrael’s back, lightly and easily confident as she kicked and slashed at wyrms. They soared toward the sun until I lost sight of them.
Fieran beamed with pride. “Aren’t they incredible?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer before he set me on my feet again, now that there was no more aerial combat or falling bodies.
Anayla and Az swooped back, and Anayla slid from his back as he dipped low to the earth. The two of them moved in tandem so perfectly.
It had been my mother’s decision to keep me here, far away from the dragon shifters. By the time I understood that she would have been expected to take me to the capital and leave me with strangers to train as a shifter, I hadn’t wanted to leave my sick father, our farm, or my precious baby sister.
But as I watched them move so fluidly, so dangerously, with so much care toward each other as they fought, a sudden well of yearning choked me.
It felt just as deep and dark as the longing I felt for my long-lost magic.
Four
The tall girl with long white-streaked blue hair in an elaborate plait—Anayla—strode over toward me, looking irritated. “Is it just my imagination, or are you covered in wyrm spit?”
“I suppose I am.” I dared another glance down at the gaping wound in my shoulder. I’d been too distracted by my fear of sudden death if the wyrms broke through the warriors surrounding me. I hadn’t been focused on the possibility of death by slowly bleeding out.
But now, the bleeding had all my attention.
“Don’t make her look at it,” a tall man chided her, moving to her side.
