Faron’s lips parted—for an insult or an excuse, she had no idea which—but Reeve kissed any potential words out of her mouth. One hand settled on her lower back, pulling her against the firm line of his body, and the other cupped the side of her face tenderly. In both cases, his touch was light, easy for her to break, if that was what she wanted. But it wasn’t. What she wanted was this.
Him.
Faron had always thought—well, notalways, but always—thatReeve would kiss the same as he read: careful, focused, thorough. Instead, hedevouredher with an all-consuming passion he could barely restrain. She didn’t know where to put her hands so that they wouldn’t be in the way. They settled on his shirt, fingers digging in as if that would give her some measure of control. But Reeve just kissed her harder, and her thoughts splintered in a thousand directions until she was nothing but a single nerve awash in sensations. His soft hair. His gasping breaths. His hot mouth. The smell of him, ink and spice and sweat.
Her toes curled in her shoes. She rocked upward to slide her arms around his neck, and he said her name in a way he’d never said it before, and she exhaled a sound that made his arms tighten around her and—
“Vincent!”
Faron ripped herself away from Reeve with a gasp. Jordan Simmons glowered at them as if they were lizards in his kitchen and he couldn’t decide which one of them to kill first.
“Get,” he snapped, “in the godsdamned drake.”
Her heart was racing as she hurried up the ramp, and her lips seemed to tingle with the phantom touch of Reeve’s fiery kiss. Jordan’s glower meant nothing to her in the face of her sudden fear of Reeve’s reaction. Every part of her wanted to forget her mission and kiss him again, but it had been her first kiss. She’d been clumsy and unpracticed, and what if he’d hated it?
When she did finally turn, Reeve was watching her with those storm cloud eyes, a thin line of vivid blue around wide, dark pupils, his mouth so very, very red. And she’d done that to him. That look was forher. Pride twined with the heat in her blood as the ramp lifted until she could no longer see him. Only once the door hadsealed with a hiss did Faron finally stop smiling—and only then because she was sure she looked like a fool.
Before she’d taken more than two steps toward the deck, however, Jordan grabbed her arm to stop her. “You may have them fooled, but Iknowyou’re up to something. You’re always up to something,” he hissed.
Faron beamed. “Want to play dominoes and see if you can win your rayes back?”
Jordan considered this. Then he let her go. “Deal.”
Valor landed on the abandoned farmland that surrounded the road out of Deadegg, long cleared as a makeshift landing strip by the queen.
“We need to be in the air after no more than three hours,” Wayne told her as he lowered the exit ramp. “We’ll run maintenance on Valor until you get back.”
“Three hours,” Jordan shouted from his cockpit. “Don’t make me come get you.”
Faron ignored him and stepped out onto the road. Deadegg slumbered before her like a lazy cat in the sun, a huddle of mismatched, multicolored buildings made of weatherworn concrete and aging wood, and she lost track of the time before she was crossing the town line.
As she walked through the familiar streets of her hometown, she was suddenly reminded of her race against Jordan. That had been an entire lifetime ago, and yet she was tracing the same path. The dull gray scales of the dragon egg in the center of the town still rose above everything like a lonely guard, drawing the eye.
Everything had changed and yet nothing had changed.
Okay, Gael, Faron reached out.Where are you?
He appeared to her easily, still inhumanly beautiful. “Empyrean.”
“It’s the egg, isn’t it?” Her gaze was drawn to it again, to the way the sunlight glanced off it in rainbow prisms that hurt her eyes to look at directly. “It’s the only thing that makes sense, the only thing we wouldn’t get near—or, if we did, the only thing we wouldn’t be able to move or destroy. The egg is the entrance to the Empty.” Her gaze slid back to him. “Isn’t it?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Gael said, that familiar charm wrapped around his words like chocolate dripping slowly down a bowl. He stepped closer to her, close enough that she could almost feel his warmth, close enough that her world narrowed down to her and him and the dark bargain she was poised to fulfill her end of. “Are you sure about this?”
Her shoulders tensed. “You don’t think I can do it?”
“I know you can.” Gael’s fingers tipped her chin up. His smile was a drawn weapon. “I’ve always known you can.”
She moved away from his touch, artificial and manipulative where Reeve’s had been right and real. His influence was harder to detangle herself from, but she just had to stick to her plan, and everything would be okay. “Swear to me you are who you say you are. Swear it.”
“I swear.” Gael sounded amused. “Good luck, Empyrean.”
And then he disappeared, leaving her with a straight shot toward the dragon egg that had always been in the center of the town square.
It was midday in Deadegg, when Irie’s sun burned the brightest, roasting the air until it rippled. On a normal day, Faron would bein the school building, or maybe loitering around the yard buying a bag juice or a freeze pop to compensate for the overwhelming heat. Instead, she wandered through the anemic crowd gathered in the square. The road curved to the left and right of the dragon egg, but everyone was giving it a wide berth, anyway. It was only the children who were ever stupid enough to touch the wall or climb the egg.
Faron couldn’t seem to drag her eyes away the closer she got to the mottled silver shell. It felt as if the egg had a presence of its own and were calling to her, asking her to come closer, daring her to climb it like she had so many times before. She resisted the urge, studying it critically. What was the best way to crack it open? Did she even crack it open, or did she try to lift it?
“Break it,” she heard Gael’s seductive voice whisper in her ear.
