Tate had never seen him that way. Jacob made it out. Battered. Bruised. Scarred. But he’d survived and was feeling his way forward, one day at a time.
It was a very hard thing to find purpose again and a reason for living after what he’d gone through. It was so much easier to give up.
The fact he kept going was something to admire and celebrate, not treat him with useless pity.
“He’s better with the children than I thought he’d be,” Tate admitted.
It had taken a long time for Tate to see behind Blaise’s prickly exterior. He used his thorns to irritate and keep others at arm’s length. Only those he accepted ever saw another side of him. To Tate’s knowledge, that list only consisted of dragon-ridden.
“The children are good for him. They remind him of his brother.”
Tate lifted her eyebrows. She hadn’t known he had a sibling. Not surprising, really. There was a lot she still didn’t know about Blaise—or any of them really.
They’d had centuries to accumulate experiences and history while she’d only been in their orbit for a short time.
For beings as long lived as they, sometimes the memories weren’t a pleasurable place to visit—
especially when most of the people you once knew were already dead.
“They were twins.” Jacob’s eyes landed on Tate. “That year the signs said there were multiple dragons crossing the rift. They went to the rift together to see if they were compatible.”
“Only one of them took the bond?”
Jacob shook his head. “No. They both gained a dragon.”
Tate’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. From the sorrow on his face, she could tell the twin was no longer in this world.
“Blaise survived his first change so did Bell. For a time, we thought they’d both make it. It didn’t take long before we saw how wrong we were.”
“What happened?”
“He went mad.” Jacob’s smile was pained. “Blaise was forced to put him down.”
A horrified quiet fell between them.
That was an even worse outcome than Tate thought it would be. She couldn’t imagine how difficult it would have been to end the life of someone you’d shared a womb with. Just thinking of having to face that decision with Night or Dewdrop opened a pit in the bottom of her stomach. It was no wonder Blaise was slow to warm up to strangers. A loss like that marked a person.
Jacob pushed off the pillar, coming to standing. “That’s why the children are so important. He sees his brother in them. Saving them is the same as being able to save Bell. They have to survive.”
Tate nodded slowly, holding his serious gaze with her own.
She’d always known each of the dragon-ridden saw the children as something to be protected, but now she saw how deep that instinct ran. Blaise saw his brother in them. Jacob, a chance at redemption for wrongs he wasn’t responsible for. Even Thora wasn’t as impartial as he pretended. He, more than anyone, knew the loneliness and sorrow that came with this existence.
The dragon-ridden were eternal. They didn’t age. The only way they died was if something killed them.
The children gave them hope amid a lifetime of hard choices and lost loved ones. Losing them would leave behind a wound that Tate didn’t think they’d ever fully heal from.
It wouldn’t be the first time they’d suffered such a wound, and Tate very much feared for the older among them. Thora especially. For all his age and strength, he was fragile in this aspect.
It was why he’d been so reluctant to even try to save them at first. Sometimes it was harder to hope and have that hope stolen from you than to give up from the beginning.
“Tell me about the dragon slayer,” Tate said in a serious voice.
Now more than ever, she needed to understand what about the woman so upset the rest. Only then could she know how much of a threat George presented and whether that threat needed to be eliminated.
Jacob studied Tate with a thoughtful expression, seeming to come to a decision. “Georgiana Rosewood is only the latest to take up the station of dragon slayer.”
“I’m going to assume her task is to kill dragon-ridden who step out of line,” Tate said.
