I'm coming, Ruby. Hold on for me.
No response. Not even a flicker along our bond, and with each second of silence, the fear inside of me grew.
Hundreds of Stratford residents lingered around the barrier, preparing for an attack. They gasped as I sprinted past, having never seen me in my hybrid dragon state before.
If Justice wasn't okay, it would probably be the only way they saw me.
This was my beast’s compromise so that we had a greater range of movement to help Justice if needed.We must protect her.
When I burst through the barrier, I skidded to a halt on the other side, my breathing harsh.What the fuck…?
Everything was red, the way it had been in Faerie when the curse covered the jeweled lands. I couldn't see how far back it went, but I saw enough to know that at least a mile was now ruby.
Moving hurriedly, I searched for Justice, trying to feel her through our bond.
"What happened here?" Louis was beside me, having just popped through the barrier, followed by the others.
"Justice must have spelled them with the same ruby curse that covered her lands.”
That was what drained her, the reason I couldn’t feel her through our bond. A spell like that would have taken an exponential level of power.
“I’ll help you search,” was all he said.
We moved forward in the eerie silence, just the footsteps of my pack behind us.
The longer we searched, the more frustrated I grew, until my dragon was roaring in my head. A flicker of power from about twenty feet away drew me forward, and I only paused when Louis barked out, "Don't touch it! That's the talisman that caused the barrier to become infected. It's been frozen, in a manner, even if the rubies don't cover it."
I looked closer at the red figure with the visible pendant.
"President Caine," I rumbled. "Bastard met his match in my mate—"
"Justice!" Grace's scream cut me off and I spun to find her crouched beside another blob of ruby. I got to her side in seconds to find Justice perfectly entombed in rubies, her face lifeless and serene beneath the red.
Unlike the humans, I could see her face perfectly, like the gems wanted to leave a shrine behind.
Grace's face was swollen and tearful when she lifted her head and met my eyes. "What happened to her?"
Only her face was visible, so it was impossible to tell why Justice had been taken over by her own spell. “I don’t know. I blocked her out as soon as the shield and our power fell under attack. I was protecting her from the pain, and the possibility we might lose our fight.”
But in doing so I hadn’t felt what was happening when she took on the humans.
"It's like Snow White," Mischa said, and I whipped around to her.
"What do you mean?” I snapped. “What is Snow White?"
She swallowed, looking devastated. "It's a fairytale. She was poisoned and they encased her in a glass tomb. She stayed in a living death for a long time."
"Did she die?"
I wished I could take the question back, because I refused to even accept it as a possibility, but at the same time, I needed to know.
Mischa shook her head. "No, she didn't. The prince woke her with a kiss. True love's kiss."
Jessa snorted. "We don't live in that sort of fairy tale. How do they wake them in the dark ones?"
Mischa looked devastated. "Probably with sex. Or someone else’s death."
Shaking my head, I turned away. Human fairy tales were not going to help us here. I had to use my fucking brain and figure it out. Justice was relying on me.
