Her jaw tensed. No. She couldn’t bring a child into that place. The fortress meant to protect her and all the other shadow dragons could turn into her tomb.
“You didn’t bring a jacket for the hatchling?” she sniffed as her brain whirred. Her thoughts had caught on something without her noticing—connecting dots she hadn’t even seen. Something to do with the fortress being built to protect—and more than that. A place of comfort. A city-fortress made for a people who had exiled themselves to the edges of the world—a place made with love.
All those useless stories she’d glazed over in the shadow dragons’ records. The one constant she’d read was the excitement of the shadow dragons’ mates at becoming part of that world. The way the magic had made them part of something.
Something they had only mentioned obliquely, never written down in detail, because if they wrote it down, someone who wasn’t meant to know about it might use it against them.
Someone whocouldn’tknow about it, the way they knew.
“You try to put her in a jumper and see how easy it is,” Mathis grumbled. “And watch out. She bites.”
Julian said that once the shadow dragons brought their mates back to the fortress, some of the dragons’ magic transferred to them.
She gritted her jaw, making up her mind, and met Lance’s eyes.
“Julian will do anything to prevent the Soul-Eater from being freed. If he dies in there, so will everyone else. “
Lance’s eyes darkened. Francine unwound the golden baby dragon from her neck and passed it to him.
“Give me one of his scales and let me stop him before that happens.”
42
Julian
Back on the ship, he’d frozen in horror after knocking cold a single guard.
There was no time for that now.
He raced to the Soul-Eater’s prison, drawing shadows around him even in the fortress where everything was made of shadows. In his dragon form, lithe and sinuous as a snake, the danger was even clearer.
The explosions as Eloise’s people blasted their way in through the oceanward entrance had done something to the enchantment. He could taste it with every breath, every warning shiver of scales as he pulled in his wings close to his body.
The fabric of the fortress was already tearing.
And it turned out he had lied to Francine. The longer he spent here, the more in tune with the enchantment he became. He couldn’t see how to repair it.
But he could see how to destroy it. The same way he’d torn down Harper’s tower.
He tore it further, scoring deep rips in the enchantment with draconic claws, sending magic crumbling to block off passageways. His senses were changing in other ways, too. There were too many pieces ofhimin the fortress, spreading out, clustered together, and maybe that was affecting the enchantment too. When only Francine had been here wearing one of his scales, it hadn’t felt like this. Like a thousand pieces ofhimstretched out, pinned to a board as the board cracked and split beneath them.
He estimated fifty soldiers had been aboard theQueen of the Pride, counting personal bodyguards and the grim-eyed men and women who’d lurked in the shadows. He counted—maybe fifty, maybe fewer, pinpricks of wrongness in the place he’d once called home.
They were all keeping to the human-sized sections of the fortress, busy fighting one another. The sneering alliances they’d formed on the ship meant nothing when the prize was almost in sight.
All bearing his scales.
If he died, so would they all.
Except the Soul-Eater.
It was the one perfect solution.
Unless the enchantment fell with him.
No. That wouldn’t happen.
The fortress was meant to survive as long as the shadow dragons did. And he wasn’t the last. He’d called to his niece, that bonfire-bright shooting star of a mind that had chased him across the globe. She was out there. Alive. But the way the fortress was crumbling—maybe it wouldn’t survive this.
