“We’re trapped—”
*We’re safe together.*She wrapped his hands in hers and closed her eyes.
Ice exploded all around them. Darkness sucked in. Not the comforting half-world of the shadows, but cold, unfeeling reality.
She kissed him, and their mate bond burned white-hot.
Francine gasped against his lips, in the last breath left to them—and he stepped with her into a new world.
Magic wrapped around them, a shape like a nautilus, a cone shell driving down into the ice and the frozen earth.
Francine’s voice was in his ear, his mind, his heart.
“If nobody writes down a thing,” she said, “it’s because they don’t need to. You don’t describe how to breathe. Every dragon and every one of their fated mates who came here knew how the enchantment holding this world together was made.”
“Why didn’t I?”
He saw, or imagined, her eyes fill with love and understanding. The soft emotions she never let herself feel onher own behalf. “Did you want to?” she asked gently. “Knowing how to fix this meant there would be a way out.”
A way out.
A way to stay alive. A way tohaveto stay alive, to face everything that was coming. A lifetime of knowing he had failed his sister and her mate. A lifetime where his little spitfire niece was alive, hatched and safe and happy and so powerful she had tracked him across the globe, and it was his fault her parents were dead.
“A lifetime where you get to see her grow up,” Francine said, magic dancing like a constellation around them. “A lifetime with—”
She hesitated, and in that hesitation, his heart almost broke.
“With me,” she said, brusque, running away from the sentiment the moment she expressed it. “If that’s what you want—”
“It’s what I want above everything.”
They kissed, and the world came back into being all around them. The fortress, whole and comforting, and within it, dozens of specks of life.
He hadn’t needed to die. He hadn’t needed to rain death upon the invaders. They were alive.
He and Francine were alive.
The Soul-Eater turned. Its monstrous eyes sharpened, focusing in on them. It stalked forwards on legs that bent the wrong way, spider-like, if spiders broke and reformed their bodies second by second.
And ice swirled around it, trapping it once again.
“No! This can’t be happening!” Eloise’s snarl cut through the whirl of magic. “If I can’t control you, no one will!”
“Stop her!” Francine shouted, but it was too late.
The explosion destroyed everything. The enchantment was too new, the rock and ice still too close to the surface. Magic stretched, forced to its limit to keep them safe within the blast.
And then it broke.
The last safe place of the shadow dragons’ ancient fortress was the first to be destroyed. Julian held his mate close as death came for them.
Then through the plunging waves, a nightmare rose from the depths to pluck them from the chaos.
45
Francine
Someone was biting her toe.
