Myth’s nostrils flared, but I jerked forward, standing.No, don’t,I urged him, silently.Whatever happens, you can’t use your flame.
If we passed this test, which we would, we still had a chance.
But not if he revealed his flame.
Myth’s chest shrank, and he angled his face away as the man circled around to where Myth’s tail was shackled to the concrete. He lunged in and dug the pliers into Myth’s flesh.
The pain I felt knocked me straight to the ground.
Searing in my chest, my blood, my breath, was his pain.
I clutched at my throat. Couldn’t breathe. The sounds of his agony filled the arena. The man pulled on the pliers until a scale was bent upward, out of place, and iridescent blood poured onto the ground.
“Stop!” I shouted, getting to my feet. My knees were stained with the dirt of the arena.
Myth growled but did not fight.
The man stepped away from Myth, his tail still bleeding, scale bent to a sharp angle. Myth tried to turn around, to sniff at his wound, but his movement jerked against the chains.
The man sauntered back to the table, set down the bloodied pliers, and picked up a syringe. His gaze flicked to me, and in his eyes was a disturbing emptiness, like he was a husk of a man, a puppet.
When the syringe pierced Myth’s skin where the scale had been bent, I almost blacked out. There was confusion, pain, disorientation. Horrifying mental images swam before my open eyes. I tried to pick my feet up, afraid the ghostly hands reaching up from the ground would swallow me, but the wooden chair was unstable, and I ended up toppling backward.
Myth howled.
His screams were going to break my bones.
In my mind, I now saw stretches and stretches of ocean. Then people, dozens of them, faces I didn’t know but thought looked familiar. These people raced past me, as if I didn’t exist. The hallucinations shifted, and I saw the walls of Cardan Lott.
The forest.
Flowers in rapid bloom.
Blood.
And my face.
When I saw myself, I stopped rocking on the ground and scrambled to grasp the back of the toppled chair. My eyes turned to Myth. He was panting, breathing so fast his chains rattled, but he was otherwise entirely still. Then I could see the arena, and me, lying in the dirt, clutching the back of a fallen wooden chair.
“Myth,” I wept. “I’m right here.”
A snort escaped his nose that blasted dirt across the arena floor.
“I’m right here.”
The man with the syringe had returned to his table. When he moved, this time, he came toward me.
With a clammy hand, he pulled me up by my arm. He looked into my eyes, tugging at my eyebrows and twisting my face back and forth. Then, with a jerk, he grabbed my hand and bent one finger back until it hurt. I yelped.
Myth surged against his chains so violently I thought they might break.
Though he didn’t flinch, the man beside me looked at my dragon. He released my finger.
Whatever they do to me, don’t flame, I commanded Myth.We will pass this; it will end.
The man then took another syringe and jammed it in my arm.
When I collapsed, he was ready to ease me to the ground. But as soon as my body was lying motionless on the dirt, he turned toward Myth, eyes expectant.
