On the ground, chaos erupts. Syndicate operatives swarm from positions behind the standing stones. I catch glimpses of the Brotherhood engaging them—Declan's massive black wolftears through two operatives while Kian's tiger form intercepts a third. The syndicate came prepared for war.
Mikhail breaks free from Finn's grip. He wheels toward me, phoenix fire building in his open beak. The flames hit my scales and pain explodes across my left wing—not the searing agony of true burns, but the sharp warning that dragon scales can only withstand so much concentrated heat.
I breathe my own fire in response. The dragon instinct guides the attack, showing me how to superheat the air, how to focus the flames into a lance instead of a spray. Mikhail dodges but I'm already adjusting trajectory, forcing him lower, driving him toward the crashing waves exactly like Finn ordered.
He's burning through energy, and I can see it in the way his phoenix fire dims slightly between attacks, the way each transformation takes fractionally longer. But he's still powerful—centuries of preparation and ritual sacrifices have made him more than a normal phoenix shifter.
A scream cuts through the storm and I bank hard. I see one of Grayson's bears engulfed in phoenix fire. The burning doesn't just kill the shifter—the body doesn't fall so much as disintegrate, leaving nothing but ash that the rain washes away.
Rage erupts through our connection as the pack's collective fury slams into him. Another scream tears through the air as a tiger burns to nothing under Mikhail's flame.
Shifters dying. Clan and pack members lost fighting to protect Moira, to protect Stormhaven, to protect me.
Finn's fury ignites with enough heat to rival dragon fire.
In my head, I hearThis ends now.
Finn shifts mid-flight, human form appearing as his dragon dissolves into silver mist. But instead of falling, he angles his trajectory, arms outstretched, aiming for Mikhail's back. He catches a small dagger thrown to him by someone on the ground. The phoenix doesn't even notice Finn until it's too late.
He lands with both feet between Mikhail's wings and drives his blade deep into the joint where feather meets bone. The phoenix screams and shifts to human out of pure reflex. Both men plummet toward the ocean, trailing blood and smoke.
I dive.
The scientist in me calculates terminal velocity, wind resistance, the angle needed to intercept Finn's fall without breaking his spine on impact. The dragon just moves, instinct and love combining into pure focus.
I catch him before he hits the water. His weight settles across my back and his grim satisfaction matches mine. Mikhail crashes into the waves below us, disappearing beneath churning surf.
We plunge after him.
The ocean closes over my head and the world transforms. Storm sounds muffle into dull roaring. Pressure builds against my eardrums as we descend. Lightning illuminates underwater spaces in brief flashes that show Mikhail swimming deeper, blood trailing from his wounded shoulder in dark ribbons that disperse into the current.
Mikhail shifts. Phoenix form erupts underwater and everything about it looks wrong. Fire fights against physics, flames guttering and sparking, turning water to steam that rises in bubbles. The combustion strains against natural law, battling to exist in an environment designed to extinguish it. Mikhail's desperation shows in every flicker of those impossible flames.
I studied these waters before coming to Skara—bathymetric maps, research papers, satellite thermal imaging of the vents. But that's not what guides me now. Through our connection, Finn's knowledge floods in—millennia of swimming these depths, hunting these channels, knowing every thermal vent and current pattern the way I know lab equipment. His territory. His home. And now, through the bond, mine too.
Finn releases his grip on my back and shifts—two dragons now, circling Mikhail in the deep water where his phoenix fire can't burn properly. The choreography happens without words. The bond carries tactical information faster than speech. I lead, he follows, both of us moving through the water with the kind of coordination that comes from being perfectly synchronized.
Dragon forms aren't designed for underwater combat, but we're stronger than Mikhail here—heavier, more stable. He has to fight against buoyancy and water resistance with every movement while we use our weight to dive deeper, to control the battlefield.
I lead the way, navigating by borrowed memory and dragon senses I'm still learning to trust. The thermal vent is close. The temperature gradient shifts, the water warming as we descend. And there, glowing faintly in the darkness, the algae bloom I've studied in journals but Finn has seen countless times.
Mikhail sees it too. He shifts to human, swimming with desperate speed toward the surface. But Finn cuts off that escape route, his dragon form blocking the ascent. Mikhail has two choices—face two dragons in open water or risk the algae field.
He chooses the field.
Phoenix form erupts again and his fire touches the first concentration of bioluminescent algae. The organisms flash brilliant blue green, exactly as I expected. The cascading light should create disorientation, maybe buy us a few seconds.
Instead, the bloom detonates.
I wasn't expecting that. The algae reacts to the phoenix fire in ways that have nothing to do with normal bioluminescence. A pressure wave scatters outward, combined with forces I don't have vocabulary for. Impact hits my scales like a physical blow, rattling my teeth. Mikhail's phoenix form flickers and gutters like a flame in high wind. Pieces of his magical signature scatter across the water.
Finn's surprise mirrors mine, but also satisfaction—whatever just happened, it's working.
Mikhail's regenerating. I can see it happening through the dissipating light, flesh knitting back together, phoenix magic pulling his form stable again despite the disruption. He's swimming for the surface with renewed strength, wings propelling him upward despite the wounded shoulder.
If one algae bloom disrupted him, maybe another will finish the job.
I breathe dragon fire directly into the secondary algae concentration.
