Chapter Seventeen
ROXY
The witch’s hands lift, and the air between us fractures. Violet static coils from her fingertips, streaked with dull gold that pulses like a slow heartbeat beneath the surface, the colors bleeding into the space around her until reality itself looks cracked at the edges. Obsidian shadows gather along her wrists, threaded through with amethyst light that moves like living silk, magic so old it presses against the senses instead of being seen.
My chest tightens as those ancient eyes lock onto Raze, and something in her expression shifts, judgment cooling into something sharper, more deliberate, purpose settling over her like a crown she never needed to claim.
“The price…” she says, her voice carrying the weight of millennia, “… is the fire you lost. Returned in full, untempered, exactly as it was before I bound it. United with your frost. You will now contain both. A hybrid dragon of fire and ice, your scales shimmer between molten crimson and frost-bitten silver, steam rising where the elements meet. When you breathe, flames and winter will collide in a storm of ash and crystal.”
Raze goes perfectly still beside me, frost crackling along his jaw as understanding crashes over him. “No. You don’t understand! Ican’tcontrol the fire. Not after three hundred years. It’ll consume—”
“Everything.”The witch’s smile is thin, pitiless. “Yes. Thatisthe point, dragon. You want to keep the human? Then prove you have evolved beyond the monster who burned villages to ash. Prove thatcontentmenthas made you somethingmorethan rage wrapped in scales.”
She doesn’t wait for his agreement.
Her hands move in patterns that leave afterimages burned into my vision, violet and dull gold streaking the air. Obsidian shadows coil around her wrists as symbols that predate language form between her palms, runes flaring amethyst at the edges before sinking into molten amber at their core. The air thickens, heavy and electric, each breath dragging through static while her magic builds, not like a storm rushing in, but like gravity folding tighter around us. When she speaks, the sound isn’t language so much as authority, syllables wrapped in violet fire and threaded with ancient gold, commands etched straight into the bones of reality.
The crystal dome shatters under its weight, exploding outward in a violent bloom of fractured crystal that flashes with her colors as it scatters across the stone like fallen constellations. For a suspended heartbeat, the flame inside hangs free, gold and crimson spiraling upward through lingering streaks of violet light, wild, incandescent, and unbearably alive. Then it slams into Raze’s chest with the force of a battering ram, witchlight collapsing inward with it, gold, violet, and fire folding into his body in a single, devastating surge.
His entire body snaps backward, his spine arching as fire floods through him in a torrent that makes the air scream. Frost erupts from his skin in violent bursts, ice trying desperately to contain the inferno racing through his veins, and the sound that tears from his throat is nothing I’ve heard from him before—relentless, agonized, half roar and half scream—as three centuries of denied power crashes back into a body that has forgotten how to hold it.
“Raze!” I lunge forward, but Scar’s hand closes around my arm with bruising force, yanking me backward as fire explodes outward from Raze’s body in a ring that scorches the stone floor black.
“Stay back!” The vampire’s voice cuts through the chaos with absolute authority. “You get close to him right now, he’ll incinerate you before he even registers you’re there.”
I watch helplessly as Raze’s transformation rips through him with savage, devastating beauty. His human form tears itself apart, bones cracking and reshaping with sounds like glaciers calving, skin splitting as scales erupt in cascading waves of crimson, gold, turquoise, and purple. Wings burst from his shoulders in an explosion of membrane and muscle, each one larger than his entire body, spreading wide enough to span the club room before slamming down hard enough to crack the floor beneath him.
Fire pours from his mouth in bouts that turn the air to liquid heat, flames so bright they burn afterimages into my vision every time I blink. The temperature skyrockets, cold replaced by searing warmth that makes sweat bead instantly across my skin and turns every breath into something that scorches as it goes down.
He’smagnificent.
And absolutely, catastrophicallyout of control.
The dragon that rises where Raze stood seconds ago fills the clubhouse from the floor to the three-story-high ceiling, scales gleaming like molten metal, eyes blazing with fire that holds no recognition, no awareness of anything except the rage that has been building for three hundred years, with nowhere to go. His tail lashes out, smashing through support beams with enough force to send chunks of timber crashing down around us, and when he roars, the sound doesn’t just echo, it reverberates, shaking stone and rattling my teeth.
“Everyone out!” Scar’s command cuts through the destruction, vampire speed already carrying us toward the nearest cluster of brothers. “Now! Before this whole place comes down.”
Brothers scatter in every direction, Maul grabbing Bennett and physically hurling the angel toward the exit as flames wash over where he stood half a second before. Wreck flows through shadows, pulling Flux with him as another gout of fire reduces furniture to ash. Coil shifts mid-stride, basilisk form allowing him to slip through gaps in falling debris that would crush anything larger.
Through the smoke and heat, I see Ivy’s greenhouse explode in a shower of glass and burning plant matter, her wards shattering under the onslaught of fire they were never designed to contain. Ash appears at the edge of the flames, phoenix wings manifesting as she tries to absorb the excess heat, but there’s too much. Raze’s fire drowns her abilities like dropping a teaspoon into an ocean and expecting it to matter.
“Ivy!” Luna’s voice cuts through the destruction as the selkie appears from nowhere, her slender arms wrapping around Calder’s waist as she hauls the still-recovering kitsune away from a column that crashes down exactly where he’d been standing. Her strength surprises me, she moves him like he weighs nothing, selkie power bleeding through in the emergency.
The ceiling groans overhead, timber screaming as fire eats through three-hundred-year-old beams faster than anything natural should burn.
And I can’t look away from Raze.
The dragon circles in the confined space, wings smashing through walls, tail reducing stone to rubble, fire pouring from his jaws in rivers that catch on everything they touch and spread with terrifying speed. His eyes sweep across the destruction without seeing it, without recognizing the brothers scrambling for safety or the clubhouse crumbling around him. There’s nothing in that gaze except rage, fire, and the absolute need to annihilate.
“Raze, please!” The words tear from my throat before I can stop them, desperate and useless. “You have to stop! You’re going to kill them!”
If he hears me, there’s no sign of it.
His massive head swings toward the sound of my voice, and for one terrifying heartbeat, those blazing eyes lock onto mine. Fire gathers in his throat, bright enough to see through scales and muscle, building toward release, but Scar moves. Vampire speed carries him between us faster than thought, his body positioning itself as a shield I never asked for, fangs bared and red eyes locked on the dragon with the kind of absolute conviction that comes from five centuries of standing his ground against impossible odds.
“Don’t youdare,”he snarls at Raze, and something in his tone, fury mixed with desperate, aching loyalty, cuts through even dragonic rage for a fraction of a second.
The fire releases anyway.
