Adrissu forced himself not to flinch; while the pearl was rare and the necklace pricey, a hundred gold was easily double what it was worth. The man seemed to be an idiot as well as a thief and a murderer; somehow, he thought, that was worse than the idea of Volkmar being killed by someone calculating and intelligent. It made his death seem all the more pointless, set in motion by a mere opportunist.
But he came here for a reason. Adrissu forced himself to smile, despite the way his blood burned in his veins. “Done,” he said quickly. “I don’t have that much on me, but I live just up the road. Would you mind?”
A nervous look flitted over the man’s face for a moment, and he shifted slightly to the left—just enough that Adrissu could spot the dagger on his hip, though he purposely did not look at it.
“Sure,” the man said, gesturing up the road. “Please, lead the way.”
Adrissu grinned wider, and the man glanced away. “Of course,” he said, overtaking the man with a few long strides. “In fact, I know a shortcut.”
The road ahead was empty; Adrissu did not care if anyone could see them from behind him. He reached one hand out to clasp the man’s shoulder; the sailor flinched away instinctively, but Adrissu’s reach was longer. He clamped his fingers around the man’s shoulder the moment he made contact, thought of his lair, and snapped his fingers.
The world lurched around them, and the street went dark.
“What the fuck!” the sailor exclaimed, leaping away from Adrissu only to stumble in the sudden darkness. “What the fuck did you do?!”
Adrissu ignored him, his true form surging forth from his body. His draconic sight clicked into place, piercing through the darkness of his lair, just in time to see a look of horror dawning on the sailor’s face, eyes turning up as Adrissu grew to tower over the human. He smiled again, feeling the heat gush from his throat as he exhaled, embers fluttering around his bared teeth.
Before the sailor could react, Adrissu lunged forward, grabbing the man with his claws and flapping his wings to glide through his lair. The man was screaming, the sound echoing through the chamber; luckily, he didn’t start pissing himself until Adrissu had cleared the entrance, and light surrounded them again as they rocketed over the ocean.
The man was begging for mercy as Adrissu flew, eyes scanning the horizon for somewhere to land. It would not be enough just to drop him into the ocean. He was going to completely eviscerate the bastard that had taken his mate from him.
He had flown maybe two miles, and the man’s desperate cries had faded into hyperventilating breaths, when Adrissu spotted a narrow rock formation rising up out of the waves. It would barely support the weight of his body, but it would work. He turned sharply toward it, holding the man out in front of him to slam him into the rock as he landed. There was a satisfying crack and a howl of pain that became a wail of fear as Adrissu towered over him, wings spread out to block the light of the sunset.
“Give me the necklace,” he growled, lowering his jaw close enough to the man’s face that the skin of his face reddened with heat as he spoke. The man froze, eyes wide with shock and confusion. Adrissu snarled, and the man cried out again. “Give me the fucking necklace!”
“Here!” he sobbed, scrambling with one hand to reach into his pocket. He pulled out the necklace, holding it up by the chain.
The pearl had been cracked with the impact, and as he held it up, the cracked half fell off completely and splashed down into the ocean below.
Adrissu screamed in rage and ripped the man’s hand off with his teeth, the coppery taste of blood filling his mouth. The sailor was shrieking now, kicking against him uselessly, as Adrissu flung his severed hand out into the ocean and the remains of the necklace with it. He had wanted to make the man suffer, but now a blind fury filled him. The only coherent thought he could put together was that this was the man who killed Volkmar, and he had deserved to die days ago.
He drove his head down again, powerful jaws closing over the man’s chest. His ribs crunched and parted against Adrissu’s teeth, and his screams became a burst of bloody air on his tongue as his tiny human lungs were crushed. When Adrissu reared back, entrails dripping from his teeth, the man was looking down at his obliterated body with an expression of absolute agony, even as his face drained of color and the light left his eyes.
Adrissu inhaled hard, then sent a stream of flame shooting into the man’s face, the fire consuming the human’s body and skittering across the rocks. When he finally stopped to inhale again, the human was dead, his skin blistering and sloughing off.
It was not enough. He breathed fire again, and again, and again, until every last bit of flesh was burned away, and only blackened bones remained. Even then, he smashed the burnt bones with his claws, splintering and crushing them until they were like gravel. It still was not enough, but there was nothing left.
With one last slash of his claws to send the mess of ash and bone spilling into the waters below, Adrissu took to the sky again, screaming flame down into the ocean as he went, where it boiled and steamed away uselessly. He almost hoped someone spotted him, even miles out into the ocean, so he had an excuse to keep killing and destroying everything. But he was alone, and when the flames no longer came and the blood dripping from his mouth was now his own, he turned and flew home.
He had his revenge. He didn’t feel any better.
Book Three
Braern
Chapter Twenty-One
Aftertakinghisrevenge,Adrissu did not leave his tower for well over a month. An instructor from the academy would drop by once a week, mostly a formality to ensure he was kept in the loop of the goings-on at the school, but largely he did not care what was happening. To care about anything felt pointless. He had done all that he could do to avenge Volkmar, but he was still alone, without his mate, so what was the purpose of it all?
Volkmar’s death wrecked him in a way that Ruan’s had not. He could not place it, not at first, but in the end it felt as though he were at fault with Volkmar in a way he had not been with Ruan. Ruan had understood the risks of the conflict he joined and accepted them, forcing Adrissu to make his own peace with it. Volkmar had no such acceptance. If anything, Adrissu had driven him into the very situation that killed him.
Guilt was not an emotion that he had often felt prior to this, but for weeks he was paralyzed with it. Their last argument played in his head, over and over, as he considered every word he might have said differently that could have prevented this. Part of him wished that he had killed Naydruun on sight, or when they had turned to go—part of him wanted to go find the dragon and kill them right then, as if that would somehow make him feel any better, or bring Volkmar back to him. But as much as Adrissu hated the other dragon, he would not have had the energy or drive to truly seek them out. And he did owe Heriel, Naydruun’s mate, a debt of gratitude. He would not seek the dragon out, but if he ever saw them again, hewouldkill them. The decision was something like a balm to his other troubled thoughts.
He was miserable, but eventually the sight of the same walls around the same room was driving him to the brink of madness. So when he could bear it no longer, Adrissu forced himself to go to the academy in the mornings, hating every moment. He did almost no actual work, but it made him feel a little better to be moping somewhere other than Saltspire Tower.
As it had a knack of doing, time eventually took the sting out of it all. Adrissu’s grief settled into the old, familiar longing—waiting for his mate to return—and he could think of other things for long enough that the guilt began to ebb away. There was nothing left to do, except to wait, so he might as well pass the time doing something other than being miserable.
Much like he had before, he threw himself back into his work, devoting most of his time and attention to the academy. In the nearly forty years since its founding, its growth had stalled after the first decade. With their attendance at around fifty students each year, the four instructors were enough; but if he could bring in more instructors, he could bring in more students. He spent the following year revising and expanding the current school curriculum; he added extra lessons to the existing concentrations and designed new areas of study that included protective and offensive magic, expanding the slight overlap they already had with the mercenary’s guild.
