“Go to hell, Canto!” Lirin snarls.
I’m careful to keep my feelings muted, but I think we’d have a better chance of winning the lottery than staying away from her now.
An omega, and the first one we haven’t wanted to kill on sight. The only exception to that rule is omegas who are happily mated. All others, it’s been near on open warfare. Especially Reed.
His run-in with the woman who put him here still haunts his dreams. He thought it was love. She was more concerned with saving herself. He got the blame and was sentenced with the rest of us.
Feeling the softening of his feelings over the last few days has been unnerving. Smelling her on him was wildly alarming. Until it wasn’t.
I don’t think the others know that he’s already touched her.
An omega. I shake my head, but I can see it now. If you take away the years of hunger and brutal exercise, she would be softer. Her scent is tart, but we’ve caught notes of the possibility of it being richly sweet.
“Off limits is not going to work,” I murmur.
“It has to!” Canto says firmly, glaring at me. “Imagine accidentally bonding an omega and leaving her here alone, or worse, taking her with us.
I cringe. His point is valid.
“What do we do if she goes into heat?”
“We can’t see an omega through a heat, especially not her,” Ronit stresses. He closes his eyes, and for a moment, it looks like the weight of all our problems will finally break him.
“Okay, we don’t touch her,” he whispers. “We stay away, we fight it.”
“Yeah, great,” I snarl. “Has anyone bothered to tell the freaking dragon that?”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Lirin opens his mouth to argue but stops, his smile falling away.
Ronit rubs his forehead. “Debate it all you want, but it’s a pointless exercise. There is no us, there is no happy ending. We deliver her, or we go back alone. Those are the choices. Leaf doesn’t get a say. He goes where we go.”
That unhappy future settles into me like a hard lump. I think I’d known we wouldn’t be finding the Fae to get revenge, but to know for certain that there is no hope is bleak.
“Excuse me, can I get your selfie?” a giggling voice asks.
“What is a selfie?” Ronit growls.
She laughs, holds up her phone, and runs away, returning to a group of girls who stand watching us from the corner of the street.
“Lets get out of here,” I mutter. “Humans are weird.”
I listen for the song again and hear it twanging with something. I clamber to my feet, pulling out my viola.
“Brio?”
“Leaf is in trouble.”
Ronit turns, baring his teeth. “Where are they?”
I take off at a run, racing straight out into the bumper-to-bumper traffic and through the city streets with no other thought but to get to them.
It takes too long, and the sound of his song turns into a war cry, a summons. I picture the place I want to be, and then it’s there, replacing the image of huge buildings. A lake and massive trees with old, ancient architecture in the background and Leviathan and Kit standing in front of her.
How did we get here? What was that? But there’s no real time to assess the situation because Leaf is raging and circling her with hard and jerky movements, while rattling a long and slow, violent warning from his scales.
“Leaf, what is it?” Ronit barks, his alpha command demanding the dragon obey.
“He’s here,” the dragon bellows with the force of all the dragons that ever were. The sound thunders and rolls through the air. His rage makes the world tremble.
