“In a minute.”
“The sun’s almost set.”
“I know. That’s why I’m out here.” She gestured toward the harbor, where the last light was painting the water in shades of amber and rust. “I want to see it. After being stuck inside for three days, I need?—”
She stopped mid-sentence.
Something was wrong.
The water near the breakwater was churning in a pattern that wasn’t natural. Foam rose and fell in rhythmic pulses, as if something massive was breathing just beneath the surface. The temperature dropped ten degrees in seconds, cold enough that her breath fogged the air.
Aero was on his feet before she could speak, his body angling in front of hers, scales rippling beneath his skin.
“She’s back,” Cassia breathed.
Nerissa rose from the harbor.
FORTY-FIVE
CASSIA
The siren ascended on a pillar of churning water, her iridescent eyes blazing with the kind of obsession that had curdled into poison over three decades.
“You should be mourning,” Nerissa’s voice carried impossibly clear across the harbor, cutting through the evening air like a blade. “Your little witch looked so fragile when she fell. Did she survive?”
Cassia gripped the porch railing, forcing herself upright despite the pain flaring in her ribs. She wanted to shout back—wanted to hurl lightning and fury and prove she wasn’t fragile at all—but her magic felt distant, muted by exhaustion and healing. She had nothing to fight with.
Aero didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
His dragon tore free.
Cassia had seen him shift before—the research flights, the night he’d taken her into the sky. Those transformations had been controlled, graceful, his human form flowing into dragon with practiced ease.
This was something else entirely.
The shift exploded out of him in a wave of raw power. His wings unfurled against the fading sunset, vast enough to blockout the sky, lightning crackling along every joint. When he roared, the sound shook the foundations of buildings and sent what few people remained near the harbor fleeing for cover.
He was terrifying. He was beautiful. He was fighting for her.
The thought made her chest ache in ways that had nothing to do with healing bones.
He launched, lightning crackling in his wake, the clouds overhead responding to his passage, darkening from rose and gold to threatening gray.
Nerissa watched him come with a smile that held no sanity.
“There you are,” she called. “Finally showing your true form. Does she know what you really are, dragon? Does she understand what she’s chosen?”
Aero’s only response was a blast of lightning that turned the water around Nerissa’s pillar to steam.
The battle began.
Cassia had never seenanything like it.
Fire and lightning against water and ice. Ancient power meeting ancient power in a display that turned the harbor into a war zone. Steam rose in massive clouds where Aero’s attacks hit the water. Ice formed and shattered as Nerissa hurled spears and walls and serpents made of frozen ocean at the dragon circling above her.
He was faster than she’d imagined—eight hundred years of aerial combat distilled into pure instinct, his massive body twisting and diving and climbing with a speed that shouldn’t have been possible for something his size.
And his attacks—gods, his attacks. Lightning didn’t just strike from the clouds. It poured from him, crackling alonghis scales before lancing toward Nerissa in devastating arcs. Fire followed, dragon breath that superheated the air and sent plumes of steam rising high enough to be visible for miles.
