Page 104 of Peacemaker

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Dragon

I delivered her to death.

I barely felt the pain of it. That pain was distant and curious. There, but muted.

I felt her on my back and recognized that she belonged there. She would always belong there.

I was the beast. The dragon. My brain was not the same. My heart was not the same.

My freedom. There were no words for it. I flew hundreds of miles before I was called back, back to carry my mate to her death. Back to burn the enemy.

I circled above, watching her.

Like the warrior she was, she stood, ready to fight. And like the sacrifice she was, she drew a blade and sliced open her arm.

They came.

The enemy streaked from the water and swarmed the island, noses in the air, sniffing, searching, as her pure blood drove them into a frenzy of desperate madness.

With the strong scent of her blood in the air, they became mindless and eager, seeking only to taste her.

And so she killed them, dozens and dozens of them, before they took her.

As she fought, the part of me that belonged to the man screamed in agony.

From my great height, I saw the end of the rifters. The island seemed to writhe and undulate as the they covered it, crowded upon it, trampled each other in their need to reach that blood, that life-giving, rifter-making blood.

The girl should know they would die, that I would kill them. She should feel their deaths. She deserved to.

So before I felt her last breath leave her body, I flew closer, and I rained fire down upon them, drew a circle of flames around them, and as they threw themselves into the fire, trying to reach the water, I felt every single one of them.

Felt them like joy, like victory, and it was sweet. I needed to burn them. It renewed me, strengthened me, dragged me deeper and deeper into the dragon I had become.

Still, as she died, my heart shattered.

I loved.