Page 87 of Dragon’s Rogue

Finally, she couldn’t stand it any longer. She pushed open the door and walked inside.

Chapter 38

Blaze stopped inside the door, stunned. It was like walking into a fairy tale—Aladdin’s cave or Midas’s hoard.

Enough treasure to ransom a dozen kings spread before her, glittering in the light of magical torches. Mounds of gold bars and coins, sprinkled in with some silver and copper. Goblets and statuettes and jewelry were arranged artfully on shelves and tables and display stands, or piled on the floor. A crown set with diamonds and rubies sat rakishly on the golden head of an Egyptian goddess.

On one side she glimpsed a human-sized living area with a fireplace and polished wood furniture, but the room was dominated by the huge dragon curled up in the center of it, his giant head resting on a smaller mound of treasure set a little ways away from the rest.

His eyes were half-closed as he hummed along with the song, the low notes vibrating through the floor and up through the soles of her feet.

He was so beautiful. Summer-sky blue, the color of his human eyes, the kind of blue that took her back to perfect childhood days lying on her back in the grass, gazing into the fathomless expanse above and seeing wondrous creatures in the shapes of the clouds. His scales shaded to green underneath, like a hint of those green summer fields, of innocent times when everything was possible.

He gave no indication he’d heard her come in—just closed his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to see her.

She walked carefully over to him. Despite Thorne’s warning, he didn’t seem angry at her intrusion. Just full of an unbearable sense of failure and sadness.

She sat down next to his head, on the pile of gold bars and coins. It should have been hideously uncomfortable, but the gold seemed to shift and soften, cradling her as she sat.

She leaned against Zane, stroking the side of his face. He sighed, a soft, rumbling sound deep in his throat, as if he’d needed that exact thing but hadn’t known it until she came.

“Thorne told me about your family,” she whispered.

He moved his head fractionally away from her. I didn’t want you to know about that.

She shook her head, moving closer again. “I’m so, so sorry. I know what it feels like to lose everyone you care about.”

At least for you, it wasn’t your fault.

“It wasn’t yours either,” she said.

Yes it was.

She smoothed her fingers over the soft scales above his eye ridge. “Tell me. We’re mates.” She felt it even more strongly now that she was with him. She didn’t know everything it meant, or everything it would mean. But it resonated in her bones.

He moved his claw, and she saw a gold chain tangled around it, with a medallion in the shape of a grizzly bear. Gently, she reached over and untangled it, cradling it in her hand. “Is this the token you gave your sister?”

He moved his head again, a giant headshake. That’s its twin. The one I was supposed to be wearing when she called me. But I was busy, digging for gold and learning to mold it, enamored with my new hoard. I didn’t have it with me.And when I finally remembered and went to get it, it was too late.

“Oh, Zane,” she breathed. She couldn’t imagine what that would feel like.

I knew when I touched it that she’d called me the day before. I flew as hard as I could to get there. I almost made it in time. If I’d been even a few hours earlier…

Blaze pressed her forehead against his skin. There was nothing she could do to make this easier, nothing to make it so it hadn’t happened. All she could do was sit with him while he told it.

So many dead, he said. Nearly the whole clan. I found the bodies piled in the forest like garbage, for the animals to find. Everyone in my sister’s family, except one. Before the attack, they’d managed to hide a baby girl cub in a hollow log in the forest, with my amulet wrapped around her. I followed the signal and found her, and I took her to safety.

His eyes opened, and flashed red for a moment before going blue again. Then I went back and buried the bodies. And I flamed all those murderers to ash and devoured their bones.

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “After the raid on the panther clan, when I saw what Silas had turned the coven into, I was so bitter and angry. I carried that bitterness and anger in me for years. It kept me going. But it led me to a dark place, too. I found rogue wizards—the worst ones—and paid them to teach me exactly the kind of dark spells I’d hated the coven for doing.

“I’ve never used them the spells—I told myself they were just to defend against the coven, to prepare myself to fight them. It took me a long time to realize that just learning them made me into a different person—one I didn’t want to be. So I stopped studying them. I magically severed my ties with my old coven and all my teachers, and reinvented myself as a new person. Blaze McKenna. I cleansed myself inside and out, but… I’ll never be the same as I was.”

This time Zane moved his head closer to her, and the golden mound of treasure shifted again so she was cuddled closer to his head. He moved his claw, encircling her in a cocoon of warmth and comfort.

Grief can send you down a dark road, Zane said. Thorne found me. He brought me back.

“He did?” Trust Thorne to leave that part out.