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Then five.

Eagan moves between me and the road, blades in both hands. “You heard him.”

“And you heard me.”

“Alessia.”

I lift my hands. The fire from the burning building bends around the civilians trapped near the doorway as I push the flames back.

Creating a wall, curving over them as burning timber crashes down where they had been standing, and the flames hit my magic with a shriek of heat and light before sliding off in bright streams that spill into the road.

“Move,” I shout at the people. “Run to the fields, get out of the town and do not stop.”

Eagan curses, but he fights beside me, cutting down a lycan that lunges too close, his blade flashing once across its chest, then again across its throat before it drops at his feet.

The dragon lands in the center of the street.

People are thrown from their feet as its claws dig into the road, and its long neck lowers, eyes burning with intelligence as fire gathers behind its teeth.

And I unleash my magic.

The earth beneath the road cracks open, roots bursting from the ground in thick, twisting lines, not dead roots, not old ones, but living things dragged up by force from beneath Purgatory itself, wrapping around the dragon’s legs and tightening as it roars.

It tears free with little effort.

The roots snap, and the dragon lunges.

I reach for something harder, a piece of steel that’s fallen from one of the destroyed buildings.

The steel slices through the air, glowing gold as it bends toward my hands, folding, flattening, stretching into a blade longer than my arm. Its edge burns white-hot, its center threaded with green light from the roots and silver flashes from the storm gathering above as lightning strikes it.

Eagan looks at the sword that has formed in my grip, and he goes still for half a breath. “By the old gods,” he mutters.

The dragon strikes, and my blade cuts across its snout in a bright, brutal arc, opening scales and flesh in a line of firelit blood, and the dragon rears back with a scream so loud the burning street trembles.

Kylian appears behind it, blood across his mouth, one lycan dead at his feet, two more clinging to him as he tears one from his back and drives it into the ground.

“Alessia,” he shouts, but another lycan crashes into him before he can reach me.

The dragon is forced to shift back. Its body convulses, scales retracting, wings folding inward, bones breaking down and reshaping beneath skin until a man stumbles from the beast’s form, naked from the waist up, black hair falling around a face, and a huge dragon head branded into his flesh.

He looks at me and smiles through blood.

“You,” he says. “Now I can repay you for destroying my ships.”

The world narrows as I realize the man standing before me is King Draven himself.

My hands tighten around the sword when a woman with vibrant red hair steps into the street. At first, I don’t understand exactly what draws my attention to her, until she lifts both hands and roots shoot from the ground, wrapping around our guards and flinging them around as if they weigh nothing.

Mage, she is another mage.

Eagan fights toward me, his blade buried in one lycan’s shoulder as he shouts my name.

Kylian is surrounded by three of them now, all muscle, claws, and snapping teeth, and he fights to get to me.

The bond screams through me, Kylian shouts, Eagan curses, and I turn just in time.

My blade drives into Draven’s body.