Page 58 of An Accident Waiting to Dragon

“I need to ask you?—”

“I already know.” He waved her question aside. “Asher didn’t betray me for his king. The plan was always to let his enemies kill me if we were caught.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Asher

* * *

The place looked the same.

Gwen and Goran’s childhood home was a two-story building of stone, white on the outside with quaint windows and a chimney. It looked like many a Scottish cottage, but it was anything but what it seemed. The entire village where they lived was warded to appear human. Protected in all sorts of magical ways.

As a boy, he used to run right inside without knocking. Welcomed into the fold by voices calling his name or telling him where Goran and Gwen were. Offering to feed him. Telling him he’d grown even since the day before.

The last time he’d come, it had been with bad news.

Even his dragon, who’d been pushing so hard to get here, had tucked his tail and paused.

Facing Goran and Gwen’s family again wasn’t going to be easy.

Asher hoped like hells they’d tell him if they knew which way Gwen had headed. Delilah already said that Gwen was on “sabbatical,” and she didn’t know where her pixie courier had gone.

Raising his hand, Asher knocked before nerves could make him rethink coming here.

Her family was his best bet at finding her fast.

If they cooperated?—

The door swung open, and Asher found himself facing Ewen Woodshield. Gwen’s father. Lean and tall for a pixie, he wasn’t dragon-sized, and yet he had always been slightly intimidating with a thick black beard now greying around the mouth.

He took one look at Asher, blinked, then anger filled his eyes in a blazing scowl.

Faster than Asher had ever seen a pixie move, Ewen raised both his hands, his wings suddenly appearing, and before Asher could so much as take a step back, roots and vines exploded from the woods surrounding their home. They shot right at him, wrapping around him like a hundred snakes, pinning his arms to his sides.

Then the vines dragged him off into the woods.

Panic threatened worse things than the vines, his heart thudding painfully with it. Asher held onto his control with an iron fist as, with a complete disregard for the racket they were making, Ewen hauled him between trees and over boulders and brooks, and yet he didn’t hit a single rock or tree. Thank the gods. He wasn’t back to full strength after the wraith’s poison yet.

Suddenly, the vines yanked him off the ground to dangle him upside down in the air.

Asher didn’t struggle to free himself. Instead, he waited, watching, searching the forest around him. At the same time, he tried to slow his beating heart, and the stab of truth that these people who’d once loved him didn’t trust him anymore. To this extent.

So many things to fix.

They came from overhead, Ewen…and all of Gwen’s siblings… stirring the air with the flutters of their wings.

Woodshields.

Unlike Gwen’s and Mauren’s, the coloring of their wings were all about browns and greens and greys, in hues that could look dull one second and then catch the light just right during another, turning to something brighter.

Ewen landed in front of where Asher dangled, and behind their father, her siblings lined up. All of them. Arms crossed, faces rigid with anger.

He would never fight Gwen’s family. He’d given them space after Goran had died, knowing that all he was to them was a painful reminder. But this…

They’d been keeping this from him.

Their blame.

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