Page 60 of An Accident Waiting to Dragon

“Release me,” Asher thrashed in his bindings.

Ladon would be proud. He’d sounded like a king.

“What if you make it worse?”

They would never trust him. Not after Goran. Not until they knew the truth. But he’d never risk Gwen for them to find that out. He had to get to her. Now.

Screw this.

Asher sucked in hard, stoking the fire in his belly, desperation snarling through him, driving him. Without shifting, blue fire erupted from his mouth, eviscerating the woody bindings around his body, reflecting in the shocked eyes of Gwen’s family.

“I love her,” he said as the last binding dropped away and he fell to the ground in a heap. “I’ll stop her.”

They stared at him with hard faces and hard eyes, Ewen in particular, his gaze…assessing. Measuring.

“I’m only allowing it because it’s what Gwen would want.”

Another turn of the knife in his heart, but Gwen was what mattered most right now. “Where?”

Her father pointed. “That way.”

Asher jumped to his feet and took off at a dead sprint.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Gwen

* * *

Shock was a thunderclap that had Gwen straightening so violently she slammed into the back of her chair.

They’d what?

They’d planned to let Asher’s enemies kill Goran?

She couldn’t even comprehend the words.

“What?” her voice wavered, and she took a deep breath. “Why in the seven hells would you do that?”

“Because I was already dying.”

She didn’t think anything could trump that first thunderclap, but this one did, reverberating through her bones. Gwen shook her head. Hard. And caught the tiniest glimpse of writhing in the dark off to her left.

Gluing her gaze to her brother, she shook her head again. “No. You were?—”

“I carried the black death.”

The black death.

Oh my gods. Tell me it’s not true.

The phrase meant something much different to pixies than it did to humans. Her people associated the term with the only disease known to be both deadly and untreatable among their people. A horrific end where the infected would start to lose weight rapidly, turning almost skeletal before their wings and then their skin started to turn black, then liquify like something out of a horror movie. A rare but fatal illness.

None of her people had been able to determine the source, but it never struck multiple pixies in the same dwelling or flutter.

Goran had been infected with the black death?

When?

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