Page 28 of Monsters of Air

“They really didn’t teach you anything did they?”

“Sod off!” I grabbed a stick out of the pit and chuckled it at his head. It went wide. Yet another thing to work on. I resorted to scowling. “There had been no riders from my town that anyone remembers, so of course they taught me nothing.”

“The other issue…” Zilon interrupted, plopping himself down on the dirt between Landers and I as if that was going to stop our stare down. “Since we don’t have riders, we can’t blow fire.”

The fire blazed to life between us, but I could have sworn the world had gone cold.

“You can’t blow fire?”

“No,” Zilon shook his head, “unmated dragons don’t have fire.”

How had I never heard that before?

“Why is that anyways?” Landers asked, crouching by Philit, watching him work with a frown as Philit tried to get a fire going.

“It’s the riders, but I don’t know how or why. My father always told me it was something we would learn at the academy,” Philit shrugged. I barely restrained an eye roll; and they tried to claim that I knew nothing.

“So, we find our mate and we get to blow fire.” Landers pondered that, his glance coming my way briefly. “Well, one of us will be lucky when we get there.”

He gave me a wink, and my stomach did the somersault it always did. I stared at the fire before I hurled myself at him, which didn’t really help seeing that the flames were flicking in the night with almost the exact same shade of his scales.

“How does it work?” I asked, needing to think of anything else and of course picking the worst possible option. “The bonding?”

“No clue. But it feels like fucking bliss from the rumors.” Landers leaned forward, his eyes digging into mine as the fire illuminated the peppering of scales on his chest, and the red I had missed in his eyes.

“It is a treasured secret,” Philit thankfully pulled my focus. “One we should take more seriously. No dragon and rider pair has spoken about it. They won’t, so don’t bother asking when you meet one. I guess it’s super personal to them.”

Philit. The ultimate party pooper.

Zilon dug in his bag for something. “It’s the ultimate bond from what I hear. There are no other bonds in the world that can compare. So, of course they’d keep it a tightly locked secret.”

“That can’t be right,” Philit said, pulling the squirrels the others had prepped over to lay over our fire in a makeshift spit. “I’ve talked to travelers, and there are no other bonds besides dragons and their riders.”

Zilon looked like he was going to challenge him on it, but thought better of it. I didn’t blame him, I was quickly learning not to argue Philit on anything dragon related.

“Do you get lots of travelers where you are from, Philit?” I asked, we hadn’t actually dug into this at all. We had mostly been focused on stopping me from face planting into a mountain. But now I wanted to hear everything about them, where they were from, their lives, everything they loved and hated.

“I’m from Xrotte,” Philit said with that usual ‘greater than thou’ aire. “So yeah, we get a few.”

I practically forced my jaw to stay where it was. That beautiful, bustling city was his home. So, that family in the picture… I swallowed, my chest trying to break open again.

No wonder he hadn’t wanted to go back when he got injured, it really would have been a failure for him.

“Where are you from,” I turned to Landers, who was already giving me his playboy smile as he leaned forward.

“I’m from Tyne–”

“I’ll be right back.” Zilon jumped up like he had been zapped.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Food. Unless you guys fancy sharing the one squirrel we found for the rest of this journey, I need to track down something bigger.” Zilon disappeared into the forest, leaving us all to stare after him.

Hunting. Great.

It was just another way I would have died out here. I exhaled, nostrils flaring in frustration as I rounded on the other two.

“What does he mean by bigger?” I asked, my chest aching the same way it did when my father pulled from Landers. Except this time that throbbing pain was coming from Zilon’s departure. What the hell? So much for Landers being my dragon, unless it was just normal to feel this way around all dragons.

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