Page 63 of Fae Exile

Her grin spread. “See you in the Igneuslands.”

Well, at least she had no illusions of where she’d end up. The Etherlands would probably burn to a crisp should she ever step foot in them.

She flicked the fingers of both hands toward me and my brothers.

I drew my sword and heard three similarshwiiiings behind me.

Then the stone beneath our feet, already cracked and upended, rattled and vibrated with a loud moan, pushing up entire slabs of marble. I bent into a crouch and rode the wave as the heads of Idra and Yorgen toppled and tumbled out of the way, smaller rubble rolling with them.

Unwilling to wait to discover the queen’s chosen method of death, now that the ruse was definitively up, I leapt onto the dais and swung my sword at her neck.

Moving faster than was possible, faster than she should have been able to, she appeared behind her throne next to the tunnels, her laughter drawing my eye to her.

“You didn’t actually think I didn’t have secrets, did you, Rush?” Shetskedand shook her head, her crown not daring to move. “Such a waste. You’re so damn beautiful.” Then she waved three fingers at me.

“Enjoy your meal.”

It took me a beat to realize she wasn’t speaking to me, and by then she was gone, again moving faster than was reasonable forany fae of any kind, the open door to the tunnels the only sign of where she’d gone.

Ivar and Braque were following behind her at a normal jog when a roar I’d heard before shook my insides.

I turned in time to witness a dragon’s snout rising through the floor.

22.ILLUMINATING A PATH THROUGH THE HOPELESS DARKNESS

~ RUSH ~

With my startled stare pinned on the emerging dragon, tracking every one of its movements, I bounded toward my brothers, thoughts scrambling through my mind in a rapid jumble:How thefuckis there adragoncoming up through the floor? Was that actualbloodshe was drinking? And if so, could that be what gave her unreasonable speed? What other advantages might she now have? Like we needed her to have any more...

Though it wasn’t a greatsword that required a double-fisted hold, West gripped his blade with both hands as he exclaimed, “What the fuck?” We’d need incredible force to slice through the thick, corded neck currently knocking back and forth to widen the stone opening.

“We can’t kill it,” Hiroshi said an instant before I did.

West’s eyes widened. “Whaddya mean,we can’t kill it?Are you fucking kidding me right now? It’s definitely planning on killing us!”

The beast was pushing its shoulders through the gap, marble slabs sliding along the upended floor to crack into pieces. It snapped its black, shiny eyes at us and roared so ferociously my nose hairs prickled.

“See?” West yelled. “We gotta kill it. We have no choice.”

“Or we could run,” Ryder said.

As a rule, none of us ever ran from a fight. In Embermere, appearance was as important as truth, and any suggestion of weakness was a dangerous vulnerability, especially for drakes like us with a duty to protect our entire clans.

But if our pretense with the queen was up, the rules of the game had already changed.

“We can’t kill a dragon after what we saw in the dungeons,” Hiroshi insisted, again mirroring my own thoughts. “We can be allies.”

“Uh, ya wanna tell this one that, then?” West asked as he shuffled backward, pushing us back with him. “’Cause I’m pretty sure it didn’t get the update.”

The dragon was squeezing its wide torso into the throne room, its blue scales coated in a pale dust. Its massive shoulder muscles rippled as it struggled.

“So this time, we run,” I said. “I won’t hurt the creature unless there’s no other choice, and right now there is one. We run, regroup, and figure out how to take down the queen after.”

The dragon snapped at its own hindquarters as one haunch snagged on stone.

Usually, we’d talk through the matter until we were all in agreement, or as close to it as we were going to get anyway. But nothing about a dragon coming up through the floor was normal or even logical. There were several stories beneath us before we even hit the dungeons, let alone the pit of cages in the bowels of the palace.

“Let’s move,” I yelled, startling West, who nodded and was first to spin around, the rest of us keeping our stares trained on the beast’s mouth. As far as I knew, they all spewed fire.

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