Page 102 of Ash

Or any hope of stopping it.

Dani.

Tyrez’s head shot upward and crashed into stone. The darkness was absolute, and the air filled with dust. Where was he? His mind groped for answers. Karank. The fortress in the mountains. But that didn’t explain why he was lying in darkness, surrounded by stone.

When he tried to move his right wing, grinding pain shot up to his shoulder. The left was folded against his body, held there by a mound of broken rock.

He was buried alive.

Dani.Something horrible had happened. He had to get out of here. His legs were bent beneath them, and now he shoved hard against the paving stones.

Bits rained down on him from above, along with clouds of dust. He wrenched his trapped wing free on a blaze of pure agony. The bones would heal if he shifted form, but if he did so here, he’d be crushed in an instant. He coughed, and as he fell back again, desperation flooded through him.

Dani needed him. He was sure of it.

He was Dragon. A Legion warrior. Nothing could stop him, not even being buried by a fortress of stone.

Tyrez reached deep, tapped into the crystal energy within his tissues, and pulsed it through to his limbs. Then he put everything into one giant effort to break himself free.

He surged upward, and when the stone merely shifted, but did not yield, he twisted, smashing his spine against it. Once, twice—

On the third hit, something gave. With a rumble, the stones began to slide. Tyrez surged again, and the slide became an avalanche, threatening to crush him as massive pieces of masonry tipped toward him.

But he would not be beaten. He ducked and squirmed through them as they fell, taking the hits on his powerful shoulders, deflecting with his thighs, and dragging his injured wing along for the ride.

With a final, grinding shift, he broke free into clean air. The rocks settled into new patterns beneath him as he yanked his hindquarters free and glared around him.

There, on the mountainside—not three hundred feet from him. A Dragon, far too familiar, sitting partly upright, shaking her head as though dazed. Crouched beside her, a small, dark form. Jacques.

Farther along, another lay limp in the snow. Too far to be certain, but heknew. Dani, with someone hunched over her. The man’s hands glowed with repressed power.

Rage erupted within Tyrez. His broken wing hung limply; he couldn’t fly. But nothing stopped him from leaping like a panther, covering fifty feet in a single bound.

He jumped clear over Sirki and Jacques, landing in a flurry of displaced snow only twenty feet from where Dani lay.

The man looked up. Long hair caught the wind of Tyrez’s arrival. Black streaked with white. Not Rindek. But the hand raised, and a pulse of pure power came at the Dragon.

Tyrez braced, but it hit him like a battering ram. Far stronger than anything he’d ever experienced—except also familiar.

This was what had hit him at the cemetery. Another Torshin. Was he wielding a new weapon? He’d only seen the hands, nothing else. Where had that power come from?

It knocked him right off his feet and drove him into a snowbank. He rolled back upright with a roar, but the figure was already running, throwing another pulse as he did so.

Tyrez ducked, and it scorched the snow where his head had been. He plunged after the racing form, but his Dragon weight sank deep, bogging him down.

As he passed the form lying in the snow, he heard her moan.

It stopped him cold. A moment later, energy pulsed over his skin—a gate activated nearby.

His target was gone, and Dani needed him.

As he hovered over her, his heart twisted. The snow had broken some of her fall, but not enough. Both legs appeared to be broken, and one arm. But the blood that trickled from the side of her mouth spoke to severe internal injuries.

One look, and he knew she needed far more than what he could offer. Could he move her? Take her to Cara? He didn’t think so. Moving her could kill her.

His fingers and talons hung above her—he daren’t even touch her like this. Tyrez shifted to human, groaning as the wing bones realigned and sealed. He couldn’t pull them into his body until the healing was complete, so he merely reduced them in size as the rest of him changed.

As the crystalline tail spike fell free, he grabbed it and laid it over her body. It was so long the point fell below her knees, while the hilt sat between her breasts.

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