Page 113 of Of Blood and Banes
“Kat?” Archie turns his bewildered gaze to me, his face beginning to spin. He lurches forward to catch me, but I can’t remain conscious long enough to see if he does.
My sense of gravity slips away, like I’m falling. My skull crunches against something hard.
Even in the depths of whatever existence I’m in, she’s there. A sparkling onyx orb promising peace and home.
“Where are you?”she calls out to me, the orb constricting and expanding with each inflection.
“Here,”I groan, but I’m too far for my voice to carry. I reach for her, only to find my nerves tingling as if I slept on them for too long and just woke. But my hand is outstretched before me, and I wiggle my fingers. Something about the sensation tells me this isn’t The White. I’m not dead.
Or at least not yet.
“Katerina?”Daeja calls again, her voice tipping into fear.
“I’m still here,”I croak.
An invisible breeze brushes against my skin. And a foreign, sultry voice whispers in my head.“Let me help you…”
I flinch. Raking my gaze around the blank wall of white around me to pinpoint the call, I stop at a green orb.
“Here. Yes. Come to me.”It echoes out across the vast nothingness.
When I turn back to the black orb where I felt Daeja, she’s gone.
“How do I know I can trust you?” My voice echoes loudly around me.
“You either trust me or die. Which shall it be?”
I glance down at my hands, and while I still have the dark stain around my middle finger where the bond marking is, the Blood Ring is gone from my left hand.
“The clock is ticking. And if you die, so does the Moon One.”
As I open my mouth to respond, something crawls over my face. A solid wall of heat blasts me off my feet. My mouth is ripped open by the unseen.
The voice distorts into something sinister and menacing,“Breathe…”
My eyes snap open, and I gasp for breath like a fish out of water. My vision floods with blinding greens and yellows. I clawat my mouth, pulling off roots hooked into my teeth and tossing them off me with a cry.
A pair of wide, gold-glittering eyes regard me from above. Long strings of ivy cascade from the antler-like horns on the green dragon’s head. It retreats from me. The sunlight behind it outlines the overgrown moss strung like curtains from its wings. Every square inch of the dragon’s scales is covered in growth, as if it surfaced from the earth itself.
Daeja crowds into my vision next to the green dragon lurching over me.“You’re here.”She nuzzles her scaly nose under my chin, her breath heating my neck.
“What…happened?”
“You passed out. When you drew the poison from Corvin’s body, you absorbed a lot of it through your skin. So, it kind of took you…”
“To the brink of death,”the foreign voice rings in my head.
So it wasn’t because the magic overwhelmed me. When I try to curl up off my back, I find a numbness blocking my limbs. I’m unable to do anything but move my head and blink.
“Careful,”the earth dragon warns, somehow sensing my struggles.“Let the breath chase out the poison.”
“The breath?”I ask.
“Dragon’s breath,”Daeja answers.“He was gracious enough to come to our aid and heal you.”
I lock gazes with the green dragon with vines curling around its body.“You…you were in there, weren’t you?”
It blinks long and slow at me.“Yes. I heard the Moon One’s roar. The forest has been quiet for over a hundred years, so I knew there was trouble. Though, I never expected to find you.”As it turns its head slowly to Daeja, I hear the creaking of wood.“Take your humans and fire dragons and leave. This forest does not welcome outsiders. And others may not be as forgiving as I am.”
