Page 68 of Dreams and Dragon Wings
Alive. We’realive.
But for how long?
My skin prickles. My senses warn me to run again.Danger. Danger is coming.
No. Danger is already here.
Shivering, panting for breath, I stare through the downpour as a pair of dark boots attached to long legs stroll into my line of sight. I flinch backward, my hands slipping over wet grass and sodden earth.
My eyes lift, quickly skimming upward along the lines of the towering stranger before me. Strong, sleek, with impossibly green eyes, black hair, and a beard streaked with gray, he carries himself like a man out for a casual stroll.
Save for the fact that he is completely dry, as if the storm cannot touch him.
And the fact that I know at once he is no mere man.
He is a dragon.
He does not smile. He does not mock. He does not so much as even speak.
But I feel him prowling on the outskirts of my mind all the same. Looking for an opening. Testing my defenses.
Fear. Anger. Desperation. All three sweep over me, radiating through my bond with Bene.
Vines burst from the wet earth and snap taut around the stranger’s legs, rooting him in place before he can take another step closer.
I scramble backward and finally lurch to my feet. My gown hangs heavy, soaked as it is. It weighs me down. The silk tangles around my legs. My heart hammers like a war drum, pounding in my ears.
Brisa and Glorana flit into view. They drive through the storm, the light wreathing their forms flickering, weak. But still, they fly between the two men. Still, they spin their weaves.
Glorana with her weave of Earth she casts over the gaping hole in Bene’s chest.
Brisa with her weave of Air and Water she spins around the stranger, binding him in ice from the legs down.
Bene, I implore along the link between us.Please, let’s run. I don’t know if we can. But surely trying to escape is better than just standing here, waiting to die.
Bene shudders where he stands several paces away, his head bowed but his eyes ablaze. His focus all on this latest threat.
He doesn’t answer me. He doesn’t so much as glance my way.
But his vines will not hold this creature. Nor will Brisa’s ice. I know this in my soul. I sense it on the wind. Power pulses off the stranger in noxious waves—oily and thick, dangerous andwrong.
For a moment, the air before him shimmers silver, and suddenly I see through the veil of Mind overlaying his form, hiding the fact that he is not imprisoned by Bene’s vines at all. Perhaps he never was. He truly stands several feet away, his attention fixated on me and me alone through the downpour.
It is all an illusion.
As my eyes meet his, a small smile finally tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“Clever girl.” Those words sound just beyond the curve of my ear, carried there on a delicate thread of Air.
I stagger backward, a scream catching in my throat. I try to call out to Bene, to warn him of the danger, but I cannot.
I stand frozen, useless.
I can’t move. I can’t speak.
Not even when I spy the stranger deftly pulling in threads of magic almost faster than my eye can track. Not even when he flings the silver and gold weave tinged with a hint of black directly at me.
Like an arrow aiming to pierce my heart.
