Page 56 of Rejected By Dragons

There's something different about her. A sleekness to her features and a wildness to her hair. Her eyes faintly glow, and my dragon lifts its head in interest.

Rhiannon doesn't feel like a threat, but an aura of danger surrounds her, and I instinctively draw up straighter.

A thousand apologies and excuses fly toward my lips, but I swallow them down. Rhiannon's gaze isn't accusing, and it doesn't matter what I say. She's caught me dead to rights. I snuck into her office and peered into this crate that she specifically told me to stay away from.

Instead, I tell her the truth. "I had to. It was calling me."

"Then you had better answer it." Her tone is deathly serious.

Surprised as I am by her response, I don't question it. She's staring at me levelly; as always, her gaze seems to peer straight through me.

I swallow hard and drop my gaze again to look at the bracer. The swirling energy surrounding it shifts in hue somehow, going even warmer and darker, and I shiver. It's as excited and drawn in as I am, and I extend my hand once more. I brush my fingertips over the metal, and I hear whispers in my head in a language I don't know. Sparks of purple energy crack the air.

And then the bracer is flying out of the crate. It snaps itself around my arm.

I barely have time to gasp before the entire world goes black.

Chapter Fifteen

EMBER

Nope, I'm wrong. The world doesn't flash to black. It's too deep for black--too layered and complex.

It's dark.

And inside of that darkness is texture and movement. Sinuous, sensuous sliding motion, with glints of scales and hidden musculature. Black flames and ash that swirl through the darkness.

And there. Beneath it all. Hidden far away where I can scarcely see it.

Light.

I reach toward that brilliance with my entire being, my dragon rising upward and out of my chest, her wings flapping through the insides of my ribs, and for a moment, I feel as if the beast who's laid dormant inside me all these years is here, and we are one. My eyes sting, and my heart throbs with a wholeness I've never felt in my entire life.

I blink.

And then I'm back in Rhiannon's office. I dart my gaze around until I find her. She's standing opposite me, leaning against her desk, and she's turned on the little lamp that sits by the wall. Beneath its ivory shade, the tiny bulb casts a warm amber light around the place, but it's not the light that draws my attention. It's the shadows. They're richer than I remember, and I swear they seem to move. I focus in on them, and they go still, but there's this sense, somewhere deep in the recesses of my consciousness that they could come to life at any moment.

I look to Rhiannon again and open my mouth to ask her what the actual fuck is going on, but my mouth closes of its own accord.

Her dragon stares out of her human eyes, majestic and huge and the color of night. My own dragon, still close to the surface but contained once more, swishes its tail in answer. I can't help the sense that they're having some kind of a conversation, and the envy inside me burns. My dragon's barely deigned to speak to me in more than two decades. Now she's striking up a conversation?

She lets out a rough breath and sinks slowly back into the quiescence, still awake but less immediate of a presence. Rhiannon's eyes brighten, and her posture relaxes, and okay. I guess that's the end of the dragon summit I wasn't invited to.

"What--" I start again.

She cuts me off. "Foolish." She shakes her head and chuckles darkly.

"Hey--"

"Not you." Inhaling, she lets a small smile cross her face. She looks older than she did just a moment ago. A part of me wonders exactly how old she is, beneath the layers of dragon and magic that surround her. "Me."

I crinkle my brows, tilting my head to the side.

"Here I thought I could make the Shadow Bracer choose me."

Her tone stops me cold. "'The Shadow Bracer?'"

And yes, I can definitely hear the fact that she capitalized the letters in her speech.

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