“How do I help you turn into a dragon?”
Yes, she’d just said that. Out loud.
“Dragon,” Trevarr repeated, with faint amusement. He held out his fisted hands, displaying the shackles, the chafed and bleeding skin, the deeper wound on the outside bone of his wrist. “These keep me from releasing that part of myself. These, and older glyphs. Older scars. I cannot draw on what lives inside me.”
The light dawned. “You can’t, but I can. The same way I got inside this creepy cave in the first place.” Using energy from outside this world.
The subtle lift of his head said enough. He opened his hands in invitation.
“Do it, if you think you can. I have places to be.” Anjhela looked away, arms crossed, her affectation one of boredom. “I offered you a solution,” she told Trevarr. “I offered you a place with me. Whatever happens now, it is your own doing.”
He spared her a glance—one that was grimmer than Garrie expected, responding to things unspoken. She drew breath to ask, and then released it. He’d tell her when he could, and until then, every moment they spent in this place brought escalating risk.
For everyone. Here, and at home.
So instead of asking, she placed her hands over Trevarr’s, grasping them—finding him still grim, still ready. She felt anew the warmth of his palms, the rough nature of grit and callouses. She grounded herself in every tiny detail of the moment—the faint flare of his nostrils, the only visible sign of emotions held in check. The scent of him. The rustle of the duster with the imperceptible motion of his breathing.
Though she couldn’t help but raise a brow and whisper, “A dragon? You?”
And he murmured, “Kyrokha.”
It sounded like...yearning.
Okay then. Garrie closed her eyes, going back to what she knew of herself. The discipline of Rhonda Rose, the reckoner of the Southwest, the woman who had channeled a portal’s worth of energy back into the San Jose earth. Surely she held enough to do this thing.
Kyrokha.
Already she pulled breezes into cohesion—soft twisting ropes, yielding and yet full of promise. She spun them out into clarity, separating them from the thread of burning cold Keharian energies that now also suffused her being.
But she also remembered what these energies of hers had done to him in the past, and she hesitated—seeking his gaze to ask are you sure? And doing it with warning in her eyes.
He held steady. No hesitation, no uncertainty—the whole of him alert and ready and all but quivering, a predator about to pounce. A man determined and bracing himself. A man, ready to fly.
Garrie understood in a sudden rush.
What these energies had done to him in the past was exactly what he needed now. The direct brush of otherworldly energies, waking the forbidden kyrokha.
She gave him a hint of a nod—a flicker of her gaze. The only warning.
Then she released the energies she’d gathered. Then more than a trickle, pushing onward while he struggled to absorb it all, bright pewter gaze turning to hot silver, his mouth twitching, his jaw growing hard, his gaze holding hers like a lifeline.
Anjhela scoffed, her scorn sounding strangely disappointed. “All this time they were afraid of what he might turn out to be—but there’s nothing to him, is there?”
Garrie couldn’t help but laugh, knowing how quickly he’d risen to the careful increments of increased energy flow. Trevarr closed his hands around hers, not the least bit gentle. But his eyes never left hers, and she saw the message there before he spoke it out loud. “Do it,” he said. “Do it now.”
“Atreyo,” she told him, ever so gently. Warning. And unleashed a flood of herself upon him.
Anjhela muffled a startled sound. Trevarr’s grip on Garrie’s hands tightened, and tightened again. He stiffened; his lip lifted in a snarl of defiance.
But his eyes showed the edge of panic.
“Look at me,” she told him, struggling to catch her own breath, aware of a rumble but with no idea if it came only inside her own head or if the stone floor truly shook beneath them. “Look at me, dammit! You can do this. Just look—”
His gaze flickered, darkening—nothing to do with transformation and freedom and the struggle that consumed him. Garrie caught motion from the corner of her eye. Anjhela!
She jerked her hands free and snatched the knife from her pants, the one that sliced wood and skin and atoms all the same. It had length, it had purpose, and it slipped from its sheath with no more than an unheard whisper as she thumbed the release aside, whirling around.
And Anjhela was right there.
Garrie ducked wildly as metal claws slashed past her face and skidded across her shoulder, tearing deeply through cloth and flesh, as wild panic shot through her chest and right down her spine. But if reckoning had taught her anything, it was to finish what she’d started. No quailing, no flinching, no half-hearted sallies.
Especially when running wasn’t an option.
She pulled herself back into balance, spinning around the knife and putting it back out in front of her in an inexpert guard, all the while siphoning energy into Trevarr, a transfer that had taken on its own life. Pulling, tugging, a steady flow grown swift—
“There.” Anjhela sounded strangely satisfied, her voice a hard whisper beneath the ongoing rumble, the gauntlet still up to strike but her hand pressed to her side. “They cannot say I didn’t try.”
Garrie looked at the knife clutched so tightly in her grip and found it coated with dark blood.
Trevarr made a sound between agony and ecstasy and ripping grief, sinking down to his knees. Anjhela’s gauntlet melted away into skin and she took an unsteady step backward, and another, until she backed up against the side of the cave and briefly used it to stay upright.
“You didn’t—” Garrie said, trying to wrap her head around what she’d seen and felt and suspected. “You meant to take that hit!”
“I meant to kill you,” Anjhela said, so harshly that only a hint of her silken voice remained. Trevarr made a sound through a shuddering gasp, the energies pounding into a heartbeat that was fast and hard and audible to them all. Anjhela looked down at her hand; it didn’t come near to covering the length of the deep, slashing cut through her leathers. She laughed a little as she slid down the wall.
Trevarr spoke through the rising pulse of power, his voice breaking on a groan. “Anjhela...”
“No!” She turned on him, snarling at the mere hint of his regret. “I would have killed her. You know I would have. But since I didn’t...now it’s your turn, kyrokha. Go fly. You should have done so long before you came to my hand again.” Her head rested weakly against purple-tinted flowstone. Still, she narrowed her eyes into annoyance. “They’ll be coming, you fool. The glyphs are breaking and you need to go. FLY.”
Trevarr’s breath was a wild thing, his chest heaving with it. The pulsing energies filled him with blued sunlight, so sharp and bright that Garrie couldn’t see beyond it to his features. She threw herself at him, offering only the one hand while she kept the knife away from them both—bloody knife, preternaturally sharp blade, sticky in her grip.
“She’s right—they must know!” She shouted the words, still not certain if the rising, shuddering grumble existed only in her mind. “Let go of yourself!”
The shackles vibrated against his wrists, their glyphs glowing bright and brighter, shards of hot light cutting through the blue-tinted energies that flared around and through him, bouncing from the walls and cutting through the dark, rising fog. He closed his eyes, straining, fighting the energies, fighting himself. Fighting the constraints of Ghehera. Smoke rose to sting Garrie’s eyes and she wasn’t sure from where but when the door groaned behind her she knew damned well what it meant.
Anjhela’s harsh choking laugh confirmed it. “Fly,” she said, her face contorting into both laughter and tears, her grip gone spastic on her side. “Fly.”
“Open your damned eyes and look at me.” Garrie grabbed his arm, past the shackles, and pushing up through his light. Up against him. “Hold on to me—and let yourself go!”
As if she didn’t know that exact feeling—of letting go to the energies, letting them make of her what they would. As if she didn’t understand exactly what held him back, his lashes wet and his whole body shaking.
She hadn’t had any choice. And now neither would he.
Garrie scooped up her fast-diminishing resources and shoved them out at him. Shoved hard. Everything she had and then digging deep for more, an aching emptiness creeping into her bones and gray sparks crawling across her vision.
He made a sound of profound surprise, light limning his features from within, leaking from eyes and nose and ears and mouth.
Fly! she told him, ramming the thought home whether he could hear it or not—scraping through the newly hollow places of her soul. Something wrenched inside her; something broke. And still she flung out everything she had for one...last...push.
Trevarr threw his head back with a cry that turned into a roar. The energies whipped into a storm, blinding but not quite deafening her—not to the sound of his shackles shattering or to the explosive crack of the door giving way. Anjhela screamed a warning, and then Trevarr—
The thunderous clap of wing, the scent of drifting wood smoke, the rustle of scale and feather.
Garrie fell forward into the space where Trevarr had been, the shackles at her feet, the ethereal winds whipping in her hair, shouts of fury behind her.
And then those things were all gone, and she was the one who screamed. And panicked. And flailed. And lost herself to the whirlwind of what had been inside her and now thrashed around her, all fury and freedom and inexperienced flight out of the cave and into the etherea.
She tried to breathe and couldn’t, and found all her air gone with that first scream. The prickling gray sparks filled her vision; she would have fallen if there’d been anywhere to go, and instead simply went limp, startled into terror at the thing that should have occurred to her from the start. Because she’d shoved Trevarr into his ethereal form, and now she had no idea if he knew how to come back. Back from the travel, back from the unfamiliar form...
Or if she passed out now, whether she’d ever wake up.
Lungs burning, personal energies drained, she only had time to realize there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.
~~~~~
A glimpse of a familiar cave—too small, too small!—and wings battering against rock. The whirlwind glimpse of another, a precious gasp of air and away again, a tumult too big to be contained.
A tumult that didn’t know how to be contained.
A tumult that would kill them trying.
Shattering rock, splintering trees, the angry scream of a startled predator, the resounding crash of something unknown, all in a daze of barely seen, barely perceived, barely conscious. Frustration and twisting effort all around her, hints of solidity swept away by flailing uncertainty until even in that daze, Garrie knew they were close to flying apart forever.
Dissolution.
Darkness.
~~~~~
Darkness breaking through to rainbow clarity, a sweeping rush of light. Feet, on solid ground. Black fog tickling her bare ankles, arms caressed by a very physical breeze as she fell, boneless and emptied. The solid flap of wing, the brush of scale-like feather, the sense of looming presence, a deep huff of breath from a thing of strength and size.
Garrie took a deep whooping breath of warm, spiced air. Energy whirled, more softly than before—brushing her cheek and ruffling her hair. Trevarr’s voice came from the exact height that it should, his hands holding her upright exactly where and how they should be. “Open your eyes now. Open them, atreya, and look at me.”
~~~~~~~~~~