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For one agonizing moment after the Lord Dragon appeared by her side, Fee couldn’t gather enough breath to move. The dragon—her dragon—was terrifyingly beautiful in the flesh. He was head and shoulders taller than herself, his muscular bulk so tremendous it bordered on the sublime. His dark eyes pierced hers and his rich marshmallow aroma intoxicated her senses. Worse, the entirety of his human form was wreathed in a magnetic forest of flickering flames.
The fire must have been what pushed her over the edge. That’s the only way Fee could explain forgetting who she was and why she was present in enemy territory. Forgetting Malachi’s hard fists and the desperate poverty of the people who shared her underground home.
Instead, she’d clutched the dragon’s shoulders for stability as she half-climbed his body to claim the offered lips with her own. She hummed into his mouth and twined fingers through raven locks as she collapsed into the satisfying heat of crackling flames.
Although, to be fair, it wasn’t pure physical attraction that moved her. Instead, Fee’s actions were an acceptance of the conclusion that had been trickling into her brain all morning long.
Mason was the closest thing she’d ever seen to pure good on two feet. Despite the dreary picture her father had painted of the magic-less majority bowing down beneath a dragon’s overbearing thumb, the inhabitants of the Sunsphere weren’t terrified and imprisoned lackeys. If anything, that particular description more aptly applied to her own compatriots who walked with bent shoulders beneath Malachi’s gimlet gaze.
Knowing that Mason nurtured such trust and happiness in his community, Fee allowed herself to be drawn by his magnificent fire. She sank into their shared kiss and luxuriated into the burning fingers that caressed her shoulders and neck. For a long moment, in fact, she even forgot their joining was being witnessed by a rather embarrassing audience—Mason’s plant-loving foster mother.
Only when cold air licked at her bared midriff did Fee glance down and see her secret revealed. Then breath fled as she read the words moving across the cell phone’s illuminated screen.
“Last call,” Malachi had typed. Her father’s impatience echoed through the air, his anger sharp in the eight small letters.
He wouldn’t.
But Fee’s fingers were already fumbling frantically to tap out a reply. Because deep down inside, she knew that her father really would. He would punish a daughter who disobeyed his orders, even if that rebellion was as minor as a delayed check-in. He would set off this bomb in the wrong part of the Aerie out of pure spite.
He would extinguish his only daughter’s life, considering the gesture an acceptable loss in the pursuit of his overarching goal.
Knowing she had mere seconds to change Malachi’s decision, terror made fingers clumsy as they slid across the slick surface. Then words changed to numbers as Fee failed at her task.
2:00, 1:59, 1:58.
It was already almost too late.
“Turn it off,” Mason demanded.
For an instant, her father’s harsh voice filled her mind in counterpoint. This was Fee’s final chance to force Mason’s hand. She could dart aside and grab the dragon’s mother, threaten Sarah with the knife swiped from a third-floor drawer. After sensing protective passion smoldering beneath Mason’s skin during that mind-altering kiss, Fee knew her companion would do anything to save his mother’s life.
But instead, she looked away, unable to meet the intensity of her companion’s gaze. “I can’t,” she breathed.
1:55, 1:54: 1:53.
For three long seconds, Lord Dragon stared at her, pain and disappointment evident in his gaze. Then he turned his back, those joyous flames a distant memory as he barked orders at the older woman watching with cocked head from the opposite side of a hydroponics bench.
“Evacuate everyone,” he demanded. Then, despite the time limit, he waited for Sarah to reach the down staircase before grabbing Fee’s arm and pulling her up the stairs leading in the opposite direction. Seconds later, they stepped together onto the open platform that made up the Sunsphere’s roof.
Wind snatched away what little breath Fee had managed to regain and she gasped at the cold. The wintry gust bit into her skin, whipping a strand of hair into her mouth and tearing her eyes.
“Can you at least take it off?” her dragon asked quietly. Mason should have been livid with rage. But instead, he was far more patient than rapidly disappearing numbers on the cell-phone screen gave him reason to be.
Fee forced air through a tightened windpipe and nodded. “Yes, but it’ll take time.”
“Hopefully less than one minute and forty seconds of time,” Mason countered. She thought there was a hint of a smile on his hard face, but then the man was gone and a massive dragon stood on the open platform in his place.
If Mason had been enticing in his human form, he was now entrancing. By rights, a dragon should have grabbed Fee around her waist and gripped her painfully as he launched himself away from the people he loved. But, instead, the Lord Dragon himself stood stock still as if she had reason to be scared of him rather than vice versa. Didn’t he realize Fee was strapped skin to wires with explosives?
Well, if Mason wasn’t going to grab her, then it was up to Fee to find her own way aboard the only available transportation on offer. Because sometime between waking in a marshmallow-scented bed and discovering that her father considered her expendable, Fee had decided to do everything in her power to rescue the defenseless innocents below. Now, without hesitating, she gave herself a leg up via the dragon’s bent elbow then created handholds out of one curved scale after another as she scrambled atop Mason’s back.
Flames opened out around them like the petals of a flower. No, those weren’t flames, they were wings. Sails of fire that carried the two aloft while enfolding Fee in the most profound feeling of safety she’d ever experienced.
It wasn’t an entirely smooth ascent, though. Instead, the abrupt motion of the dragon’s launch nearly tossed Fee from her perch. But Mason’s tail bumped her back into place in the valley separating shoulders from neck, preventing her from plummeting to an untimely death.
0:58, 0:57, 0:56.
While Fee had been figuring out how to board a dragon, the cell phone had already breached the final minute of its countdown. Time seemed to expand and contract all at once, each instant lasting an eternity but also whipping past as quickly as the wind flew by her face.
Hurry up, Fee reminded herself.
She had work to do if she wanted to experience another toe-curling kiss with the human equivalent of her draconic steed. So she ignored both dizzying earth rushing by beneath unshod feet and fingers aching from their death grip around the dragon’s massive neck. Instead, she pried one hand loose with an effort and stuffed bare toes into jagged cracks between heated dragon scales. Then, after hesitating only an instant, she relinquished her second handhold as well.
Fee knew she should have been terrified to ride hands-free on a dragon with ticking explosives strapped around her waist. But instead, her original fear fled as fire magic consumed her. Opening her mouth, she whooped with delight...and was nearly startled from her aerial perch as the massive dragon beneath her mirrored the cry.
Mason’s bellow of sound and flame, unlike her own, served a utilitarian purpose. Down in the swirling mass of snow beneath massive dragon belly, other fliers launched themselves from the summit of towers clustered along the river’s nearest bank. Three dark specks grew as they arrowed upward to join the dragon to whom she clung, and Fee knew she was soon fated to meet the other shifters who called the Aerie home.
0:39, 0:38, 0:37.
Okay, enough sightseeing. It was time to prevent the catastrophe her father had set into motion. And, really, the effort shouldn’t be so hard.
After all, Fee rather than Malachi had placed the device around her waist in the first place. Fee rather than Malachi had been the one to pore over books late at night, deciphering wiring diagrams as she cradled her mug of steaming chamomile tea and ached for missing sleep.
When it came right down to it, the puzzle was merely a matter of disentangling threads of copper and teasing them back out the way they’d come in. It was as simple as pulling loose just the right wire and leaving the entirety deactivated, a harmless hunk of metal and plastic.
Okay, so there was also one small failsafe to consider, the fact that removing the cell phone from its cradle or pressing a single button would cause the bomb to detonate prematurely.
But even that trigger wasn’t the cause of the sinking sensation in the pit of Fee’s stomach. No, it was a second fleeting glance earthward that turned an exhilarating ride into a journey through hell. And not because of a fear of heights either.
Because back in their underground tunnels, Fee had taken her father’s words as fact. She was to be the invader, the sole warrior bringing fire-mage battle to the heart of the dragons’ domain.
Now she realized that Malachi had been lying about her purpose in the Aerie just as he’d lied about everything else. Even from this distance, she easily recognized the canary jacket of Malachi’s second-in-command as the man crept through the tangle of winter-sleepy Green below. And once she focused on the glow of gold, she could pick out a handful...no a score...of soldiers stealthily stalking through the plant-covered city in the minor mage’s wake.
The conclusion was gut-wrenching and obvious all at once. Fee hadn’t been her father’s carefully trained assassin. No, as she took in the scene arrayed beneath her, she realized she’d never been anything other than bait.