by Amelia Jade
“Well that’s just great,” he muttered, angry at himself.
You need to say something!
But he couldn’t. She was an instructor, but she was more than that too.
Rhynne Nova was a Guardian, one of the Cadian Elite. They patrolled the borders, keeping shifters in, and humans out. They also settled internal disputes.
She was one of their finest, and he was just a degenerate drunk getting into bar fights.
No wonder it only happened once.
Dominick shut that thought down immediately. He’d sworn never to bring it up, and tried to banish the memories entirely, even if they all but consumed him.
“I need to be alone,” he said, shaking off his friends. “I promise I won’t get into any more trouble tonight, okay?” he said forcefully as they tried to restrain him again.
They didn’t say anything, but he could sense the disappointment in them too.
Well, I suppose it’s easier to disappoint everyone at once, instead of doing it individually.
Dominick wandered off into the darkness, his head low as he struggled to come to terms with why he was feeling the way he was.
***
The cadets filed out of the Top Scale Academy building and into the rear courtyard.
The three humped buildings, joined by long, low corridors, housed everything that was necessary to run the school. The westernmost building housed the dormitory where the cadets stayed. It was a self-contained unit. Sleeping rooms, a library, study, common area, kitchen, and even an exercise room below grounds were all part of it.
The central building was for the instructors. Dominick had never seen much of it. The main entrance to the whole Academy was there, but beyond that, the exit to the rear, and the hallways that led off to the two outbuildings, he hadn’t seen any of it.
Finally, the eastern building was given over entirely to the Wing Commander, the Master of Top Scale. He wasn’t present today that Dominick could see, but many times Daxxton Ryker would be there, either high in the sky, or somewhere else near their training grounds, to observe the cadets as they trained.
It wasn’t a large building, but it was big enough. It didn’t need to house a lot. There were only three cadets in this class, and it was the first class to be run in at least half a decade. Oftentimes there was only one or two students. Top Scale was that rigorous in who it let in, and even then many of them failed out.
Like Dominick knew he was coming close to doing. He had to ace today’s test, whatever it was, or else he might be in serious trouble.
Unfortunately, the instructors had been extra mum on the objective today.
The rear courtyard was on mostly hard-packed dirt, except for the multitude of fifty-foot wide circles of stone inlaid into the ground.
As Dominick watched, the three instructors, Rhynne Nova, Zander Pierce, and the Senior Instructor Blaine Wingstar, all moved to a circle as the cadets approached.
He watched, fascinated as always as they shifted.
Zander reached the center of his stone circle first, and Dominick watched winds whip up around him from seemingly nowhere, wrapping him in a cocoon of gale force winds. Tiny particles of dust, vegetation, and other debris were caught up in the tempest that grew as it expanded rapidly inside, the winds moving so fast they blurred the air, obscuring what was happening.
Then suddenly the air went still, and debris clattered down as the sphere dissipated. A magnificent brass-colored dragon was suddenly visible, its wings slowly retracting until they lay flat down the flanks of the forty-foot-long creature. Though Gale Dragons were one of the smallest of the dragon breeds, they were lightning quick, and their GaleFire breath could send even the strongest dragon tumbling from the sky.
He expected the huge coppery membranes attached to the dragon to reach out and send it spiraling quickly into the air, but the dragon simply stood there, the huge yellow eyes looking over the Cadets as they waited.
Rhynne was next. He watched her, trying not to stare, as the tall, powerful woman took a knee in the middle of her chosen circle. Flame-ridden black clouds of smoke circled her, rising above her as she stood up in time with them, until she too was obscured in a sphere of her elemental nature. Yellow flames briefly burst through the clouds in a powerful display as the sphere expanded. Blackness crept back into it, and then it all rose up into the sky as she finished her transformation. A magnificent red dragon, a solid seven or eight feet longer than Zander’s, settled down in the center of the stone circle.
Her eyes fixed on him, and Dominick swallowed hard, transfixed by their beauty even in animal form. He was so focused on her stare that he almost missed Blaine as he reached the center circle of the three that had been chosen.
Blaine was a Fume Dragon. Thick green clouds of noxious nerve gas billowed out from his feet. They didn’t swirl up and around him like the others. Instead, they compressed in a ball behind him, until at last he threw his arms out wide. The green gas exploded outward in all directions, enveloping Blaine in its midst. The fumes took on the shape of his dragon instead of a sphere, showcasing his mastery of the powers within him. The clouds solidified, and suddenly it wasn’t a gas sculpture of his dragon, but a brilliant verdant-scaled beast that stood there.
Dominick never ceased to be amazed as he found out new things that he might one day be capable of.
It was just those sorts of things that kept him coming back to Top Scale, despite everything else.
“Asher, you are with me,” Blaine intoned. “Zeke, with Zander. Dominick, you will work with Rhynne today.”
He gulped, and moved toward the center of another circle, preparing himself to change.
Work with Rhynne? Part of him was elated at the opportunity to spend more time with her. But the unimpressed look that seemed to be etched upon her face anytime he saw her looking his way made him rethink that decision. If only he could just talk to her. To discuss what had happened. Maybe she would change her mind. Maybe—
No. Just let it go. She already said it was a mistake on her part. You need to stop thinking it over.
“Stop. You will go with them as you are,” Blaine said, stopping the cadets before they could shift.
Dominick blinked in surprise, but did as he was told, climbing aboard Rhynne and seating himself behind her neck. She didn’t say a single word, nor did she dip her wing low for him to easily climb aboard.
It was a petty gesture, but he didn’t care. As he grabbed her neck and pulled himself up, he made sure to land with full force, earning him a hiss of anger from the red scale-covered snout.
Deal with it.
Rhynne didn’t wait for Blaine to say any more before she launched herself into the sky, forcing Dominick to scramble for handholds. He rolled his eyes. It was going to be like that, was it? Very well.
“You’ve learned a lot,” Blaine said as he and Zander rose into the air as well, the dragons maneuvering toward the nearest thermal plume of hot air which helped propel them high into the sky with ease. “But today, you’re going to learn your hardest lesson yet. Pay attention, because this exercise has killed cadets before. And it will kill again in the future if you don’t pay attention.”
Dominick’s full attention was on his instructor now. They had tried dangerous things before. But this was new. Beneath him he felt Rhynne move, as if trying to roll her front shoulders to relax them. They were high in the sky, he noticed. Higher than they generally flew at. What was going on?
And why was she nervous?
“You’ve all learned to shift smoother and faster. But all of your training so far has come under ideal circumstances.”
He paused, looking at each of the three cadets.
“It’s time you learned to do so under less…organized ones.”
Without warning, the three instructors rolled.
Dom, caught entirely by surprise like his fellow cadets, tumbled into the sky.
“What the fuck!” he shouted at Rhynne, shaking his fist as he fell toward the
earth, looking back up at her, shooting an angry gesture at all three instructors, who now turned and plunged after their charges.
Fuck this shit.
The ground was coming up fast. He focused, reaching inside of him to the coiled ball of lightning that was his dragon, and touched it, urging it forth.
The power flowed into him, and he urged it faster. There wasn’t much time, and his view was about to be obscured as a lightning storm enveloped him. He had to focus here. To his right, he saw a white ball of ice trailing fog as it plummeted. That was Asher.
Zeke was somewhere behind him, and Dominick couldn’t take the time to shift his focus away.
The wind plucked at the lightning storm around him, whipping it away, as his terror fought against his focus. He tried to close his eyes, but he couldn’t, not with the ground coming at him so swiftly. He pulled harder on the lightning within, forcing more of it out, trying to control it and bring up the protective shield that they’d been taught to produce a few months earlier. If he could concentrate his power like that, he could then use it to shift.
But the shield refused to form. He poured all of his power into it, but his mind was in a million places as he plummeted down, approaching terminal velocity.
“You must shift!” a voice roared behind him.
He looked over his shoulder to see Rhynne keeping pace with him as the winds whipped furiously at his clothing, forcing his eyes into slits, and even those watered profusely.
“Come on, come on,” he urged through gritted teeth, trying to pull his dragon out of him.
Shit.
It was too late; he’d never make it now.
“Fuck you!” he shouted at the world, and prepared to hit the ground.
Giant taloned claws closed around him, and he was hurled against them violently as Rhynne snapped her wings open wide and pulled out of the dive at the last second, flying so low over the landscape below that the grass reached up and almost touched him.
Their speed slowed quickly, and Rhynne banked back toward the Academy building. As she approached at a more reasonable speed, Dominick yelped as she opened her claws and let him fall. He hit the ground hard, then bounced and rolled several times, before coming to a stop on his back in a swirl of dried earth.
“Ouch.” He coughed, trying to sit up.
The entire world spun dizzily, and Dominick thought better of it.
To his left, the other instructors landed, followed shortly after by both Asher and Zeke, in dragon form.
“Dammit.” The one word conveyed all of his emotion at once.
Grimacing, Dominick got to his feet, ignoring the questions of how he was feeling that came from several parties.
“I think I’m done for the day,” he announced to the group as a whole, holding his side. His ribs were bruised, if not cracked.
That would be painful for the rest of the day. He stomped his way inside, initially intending to head for the dorms, but he changed his mind when he realized the others would go that way as well.
So instead he pushed his way through the front door. There wasn’t much around Top Scale, but there was a river that wound its way through the plains. It was a twenty-minute walk, but he could do with that time. Shunting the pain from his battered and bruised body away, he headed down the stairs.
Chapter Two
Rhynne
“Go find him,” Blaine said as they finished shifting back to their human forms.
After the near-miss, he’d decided to call it a day. Truth be told, Rhynne thought he was a little surprised that the other two had made it.
And if he’d paired Dom with someone else, and not me, Dom would have made it just fine as well. But no, the stubborn old man wouldn’t listen!
She seethed inside at that, but wasn’t willing to let it show. Her reasoning behind asking him to switch the pairings up had been flimsy at best. But she couldn’t tell him the real reason. That would have been disastrous in its own right.
So now she snarled silently at Blaine and went after Dominick. Which was exactly the last thing that she wanted. Hell, it probably wasn’t too high up on Dominick’s list of ways to brighten his day either.
Too bad. If I’m going to be miserable because of you, you’re gonna be miserable too!
It wasn’t her normal way of thinking, and she wasn’t proud of it, but right then Rhynne was just pissed.
And you owe him an apology for dumping him on the ground like that too. He didn’t really deserve that. Besides being awkward and formal around you, he hasn’t really been a bad guy about it all.
Rhynne sighed as she headed toward the cadet dorms. It was true; she’d been rather hard on him, as if blaming him for her moment of weakness.
Her eyes flickered over toward the front door as she saw movement. Pausing, she moved closer to the frosted glass door until she could peer through one of the clear sections.
It was Dominick.
So he hadn’t gone to the dorms after all. Shit. Now she would have to confront him out in the open, instead of behind closed doors.
It just kept getting better and better. Pushing the door open, she strode down the stairs and out across the hard-packed plain after him.
“What do you want Rhynne?” he asked as she drew closer, not even bothering to turn around.
He must have heard her footsteps, since he was upwind of her and couldn’t smell her. So how had he known it was her?
“I could ask you the same thing,” she said, carefully modulating her voice to be equal parts taunting and equal parts concerned.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he asked, spinning in place.
She noted the way his fists clenched together at his sides as he looked at her. Why was he so scared of her that he clammed up? She couldn’t understand it. He hadn’t been like that before it happened. So what had changed after?
“It means exactly what it sounds like,” she said, her anger coming to the fore at his challenge. “You,” she stabbed a finger at him, “have been acting out lately. And it’s driving everyone who cares about you nuts.”
Dominick’s jaw opened to respond, but it clicked shut as she finished her point.
“And you won’t tell anyone why. Which leads me to believe,” she said with another stab of her finger, still walking until she was only a few steps away from him, “that you want something. That you’re looking for something. And you’re throwing a tantrum until you get it.”
She saw something flicker in his eyes as he stared at her while she spoke, but it was gone so briefly she couldn’t identify what it was. The simple presence of that flicker was enough to tell her she was on the right track.
“You need to get your shit together, mister,” she began, intending to say more, but Dominick’s right hand snapped up.
“I know,” he growled. “I have to get it together, because I’m on the verge of flunking out. Trust me, I’m well aware of that. Today didn’t exactly go a long way to helping that situation. I’m aware of that as well. Anything more you want to berate me about? Perhaps something I don’t know about? I’m more than capable of beating myself up for my own actions though.”
Rhynne quivered with barely repressed rage at the insolence in his voice, but she didn’t rise to it. Not quite, but it was a close thing.
“Listen,” she said through clenched teeth. “If you aren’t mature enough to handle the minute fallout from one little slip up on my part, then perhaps you don’t deserve to be here after all. You need to act like an adult over it. These things happen. Most people don’t freak out over it.”
The same look flashed through Dominick’s eyes again.
“Just a slip up? A mistake? Wow. That’s kind of mean. Couldn’t have gone with the ‘It was fun, but can’t have it happen again while you’re still a cadet’ route?”
Dom’s mind flashed back to the evening it had all happened. The normally hard-ass and standoffish Rhynne had been the only Instructor around that night. Zeke and Asher had also depart
ed, leaving the two of them the only ones around. They’d kept to themselves for most of the night, but at one point, he still couldn’t figure out why, he’d gotten the sudden urge to talk to her.
As events would have it, Rhynne had experienced a similar feeling at the same time. They’d met in the halls between wings of Top Scale, and done just that, talked. But it had quickly become apparent to him that there was something special about that evening. Rhynne had been a different person. More open and talkative, she hadn’t berated him with insults. In fact, she’d been kind, gentle and more…human…than he’d thought she was capable of.
They’d paused in conversation, her brown eyes with the exotic flare of red to them had met his cerulean blue orbs, and that had been that. He didn’t know who’d made the first move, and didn’t care. It had happened, and that was that. They’d spent the night in his bed. She’d been gone in the morning, and had never shown any sign of that person before.
He sighed at the memory.
Rhynne rolled her eyes. “Are we really going to argue about the semantics? I shouldn’t have done it, and you shouldn’t have let me do it. But I did, and we did. It happened. But for both of our sakes, we can’t let on that it did.”
Dominick snorted. “Both of our sakes? Do you even hear yourself? What’s going to happen to me if it got out? Oh, nothing? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Get off your high horse, Rhynne. It doesn’t suit you.”
She jerked back as if stung.
“That will be quite enough, Cadet,” she responded sharply, before she could rein herself in.
“Yes, Instructor. Is there anything more?”
Rhynne bristled at the extreme formality in his voice.
It’s your own fault. You started it, so stop being upset when he follows suit. Take your own advice, and deal with it.
“You need to stop acting so awkward around me. Someone is going to catch on eventually, and then it will be awkward for both of us. Understand?”
Dominick looked at her. “Oh I understand, Instructor.” He turned and began to walk away. Then, over his shoulder, he said, “Though I can’t help but wonder if it would be awkward for both of us, or just you.”
