by S. M. Reine
Love. From a dragon.
Deirdre’s world, and everything she knew, had been shattered.
Stark wasn’t a strong man of principle. He was weak. Helpless to his wife. Disinterested in helping people.
Melchior wasn’t a serpent driven solely by greed. He truly loved two children that he had nurtured for years.
Deirdre didn’t know anything anymore.
Melchior’s chest hitched. A tiny flower blossomed at the edge of his wound.
“Stark said that he sent the kids with you to protect them,” Deirdre said. “But you surrendered them—and yourself—to Rhiannon. Who’s lying?”
“Neither of us,” Melchior said. “I was there that night, when Rhiannon went into labor. Alona came out blue-skinned. Nobody had seen sidhe at the time. They didn’t exist before Genesis. All we knew was that she was wrong. Rhiannon said it was a mistake and immediately conceived the second with Everton, but Calla came out the same. Blue and drenched in magic.”
“Naiads,” Vidya said. She was staring at the wall, eyes distant with the same memories that had taken Melchior.
“We didn’t have the word at the time, so Rhiannon called them demons. She blamed Ever. Said that he must have been half-demon Gray, a creature between man and monster, and that he had passed his devil seed into her.”
“So Stark had you take them away to preserve their marriage,” Deirdre said.
“I would have done anything for him back then. We still trusted each other.” He squeezed his fists around the sword, jaw clenching as a fresh wave of pain crashed over him. “I took the compulsion because I thought that both Ever and Rhiannon wanted it, because I wanted to protect the babies. But when Rhiannon found me, she told me that Everton had lied to me. She wanted to keep the girls. He had forced me to steal them.”
“What happened in Genesis?” Deirdre asked. “What is Rhiannon?”
“A witch. Just a witch, like she always had been. But a lot of magic was unlocked in Genesis, arcane and deadly forces that allowed her to harness the girls’ powers for herself. Their magic lets her masquerade as sidhe.”
It also gave her a lot more power than she would have had as a mere gaean witch.
What a bitter pill that must have been—coming back after Genesis surrounded by so many people who had been granted amazing, inhuman powers, only to discover she hadn’t been changed.
“You know Rhiannon didn’t chase you down because she loved her daughters, right?” Deirdre asked. “She chased you down so she could harness their powers.”
“Using the girls doesn’t hurt them. Rhiannon loves the girls. Why else would she have struggled so long to find a home safe for them in the Middle Worlds? The seelie, with all their nauseating righteousness, wouldn’t have anything to do with us. They wouldn’t forgive Rhiannon for the crimes she committed on Earth.”
“Crimes against the seelie?”
“Crimes against the people who became the seelie. Rhiannon was an orphan raised by the Arigotti family.” He said the name like it should have been significant.
Deirdre looked to Vidya, who explained. “A coven. No more than a gang, petty criminals. Practically mafia. And known for experimenting on werewolves before Genesis.”
“Rhiannon tried to apologize,” Melchior said. “The seelie wouldn’t take it from her.”
“Probably because she was full of crap,” Deirdre said.
He didn’t seem bothered by that. “But the unseelie took us in. They hid us from Ever. They helped us enchant safe rooms for the girls.” The bedroom that they had seen with all the grass and trees.
Now they were heading back to Earth so that their mother could use their magic while taking over the Alpha position from Rylie. And better still, Stark was serving as Rhiannon’s mate.
One big happy family.
“Send us back to Earth, Melchior,” Deirdre said, digging her fingernails into his chest again. “I know you can do it. You’ve been hiding out in the Winter Court for years, and you know how to get out.” She caught his gaze, holding it steady. “You can also make me a phoenix so I can kill the Starks.”
“But the girls need Rhiannon.” Melchior groaned again. Without the naiad magic, the Ethereal Blade was now shifting inside of him every time he breathed, budding with new flowers. Sweat rolled down his cheek.
“You know why Rhiannon wants them,” Deirdre said, stroking Melchior’s forehead. She couldn’t deny him the small comfort of human touch. Not when he was dying. “You know I’m right about her. They’ll be safer without her. Without either of their parents.”
He nodded reluctantly without opening his eyes. “You don’t need to convince me. You can get back to Earth through the ley line juncture we used last time. It’s still there—invisible. I’ll change you so that you can fly into it.”
Deirdre’s heart skipped a beat.
He was going to make her shapeshift again.
Excitement quickly dissolved to fear. That was only one change. One chance to embrace her animal. She had quickly lost her form last time, so she didn’t think she’d be able to maintain it long enough to confront Rhiannon, and Deirdre didn’t think she’d be able to change again.
The only man who could make her into a phoenix was dying.
“I’m taking you with me,” Deirdre said. “If anyone can heal this, it’d be Marion. I’ll make her heal you.”
“Before you kill her?” Melchior asked.
“Okay, that wouldn’t work. But there’s gotta be someone who can do it.”
“I wouldn’t make it that far. You have to go without me.”
Deirdre’s heart felt like it was shattering.
Dammit, it wasn’t fair, having her animal dangled in front of her and taken away again.
Melchior gripped her wrist. She’d never seen such grave intensity in him before. He’d always been flippant, as though above the petty politics of mortals. But now he was dying. And there was something he cared about very much. “Get the girls away from them,” Melchior said. “Rhiannon doesn’t love them and Everton will only hurt them. Find someone who will love them without fear. Please.”
The dragon had revealed to Deirdre the one treasure that mattered to him above all else.
She rested her hand over his. “I’ll do everything I can, but I won’t be able to defeat Rhiannon and Stark without your help. I can’t control my phoenix.”
“You don’t need flame,” he said. “You have something better than that.” He moved her hand to the hilt of the Ethereal Blade. It was warmed from proximity to his body. “Take it out. Take it out and save my girls.”
My girls. The children who had virtually become his daughters in the years since Genesis.
“You’ll die,” Deirdre said.
“I died the instant you buried it in my chest,” Melchior said. “You’ve already murdered me.”
She’d murdered the man who made her shapeshift, the only person who loved and cared for Alona and Calla.
The regret was so powerful she almost choked on it.
“They have a head start,” Vidya reminded her. She didn’t sound remotely grief-stricken. She was unbothered by her former comrade’s looming death.
Deirdre’s eyes stung. Fresh flame guttered over her skin, glittering on the dragon’s scales. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
Melchior caught her gaze. “Change.”
She changed.
Deirdre’s body rearranged itself. The sensation was bizarre, but not painful.
She clapped her hands over her mouth. The beak protruded from the bones of her gums, teeth falling into her palms, hard little white rocks.
The tip of her beak was hooked for tearing, sharp as a knife. And when it pushed out of her face, it made the skin of her lips stretch back, painfully thin.
Feathers bloomed around the edge of her beak.
Niamh watched in awe as Deirdre shook herself, trying to relieve the incredible itching created by the feathers emerging from her skin. It felt like they wer
e always lurking there, trapped, waiting for a hair follicle to open and allow them to escape.
She became a bird. Something between hawk and heron.
A phoenix.
The last of the change only took a few moments. All of her human parts were gone, and Deirdre lifted one of her feet to study it. Her skin was leathery, yet light, the skin as flaky as though she were made of papyrus. Feathers hung to her knee.
The talons tipping her toes were magma-black. They looked cruel and sharp, like she could cause real damage with them, the kind of damage that Stark did with his claws as a bear wolf.
They’d be great for killing a fourteen-year-old mage girl.
Surely it’d be swifter than burning her.
Wouldn’t that be the greatest favor that Deirdre could offer Marion? A death as swift as Gage’s and more merciful than her father’s?
“Your rage is beautiful,” Melchior said. “Don’t forget it. You’ll be able to change again if you hold it close.”
Deirdre reached toward the Ethereal Blade.
Vidya stopped her. “I’ll do this.” She dropped beside the dragon, taking the hilt in hand. “You go to Valhalla now, Melchior.”
“I’ll meet you there,” he said.
She drew the blade from his chest.
It slid free with a slick sound, like a knife carving uncooked meat.
Melchior groaned. His body arched over the ground. It wasn’t because of muscle spasms: the instant that the sword was drawn from his back, vines thrust from the rear of the wound. They pushed him off of the ground. Leaves curled around his ribs and blossoms bled down his stomach.
Everyone else that Deirdre had seen killed by the Ethereal Blade had gone like this. Their bodies had become a fertile bed for new life as their lives ended.
That wasn’t where Melchior stopped, though.
The last breath whispered over his lips. His eyes unfocused.
And then he dissolved.
He turned to nothing but ash and scales, gathered in a glittering pile on the floor where he had rested. There was no bone or blood. Just scales.
The dragon was dead.
Deirdre picked up one of the scales with her cruel talons. The scale’s edge was as sharp as Vidya’s feathers, and just as beautiful in its own way. She clenched it in her foot. The way that it bit into her leathery flesh was satisfying.
She wouldn’t forget Melchior. She would remember the dragon who had treasured the daughters of his enemies above any other riches.
And she would honor his memory by saving Alona and Calla.
Vidya extended the Ethereal Blade to Deirdre. Her eyes glistened.
“We fly,” the valkyrie said.
“To where?” Niamh asked, jerking her feathers over her shoulders.
Deirdre couldn’t respond, but she filled her mind with her memories of the werewolf sanctuary: that oasis in the Appalachians. It was just outside of Northgate. There was a waterfall there, a lake, the academy.
Paradise.
That was where they would hold the inauguration, and most likely where Marion would be waiting.
“We’ll follow you,” Vidya said.
Deirdre took the hilt in one of her three-toed feet, flapping her wings to lift herself from the ground. It was effortless. She was lifted by magic, bearing the most incredible weapon on the face of the Earth.
Marion needed to die.
And then Stark needed to follow.
She flew.
XIV
It only took them a moment to find the portal. Deirdre’s flames lit the emptiness in the sky that indicated a hole leading back to Earth. She painted the clouds crimson. The path was a swirling blackness.
Phoenix, valkyrie, and harpy plunged inside.
The ley lines let her out distant from the shore, high over the ocean.
Deirdre blazed a path through the night, streaking through the clouds like a comet. She had all the momentum of it, too. She leaned to the left, letting the tip of her wing drop into the wind, sending her wheeling toward her target.
Vidya and Niamh popped into the sky a few hundred feet behind her. Deirdre made sure that they were following before returning her attention where it really mattered. To the job to come.
Melchior had once told her to embrace her rage.
She embraced it all right.
Deirdre was more than a phoenix. She was a fireball, devastation rained upon the earth, a mass hurtling from the depths of space to set fire to everything that Rylie Gresham cared about.
Niamh and Vidya were carried in the wake of her animal. They didn’t even have to flap their wings. They simply stretched their limbs out wide and did their best to ride along the currents.
Ocean turned to shore. Deirdre’s keen eyesight made it easy to see when people spotted her—getting out of cars, shading their eyes, tilting their heads to the sky. They looked afraid. Worried. She wondered if they were afraid that a new death, one brighter and hotter than Genesis, was coming upon the world.
They should have been afraid. Everyone should have been afraid of her.
She was going to burn the world down.
The mountains were hundreds of miles away. At that distance, they would have been invisible to Deirdre in her human form, but now she could see them as though they were directly below. She could pick out the shapes of the individual trees, their branches scraping at the sky, the fog clinging to their roots. She could see owls hunting for nighttime prey. She could see roaming deer.
She could even see wolves.
When she began to see wolves that were much too large to be natural, she knew she had spotted the sanctuary’s perimeter.
The shifters who lived with Rylie had privileges that ordinary shifters did not. They were permitted to hunt the carefully controlled deer population that was cultivated in the nearby mountains, the rabbits and the mice. They were allowed to embrace their animals.
Everyone else was forced to live an existence as human as possible.
It was wrong. It made Deirdre angry.
The anger fueled her flames.
Melchior was right. It was all she needed—this anger, this rage, this devastation.
Magic sizzled when she entered the airspace over the sanctuary, trying to rebuff her entrance. Deirdre punched through it. The warding spells crackled as they broke down, leaving a ring of fire behind her that illuminated the whole forest.
Her approach brought premature sunrise upon the sanctuary.
It also brought a thousand jangling alarms, magical and mechanical.
Sirens shrieked. Guard posts illuminated, peppered throughout the mountains and valley.
They knew she was coming.
It didn’t matter. They wouldn’t be ready for her.
The cottages spread out below, arranged along the beach of the lake, opposite the academy where the most privileged young shifters were educated. Rylie Gresham and Abel Wilder’s cottage was indistinguishable from the others. Deirdre had taken that for humility before, but now she saw how it was practical in another way: she couldn’t tell where they lived from above, so she couldn’t attack.
She wasn’t going after them anyway. They weren’t the threat now.
Deirdre needed to find Marion.
Pulling the Ethereal Blade tight against her feathery underbelly so that it would create no additional drag, she folded her wings.
Beak angled toward the earth, tail of flame trailing behind her, she plummeted.
Vidya let out a battle cry as she followed.
Only Niamh was silent, eyes wide with fear in the darkness of night.
Deirdre swooped low over the sanctuary’s downtown region. She allowed her tail to dip, flicking the feathers by instinct. Flame gushed from her body. It poured molten over the rooftops. Sparks showered over the road.
Only a few shifters in their human forms were out that night, but those who were fled at the sight of her, racing on the sidewalks and taking cover between buildings.
They didn’t run
fast enough. It wasn’t possible.
Her fire consumed it all.
The buildings must have been built to be fire retardant, but they weren’t able to withstand Deirdre. She wasn’t any kind of natural fire. She was elemental, magical, and so hot that she ignited the wood. The flames were instantly white, dancing blue in the night. The smoke stank of artificial chemicals. It choked out the buildings. Choked everyone inside. Deirdre could hear them struggling to breathe.
The smoke was far deadlier than the fire. Deirdre would suffocate the pack before she could melt any of them.
Even werewolves couldn’t heal if they couldn’t breathe.
She threw a glance back at Vidya. The valkyrie’s expression was blank, obeying her drive to kill without question, without doubt.
Niamh wasn’t the same. The human face mounted on her eagle body was terrified.
But they followed her with equal readiness.
They only needed to find Marion.
Find Marion, kill Marion, end the oath.
Kill Stark.
He had laughed when she’d burned him, laughed and embraced her and started planning the rest of their lives together. He was sick. Crazier than she ever could have imagined.
If Stark wanted to raise the stakes like that, then that was fine. She’d raise them even higher.
Deirdre wouldn’t win the game. She’d change the rules.
She watched the burning pack running away from her, fleeing in waves. They were faceless gaeans. The privileged shifters fatted on Rylie Gresham’s indulgence.
They deserved to burn.
If Stark had been the man she believed him to be, he would have burned them already.
She flew in a methodical grid over the cottages, watching them ignite. Marion would be in there somewhere. Marion, and probably children, and innocents, and—no, none of them are innocent.
Deirdre flew too low.
Icy pain spiked through her right leg. She let out a musical shriek of pain, flapping harder to try to escape.
But something heavy was pulling on her. She couldn’t break free. Couldn’t gain altitude.
Deirdre curved her swanlike neck around to see a wolf hanging from her foot.
