by Amelia Jade
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. “Y
ou,” 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 departed, 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.”
She snarled at him and turned away, heading back inside, then changing her mind and pushing through the double doors out to the back of the Academy and the nearest stone circle. A nice aerial workout would be just what she needed to calm herself.
How could I have been so weak as to be with someone as immature as him? What the hell had she been thinking?
Okay, so maybe I wasn’t thinking with the logical part of my body. I’m going to have to work on better controlling my needs, however. I can’t allow myself to get into a situation like this again.
She didn’t bother to control her shift this time, and flames rolled out across the stone, just licking at the scrub of vegetation that pressed up against the edges of the circle.
With an angry hiss she spread her wings and launched herself into the sky.
***
The lavish house came into view as the trees ended and the carefully manicured lawns took over.
Home.
Well, her parents’ home, to be precise.
Rhynne banked slightly to the right as she began to descend. The house had been built to exacting specifications. Set in a meadow to the east of the town, it had been constructed in a cross-shape pattern. Each of the crosses was a different wing of the house, and one of them aligned directly with a primary compass point.
Extending away from the house along a direct line from the wings were stone pathways reminiscent of some ancient civilization. Solar lights lit up the pathways, acting like beacons for the runways. At the end of each, in front of the house, were stone circles. One for each point on the compass.
They were no ordinary circles either, she noted as her talons clacked against it as she settled herself in. The stone was a red quartz, kept constantly polished and smoothed despite the frequent amounts of airborne visitors that used them.
Rhynne purposefully kept her shift quick and efficient. She was not interested in putting on a display of power, as Blaine had the other morning with his fume-shaped dragon. Rhynne could mimic that, though she kept that knowledge to herself. There might come a time where having it was handy. She’d worked too hard in secret to achieve such a feat, and didn’t want to use it for the first time to minimal effect.
“Refreshments, madame?” a butler in white livery asked as he stepped around the exquisitely sculpted garden that sat between the landing circle and the house. The gardens each had one magnificent Vallenwood tree, towering high above everything else at the center, with smaller bushes and flowers placed around it for maximum effect on guests, both those coming and leaving.
The whole place was, in fact, designed to showcase the power and wealth of those within. It was a statement piece, really. To Rhynne it was more like a movie set, or a political building. It was her parents’ house, but growing up she had to admit in hindsight that it really hadn’t felt like a home.
She nodded politely in acquiescence to his question. “Yes, Kenneth, that would be lovely.”
Her ruby-red dress caught the light of the cold-white solar lamps overhead as she moved toward him, the thigh-high slit on the right showing a copious amount of leg that the butler did his best to avoid glancing at.
Rhynne tried not to smile as she saw him have much more luck with that than he did not allowing his eyes to wander down her neck to the rounded curve of her cleavage that the plunging neckline left exposed. Although she wasn’t particularly blessed with ample amounts to see, the dress did a wonderful job of amplifying what she did have.
He didn’t ogle, and his eyes constantly flicked back as he fought to keep them under control while she took a glass of ice water from the tray in his hand and tossed it back, glad for the liquid after her flight.
She considered grabbing something a little stronger from him to help fortify her before she went inside, b
ut decided against it. No matter how strong, it wouldn’t matter once her parents got going. She would just have to deal with it.
Kenneth took one last look at her figure as she strode inside. Rhynne did her best not to let her hips sway enticingly. He had been quite polite in his staring. Besides, if Rhynne wasn’t comfortable with people looking at her, she wouldn’t have worn the dress she did.
Truth be told, she kind of liked the attention. Being so tall and naturally blessed with a fair amount of muscle, it wasn’t until approximately a decade earlier that men had truly begun to notice her. Rhynne had also filled out a tiny bit at that time, gaining some extra size in her hips and her bust without sacrificing any muscle.
She’d also grown her auburn hair long and begun to style it fashionably.
The effect had been instantaneous, and suddenly suitors were all but throwing themselves at her in a way she had never before experienced. Although she was used to it now, the subtle glances from men when she dressed up still flattered the old her which lived inside.
The door was open, with only a mesh screen draped over the opening to keep any bugs out. She pushed between the two halves and strode inside.
Her calves were already beginning to hurt from the heels she had chosen to wear that evening.
I should wear these more often.
Or not. Truth be told, though her ego enjoyed the attention of getting all dolled up, Rhynne hated the effort. She would much rather be in a comfortable shirt, pants, and shoes, at a bar having a brew with her friends.
Hell, even an evening with Blaine and Zander would be enjoyable next to this.
She couldn’t turn down the invite, however, despite the extreme desire to do so. Her parents had ensured she had everything she needed as a child, and though her choice to work toward Academy acceptance and becoming a Guardian of Cadia had not been what they wanted, they hadn’t fought her too hard either.
