Infinity

flames that had been surrounding him and then let out a rather large, fiery belch.

I’d seen Winston transform probably a dozen times, but except for the first time when the Fate Maker had controlled his change, I had never been close enough to really watch. It was beautiful. Absolutely terrifying to suddenly find yourself face-to-face with a ten-foot-tall dragon with scales the size of dinner plates but still amazing.

Not that I was going to tell him that. God knows he and Rhys didn’t need anyone else helping inflate their egos.

“Was that supposed to impress me?” I put my hands on my hips and shook my head, trying to act like I was anything but awestruck by what I’d just seen.

Winston lowered his head toward me in what I thought was supposed to be a nod. Or possibly a “yeah, obviously.”

“You’re seriously going to have to up your game, Carruthers, if you think that little display got you anywhere with me. I’ve seen hatchlings manage a more graceful transformation than that one. Weak. Totally weak.”

My dragon just snorted before he dropped down in front of me and stretched his neck out, giving me a way to scramble up onto his back without needing a boost. Not that climbing up the spikes on my boyfriend’s back like some kind of kid on a jungle gym was any less mortifying or anything.

I grabbed one of said spikes and started trying to climb, balancing my feet on one spike while I used the next as a handhold to lever myself upward. When I finally reached his shoulders, I shifted my body to turn and sit, using the space between spikes like a weird sort of saddle.

Winston looked back at me, and it didn’t matter that he couldn’t speak. I could tell he was trying to figure out if I was done wiggling and whether or not we could go.

I narrowed my eyes at him and squirmed once more before lifting my heels and giving him a not-so-tender thwap with my heels. “Giddyap.” I thumped my feet against his shoulders again.

Win glared at me, then huffed once, his forked tongue flicking out to blow the dragon version of a raspberry before he turned his head, stood up, and launched us both into a straight-on vertical, which meant, if I was going to stay on his back, I had to throw myself forward and cling onto his neck, careful to avoid the blunt-tipped spikes.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I yelled, tightening my grip and hanging on for dear life as we flew higher. Instead of leveling out though, Winston kept climbing, still stretching for the sun. Just when I thought we couldn’t go any higher before we ran out of air, he stopped, letting himself tilt forward, flattening. No… He wasn’t leveling out…

“Oh crap!” I screamed as his nose dropped, and we fell into a dive. It would have been scary enough if we’d been over water or something, but considering we were over a big, hard expanse of bare dirt, it was downright terrifying. “I hate you so much!”

Instead of answering, Winston tucked his wings into the sides of his body and continued to dive, leaving me clinging to his neck and afraid to close my eyes because it might’ve made the ground seem like it was coming at us even faster than it really was.

The instant his snout passed the top leaf of the nearest tree he pulled himself back up to a flat position, and instead of falling, we were gliding just over the tops of the forest. Leaves brushed against my toes, and when I looked down, birds stared up at us, almost looking confused by why a dragon with a queen on top was disturbing their nests.

Winston glided us into a smooth turn that put the sun to our backs and then opened his wings, letting the wind lift us higher as we soared across the skies of a kingdom that was somehow mine.

I shook off the thought, sat up, and threw my head back, bringing my hands out to the side and letting the wind rush through my fingers. My heart pounded , and all I wanted to do was laugh like a kid on a Tilt-A-Whirl spinning too fast.

I was riding on the back of a dragon. A dragon! My boyfriend the dragon, in fact, and for the first time since we’d opened the Chronicles of Nerissette back in the normal world and tumbled through that magic portal the book had opened in the library, I wasn’t flying because we had an army to fight. We were just hanging out for once. Flying and having fun. Like going out for a drive, Nerissette style. Like nothing bad could happen to us.

I dropped forward and wrapped my arms around Winston’s neck, a hug this time instead of a desperate attempt not to fall to my death. “Thank you for this,” I said into his side, unsure if he could even hear me. “For everything. I know the past year has sucked. Thank you for sticking it out with me.”

He turned his head to look at me, and I watched as his mouth opened slightly, curving upward at the sides in what I thought looked suspiciously like the dragon version of a smile. Then he swiveled his head to the side slightly and nuzzled against my hand. He shifted his gaze forward again and started to flap his wings, taking us higher before turning us south, flying us toward the forests and villages near Wevlyn Lake.

Maybe, if we were lucky, we’d be able to find the dryads, including my best friend Mercedes, as they started to make their way back to Neris. Sorcastia, a farming community on Wevlyn Lake, was the last place the dryads had planned to stop before they came back to the palace. I hadn’t seen Mercedes, or her mentor Darinda, the head of the Dryad Order, for almost a month, and I missed them both. But as we neared the village of Sorcastia, I saw smoke coming from the trees.

“Win!” I pointed at the smoke.

He dropped his head and started to flap his wings harder, going up but at the same time moving us toward the trees.

Smoke was not good. Smoke meant fire, and the dryads never used fire. It could have been smoke from a farmer’s chimney, but I knew that none of the farmers in Sorcastia made their homes outside the village, preferring to cluster together instead—an age-old defense against the trolls who used to hunt these woods.

The closer we got to the trail of smoke, the more I saw that it wasn’t one tiny curl of smoke—it was a plume. A big plume. And underneath all the smoke I could see the red-gold of crackling flames.

I nudged Winston with my knees and then leaned closer so that my mouth was pressed against his ear. “Take us lower. We need to find Mercedes.”

There was nothing left, nowhere for them to hide, nowhere safe where they could have escaped the flames without us seeing them already. I clung to Winston’s neck as he dropped lower and watched as miles of burning trees passed by underneath us. He shifted direction, going toward Wevlyn Lake, and I kept my eyes peeled, looking for the green women down below. They had to be in there somewhere. We just had to find them.

Winston shifted again, toward the mountains this time, and flew lower, both of us staring down at the nightmare below. The closer we moved to the mountains, the more damage we saw: whole swaths of forest gone, the trunks of trees black with a gruesome orange glow emanating from them. It was like looking down at every horror movie I’d never been allowed to see as a kid but had snuck off to watch anyway all combined together in one big nightmare of flames.

My heart was pounding, and I had to fight the urge to gag from the mixture of smoke and fear. Whoever had done this had turned the entire forest into a blazing inferno, destroying everything in its path. Somewhere down there was my best friend, and I didn’t know how to get to her.

Someone had attacked one of my settlements. No, not just someone. My aunt. It had to be her. We’d been at peace for less than a week, and already she’d broken our treaty. She’d waited until we thought we were safe, that things were going to go back to normal, and then she’d attacked.

Winston had been right. I’d pushed her too far, demanded too much, and now she was making my people pay for it. She was making Mercedes pay for it.

There was a muffled pop, and I whipped my head around, my eyes widening as a tree to our left exploded, bits of bark shooting toward us like tiny daggers. Something stung the side of my neck, and I swiped at it with my right hand while clutching Winston tightly with the left. My palm started to burn as I beat it against the places on my green cotton tunic where bits of flaming bark had hit me and burned holes in my clothes. I flicked off the last of it from my still-smoldering trousers and turned back to Winston, dropping lower against his body to protect myself from more exploding trees.

Then I saw it, a gap in the trees where nothing was burning. Not a very large gap but dead center of what would have been the fire, what should have been the hottest part of the blaze, and there was no smoke, no fire. A great big hole of nothing.