Firelight

beneath thick brows, they drill into me with a stark intensity, scanning me, all of me. I imagine myself as he sees me. My wings furled behind my back, peeking up over my shoulders. My supple-sleek limbs that glow like fire even in the gloom of the ledge. My narrow face with its pronounced contours. My ridged nose. My high-arching brows and my dragon eyes — two black vertical slits where the pupils should have been.

He lifts a hand. I don’t even flinch as he closes a broad, warm palm over my arm. Feeling, testing. His touch glides downward, and I’m sure he’s comparing my skin — draki skin — to human skin. His palm stops, flattens over the back of my hand, rests over my long, talonlike fingers. Heat zings through me at the contact.

He feels it, too. His eyes widen. A lovely hazel. Green with flecks of brown and gold. The colors I love. The colors of the earth. That gaze drifts over the wet snarls of my hair brushing the rock floor. I catch myself wishing he could see the girl within the dragon.

A sound escapes his lips. A word. I hear it, but think, no. He didn’t say that.

“Will!” a voice shouts from above.

We both jerk, and then his face changes. The soft, curious expression vanishes and he looks angry. Menacing. The way his kind is supposed to look at my kind. His hand flies off mine, all intimacy severed. I rub where he touched me.

“You okay down there? Need me to come—”

“I’m okay!” The deep rumble of his voice bounces off the walls of our small shelter.

“Did you find it?”

It again. I huff. Smoke clouds from my nose. The smolder in my lungs intensifies.

He watches me intently, his eyes hard and merciless. I wait for him to announce my presence, holding his gaze, refusing to look away, determined that this beautiful boy see the face he sentences to death with his next words.

“No.”

I suck in a breath as the smolder dies from my lungs. We stare at each other for a lingering moment. He, a hunter. Me, a draki.

Then, he’s gone.

And I’m all alone.

3

I wait forever. Long after the sounds of choppers and engines fade. Wet and shaking on my ledge, I huddle, hugging my legs, rubbing the supple stretch of my calves, hands gliding over red-gold skin. My injured wing burns, throbbing as I linger, listening, but there’s nothing. Only the whisper of the forest and the gentle sigh of the Cascades around me.

No men. No hunters. No Will.

I frown. For some reason this bothers me. I will never see him again. Never know why he let me go. Never learn if he really whispered what I think he did. Beautiful.

In that single moment we connected. Somehow it happened. It’s hard to wrap my head around. I thought he was going to rat me out for sure. Hunters aren’t big on mercy. They see us only as prey, a subspecies to be broken and sold to our greatest menace — the enkros. Since the dawn of man, the enkros have been hungry for the gifts of our kind, obsessed with tearing us apart or holding us captive for their use: the magical properties of our blood, our armorlike flesh, our ability to detect gems beneath the earth. We’re nothing to them. Nothing with a soul or heart.

So why did Will let me go? His incredible face burns in my mind, imprinted there. The slick-wet hair. The intense eyes peering at me darkly. I should see Cassian’s face. Cassian is my destiny. I have accepted it even though I grumble and risk daylight to break free of him.

I wait as long as possible, until I can stand the damp chill of my shelter no more. Wary of a trap, I ease out carefully and glide into the icy water. I scale the wall of jagged rock, my single wing working hard, slapping wind, the membranes taut and aching in their frenzy.

Air saws from my lips as I pull myself to the top. Collapsing, I absorb the thick, loamy aroma of the ground. My palms dig into the moist soil. It sustains me, humming into my body. Buried far below, volcanic rock purrs like a sleeping cat. I can sense this: hear it, feel it, feed from it.

It’s always this way — this connection to fertile, arable earth. This will heal my wing. No man-made medicine. I draw strength from thriving, life-giving earth.

The smell of rain rides the clinging mist. Rising, I walk into its waiting embrace, start back toward the lake where my bike and clothes wait. Faint sunlight filters through the canopy of branches, battling the mist and turning my chilled skin to a reddish bronze.

I’m convinced Az made it home. I won’t let myself consider the alternative. By now the pride will know I’m missing. I start working various explanations in my head.

The pads of my feet fall mutely as I weave through trees, listening for sounds that don’t belong, wary of the hunters returning…but beneath the wariness lurks a hope.

The hope that one hunter will return and satisfy my questions, my curiosity…this strange fluttering in my stomach at his whispered word.

Gradually a noise penetrates, ribboning through the air, chasing birds from the trees. My draki skin prickles, flashing from red to gold, gold to red.

Fear shoots through me as the faint growl of engines grows close. At first, I think the hunters have come back for me.

Did the beautiful boy change his mind?

Then I hear my name.

Jacinda! The sound echoes desperately through the labyrinth of towering pines.

Lifting my face, I cup my hands and call, “I’m here!”

In a moment, I’m surrounded. Vehicles brake hard. I blink as doors open and slam.

Several of the elders appear, storming through the evaporating mist with their faces grim. I don’t see Az, but Cassian is among them, so like his father with his mouth pressed in an unforgiving line. He usually likes me in draki form, prefers it, but there’s no admiration in his eyes right now. He moves close, towering over me. He is always this way. So big, so male…so hovering. For a moment, I remember the warm strength of his hand when he grabbed mine yesterday in Evasive Flight Maneuvers. It would be so easy to let him in and just do what everyone wants…what everyone expects.

I can’t meet his gaze, so I study the shine of his ink black hair cut closely to his head. He leans down, rustling the hairs near my temple as he growls in his smoky voice, “You scared me, Jacinda. I thought I lost you.”

My skin bristles, tingles with defiance at his words. Just because the pride thinks we belong together, doesn’t make it so. At least not yet. For probably the hundredth time, I wish I was just an average draki. Not the great fire-breather everyone expects so much from. Life would be so simple then. It would be mine. My life.

My mother pushes through the group, brushing Cassian away as if he’s just a boy and not a six-foot-plus onyx capable of crushing her. Framed with bouncy curls, her face is beautiful, pleasantly rounded with amber eyes like mine. Since Dad died, several of the males have tried to court her. Even Cassian’s father, Severin. Thankfully, she hasn’t been interested. In any of them. It’s hard enough dealing with Mom. I don’t need some macho draki trying to take my father’s place.

Right now, in this moment, she looks older. Tight lines edge her mouth. Even the day they told us Dad wouldn’t be coming home, she didn’t look this way. And I realize this is because of me. A knot forms in my stomach.

“Jacinda! Thank God you’re alive!” She folds her arms around me, and I cry out where she crushes my injured wing.