“I suppose you’re right. Many still fear the ability. Your kind are supposed to be extinct. It’s abnormal.”
Vesper gestured between hiscavaeandzvezda. “There’s little about me I would consider normal.” Between his burden of mimicry and mishmash of fucked up magic, he’d always been an outcast, even in his own family. Izzy and his father had bonded so easily and it’d filled him with such longing, but now … it was Thorrin who seemed to understand this. To understandhim.
“Care to go for a ride?” Thorrin asked. He yanked up his mask, identical to Vesper’s, and winked at him. “It’s easier to target the bloodlace from above.”
“We can race,” Kyrith declared. She jogged over to Thorrin and he clasped her hand to yank her onto his mount. “Unless you’re tooscared.” She settled in behind Thorrin and wrapped her arms around his waist. Something in Vesper’s chest twinged at the ease of the gesture.
He ignored it and aimed his attention at hisShadowheart. The dragon stared back. The threat of his magic failing had always lingered in the back of his mind. What if he hit Collapse while on her back? But with the new knife, he could at least try to fly. And he would have to. He had already given the impression he had before, although Kyrith saw right through him.
As Thorrin’s dragon’s wings stirred dust into the wind, Vesper braced a hand over his eyes to avoid the burn. He rounded Kaida and placed his palm on her shadowy back. Even as the darkness rippled around his hand, and his mount responded, solid, breathing, and alive, he drew a hesitant breath.
“Together?” he whispered, his voice quivering. Fucking humiliating.
The stunted “yes”into his mind was all the prompt he needed.
With far more precision than he would mount Balthasar with, he climbed onto her back. His boots skidded on her scales as he scrambled and Kaida growled a million complaints. He barely had time to settle before she stretched her great obsidian wings. Shadowy wisps trailed behind her like a fine mist.
Vesper yanked up his skull mask and sent a silent prayer to the gods not to fall from her back and break his bloody face, or neck, although his neck would be better. That way he wouldn’t have to face the ridicule afterwards.
“Slow,” he whispered to Kaida. “Don’t embarrass me. We need to make this look good. Like we know what we’re doing. Got it?”
She growled low in her throat in a response he had no clue how to interpret, especially as she stared hungrily up at the ceiling. And when Thorrin’s mount rose and disappeared through the hole, Kaida didn’t hesitate.
She launched herself into the air, leaving Vesper’s stomach behind. Bile rose in his throat, and he squeezed his eyes shut as the wind assaulted them.
He had never clutched anything like he did Kaida’s neck, as she practically turned vertical and shot through the ceiling. His dragon roared in manic delight. Fucking wonderful. Vesper only managed to whimper into her hide as the ground shrank beneath them and the sky grew closer.
The chilled air thick with the beginnings of spring whipped his face as a foreign terror laced with adrenaline flooded hisveins. He feared fucking this up, but also he was in the air, on his fuckingShadowheart’sback, something he never thought he could do.
He slivered an eyelid, and gods, the view—between the expanse of sea shimmering like a night sky and the sun setting in a watercolour painting of reds and oranges and yellows. The word gorgeous didn’t do it justice.
He wanted to draw it. Wanted to capture it. And that was a desire he'd assumed long dead.
Not even the decaying land below him could curb his high. His hold on Kaida released ever so slightly, and he sought balance. Once he found his equilibrium, he gripped her with his thighs, and outstretched his arms, revelling in the wind through his hair and the freedom of the sunset air.
Kaida closed her eyes, as if she had waited her entire life for this moment after a century in the prison of Vesper’s body. The fading sunlight swept over them in great bows, as if the sky itself bent to their will. Like they held the world in their palms.
Ahead, Vesper caught Thorrin and Kyrith as they descended on a patch of land infested by bloodlace. His mount unleashed a gust of fire. That heinous red shit withered, not as quickly as Kaida’s fire had doused it, but it still shrank.
Fuck it. What better way to convince them he could do this than to go for it? So Vesper leaned into Kaida, and urged her, “Show them how it’s done.”
She actually obeyed, though her descent mimicked that of a bone ash addict diving into their stash. Vesper clutched onto her neck for dear life.
Kaida roared and let loose a billow of shadowfire dark enough to eclipse the day. It consumed the bloodlace and Vesper could practically hear its shrieks as it shrivelled to nothing and died. He bit back his yell of victory.
Close to the cliffside, Thorrin hovered in the air. “No need to show off,” he yelled across the short expanse.
Kaida tittered a reptilian laugh while Vesper waved him off, though adrenaline still coursed his veins.
“Come on, Thorrin. Let’s race,” Kyrith prodded. “See what pretty boy can do.” She winked at Vesper and nodded to the ocean. “Go on then, we’ll even give you a headstart.”
He hadn’t prepared for this. That swoop and burn of the bloodlace was fine, but a race? Kaida seemed in tune with him for the moment but that thread often slipped. That thing that connected them. Their vision.
Either way, Vesper wasn’t a coward. He was a wolf.
And he wouldn't back down.
So, as Kaida’s great wings flapped, they raced ahead, and Vesper shot Kyrith a very impolite gesture as he passed her and headed for the sea.