Within the Flames (36 page)

Ruthless resolve shot straight into Lyssa’s heart. Pain ate at her right arm, muscles contorting with power, but this time she embraced it, opening her soul to the dragon, accepting that other half of her without hesitation.

Golden light flooded her vision. Hot as the sun, and bright.

Lyssa’s body contorted, expanding, her skin stretching until she thought she would explode from the force of the dragon fighting to emerge. Everything twisted—muscles and bone, the shape of the world—even the slant of light.

Wings erupted against her back. Bursting with fire.

Furniture scattered around her. The floor burned. She looked down, as though from very far away, and saw Eddie staring at her, his body surrounded in flames. Admiration and wonderment filled his eyes.

The
Cruor Venator
still wore her stolen leopard skin. But her gaze was human and dark . . . and full of fear.

Not that it mattered. She was hardly a mouthful, for a dragon.

Which Lyssa discovered. When she ate her in one bite.

Blood flooded her mouth, bone crunching. The taste was awful, and not because she was eating another person. The rot of Georgene’s spirit was thick and slimy, coating the inside of her mouth and throat—and then her soul—in such filth that Lyssa thought eating shit from a sewer would have been better.

And then the power hit her—memories soaked from blood—and the world went black.

“F
uck me,” muttered Roland, as the dragon ate the witch. Eddie, who had never much cared for swearing, had to agree.

Fuck me
was an appropriate response, along with
Oh, my God
.

Lyssa’s transforming into a dragon had been awe-inspiring: golden and hot, a shimmer of light that clung to her skin as scales erupted, and her body stretched with furious power.

But Lyssa as a dragon . . . was the stuff of fairy tales and children’s dreams on starry nights. A dragon, who in older days, would inspire quests and long journeys—searching for gold, when the only treasure worth finding would be the dragon’s heart itself. Living, beating, and full of love.

God, he loved her.

The ceiling cracked above her head. Eddie had to dance backward as her wings nearly knocked himly "0em" wi into the window. Roland stayed on the floor, breathing hard, weak from blood loss. Eddie crawled close, thinking about how stupid he’d been to stay so angry at the older man, these last few years. Seeing Roland wounded, tied up, in pain—felt too much like watching his father die for a second time. Making him realize just how much he still cared. He tried instinctively not to feel anything at all, to bury those emotions, but the well was already too full with Lyssa. The cap he tried to screw on wouldn’t fit.

“Hey,” Eddie said to the hurt man, just as Lyssa let out a strangled roar. Blood dripped from between her long white teeth—

—and then she collapsed.

Eddie dragged Roland out of the way before her long, scaled neck would have crushed him. He kept moving, half-carrying the older man as fire shimmered along her skin. Fortunately, she began to shift shape—and in moments had returned to her human body: naked and on fire.

“Roland,” he said.

“Go,” he snapped, sagging against the wall. “Hurry.”

Eddie raced to Lyssa’s side and threw her over his shoulder.
The fire intensified when he touched her, and he felt his own power rise as he ran down the stairs to the cage.

He had barely closed the door behind them when she exploded. Moments later, he followed—and in those first few seconds his mind opened to hers, and a rush of emotion not his own flowed through him: fear and longing, and anger.

So much anger. Lyssa’s anger. He glimpsed memories—blood and death, snow and a forest in moonlight—and he knew that she was experiencing the murders of her parents all over again, this time in the body and mind of the
Cruor Venator.
From the perspective of the murderer.

He fought to reach her through their bond, struggling against a morass of spiritual slime that tugged at him with sticky tentacles. Lyssa huddled in front of him, a beacon of light amidst disease, and when he finally reached her, it was like touching the sun on a summer morning, clean and white-hot, and full of promise.

I’m here,
he told her.
Hold on to me.

He wrapped wings around her, wings of fire, and held her within the flames. Lyssa held him, as well, with a close, hard strength that bound their spirits together—closer than flesh, closer than blood—bound in spirit, together, as one.

Around them, the
Cruor Venator
’s dying soul thrashed and oozed wit anen-us" heih murder and filth—but that stain did not touch them.

We’re forever,
whispered Lyssa’s voice.

And ever after
, murmured Eddie.

Then, together, their souls consumed the last dark remnants of the
Cruor Venator . . .
erasing even her memory.

Until it was as if she had never existed.