Light Dragons 01 - Love in the Time of Dragons

an interdict?” May asked Gabriel as he told her again to run.
    “Kostya?” Cyrene asked again, her voice more strident. “Kostya!”
    “All I cast from me,” I said, my voice ringing like the purest bell. It must have reached Baltic, because suddenly he stopped pummeling Kostya and turned to face me.
    Kostya tackled him, but Baltic simply flung him to the side as he started toward me, Dr. Kostich on his heels.
    “Is she casting a spell? It sounds like a spell,” Aisling said.
    “Devoured with rage,” I bellowed, the fire beginning to flicker along my skin as I raised my face to the sky, my heart sick with knowledge that nothing would ever be right.
    Dr. Kostich ran toward me, flinging away his glass. “Stop her! That’s a banishing spell! You must stop her!”
    “A banishing spell? Mages can’t send people to the Akasha,” Cyrene called to him. “Can they?”
    “No, but she can remove us from this location. Just stop her!” he shouted.
    “But her spells don’t work,” Cyrene said, turning back toward me.
    Baltic sprinted past Dr. Kostich, reaching me just as I released his fire, channeled into the vision of what I wanted most. “Banished so you will be!”
    For a moment, nothing happened. It was as if the world held its breath to see what effect the interdict would have on the spell. Baltic skidded to a stop next to me, his eyes shaded like dark pools of water glinting in the sunlight, and then suddenly, the air shimmered again, thickening, twisting, morphing itself into the shape of a dragon.
    “The First Dragon,” I heard May gasp.
    Heat shimmered on my skin like electricity, crawling up and down my arms and back as the dragon looked first to May, then to me, his eyes filled with infinity. Like Baltic, he was white, but more than white—all colors seemed to dance in harmony, illuminating the dragon, a soft glow wrapped around him that shifted and moved.
    Baltic leaped up to stand behind me, his body warm and strong and so infinitely precious, tears burned behind my eyes. The First Dragon looked at him and smiled, shifting into a human form, that of a man . . . and yet, it wasn’t a man. Not even his human form could hide the fact that he was a dragon.
    Around us, the other dragons stood frozen, staring at him, their expressions ranging from stunned disbelief to outright awe. I knew just how they felt.
    “Why did you call me, Baltic?” the First Dragon asked, his voice as strong as the wind, but softer than the lightest down.
    “It was my mate who summoned you, not me,” he answered, his arms sliding around me protectively.
    “I . . . I didn’t know I was going to do that. I meant to do something else.” I was so shocked by what I had done that it was almost impossible to speak.
    The First Dragon’s eyes, those uncanny, all- knowing eyes, turned from Baltic to me. I felt the impact of his gaze right down to the tips of my toes. He reached toward me, touching my forehead.
    “Remember.” The word seemed to echo in and around me, a haze coming up over me that was like nothing I’d experienced before in either a fugue or the visions that I’d had of the past.
    The haze turned white, whipping around me with an icy bite. Once again I stood on a snowy hillside, a blizzard raging around me.
    But this time, the others were present as well. It was as if the First Dragon had simply lifted up everyone standing in the field and placed us in a different time and place. We stood in a circle around two forms, one fallen, scarlet still staining the snow at the First Dragon’s feet.
    “A life has been given for yours, daughter,” the First Dragon said.
    My dead form shifted, then slowly stood up, whole again, my eyes vacant and unseeing. “Who gave it?” the other Ysolde asked.
    “It was given willingly.”
    “Baltic? Did he—”
    “Much is expected of you.” The First Dragon’s words were whipped away on the wind as soon as he spoke them, and yet they resonated within me. “Do not fail me again.”
    As the last word faded on the howl of snow and ice and wind, the First Dragon touched the risen Ysolde’s forehead in the same spot he’d touched mine, and she collapsed onto the ground—but she wasn’t dead. She hunched over, sobbing, buffeted by the snow before finally getting back to her feet, staggering down the hill and into the white oblivion.

Chapter Nineteen
    “F ascinating. Absolutely fascinating. That almost makes up for the fat dragon sitting on me.”
    I shook my head,