Light Dragons 01 - Love in the Time of Dragons

sharing the vision with me,” I said. “How is it that you’re seeing it, too?”
    “Run!” May said, grabbing my arm and pulling me after her as she took to her heels.
    “You don’t understand. I need to talk to him—”
    “Not here in the shadow world,” she yelled, her grip like steel on my wrist.
    “Ysolde!” Baltic’s roar was filled with fury like nothing I’d ever heard.
    “This way!” May jerked me brutally as I tried to stop, pulling me so hard I slammed into the side of the car, seeing stars for a few seconds.
    “Whoa!” Brom said, hurrying over to me, concern written all over his face. “You just appeared, like, right out of the air! Sullivan?”
    “I’m all right. Just a little dazed.”
    “Baltic is here,” May gasped, throwing herself on Gabriel. “In the shadow world. He almost had her. We barely escaped.”
    “Then he will be”—as Gabriel spoke, the air gathered and twisted upon itself, stretching to form the figure of a man who leaped forward out of nothing—“soon upon us.”
    “Don’t hurt him!” I cried as Gabriel and Kostya both jumped on Baltic. “Let me talk to him—”
    “Hold him!” Drake ordered, coming around the far side of the car.
    “Oh, man, I can’t believe I almost missed this,” Jim said, running down the stairs with Aisling right behind it.
    “I’ll put a binding ward on him,” she called as she started to sketch a shape in the air.
    “No!” I yelled, catching her hand to stop her. “Why are you people doing this? Stop, all of you! This has to stop!”
    Baltic screamed an oath in a Slavic language, shaking off both Kostya and Gabriel. For a moment, for the time it took to pass from one second to another, his gaze met mine. Anger and hope and pain were in it, but before I could blink, he was gone.
    “Holy cow,” Brom said, his eyes huge as he waved his hands around the spot where Baltic had stood. “I need to learn how to do that!”
    “He’s gone,” I said, inexplicably feeling as if a part of me had just died.
    “He’s run back into the beyond,” Kostya snarled as he wiped blood from his nose. “He is nothing but a base coward. He has escaped us by that means before because he knows only May can follow him.”
    “Aargh!” I screamed, suddenly filled with the same fury that I knew must have possessed Baltic. I grabbed Kostya by the shirt and shoved him backwards, slamming him up against the car.
    “Sullivan?” Brom asked, his voice full of wonder.
    “Why did you do it?” I yelled at Kostya, grabbing his hair and banging his head into the car. “You were his friend! He trusted you! And you betrayed him just as all the others did!”
    A wildcat landed on my back, biting and clawing and pulling at my own hair.
    “Make her stop, make her stop!” Brom yelled, dancing around us as all three of us—Kostya and Cyrene and I—fell to the ground.
    It took a moment for them to separate us—Cyrene refused to let go of me until May pried her hands out of my hair—but by the time they did, the strange sense of anger had passed, leaving me shaking and panting with the aftereffects.
    Aisling handed me a tissue to mop up the blood from the scratches that Cyrene had left on my face. Brom leaned into me, wordlessly needing reassurance. I hugged him, resting my cheek on the top of his head, fighting the sobs that threatened to shake me apart.
    “Well, we wanted some proof that she was Ysolde,” Aisling said as Cyrene cooed over Kostya while he gently felt the back of his head. “I guess you could say that was pretty definitive, huh?”

Chapter Nine
    “D o I have to call you de Bouchier now?” Brom asked as I tucked the journal in which he kept his science experiment notes into his backpack.
    “No, of course not.” I stood up, wanting to hug him again, but I’d already done that, and he had placed a firm “one hug per leave-taking” moratorium on me twenty minutes earlier.
    “But that’s your name now, right? That guy who appeared used to be your husband before you married Gareth?”
    I sighed. There wasn’t any way I could deny what life insisted on beating me over the head with. “Yes, I think he was.”
    Brom leaned in close, his eyes on May and Gabriel as they held a brief confab with Maata and Tipene. “So why is everyone trying to hurt him?”
    “It’s kind of a complicated story,” I whispered back. “But I’m going to do my best to stop them so that we can talk to Baltic.”
    “Is he my stepdad