The driver accelerated again, slamming his sedan into my quarter panel.
The impact jolted through my arms, through my chest, through the place where the dragon lived. The steering wheelshuddered, and I fought to keep us on the road, tires screaming against loose gravel, the back-end fishtailing toward the edge.
Then—just as suddenly—
He was gone.
The blue sedan roared ahead, engine screaming, taillights shrinking to red pinpricks around the next curve before vanishing entirely. Like he'd made his point. Like terror was the message and delivery was complete.
I pulled over. Or my body pulled over—I wasn't sure I was making decisions anymore. The truck lurched to a stop on the shoulder, engine ticking, dust settling around us in the golden light.
Cinder was talking. I could see his mouth moving, could see the fear carved into every line of his face, his hands reaching for me across the console. But his voice sounded like it was coming from underwater—muffled, distant, drowned out by the roar building inside my chest.
Not my heartbeat.
Something else.
Something older.
The cold hit first. It always hit first—that deep, tectonic shift in my core, like the temperature of my blood dropping twenty degrees in a single heartbeat. Frost crackled across the steering wheel beneath my fingers. The windshield fogged, then froze, ice crystals blooming in intricate spirals from the points where my breath touched glass.
"Taz?" Cinder's voice broke through, sharp with alarm. "Taz, your hands—"
I looked down. My knuckles had gone white—not from gripping, but from ice. Actual ice, spreading from my skin outward, coating the leather, crawling up the dashboard in jagged crystalline veins. The temperature inside the cabplummeted so fast that Cinder's next breath came out in a thick cloud of vapor.
"Get out," I managed. The words scraped through my throat like broken glass. "Cinder, get out of the truck."
"I'm not leaving you—"
"GET OUT."
He flinched. I saw it—saw the flash of old fear, the instinctive recoil of someone who'd been shouted at by men who meant harm—and the guilt nearly killed me. But the dragon was already moving, already pressing outward against my ribs, my spine, my skin, and I couldn't hold it. Not this time. Not with the adrenaline and the rage and the primal, screaming need to protect what was mine from the predator who'd just tried to destroy it.
Cinder scrambled out of the truck. I watched him through the frozen windshield—a blurred shape backlit by late-afternoon sun—and then I threw open my own door and staggered into the empty road.
The shift took me before my boots hit gravel.
It wasn't graceful. Not like Cole's transformation that I'd seen once—that smooth, luminous unfurling of fire and scale. Mine was violent. Sudden. Like something that had been caged too long finally ripping free of its prison.
I felt my spine elongate, felt my shoulders reshape, felt the cold blast outward from my center in a shockwave that turned the road surface white with frost for thirty feet in every direction. Pine needles froze solid on their branches. The truck's windows shattered in a cascade of crystallized glass. The air itself seemed to solidify, thick with ice particles that hung suspended like frozen stars.
And then I was through.
Not Taranis Rees. Not the goaltender. Not the man who'd spent twenty years learning to be small enough to fit inside a human life.
Something vast. Something ancient. Something made of winter and fury and a grief so old it had frozen into the bedrock of my bones.
I felt the weight of my wings—massive, translucent, veined with ice that caught the fading sunlight and fractured it into a thousand cold blue prisms. My talons dug into the road surface, splintering asphalt like eggshell. My tail swept behind me, heavy and armored, sending a spray of frozen gravel into the tree line. The scales along my spine shimmered—pale silver-blue, almost white, layered and intricate in patterns I'd never seen but somehow recognized. The cold didn't radiate from me anymore. I was the cold. Every breath I exhaled turned the air to frost. Every beat of my heart sent another pulse of winter rolling outward.
And the rage—God, the rage. It filled me like a blizzard, whiteout fury directed at the man who'd dared to threaten my mate, who'd invaded his home, who'd chased us down a mountain road with murder in his eyes. I wanted to follow. Wanted to launch into the sky and hunt the blue sedan until I found it and froze it and everything inside it into a monument to what happened when you touched what belonged to me.
My father's face flashed through my mind. Three boys on a playground. Bodies that stopped moving.
The memory hit like a physical blow, and I reared back, a sound tearing from my throat that wasn't a roar—it was a keen. A howl. The sound of an animal trying to stop itself from becoming the thing it feared most.
I dug my talons deeper into the road, anchoring myself, fighting the instinct to fly with everything I had. The ice spread further—across the road, up the rock face, into the trees—but Iheld my ground. Held myself in place through sheer, desperate will.
And then I heard his voice.