Still here.
I breathed out, and instead of a blizzard, it was just cold air. The frost on the trees stopped spreading. The ice on the road surface thinned, cracking in places as the ground beneath reasserted itself. My wings folded slowly, the translucent membranes catching the last of the afternoon light before settling against my sides.
The shift back was slower than the shift out. Gentler. My dragon didn't fight it—just withdrew with a reluctant, protective rumble, pulling the scales and the wings and the terrible, beautiful cold back into the cage of my human bones. I felt myself shrinking, felt the world growing larger around me, felt the asphalt under my knees instead of my talons.
And then I was just a man. Kneeling on a frozen road somehow still in my clothes as usual, shaking so hard my teeth rattled, with Cinder's hands still on my face.
"Hey," he whispered, dropping to his knees in front of me. His thumbs brushed my cheekbones. His eyes were red-rimmed,wet, enormous—but steady. So goddamn steady. "Hey, I've got you."
"I'm sorry," I rasped. My voice sounded like it had been dragged over gravel. "I'm sorry, I didn't—I couldn't stop it—"
"Don't apologize." His hands moved to my shoulders, then down my arms, checking for injury with automatic precision even as tears continued to track down his face. "Don't you dare apologize for what you are."
"You should be running." The words came out wrecked. "Any sane person would be running."
He just about rolled his goddamn eyes when he should’ve been hysterically screaming. “Yeah, well, no one ever accused me of being sane.”
Chapter fourteen
Interference - Obstructing a player who does not have possession of the puck.
Cinder
We knelt there on the frozen road for what felt like hours but was probably minutes, his breath still fogging between us, my hands still shaking so badly I couldn't have threaded a needle if someone's life depended on it. Which, given my profession, was a concerning thought.
But the clinical part of my brain—the part that cataloged and assessed and filed things away for later examination—was already working. Already rebuilding the framework of everything I thought I knew about Taranis Rees and replacing itwith something that should have been impossible but felt, in the strangest way, inevitable.
A dragon. An ice dragon, if every fantasy story I’d read was true. Kneeling in front of me on a mountain road with frost still melting in his hair and the most terrified expression I'd ever seen on a human face.
"We need to get off this road," I said, because someone had to be practical and it clearly wasn't going to be him. "Can you stand?"
He nodded, but when he tried, his legs buckled. I caught him—arm under his shoulder, his weight almost impossibly heavy against my side—and guided him to the truck. The windows were gone, shattered into crystallized fragments that crunched under our feet like sugar glass. The dashboard was smashed. The steering wheel had a thin layer of ice still clinging to its underside.
"Can you drive?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"No." His voice was raw. Wrecked. "Cinder, I—"
He didn't argue. That alone told me how far gone he was, and I guided him around to the other side. At least this one had no glass he might hurt himself on.
I settled him in, then jogged back around, brushed the glass off the driver's seat with my sleeve, climbed in, and turned the key. The engine coughed, sputtered, then caught—apparently whatever his shift had done to the exterior, the mechanics had survived. Cold air poured through the empty window frames as I pulled back onto the road, but neither of us mentioned it. After what I'd just witnessed, a little wind was hardly worth commenting on. And oddly, Taz was generating enough heat—or enough cold—to negate the chill. Okay, so that sounded weird. On top of a night where weirdness was off the scale, that almost made me laugh. But it was true. As insane as it sounded,Taz’s coldness almost warmed me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been driving? But I hadn’t banged my head.
I drove back toward the city in silence for the first ten minutes, stealing glances at him when the road straightened. He sat with his head tipped back against the headrest, eyes closed, arms wrapped around himself like he was trying to hold his own pieces together. The cold rolling off him had settled into something manageable—still lower than any human should register, but steady. Controlled. Or at least contained, and the more I experienced it, the more comforting it was.
When we were back on the highway, I spoke. I wanted to try and explain why I wasn't completely freaking out. "I saw one before."
His eyes opened. He turned his head slowly, like the movement cost him something. "What?"
"A dragon." The word still felt strange in my mouth—too mythical, too impossible for the clinical vocabulary I'd spent a decade building. But I said it anyway, because it was true. "When I was a kid. I was maybe eight, nine. We were visiting my grandmother's property in northern Colorado—she had this place up near the Wyoming border, acres and acres of nothing. Scrub brush and sky."
Taz was very still beside me. Listening the way he always listened—completely, like nothing else in the world existed except my voice.
"I'd wandered off. I did that a lot. Danny was just a baby, and my parents were always focused on him, so I'd just... disappear into the fields for hours." I swallowed, the memory surfacing with a clarity that surprised me. I'd buried this so deep, I'd convinced myself it never happened. "There was a ridge behind her property. Nothing special—just rocks and pine trees. But that day, something was different. The light was wrong.Too bright, almost blue, like the sun was hitting something reflective."
I adjusted my grip on the steering wheel, steadying myself.
"I climbed up. And it was just... there. Lying on the rocks like it belonged there. Enormous. Silver and gold, with scales that looked like they were made of—" I paused, my throat tightening. "Of ice. They caught the light and threw it everywhere. Prismatic. Like looking through a frozen window."
Taz's breathing had gone shallow.