A Destiny of Dragons (Tales From Verania #2)(16)

The hill, though. I would get to the hill and find a way to get the hell out of here.

If I hurried, it had absolutely nothing to do with being in some unknown part of the Dark Woods in the middle of the night. I just wanted to go home.

The closer I got to the hill, the more the wind groaned through the trees.

The more gooseflesh prickled along my skin.

The more I had the uneasy feeling of being watched by something.

The air felt lightning-struck, like electricity crackling unseen.

Like magic was building.

From the ground rose pinpricks of light, green and gold and white, and it felt like mine, it felt like it belonged to me. The lights flitted around me, slow and heavy like cumbersome fireflies late in summer. I raised my hand to them, and they brushed along my fingers, warm and weighted.

But it was more than that. This was magic, purer than I’d ever felt before, and it wasn’t coming from just me. If it was my magic, it was reacting to something already there. If it wasn’t mine, I was reacting to it.

I looked back behind me to see the lights trailing after me. Each footstep I’d left in the soft earth was illuminated and flickering, the little lights landing upon them one by one.

I felt… safe, oddly enough.

Like nothing here could hurt me.

Like I had no reason to worry. These lights, whatever they were, wouldn’t allow any harm to come to me. I didn’t know how I knew that. I just did.

And so of course, that’s when the little lights began to tremble and dim.

The wind picked up until it sounded like it was growling through the trees, like the Dark Woods were a thing that was alive.

Except… that didn’t sound like the wind.

I turned back around.

For a long second, nothing happened.

Then the large hill in front of me moved up.

Then down.

Up and down. Up and down. Slowly and with great deliberation, like the very ground beneath my feet was taking in a lumbering breath and—

A chill crawled down my spine like ice.

“What is that?” I whispered as I took a step back.

Because the earth wasn’t breathing. No. That wasn’t possible.

But the gigantic thing in front of me was.

And now that I was closer, I could see it wasn’t a hill at all. What rose from the ground wasn’t made up entirely of dirt and grass and brush. There was growth upon it, as if it’d lain where it had for centuries and the forest had continued on around it. But through the vegetation there was something else, something mottled white.

Something scaled.

The hill moved.

Trees crashed down off it.

The earth groaned beneath it as roots snapped and broke apart.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. All I could do was take in what was rising in front of me, larger than anything I’d ever seen before. There were brief flashes, impressions that broke through the haze that had fallen over my eyes and mind—claws and teeth and wing, oh my gods that was a wing—until a great eye turned toward me.

It blinked, slow and unfocused. The eye was bigger than I was, the skin around it cracked deeply. The iris itself was heterochromous, shoots of red and green and blue. Even as I watched, the colors seemed to swirl together, moving around the iris like waves crashing.

The eye itself moved left to right, and the little lights around me flew forward, running along the hardened skin.

The creature groaned, a deep rumbling thing that I felt vibrate from the ground up through my legs and hips until it buried itself in my chest, wrapping around my heart and squeezing.

The eye focused now, sharper, the gaze knowing.

And it was centered on me.

I took another step back.

I opened my mouth once, twice, but no sound came out.

Because I was at a loss. I had all the pieces to put together what I was seeing in front of me, but they were all jumbled in my head. I couldn’t find or sense the pattern in them.

Finally, I did the only thing a person could do if they were in my position and faced with a gigantic hill monster after having been bad-touched by an old lady into the middle of the woods.

I waved and said, “Heeeyyy there.”

The eye blinked.

“I’m just gonna back away slowly,” I told it. “We can pretend this never happened. You… you just go back to sleep. Or whatever you were doing. I didn’t mean to wake you up, and I promise it’ll never happen again. Don’t mind me at all.”

It started to growl.

“Okay, so you do mind me. That’s just swell. I’m going to get out of your hair. Not that you have any hair. No, you just have scales and teeth the size of Tiggy, and oh my gods, why are you moving toward me, you fucking psycho! I’m going to punch both her tits, I swear to—”

The eye tilted away.

Only to have a great gaping maw pointed at me instead.

And even though I was whiting out in terror, I had a vague understanding of the shape of the head in front of me, the way the reptilian lips curled around teeth, the twin slits at the end of the snout that were its nostrils. A hard ridge rose on the top of its head, fanning out in a half-spherical protrusion, like a bony crown. Sharp, pointed juts of bone stuck out from the top of the crown, gleaming brightly in the starlight.

I knew what this was.

It was a dragon.

Bigger than any other I’d seen before.