Last Immortal Dragon (Gray Back Bears #6)(37)

Struggling to her feet, she ducked as Damon collided with Marcus against the side of the destroyed house, blasting glass like bullets across the clearing. Clara held up her arm to shield her face as pain slashed across her skin. Mason yanked her backward a moment too late and hugged her tight as dragon’s fire filled the air. The roar of the battling dragons rattled her head and made her dizzy, and still, her bear was buried too deep to reach.

Mason was yelling something she couldn’t understand. Yelling. Yelling. I don’t understand! She couldn’t take her eyes off the warring dragons as they beat their wings against the air and lifted off the ground, clinging to each other’s claws as they blew streams of flaming lava.

Searing pain rocketed up the nerve endings in her arm as Mason jerked a broken bone into place. “Fuck!” she screamed in shock. A power she didn’t understand pulsed from her body and blew Mason twenty yards away. He landed on all fours and slid backward through the dirt before he came to a stop, eyes locked on hers.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, looking at her tingling palms. The lines on her hands were glowing orange, and now when she tried to close her fists, she wasn’t in control of her body enough to do so

Let me in. The words whispered across her mind. Let me save him.

What the hell was happening to her?

A slash of pain built just behind her eyes in the same headache she’d been fighting off and on her entire life. This time it was different though. This time it didn’t throb or fade away. It grew and grew, brighter and more agonizing until she was nothing at all.

Mason was on his knees in the dirt, bleeding from a hundred places where the glass had damaged him and staring at her with blazing blue, inhuman eyes as if he’d never seen her before. “Feyadine?”

Chills blasted up her body with the rightness of that name. I’m here.

“Change, Mason. I’ll need you.” She flicked her fingertips at Mason, and a massive, black boar with long, curved tusks and blazing, furious eyes burst from his body. He was as tall as her, much bigger than any wild boar. Coarse, long fur spiked up over his powerful back, raised with his fury, and as he lifted his attention to the sky, he dragged a massive hoof through the dirt, ready for battle. All this time, Mason had been hiding a monster inside of him, too.

She dragged her gaze back to the warring dragons above. She clenched her hands at her sides as waves of light pulsed from her body upward until it reached the clouds. Above her, the early morning sunshine disappeared as dark clouds drew around them, flashing jagged bolts of lightning time and time again. Ash from the dragon fire rained down over everything as Damon fought for his life. As he fought for hers. As he fought to keep the world safe from the reign of death and destruction Marcus would bring if there was no force able to oppose him anymore. He’d waited a very long time to build enough strength to carry out his vengeance on Damon. Was Clara’s death a part of his plan to weaken Damon? Was she a distraction he’d carefully aimed at the last Bloodrunner dragon? It was just like black-hearted Marcus to use love as a weapon.

The dragons were above the clouds now, nothing but flashes of orange above the gray.

Red fury filled her veins with purpose as she screamed and slammed her hands down onto the ground. The earth cracked under her touch, and a towering spray of steam shot up to open space in the clouds. There they were. The dragons who had caused her to wait for eons for this moment. One had driven her with hate, one with love, and today, as the last thing she ever did on this earth, she would right the wrongs done by Marcus’s evil.

Gritting her teeth, she thrust her palms upward, one at each dragon. Streams of power reached them, and she pulled them apart. With Markus roaring his fury, she slammed her fist into the ground, and the black dragon tumbled to earth and smashed against the surface, cracking the ground beneath her feet with the impact. The earthquake that followed rattled her to her bones, but she held her focus and lowered Damon slowly.

Everything made sense as she forced Marcus to Change back into his hideous human form.

Save him. Beaston’s voice brushed across her mind.

I’ll find you again, and when I do, I’ll be stronger. I’ll gift you mortality with the blood of an immortal dragon, and you’ll be free. She’d uttered those words all those centuries ago, and today was the day of reckoning. Today, she would follow through for the last Bloodrunner dragon.

I’ll find you again. She’d found him through Clara and had fed off his love to be strong enough for this.

God, let her be strong enough.

She slid Beaston’s knife from its sheath at her hip and held it steady at her side as she strode toward Marcus. Her bare feet made footprints in the blanket of ash, and it fell like snow in front of her as Marcus stood to his full human height. Burns covered his body, and he smelled of burned flesh.

His demon-black eyes narrowed with hatred. “You bitch. What have you done to me?”

She offered him an empty smile. “I took your dragon away. Payback for you killing me.”

“Obviously, Clara, I did not kill you. Not for lack of trying, though. I’ve put capsules of fire into every one of Nall’s red-headed descendants, just waiting for Damon to choose one of you. How could he not? You all looked the same. Exactly his type. Don’t worry, though. I’ll finish you off once I’m done with your mate.”

“You killed me and ripped my eggs from my womb!” she screamed.