Last Immortal Dragon (Gray Back Bears #6)(38)

Marcus’s face fell slack and his eyes went wide as he took a step back. “Feyadine?” He shook his head. “No, it’s impossible.”

His putrid face sagged like clay, and she reveled in the change in his features. He’d been a handsome dragon warrior once, but Damon had done this to him. Damon had burned him to avenge her and the rest of the dragons he’d murdered in cold blood. Pride surged through her as she whispered, “Do you remember the incantation you did on the ceremonial knife you used to cut me open? The one that allowed you to cut my skin so easily?”

Marcus backed up another step and shook his head, and the scent of bitter fear wafted from his skin.

“I do,” she murmured low, stalking him step for step.

“You’re just a seer.”

“No,” Feyadine said with a dark chuckle. “You were wrong about so much. I was never a seer, Marcus. I was a witch.” She murmured the incantation over Beaston’s blade, just a whisper of words so ancient and so dark, they tasted like poison on her tongue. The blade glowed orange, so bright, it was hard to look at. She clenched her fist, freezing Marcus’s body into place as she strode up to him and ran the blade over his stomach until black blood oozed from his skin and coated the knife, sizzling as it settled into the engraving Beaston had done of the Blackwing crest.

A wave of dizziness took her, and she stumbled forward, breath ragged as her power waned. Hold on just a minute longer. Finish this.

Marcus looked down defiantly at her, frozen under her will. “You meddling bitch. You can’t kill me, Feyadine. We’re bound. Now let me Change into my dragon so I can finish this.”

Her lip twitched as a branch snapped in the woods surrounding them. Feyadine backed up a few steps with the knowledge he was right. He’d done awful things to her when she’d been his so many lifetimes ago. He’d bound them. He’d made it so she could never kill him.

But she didn’t need to.

She spun in a slow circle. The woods were alive with towering, snarling grizzlies of every color. Two silverback gorillas beat their chest like war drums and pulled their lips back to expose long, razor sharp canines. Mason’s monstrous boar lowered his head and trotted closer, blood lust in his feral eyes. A falcon and a raven circled overhead, crying out a death chant, and clinging to the cliffs above was Diem’s green and gold dragon. Feyadine’s eyes stung with emotion as her gaze landed on Damon, Changed back into his human form. He was badly burned down one side, and his chest was heaving as he saw the same thing she did.

His crews had never left him as he’d asked.

They’d come for him just like he’d always been there for them.

The Ashe Crew, Boarlanders, Gray Backs, and Lowlanders had gathered together, ready to come help Damon finish this.

“I don’t need to kill you, Marcus. You thought Damon caring for others made him weak, but you were wrong. And now you’re at the end of your life, and you’ll spend your last breath as you deserve. Alone.”

Beaston stepped through a line of grizzlies, eyes blazing inhuman green over his empty smile. “Can we kill him now?”

Feyadine dragged her glare to Marcus. She’d never seen fear in his eyes before, but there it was now.

She stood back and nodded her chin once. A massive silver grizzly burst from Beaston and roared as he led the charge. The inhabitants of Damon’s mountains bore down on Marcus from all sides, and he screamed a doomed sound as he disappeared in the middle of teeth and claws.

Feyadine stumbled backward, arms tingling with weakness. Stay strong. Finish this. Damon’s love for Clara is infinite. It has to be to give me this much power. Clara is good. So much better than me. He deserves to grow old with his Clara.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured as she reached Damon and jerked his palm up. She ran the bloody, glowing blade across his skin, and she winced as the final pulse of power left her body.

Damon stared down at the blood that poured freely from the slice across his hand with eyes gone round.

She fell as all of the strength left her body, and Damon cradled her against his chest before she hit the ground. Looking up into those silver eyes, the ones that she’d fallen in love with once upon a time, she uttered the oath she’d made to him all those centuries ago, “You won’t be alone anymore. I found you again, and when I did, I was stronger. I gifted you mortality with the blood of an immortal dragon.” She gasped as she left Clara’s body, and on her last breath, she whispered, “Now, you’re free.”





Chapter Fifteen




Clara’s hands wouldn’t stop trembling as she rocked in one of the chairs on the sprawling porch of the old trailer in the Grayland Mobile Park. Damon and the Gray Backs would be home any moment now, and she had some big news that made her feel giddy and faint all at the same time.

So much had changed since Marcus’s death. Clara had fallen unconscious for two days after Feyadine had left her body, and when she woke up, her world had been turned on its axis. She remembered everything Feyadine had done through her. And now, Feyadine’s presence was gone from her life completely, taking the headaches, nightmares, and memories with her.

Damon’s house had been demolished to nothing but a pile of rubble and glass. She’d been so scared that he would be heartbroken, but he hadn’t seemed to care one bit, and moving into the old singlewide trailer, 1010, in the Gray Back’s trailer park had been a seamless transition. Even Mason had taken up residence in Clinton’s abandoned trailer.