登入Leah A child crying. Down the first-floor hallway. Deeper in the building. I didn’t think. I went. The hallway was filling with smoke, the lights flickering overhead, and the heat was real now, radiating through the ceiling from whatever was burning above. I dropped low, pulling my shirt over my mouth, following the sound of the crying through the gray haze. Third door on the left. A family a
LeahI needed to feel useful. That was the truth underneath everything. Darien hovered, the healers monitored, Andromeda fought her endless war inside my blood, and I lay in bed feeling like a battlefield instead of a person. Sleeping had become my main occupation. Some days I was awake for only a handful of hours, surfacing from the exhaustion long enough to eat, to hold Darien’s hand, to hear Keanu’s voice on the phone, and then the parasite would pull me back under like a tide that owned me. But today was a good day. I’d woken with actual energy, eaten an actual breakfast, and convinced Darien that a visit to the apartment complex was not going to kill me. “One hour,” he’d said, holding up a finger like a parent negotiating with a toddler. “And a guard stays with you.” “Two hours, and the guard waits outside the building.” “One hour, the guard waits in the lobby, and you call me if you feel even slightly dizzy.” “Deal.” He kissed my forehead and held it a moment longe
KeanuI didn’t want to. The story belonged to me and Tempest and the forest where we’d spent one night together that had changed everything about who I was. But Eldric had the kind of presence that made confession feel less like vulnerability and more like laying down something heavy you’d been carrying too long.“I met her in the forest. She helped me find the cure for my sister. We spent the night together.” I stared at the stream. “When I woke up, she was gone. I searched for her every day. Never found her. She’s an elemental dragon who hides because the world punished her kind for existing. And I don’t know if she left because she’s afraid of being found or because …” I stopped.“Because?”
KeanuThe training was brutal.Not physically. I could handle physical. Physical was easy.This was internal. And internal was where I had no idea what I was doing.The goal was simple to explain and impossible to execute. Dragon fire, in its natural state, was destruction. My golden flame consumed whatever it touched. My fire was powerful, hot, and had all the precision of a sledgehammer hitting a walnut.What Eldric needed me to produce was the opposite. A blue flame. Pure, azure, cool to the touch. A healing fire that could enter a living body and target individual cells without damaging anything around them. The blue flame wasn’t born from power. It was born from calm. From peace. From a stillness inside th
KeanuThe entrance to the druid enclave was a crack in a mountain.Not a cave. Not a grand archway or a carved entrance or anything that suggested people actually used it. A crack. Barely wide enough for my shoulders, hidden behind a waterfall that poured over a cliff face so seamlessly that you’d walk past it a thousand times without knowing the rock behind it was hollow.Iris led the way without hesitation, stepping through the waterfall like she’d done it a hundred times, which she probably had.The crack opened into a tunnel. Narrow at first, then wider, cutting through the belly of the mountain in a downward slope that made my ears pop. The walls were smooth, not carved but worn by centuries of passage, and they hummed. That was the only word for it. The stone hummed with a frequency I could feel in my bones, a vibration that had nothing to do with sound and everything to do with the magic saturated into every inch of this place.“How old is this?” I asked.“Old,” Iris said witho
Darien“Months she may not have comfortably,” Iris clarified, as if the distinction between dying and suffering was a comfort. “The witch cannot kill her. Your wolf prevents that. But the constant battle drains her. Her quality of life will deteriorate. The fatigue will worsen. The seizures may return. She will be alive, but she will not be well. She would almost be a vegetable at times … sleeping constantly.”The room was quiet. The smoke from the herbs had dissipated, leaving behind the faint scent of something burned. The sigils on the bedframe had gone dark.The door opened and Cain stepped in. He’d been listening. Of course he had. Cain always listened.“There may be another option,” he said. He looked at Keanu, who had appea
One of the healers followed me in, launching into a clinical explanation. “We’ve run every test we have. Blood work, scans, toxicology screens. There’s no sign of poison in his system. No physical injury. No virus or infection. His body just shut down.”
LeahI was watching the fight that seemed to be dragging out forever. Minutes felt like hours as Keanu's dragon and Darien's lycan clashed in displays of power that should have terrified me. Should have made me want to look away. But I couldn't. My eyes tracked every movement, every strike, catalogi
The dragon's head snapped toward me, those burning eyes locking onto my movement. Heat rolled off its body in waves, scorching the air, making it hard to breathe.It growled, a sound that vibrated in my bones, and golden light built in its throat again.Darien was suddenly there, materializing bet
I sprinted through the corridors, my boots pounding against stone, not caring about the startled looks from wolves I passed. I could hear Cain behind me, his heavier footsteps echoing, but I was faster. Fueled by panic, and something feral something &







