“She misses you,” I answered instead. “She loves you.”
“I’ll see her soon,” he replied, turning from me. “Go find your lady, and I will handle the troops.” I strode toward the door, now banging open and shut in the wind, and Altair called after me, “I love you too, brother.”
I looked back at him and placed my hand over my heart, smiling. He knew what it meant. I turned and marched into the foyer… almost totally deserted. I cocked my head to the side and frowned. Ice dragons must have been fleeing from every exit in the palace. Now, none remained. The closest voices I heard emanated from further down the hall: other fire dragons, scouring the floor for ice dragons remaining on the premises. I hoped they didn’t get too zealous and set anything else on fire.
There was one other set of voices upstairs.
My eyes bulged.
It was Nell! Nell… and Michelle… and Lethe… and Vulott…
My jaw clenched. She was with the traitorous court of ice people. I understood why she had remained in the castle, even after I had been here and seen her so briefly—but now we had driven them off our land, and there was no royal family to whom she needed to play insider. No royal family, save our own.
I pounded up the stairs to the second floor, searching for her… but saw only ice dragons crowding the corridor. One I recognized immediately as Lethe, Michelle on his back, and then, he nudged downward with his head and Nell appeared, sliding down his neck to join Michelle between his shoulder blades and his leathery wings. They were taking her! They were taking Nell!
I bolted forward, pounding down the hallway, but Lethe and Vulott had already taken their exits, out through a broken window with one other woman: Parnassia. I knew where they were going, but still, I could not bear to lose sight of Penelope. I shifted with the same speed of any cowardly ice dragon fleeing this castle, my feet hardly having time to transform before they were drawing up and leaving behind the ground.
I swept to the side of the castle and passed Altair quickly, sliding down into the snow only long enough to say, “When the castle is secured, follow through the portal to the rock island! And go from there to the portal of the ghouls!” I did not give him a moment to respond. The wind caught beneath my wings, I moved the bones of my shoulders with power, and sent myself rocketing back into the air. The Eraeus family were nothing but grains on the horizon now. It didn’t matter to me that the sky was crowded with snow clouds. My wings moved with fury against the wind. It didn’t matter to me that the drag of the wintry blasts pulled me to the side and stung at my hands and feet.
All that mattered was that I could see them, becoming smaller, and I wondered if Nell had heard me calling her name. I wondered if she knew that I was coming for her. I would not lose her again. This had gone on long enough; the castle was mine again. And she was, too.
I careened onward toward the portal.
I would not lose her again.
I passed through the portal, exploding out of the darkness and into the slate sky of Maine. America. It felt like a lifetime since I’d seen this land. I skimmed over the black, salty waters of this ocean—the “Atlantic,” it was called—to trail behind the two large shadows which moved ahead of me, one small. Vulott was the largest, then Lethe, and then Parnassia. I knew that it was Lethe who harbored the girls—his queen, and mine.
I should hang back. The sight of me would ruin any element of surprise in a later attack. But it was so hard to see Nell with them… the gods alone knew what they had in store—
Just then, a slender shadow, a tiny dash of black against the churning gray of cloudy sky, went toppling off of Lethe, and my heart leapt into my throat. It was Nell. I knew it. I just knew it. I lunged forward, but I knew that I would be too late. She fell too fast. Fell like a stone.
Nell
“You think I can talk Lethe into taking over Beggar’s Hole, too?” Michelle bellowed into my ear. “You could work in that castle, you know? Still see your family. That’d be nice. We could start a campaign to, like, support ice dragon awareness. A charity!”
I twisted slightly so that my voice would be angled toward Michelle, rather than thrown into the wind. Neither of us were sufficiently dressed for this weather, but Lethe rode too high in the sky for me to be able to think about much else. No matter how cold my fingers got, I would need for them to snap off before I let go. “I don’t think you get it,” I hollered back to her. “They’re two different worlds. You can’t bring one into the other and mix them—you can only pick one. If you want to be here, you should stay here.”