He rears back his head, and somewhere in the back of my mind I know what’s coming, but I stand there anyway, gaping like an idiot, unable to move.
“Vee!” Torrin shouts. He lunges toward me, pushing me to the ground and landing on top of me just as Lothar breathes fire over the crowd. The flames crackle around us, scorching hot. People scream. The acrid stench of burning hair and skin fills the air.
Torrin’s fireproof body is the only thing keeping me from frying to a crisp.
Swords shink as paladins draw their weapons. I hear Celeste’s voice loud and clear over all the craziness. “Follow me!” she shouts, and I feel a wave of relief. My dragon-killer sister is here to save the day. Father can hang Lothar’s head right outside my room for a month if he wants, and I’ll ignore the stench and the flies and how creepy it is having a dead dragon’s head five feet from my bed. Just as long as Celeste makes this nightmare stop.
“Come on,” Torrin says. The flames have ended, at least for now. He gets up and grabs my hand, not daring to leave me to fend for myself.
And yeah, okay, plus one hundred points for saving my life.
He pushes through the crowd, dragging me toward the edge of the courtyard.
“Get back here, you little coward!” Lothar’s deep dragon voice rumbles into the night. At first I think he means me, until he adds, “You can’t run this time, Amelrik—you’re dead. You hear me?!”
Torrin swears under his breath. He shouts for someone to bring him his sword. “Vee, get inside. You’ll be safe there.”
Yeah, right. Lothar is here because of me. This whole disaster is because of me, and I’m not just going to run inside and hide like it doesn’t matter. Like I don’t care what happens to Torrin or Celeste or anyone. Even if I just stand here, like an idiot, I’ll risk my life like everyone else. I have to see how this plays out.
Lothar lunges at Amelrik, who’s trapped inside the just-closed front gates, unable to make his escape. If he hadn’t told me to run, he might have made it. Everyone screams and moves out of the way. A circle of space opens around Amelrik, probably because nobody wants to be anywhere near the guy a dragon just threatened to kill.
“Show your true form and face me!” Lothar shouts.
Your true form. That means there isn’t just one, but two dragons here tonight. Here, at the barracks, invading my world. This is the one place that’s supposed to be safe. There’s a reason I haven’t stepped foot outside of it in four and a half years.
The dragons were never supposed to get in here. They weren’t supposed to come to me.
As I feel my world shrink, my bubble of safety popping and disappearing, I watch the fight playing out before me. Someone shoves me on their way into the barracks, probably to hide. I stumble and almost trip over an abandoned glass, spilling punch across the stones.
A spear flies through the air, hitting Lothar in the back of his right thigh, but he shakes it off. He lunges at Amelrik again, jaws snapping. Amelrik’s face is pale, panicked. But he stays human.
“Come on,” Lothar bellows at him. “Take your true form!” He laughs, like there’s some kind of joke none of us is in on.
Amelrik ducks as Lothar takes another swipe at him. One of the paladins thrusts out her hands and shoots a blast of magic straight at Lothar. He scrambles backward, out of the way, letting it hit the stone wall in front of him. The stones shatter and crumble. But he doesn’t even glance at his attacker and instead keeps his focus on Amelrik. Because apparently that’s more important than the dozen paladins trying to kill him.
Celeste’s voice rises above the noise, shouting orders for the others to cover her while she casts the spell that will bind a dragon’s powers and force him back into human shape. Our family’s specialty.
Lothar must hear Celeste, too, because he seems to recognize that this is over. He makes one last lunge for Amelrik, who drops to the ground and rolls away just in time not to get mauled to death. Lothar shouts something angry and guttural in a language I don’t know, and then he’s a blur of purple scales and flapping wings, launching himself into the night sky. The air whirls around us, getting dust in my eyes and making me squint. The smell of sulfur prickles my nose as Celeste finishes casting. There’s a flash as the magic leaves her hands, followed by a crackling sound as it fizzles out and dies, its target no longer there.Amelrik gets up from the ground, ready to run, but Torrin grabs him and forces him down before he can escape. The other paladins rush to help, and Celeste holds up her hands to cast again, though she looks tired now and sweat drips from her forehead. Magic takes a lot out of you—or so I’m told—and I swallow, painfully aware that it should be me casting this time. I should be able to take some of the burden off of her.
But if I could, Father never would have opened up this party to outsiders, and none of this would have happened.
There’s another flash of magic as Celeste finishes casting, binding Amelrik’s powers so he can’t change forms. But it seems to me that if he was going to change, he would have done it by now. Either to fight off Lothar or to fly away or whatever.
Not that I care.
Celeste’s voice rings out, echoing across the courtyard. “Prince Amelrik of Hawthorne clan, I, Celeste St. George, hereby declare you under arrest.”
Prince? There were not only two dragons at this party tonight, but they were both princes?
The crowd cheers. Medics show up to tend to the wounded. The other paladins gather around Celeste, congratulating her as they haul Amelrik down to the dungeon.
Everyone except Torrin. “I told you I had a bad feeling,” he says, grinning playfully at me to soften his words.
“I was this close to marrying him.” I pinch my fingers together to emphasize just how close.
“Nah, that wouldn’t have happened.” He puts his arm around my shoulders.
“You’re right. He probably would have ripped me to shreds before then.” My throat is dry. I try to swallow, but with no saliva, and that just makes it worse. “If Amelrik hadn’t shown up, if he hadn’t tried to kill Lothar . . .” But why had he tried to kill him? It seems to me that Amelrik didn’t want anyone to know he’d been seen. So why did he show up to this party and reveal himself to Lothar in the first place? Was he here to rip me to shreds, too? But if he was, why did he tell me to run?
“You’re lucky.” Torrin whistles and raises his eyebrows.
“Yeah, I know. I could have been killed.” If he and Celeste weren’t around, I probably would have been. A couple of times.
“You met one of the most dangerous criminals I’ve ever heard of. He’s fooled a lot of people, going around in human form like that, and he’s wanted for a list of crimes three miles long all over the five kingdoms.”
I remember Prince Lothar’s charming smile and his sexy accent. And then I feel sick for even thinking such a thing. “All these years, I was right. I can’t trust anyone.”
“Except me,” Torrin whispers. “You can trust me.”
“Now all I need is for you to follow me around, in case of dragon attacks. Whoever ends up marrying me will just have to accept that you’re my bodyguard and that you can’t leave my side day or night. That’ll go over well, don’t you think?”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. None of us knew. If Lothar hadn’t pointed him out, we’d never have caught him.”
I blink, taking that in. “What do you mean, if Lothar hadn’t pointed him out? You’re telling me the dangerous one wasn’t the one breathing fire at us?”
“Hey, I’m not saying he’s harmless.”
“Maybe a little dragon fire isn’t such a big deal to you, but to me, it’s kind of fatal.”
“I’m just saying that Lothar’s your average dragon. Amelrik’s the one you’ve got to really watch out for. A lot of people have trusted him and ended up dead.”
Great. I mean, not that it should surprise me that he’s dangerous. He did stab Lothar right in front of me. I shudder, thinking how close I came to both of them. How easily I could have trusted Lothar and agreed to marry him. Not like I didn’t have doubts—he did seem too good to be true—but it’s not like I had a lot of other options. And Amelrik . . . Technically, he saved me from him. He made Lothar reveal what he really was and told me to run. So is he really as dangerous as Torrin says?
“You saved my life,” I tell Torrin, as if this is news. As if he doesn’t already know that.
“It was nothing,” he says, trying to shrug it off.
“I like to think that me still being alive isn’t nothing.”
“You know what I mean. Like I said, you can trust me.”
I nod, because I don’t trust my voice. Because if I speak, I might start crying in front of him, and I don’t want that. I don’t want him to think of me as the pathetic girl he had to save and then comfort when she burst into tears. I’m supposed to be a paladin. I might not be able to do magic or fight dragons, but I can still act like one.
“Thanks,” I say, managing to get out that one word without letting any tears fall. I take a few more moments to get ahold of myself before adding, “At least one good thing might have come out of this.”