CHAPTER 58

SLADE

The moment my dragon's wing snaps, I jolt with excruciating pain that radiates down my arms. The sensation steals my breath and overloads my mind. I'm stuck in shock for a moment as we begin to plummet from the sky.

The ground rushes up faster and faster as my dragon roars in agony, but at the last moment, I manage to take hold of the spike in front of Auren to brace around her.

"Hold on!" I shout.

Through strained eyes, I see her hands flash out, and then gold pours from them. Somehow, she manages to break our fatal fall as we crash into the front of Glassworth's courtyard, her magic sloshing between us and helping to soften the landing.

Our bodies knock together in the teeth-jarring crash. The dragon bears the brunt of the collision, and even with Auren's gold, the fall still stuns it. Stuns me .

I don't know exactly how the manifestation magic works between creature and keeper. I have no idea if it can actually die or not. But it's very fucking clear that it can feel pain and that I can feel echoes of that pain too.

The face of the palace glares down at us through hundreds of different stained glass windows. Right before we started to fall, Auren tried to warn me that these aren't Stone Swords gathered, and she's right. The soldiers rushing over are clad in black and red.

Apprehension grabs hold of me as I realize who they are. Who they serve.

My father.

Rage sparks to life and starts ranting against my ribs.

I grasp Auren and then leap us both off the back of my dragon, my boots splashing in the liquid gold as I set her down.

"Great Divine," Auren chokes out, looking horrified at the grotesque break in the dragon's wing.

When the soldiers start to surround us, the dragon tries to stand, but before it can, its back leg suddenly breaks too.

The sound of the bone is like a snapped tree, and the courtyard echoes with it. The dragon roars out in agony, and I stumble against Auren as that ripple of pain goes through me. I gasp, knowing my father is doing this, and I whip my head around, but I can't see him. The fucking coward is hiding .

Auren cries out with alarm as she braces me to keep me from falling.

I grit my teeth and push past the pain and make my rot surge out, hooking it into the nearest soldiers in a wave of wrath that attacks them from the ground up.

Out of nowhere, a net falls over my dragon's head, and I whirl. The beast bellows with its own fury at suddenly being held down, and its sharp teeth try to snap at the bindings.

But the net is too strong; it doesn't so much as fray a single cord. And the corners are somehow secured to the ground, not allowing the dragon to rip it up and get free.

I lurch forward and try to yank it off too, but I can't. Something is keeping it down. I try to let the dragon dematerialize back into me, but that doesn't work either. It remains solid and trapped.

My limbs pulse with furious adrenaline.

Auren starts flooding her magic out at the same time that my rage expels from me. Rot cracks through the ground, ready to kill everyone here, when I see the flash of a shadow. I whip my head up, eyes widening when I see another net—the same kind on my dragon—suddenly dropping over our heads.

I snarl, my hands flinging forward to push Auren out of the way. She stumbles out of its trajectory a second before it crashes over me and takes me to my knees.

I try to stand, try to tear it off, but the gray bindings aren't rope or fabric. The net is made from something else less pliant, something with grains that move beneath the clear overlays, making my skin itch. A strange weight presses over me that makes my muscles strain and my chest flare with panic.

"Slade!" Auren yells, her tone cracking with alarm.

She leaps back to her feet and races to my side to try and tear the webbing off with her hands and her ribbons, but she can't. It's holding me down as much as the other net holds my dragon.

When she realizes she can't physically remove it, Auren lets magic flow from her instead. But the molten metal slips right off like beads of oil over water.

"I can't gild it," she exclaims, her eyes wide. "I can't gild it!"

My rot isn't affecting it either, nor can my power spread past it, no matter how fucking hard I try. The ground beneath me won't soak in with rot.

This net isn't just holding me down. It's suppressing my magic too. Which means it's also suppressing my dragon's. My father is stripping me of my strength and my power all at once.

Crippling fear pummels me, stealing the breath from my chest.

Gritting my teeth, I try to straighten, but I can't stretch up past my knees. There's not enough give for me to stand. I'm trapped beneath this thing like a rabbit in a snare, and still, my father won't show his cowardly fucking face.

Fury catches hold like an inferno, burning straight through me.

My eyes flash around at the soldiers. One of them must be responsible for using magic to hold down these nets, but they're being discreet enough that I can't pick out who it is.

Auren whirls, no doubt having the same thought about someone controlling them. She sends her gold at the soldiers, gilding them where they stand, freezing every organ and muscle and trapping them within the gleam. Her magic sludges out and spreads past the first lines.

But a scream gushes out from the palace doors.

I whip my head in that direction while Auren whirls, and there stands my mother.

Looking pale and terrified, her wide green eyes shine with fear. She's trussed up like a hunter's kill, bound with ropes and being held at sword point.

Her gaze connects with mine, and I see the clarity there. Clarity like I haven't seen in her face for so long. As if she remembers everything, mind whole and intact, and not the muddled mess she became after falling through the rip. It's cruel that these are the circumstances in which she'd be fully coherent.

"Elore!" Auren shouts.

She starts to rush toward my mother but only takes a single step before I see her leg suddenly snap . Just like the dragon's, I hear the bone breaking a second before she crumples to the ground with a scream.

My bellow of terror rips my throat raw. " Auren !"

Her scream cuts directly into my heart. It claws down our bond, pushing every feral fae instinct in me to get to her. To protect her.

I roar rabidly against my restraints, pumped full of fury.

All of this, from the moment we crashed to right now, has only been a matter of seconds. Just seconds, when everything went from right to utterly wrong.

Now, Auren's hurt, my mother is in danger, my dragon is pinned and in agony, and I'm fucking powerless and trapped .

Catching movement, my gaze flicks up, and my father appears, stepping out from the doorway of the palace.

He stops next to my mother, and she flinches at his nearness, which makes my blood boil .

Just as Auren told me, he wears an eye patch, and instead of being completely bald, he has a thin layer of hair on his head. But other than that, he looks just as I remember.

Fucking evil.

"Hello, son."

Teeth bared, I jerk toward him so I can rip him apart, but my surge of strength doesn't break me out of this net. My father's black gaze passes over me dispassionately before his attention latches onto my dragon. "Extraordinary," he says, his expression lighting up with an excitement I haven't seen in a very long time. Not since I first sprouted spikes when I was a boy.

From the ground, Auren struggles to shove her arms under her, making gold puddle between her palms upon the ground.

My stomach drops as I watch my father lift his hand.

" No !" I shout, heart beating wildly.

It's too late. He snaps his fingers, instantly breaking Auren's arm too.

Her wail of agony is like a blade to the heart. It steals my breath. My vision. Makes me and my trapped dragon both strain and fight against our bindings and roar even louder when we can't break free and get to her.

My father looks down at her from above. "We've been through this before, haven't we, pet?"

Pet? He dares to call her fucking pet ?

My rage isn't red hot. It isn't ice cold. It's pitch black. Delved deeper than the pits of hell. Soaked in the ashes of death and the shadows of vengeance that are ready to devour.

Small bubbles of gold pop from beneath her palms where she lies on the ground, face twisted in pain.

"You try to attack me, I break you. It's quite simple," he tells her.

" You won't break her ." My voice comes out like a whip, snapping across his face.

He jerks his head to focus on me. He looks at me longer this time, studying me with the same cruel gaze as when I was a boy. Purposely trying to instill his dominance so that I would lower my eyes in fear.

But now, I stare back at him with pure, suffocating hate.

My body shakes with how hard I'm trying to exert my power. I want to kill him. Fucking rot his heart from his chest and make him writhe in agony. I want to rip him apart limb by limb and watch his blood sully the soil.

I push and push, straining to burst my magic free, but my rot only leaches a few inches past the netting, killing the grass in a circle around me.

"You've grown stronger," he muses, almost gratified. "I knew you had to be capable of manifesting. You were holding back all those years ago."

My jaw clenches like a wolf that wants to snap its opponent's neck between its teeth. My dragon is doing the same thing, eyes locked onto my father, growl scouring its throat.

"I saw her bond solidifying. Saw her using your rot," he says evenly, though his voice grates down my ears. "I knew you'd come for her. And then when she came here, when the king wanted to kill her, I saw that spot." He taps the back of his own neck, and my stomach drops in realization.

He saw Auren's golden scale.

"I knew what it meant," he says smugly as he gestures toward my dragon. "Your power is strong for your manifestation to bleed through into your bonded, but it showed me the truth. Showed me that you actually manifested one. And look at it ," he says with a fanatic gleam in his eye as he watches the snarling creature. "Just as large and fierce as the first dragons of our blood, when Culls were kings of the skies."

"I'm going to crush your skull and piss on your fucking corpse," I snarl.

His eye narrows on me, and I feel sick satisfaction to know he only has use of the one. That for all these years, he's had to bear proof that I wounded him and rendered his other eye useless.

He snaps his fingers again, and I see Auren's finger snap unnaturally. This time when she screams, it cuts off as she slumps into unconsciousness, succumbing to the piling pain.

I roar as I lurch forward, teeth bared like an animal, but the net snags into me, not budging an inch.

My father smirks coldly. "Still unworthy and weak ." Then he turns his head, looking at someone else. "Do it."

Several of his guards march forward. They pass their dead comrades, while I continue to fight against the net, muscles bunching, rage boiling through my black veins as my spikes surge up. "Don't fucking touch her!"

But the guards walk past Auren.

I tense as they head straight for my dragon. When it lets out a vicious growl at their nearness, several of them flinch away despite it being held down.

Still, they surround the beast while it snarls and spits. With its leg and wing broken, it lies partially on its uninjured side, breathing heavily, pupils dilated.

There is no lead-up. I have no idea what's about to happen. One of them just moves forward, and I don't notice the ax until it's buried in my dragon's chest.

The creature lets out a chilling, bone-grinding shriek. A sound full of agony and shock, one that blares through my head and snaps against my eardrums.

My entire body jerks with blinding pain.

Through tunneled vision, I see black blood seeping between its golden scales and streaking down the toughened exterior. The soldier yanks out the ax and then swings it down again in the same spot, hacking at my dragon's chest, trying to drive the blade in deeper.

Breath gasps out of me. Fucking chokes me. I feel blood crawling up the back of my throat, either phantom or real, I can't tell which. The pain that seeps from the dragon into me is enough to make me sway. My knuckles hit the ground, but I force myself not to fall in a heap or let bile spew from my throat.

" Stop !"

I snap my head up at Auren's shout and see her sitting up. She's melted down the armor on her chest to use it to shoot at my father. It streams toward him like a giant spear…

But he moves faster, quicker than a blink, and yanks it from the air.

Then, he takes the sharp weapon and stabs it right into my mother's stomach.