Page 22 of FoolSilver
Max turned her head and looked at us over her shoulder.
“Leave,” she said, her eyes ablaze, so deep they were almost black, glowing with an inhuman light. In them I saw terror andpower and a desperate, furious love that made my wolf whimper. “You need to leave. Now!”
“Not without you!” Aelindor roared.
My heart cracked again, but differently this time. I had never heard Aelindor roar. The Fae heir didn’t raise his voice. He commanded with silence and the quiet authority of the most powerful immortal in the realm.
Until now.
“I’m not their target. You are,” she snarled.
“Even so, never without you, love.”
The word—love—hit like a detonation. It was a vow. Spoken in the belly of the DarkVeil with liquid lightning overhead, because Aelindor had decided: if this was where he died, Max would know what she was to him.
I saw the shock on her face. Her glowing eyes flickered. Her lower lip trembled.
“I can’t hold them long.” Her voice broke. The layered quality was fading. Max—exhausted, terrified, hands shaking—holding back a force that could level a kingdom. “There are too many. So many.”
“We leave together,” Aelindor said. No roar now, but the steady voice of a man who’d break physics to enforce a decision. “We’re coming to you.”
We pushed forward. The air fought like lead water. We moved anyway.
The lightning shifted, poised to strike. Max was right—we were the target.
“Back off!” Max shouted at the lightning—or the thing inside it.
She retreated toward us, arms raised, palms facing the canopy. The lightning tracked her like predators tracking prey—buzzing, crackling, pitch rising. But it held at the boundary she’d set.
“It’s Coldiron.” Blood trickled from her nose. “They don’t want me to leave. You should go first. I’ll follow.”
“Not a chance, cadet!” Drakken snarled. Gold eyes, dragon scales flickering across his jaw, his body still clawing for a shift that wouldn’t come. “We. Leave. Together.”
I howled a warning at him—sharp, pointed,shut upin every canine language that ever existed.
The dragon prince was not built for gentle touch or delicate negotiations. He communicated through orders, insults, controlled explosions. My wolf was learning that the lightning was reactive—answering Max’s mood like tide to the moon. If he pissed her off, the whole canopy might incinerate us on principle.
Max reached us, arms raised, steps careful.
“Hold on to me,” she said, voice thin with exhaustion. “Physical contact, please. If the Coldiron senses your connection to me, it won’t strike you. That’s how I pulled my friends through the Coldiron tunnel.”
Aelindor’s arm locked around her waist, pulling her against him with a grip that meant he had no intention of letting go.
I pressed my furred shoulder to her thigh, muzzle nudging her hand. Her fingers threaded into my scruff, and heat shot through me—recognition, the wolf’s bond locking tight.
Drakken hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then his hand found the back of her neck, rough and large, cradling her skull with an awkwardness that might’ve been funny anywhere else. He looked like a man asked to hold something precious who’d never had practice.
“Wait.” Max halted, head turning back toward the sheet of lightning. “I need to take some Coldiron.”
The chanting rose before she moved. My wolf heard it this time: faint, eager, tiny voices from the lightning like children calling from a schoolyard.Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!
She rolled back her sleeve, baring the armguard. “Come. In order.”
A single strand detached and arced toward her, flowing, a ribbon of molten silver. It poured into the armguard. Then another. And another. The dark iron brightened—black to steel to silver to captured starlight, humming louder with each strand that joined.
“Enough.” Max flicked her wrist at the flow. “The rest of you go back.”
The stream resisted, metal arguing like a child begging for five more minutes before bed.
