Page 109 of This Shattered Star

In the span of a breath, we both went down, her back on the ground and my knee digging into her stomach, pinning her there. The shape of wings reflected off the metal of the dagger before I embedded it between her ribs.

But nothing happened.

No gasp. No twitch of her stoic features. Not any change in those empty eyes as I waited precious moments for her to showanysign of death.

She kept pulling on her strings.

“No. No, no.”Impossible.I yanked the blade out of her ribs only to plunge it into her chest, right in the center. Not even a dribble of red leaked from the tear in her robes. I pierced her again. Again. Again.

And still, those fingers kept moving.

Wind whipped my hair across my face, but I knew it was no work of nature. The clearing was large enough for one dragon to land. And only one of them was enough to kill me.

The ground shuddered.

For the first time since I’d met him, real fear shone in Kodhan’s eyes. While I did not dare look behind me, he had a full view of the looming beast, snarling and snapping with impatience. His face was drained of all color because of the blood loss, leaving him as pale as the woman beneath me.

I choked on a gasp, snapping my attention back to her white, empty eyes.Soullesseyes. Her blue lips. Expressionless face, without a single trace of pain.

She couldn’t die—not if she was already dead.

I fought the urge to recoil. She wasn’t controlling the dragons at all. She wasn’t even controlling herself.

She was no puppeteer. Shewasa puppet. Along with the dragons, their matching eyes finally making sense. She was connected to them. Sever the cords, and they would all fall.

And I had one last chance to get rid of her.

“Kodhan, I need fire!” I raised the dagger again. Teeth reflected off it this time. Reeking breath chuffed at my back.

One final gamble. Life or death. It didn’t matter what Maverick had offered me up on that balcony. He would let me die here. Either I was smart enough to live, or I wasn’t.

Kodhan grunted, raising a hand caked in blood to aim whatever dregs of magic he had left. “I’ll burn you.”

“It doesn’t matter. Coat this blade on fire,” I growled. “Burn me or we both die!”

Flames sputtered in and out of existence along the edges of the blade. Blood sprayed from his lips as he coughed.

“More!”

Like a match had been struck, the entire blade went up in flames—my hand included. Kodhan was right. He no longer hadthe strength to withhold the scalding heat that devoured my skin. I tightened my grip on the hilt, embracing the pain. Pain meant I was still alive.

With a strangled cry, I sunk the blade right into the first wound I’d given her, just as something splattered onto my shoulder. This time, she screeched, a haunting, ear-splitting sound that curdled the blood in my veins.

Her pallid skin took on a gray tint. And began to flake off her bones.

Lines spread like webs of broken glass down her neck, disappearing under her robes.

Identical plumes of gray rained down from above. I tilted my head upwards, expecting to find a jaw full of teeth. But I was met with a massive cloud of gray instead.Ashes,I realized. They dusted my cheeks, coated my hair. Though the dragon’s head was consumed, its neck and body continued to crack and splinter like the woman, slowly peeling away.

I didn’t waste another second.

I scrambled to where Kodhan still knelt. Laid both hands—ignoring the angry red welts peppering the skin on my right—onto his bloodied ones. A deep sense of foreboding wrapped around my middle. He didn’t have much time. The skeletal fingers of death already reached for his shoulder.

“You will not have him,”I snarled as his life’s essence continued to spill around him. “He is mine and you will not have him!”

A rising cacophony suddenly broke the heavy silence of the forest. Cheering and distorted chants I couldn’t be bothered to make out.

The surrounding forest turned to mist, everything down to the moss beneath my knees like a replica of an early morning fog, drifting away on a wind I could not feel. As if the forest never existed. Until all that was left were acres and acres ofrolling fields, the castle jutting tall in the distance. Buildings twinkled behind it. Houses and shops from northern parts of the kingdom.