Page 73 of Dragon 7

Yet, hope followed that unreasonable pride the way fire followed a fuse.

And my hope was just as unreasonable as my pride. This was the sort of hope history warned men against. The sort that had walked great armies into the mouths of mountains and called it destiny.

Yet. . .I let that hope come anyway because in the end. . .a man fighting without hope was already half a corpse, and I intended to be very much alive by morning.

“War is right.” I rose from the dirt like a man buried alive who refused to stay down.

Soil covered my palms. I dusted it off and still saw the black lines the ritual had burned into my skin.

Will those lines ever leave?

The dragon-shadow leaned his large wispy head to the side, and his dark voice filled my ears. “No, but our Tiger will not mind them.”

Our Tiger. Not your Tiger. It appears my dragon-shadow is claiming her too.

The dragon-shadow widened his glowing eyes.

I claimed her before you. His voice arrived in my head from everywhere at once, pressing through the skull and settling in the soft corners of my brain.

I am going to have to get used to this.

I swallowed. “When did you claim her?”

In our office and on the first day we ever saw her.

“Hmmm.”

I liked her scent.

“Me too.”

We are the same.

“I see.” I looked around.

The clearing had emptied—red capes gone, torchlights guttering down to coals, smoke rising thin and white where the flames had been. The forest had swallowed the Death Guardian and the Silent Ones the same way the sea swallowed Akiro's scout plane earlier.

Then, warmth arrived in the center of my chest.

That’s Nyomi?

We feel her now. . .because of the bond.

“We. . .do. . .it’s odd but. . .it’s like she is. . .inside of me.” I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and held still. That sensation spread outward through my ribs. It was a compass needle swinging toward a fixed point somewhere behind me, east, below the ground. “She’s in the Bamboo Garden’s building.”

She is.

“Safe.”

Yes.

“But. . .” The emotion traveling through the bond was hot, expanding, and aimed at a target I could not see. “Rage.”

Pure.

Total.

Ferocious.