Page 2 of Claim the Light
“Zahra told me you were out here,” he says, his voice quiet.
I draw a sharp breath, guilt pricking my conscience. I’d pretended to go to bed. I thought I’d crept out without Zahra noticing.
I grimace. “I was supposed to stay indoors until you returned and gave us the all-clear. She must be going ballistic.”
Micah gives a gentle shake of his head. “She’s fine. The weight has lifted from her shoulders.”
“Oh.” The weight of responsibility. A heavy burden carried by a leader desperately trying to keep her people alive. I always understood her anger, even when it was aimed at me.
“Sophia,” Micah says, taking a careful step up toward me. “Will you tell me what’s weighing onyourshoulders?”
When Lana brought the dragon’s light out from behind the veil, it restored our dragon hearts and our power, allowing us to shift at will. I don’t need the moonlight to shift, but I also couldn’t bring myself to do it before now.
“It’s the moonlight,” I say without hesitation. “I don’t have the courage to step into it.” My shoulders hunch a little as soon as I speak my thoughts, but dammit, I want to believe that I’m safe telling him anything.
He nods slowly as he finally moves up to my side, towering over me now, so close I’m tempted to reach out and close the gap between us. “I haven’t gone into the moonlight, either.”
I’m surprised. “But you went to the veil.”
“We reached the veil before the sun set. On the way back here, all of my old habits set in.” The corners of his eyes crinkle as he casts a smile at me that nearly stops my heart.
Damn. The way his smile brightens his eyes and lifts the fatigue from his expression makes my heart beat so much faster.
I understand why his old habits would have kicked in. The Grudge, more than any other clan, became experts at hiding in the shadows and covering their tracks.
“You talk of courage,” Micah continues, “but I’d rather face Sentinels than the unknown of this moonlight.”
“It’s the final test,” I say, casting a glance across the empty, flat rooftop. “If my dragon shadow is gone, then I’m really free.”
“Mine is gone,” he says with certainty. “I can no longer sense or hear him.”
Unlike other clans, the Grudge learned how to conceal their shadows—andhow to communicate with them. But they were no more able to withstand the long-term destructive effects of their shadows than the Dread or the Scorn.
He reaches his hand out to me, palm up, and waits for me to take it. “As for what kind of dragons we are now, we can find out together.”
I hesitate, but not because I don’t want to take his hand.
It’s because I’m not sure I’ll be able to let him go again.
My dragon shadow was a water dragon named Bella Vorago, whose scales were glimmering, cerulean blue. When she first met Micah, she nudged her face to his in the way that dragons once bonded. Even though her form was insubstantial, I felt the connection she formed with him. But she’s gone now, and I’m left to discover if her instincts were also mine.
“Hope is hard,” I say.
One corner of Micah’s lips twitches up. “Then let me make it easier.”
Still holding his hand out to me, he steps onto the rooftop and into the light.
I gasp when the moonbeams burn across his frame, lighting up his hair and eyes, falling across his broad shoulders and glinting around his forearms where his shirt doesn’t cover his skin.
His pupils slowly shift, becoming silvery and reptilian. A beast’s eyes. At the same time, dark-gray scales shimmer across his visible skin, smooth and tough like the hardest stone.
I didn’t see Micah’s dragon shadow to know what kind of dragon it was. But in my mind, I’m suddenly whisked away to the top of a craggy mountaintop covered in ancient stones, the kind that have withstood any storm. A wolf prowls across that mountain, slipping between the jagged outcrops.
The wolf I see within my mind isn’t hunting its prey.
It’s searching for its pack.
Micah is both the mountain and the wolf. Steadfast and true, strong and reliable, with a heart that has space for me in it.
