The dragon lashes out with a claw and slices Lia’s cheek open before she jumps out of range. Seconds later, she responds by leaping onto his back and yanking his wing back so hard that he screams in agony even as he twists around and shoots fire straight at her.

She dodges but gets a little singed around the edges—which only seems to piss her off more. She plasters herself low across his back and punches a hole straight through his other wing.

The dragon screams again, then blurs into a rainbow array of colors for several seconds. When the blur of color passes, he’s a boy again—and not just any boy. Flint. And he’s bleeding. Not as much as I am, but the wing punch obviously hurt him if the way he hunches over as he scrambles awkwardly to his feet is any indication.

He’s dressed in the ripped-up version of the clothes he was wearing and has a lot more cuts and bruises on him now. Lia seems a little worse for wear from the fall, too, but she rushes him with a primal scream that has shivers running along every nerve ending that I’ve got. Flint meets her halfway, arm muscles bulging as he attempts to keep her flashing fangs out of his skin. Once he’s got a good grip on her, it’s his turn to send her flying to the ground. Then he grabs her head and starts pounding it over and over again into the stone floor.

She’s fighting him, bucking and snarling and doing everything in her power to get away from him. But he holds tight as he growls something indecipherable at her. I take their preoccupation with each other as my cue to get as far from them as I possibly can, as fast as I possibly can.

I stumble to my feet, ignoring the pain and the fact that my messed up shoulder makes it impossible for me to do anything but list to my left side. But forward movement is forward movement even in this world, and I can’t stay here watching Flint and Lia try to kill each other for one second longer.

Keeping one ear on the fight behind me, I start running/hobbling through the portico, looking for the tunnel that will take me back into the school’s main building. The tunnel that will bring me back to Katmere.

I make it across the center of the room to the tunnel that’s one to the side of being directly across from where Lia and Flint are fighting. But when I start to run down it, I’m torn between screaming for help and trying to go unnoticed a little while longer. And by a little while I mean long enough for me to stagger through the tunnel and into the school, where surely my Uncle Finn will put a stop to this madness.

Before the entire world explodes.

But I barely make it to the entrance to the tunnel that I think will lead me to the castle before Flint is on me. He grabs me by the hair and slams me face-first into the nearest wall.

“Flint, stop. Please,” I manage to gasp out through the pain tearing through me courtesy of my injured shoulder.

“I wish I could, Grace.” He sounds grim, defeated. “I thought I could get you out of here. But Lia’s not going to let me. And I can’t let the ticks get away with using you for what they want to do.”

“Using me for what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Lia’s had a plan all along. It’s why she brought you here.”

“She didn’t bring me here, Flint. My parents died—”

“Don’t you get it? She killed your parents to get you here. We knew it for sure as soon as you arrived and the wolves got close enough to smell you.

“We were sure we’d be able to finish this long before we got here, but taking you and Lia out is one thing. Taking Jaxon out when we realized he was involved in the plan was another thing entirely.”

I’m reeling, his words hitting me with the full force of a wrecking ball as I scramble to make sense of them. “What are you—my parents—Jaxon—how could…” I pause, take a breath. Try to breathe through the pain and confusion and horror his words stir up inside me.

“Look, I don’t have time to fill you in on everything. And it wouldn’t change anything if I could. I want to save you, Grace. I do. But we can’t let Lia do this. It’ll mean the end of the world. So you’ve got to die. It’s the only way we can stop this thing from happening.” He reaches forward, wraps his hand around my neck.

And then he starts to squeeze.

   59

Carpe

Kill-Em

“Stop!” I gasp out, clawing frantically at his hand with my bloody fingertips. “Flint, please. You can’t do this.”

But Flint isn’t listening. He just stares at me with broken, tear-filled eyes as he squeezes tighter and tighter.

I’m panic-stricken by this point, terrified that he’s really going to do it. That he’s really going to kill me…and worse, he’s going do it before I know the truth behind what happened to my parents.

“Flint, stop!” I try to get more out, try to beg him to tell me what he’s talking about, but the pressure on my throat is too much. I can’t speak anymore, can’t breathe, can hardly think as the world starts going dark around me.

“I’m sorry, Grace.” He sounds tortured, devastated, but the squeeze of his fingers around my throat never falters. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this. I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted—”

He breaks off on a scream and suddenly the pressure around my neck is gone, his fingers bending back from my skin at an unnatural angle.

I gasp, try to suck air into my starving lungs via my abused throat. It hurts, a lot, but the pain doesn’t matter right now. Nothing does except being able to breathe again.

When I finally have enough oxygen inside of me to think semi-clearly again, I look around for Lia. Find her crumpled on the floor in the same spot where Flint had been beating her head against the floor with all the strength of the dragon inside him.

Convinced she isn’t a threat—at least for now—I focus back on Flint who has sunk to his knees at this point. He’s clutching his hands, his face a mask of agony, and for a second—just a second—I feel sorry for him. Which is bizarre considering a few moments ago he was using those very fingers to strangle me.

I beat back the sympathy and take a step away, sliding along the wall in the most unobtrusive manner I can muster. I don’t know what’s happening here, don’t know which of the many, many supernatural forces surrounding us is responsible for Flint’s suffering, but I have a pretty good idea. And if I’m right, things are about to get a million times more dicey. If I’m right, Flint is about to have a very bad—

Jaxon bursts into the room like a dragon-seeking missile, his focus completely and totally on Flint as he races across the room at an unimaginable speed. His eyes, glowing and livid and filled with violence, meet mine for a second before sliding over every inch of me as if cataloging my injuries. Moments later, he’s on Flint, grabbing him by the hair and heaving him across the room into the opposite wall.