Chapter One - Continued

Six Weeks Later

  Allie’s apartment smelled like burned toast.

  She emerged from the bedroom with damp hair and a towel looped around her neck, following the scent like a warning. Erik stood at the stove with a spatula in one hand and a look of intense concentration, as if he were defusing a bomb instead of cooking breakfast.

  The pan in front of him hissed ominously.

  “You are a dragon,” Allie said. “Literal fire magic. How are you this bad at cooking?”

  “Fire magic burns things,” he said without looking up. “Cooking requires not burning things. The skills are opposed.”

  She stepped closer and peered into the pan. “That is definitely burned.”

  “It is… caramelized.”

  “It is carbon.”

  He sighed and turned off the burner. “Coffee?”

  “Please.”

  They had been living together for six weeks now. Temporarily. Just until Erik healed. Just until the city stopped shaking from what they had done. Just until someone came up with a better plan.

  No one had.

  Neither of them had suggested he leave.

  Allie moved past him and reached for the mugs. The kitchen window over the sink looked out onto the street four floors below. From here she could see the single old tree clinging to life near the curb, its trunk split and scarred where some car had clipped it years ago. A faded orange tag hung from one low branch, the city’s way of promising to remove it and never quite following through.

  It should have been dead already.

  It was not.

  She tried not to think about that.

  She filled the mugs while Erik scraped the ruined eggs into the trash. Morning light slanting across the counter caught the pale threads of the bond mark at her collarbone. She had stopped trying to hide it when someone noticed it anyway every time she wore something that dipped too low. Semicircles of silver and gold braided together where Morna’s curse had once tried to cut them apart.

  The mark hummed quietly beneath her skin. It was not the sharp crackle of storm she had come to expect. It was deeper than that. Slower. Almost like a second heartbeat under the first, as if something in the earth itself had started breathing again and had forgotten how to stop.

  She told herself it was in her head.

  “Do not look at me like that,” Erik said.

  She passed him a mug. “Like what.”

  “Like you are about to file charges on my breakfast.”

  “It left evidence,” she said. “There are crumbs and everything.”

  The corner of his mouth tugged up. He looked older some days, shadows etched deeper at the edges of his eyes, but there was something looser in his posture now. Less of the constant braced-for-impact tension he had carried when the curse still sat on his shoulders like a second spine.

  “Come on,” he said. “Balcony. Before the smoke alarm adds its opinion.”

  They stepped out onto the narrow balcony that overlooked the street. The city rose around them in glass and steel, morning light already catching on windows and distant cranes. Somewhere below, a bus hissed to a stop. A jogger’s footsteps tapped out a steady rhythm on the sidewalk.

  The old tree near the curb rose just within her view, its branches thin and bare of anything but a few stubborn leaves. Its roots had cracked the concrete in a jagged circle, as if the earth were trying to push itself back through the street and did not care what the city wanted.

  “Kael called,” Erik said, leaning against the railing.

  “That is ominous.” Allie took a careful sip. “You lead with that before or after bad news these days.”

  “Before. Sometimes during.” He watched steam curl from his mug. “She wants to meet at the Black Cat tonight.”

  Allie’s fingers tightened around the ceramic. “It is reopening already.”

  “Under new management,” Erik said. “One of the freed dragons bought it. Kael says he wants to turn it into a community space for supernatural beings. Her words.”

  “Of course she found a way to turn a bar into a political statement.”

  “She calls it outreach.”

  Allie let out a breath that was almost a laugh. The idea of walking back into that alley made her stomach clench, but the thought of someone giving it a different story felt right. Maybe necessary.

  “Is William going to be there,” she asked.

  “Probably not,” Erik said. “He is still… adjusting.”

  That was one word for it.

  “How is he,” she asked softly.

  “He lost a century of lies in a night,” Erik said. “The curse stripped away all the excuses he had used to survive. Now he has nothing between himself and the guilt but time. He is having trouble controlling the shifts. Keeps transforming when he becomes emotional.”

  Allie’s mouth twitched. “Emotional how. Angry. Sad. Existential crisis over breakfast pastries.”

  “Yesterday he was moved by a sandwich,” Erik said. “He became a dragon near a Subway. Torvald had to handle the cleanup.”

  The image of Torvald, grim and precise, dealing with a dragon sized incident next to a fast food sign broke through the heaviness in her chest. Allie laughed, a startled sound that felt almost normal.

  “So that is a yes on emotional sandwiches,” she said.

  “Yes.” Erik smiled into his coffee.

  The pendant at her throat thrummed once, then settled. For a heartbeat, beneath the usual stormlight, she thought she felt something else. Stone. Roots. A slow, patient awareness brushing the edge of her senses. A steady pull from deep in the earth, as if something far below were trying to reach her but did not yet know her name.

  She looked down at the street again. The old tree stood where it always did. Cracked. Silent. Waiting for the city to remember its promise to cut it down.

  Nothing moved.

  “Kael says most of the freed dragons still cannot shift,” Erik said. His tone had turned thoughtful, the way it did when he slipped into the part of himself that had once been the Alliance’s blade. “They can feel that the curse is gone. The weight is off. But the change will not answer when they call it.”

  “Like something is still holding them,” Allie said.

  “Yes. But it is not Morna any longer.”

  “And the Watchers,” Allie said quietly.

       Erik nodded once. “They are adrift. Without the curse, they have no task to anchor them. Some vanished. Some cling to old habits out of fear. They look like an order waiting for a purpose that no longer exists.”

       She thought of the sigils burned into stone. The roar of the void. The way Morna’s crown had cracked when Torin stepped from the dark with their child in his arms. The moment the world had shuddered and broken and tried to put itself back together in a new shape.

  She had not meant to cut the curse. She had simply reached for the one thread that felt wrong and pulled.

  “You think that is my fault too,” she asked quietly.

  “No.” Erik’s answer was immediate. “The curse is gone because you were brave enough to touch it. Whatever remains is something older. Or something left behind.”

  “That is very comforting,” she said dryly.

  “You are welcome.”

  They stood in silence for a moment. Wind slid around the building, cool against her face. It carried a faint scent of rain, car exhaust, and something else she could not name. Something like wet stone after a drought.

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A news alert flashed across the screen.

MYSTERIOUS CREATURE SIGHTED OVER WHITE ROCK LAKE

  A blurry photo accompanied it, all grain and motion. A shape in the clouds that could have been a trick of the light or could have been a dragon who had miscalculated the line between caution and freedom.

  Allie held the phone out. “Subtle,” she said.

  Erik glanced at it and huffed a breath that was almost a laugh. “Someone is becoming careless.”

  “Or brave,” Allie said.

  “Perhaps both.”

  She lowered the phone but did not put it away. The world looked the same as it had six weeks ago. Same skyline. Same traffic. Same dented tree. Somewhere, though, everything had changed.

  “What about the Alliance,” she asked. “How are they handling the fact that dragons are no longer quietly dying under their watch.”

  “Fragmenting,” Erik said. “Some factions want to build something new. Something less secret and less cruel. Others want the old control back and pretend nothing has changed. A few are trying to walk away before anyone asks them what they knew.”

  “So the usual chaos,” she said.

  “Essentially.”

  A breeze lifted the edge of her hair. The mark at her collarbone warmed again. The new undertone answered, a slow, steady drumbeat under the pulse of storm and fire.

  There it is again, she thought.

  “Have you decided about the job,” Erik asked.

  She blinked and pulled herself back from the feeling. “The nonprofit.”

  “Yes.”

  The offer sat on the counter under the salt shaker, three pages of dense text and a bright logo that still made her laugh when she looked at it. Legal Advocacy for Supernatural Communities. Someone had underlined the title three times in a red pen, as if to convince themselves it was real.

  “They want me to head it,” Allie said. “First client is a dragon who needs citizenship papers. The government does not seem to have a form for people who technically died three hundred years ago and then came back with a new legal name and a fire problem.”

  “Creative law,” Erik said. “You would be good at it.”

  She studied the city. “Do you think it is wise. Working in this world. Your world.”

  “It is your world now,” he said.

  “Is it.”

  He turned his head to look at her fully. “Do you want it to be.”

  She did not answer immediately. She thought of Kael threatening to burn down the Alliance archives if anyone touched Allie without her permission. She thought of William’s tremor when he had asked not to be found for a while. She thought of Mara and Lena rising in light and wing from the hospital roof, together and finally free.

  She thought of two pendants in her hand and a city that had never slept easy under fire.

  “Yes,” she said at last. “I think I do.”

  “Then it is wise,” Erik said simply.

  Her phone buzzed again. This time it was not a news alert. A message preview flashed on the screen.

William: Found something. Need you and Erik at the workshop. Bring Eleanor’s book. Important.

  Allie felt the words land like a weight in her chest. The book still sat on her nightstand, its leather cover worn soft where her thumb had traced the edges without opening it. The last time she had tried, nothing had happened.

  “William,” she said.

  Erik’s gaze sharpened. “What does he want.”

  She held the phone out. He read the message once, then again, as if the meaning would change the second time.

  “He says it is about the transformations,” Erik said quietly. “About why most of them still cannot shift.”

  “And he wants Eleanor’s book,” Allie said.

  The bond mark thrummed in answer.

  Erik finished his coffee in a swallow and set the mug on the balcony rail. “We should go.”

  “Now.”

  “Yes.”

  Allie looked once more at the old tree by the curb. For the first time, she thought she heard something in the rustle of its thin branches. Not wind. Not traffic. A faint, strained groan, as if the trunk were trying to straighten after too many years of leaning.

  She told herself it was her imagination. The world under her feet had shifted. Of course she was jumping at shadows and creaking wood.

  “Come on, storm girl,” Erik said. His voice was light, but his eyes were not. “Let us see what William found before he sets another restaurant on fire.”

  “Once,” Allie said as she stepped back inside. “He set one restaurant on fire one time.”

  “That we know about,” Erik said.

  She grabbed her keys, her jacket, and Eleanor’s book from the nightstand. The leather felt cooler than she remembered. Heavier. As if someone had slipped new pages into it while she slept.

  They left the apartment together and headed down the stairwell. On the street, the air felt thicker, closer to the ground. Her mark pulsed once in time with the distant thud of something she could not identify.

  They passed the old tree on the way to the car. Allie did not look up, but for a moment the hairs on her arms rose, as if something had turned toward her and struggled to remember the shape of a greeting.

  She opened the passenger door and slid inside, telling herself it was nothing.

  By the time Erik pulled away from the curb, the tree had gone still again. Its cracked branches reached toward the pale morning sky as if they were waiting for something. Or someone.

  Neither of them saw the small shower of dry twigs that fell from its lowest limb as the car turned the corner and vanished from sight.