“What way?”
“There’s no need to be kind to spare my feelings, surely you’ve noticed,” I muttered. “I’m not like most men.”
“I know,” she said carefully, as if she were dealing with a spooked animal.
And maybe she was,I thought despairingly.
“Whatever it is, Kael, you can tell me,” she said softly. “Please, you can trust me.”
“Idotrust you. The one I don’t trust is myself,” I said shortly.
“What do you mean?” Her voice was gentle as she waited for me to speak.
I grabbed for the pendant at my throat. Running the pad of my thumb over the facets of the gem in the center, I paced away from her while I struggled to find the words.
“Does this have something to do with why you’ve been avoiding me?” Seranni’s voice was soft but resolute, and it cut through the fog of my thoughts like a blade. I kept my back to her, unwilling to meet those beseeching amber eyes. They had a way of pulling words out of me that I wasn’t ready to say.
“Why can’t you tell me the truth?” Seranni pressed. There was no accusation in her voice, only quiet pain.
I gritted my teeth and squeezed the pendant at my neck, the black gem in its center gleaming faintly in the firelight. That small, unassuming piece of jewelry was a countdown to my death—a constant reminder that time was running out. One more transformation, one last fight, and the magic that bound me to this existence would burn me away entirely.
The mage’s voice echoed in my mind, smug and clinical as he’d handed out these pendants to the soldiers who guarded his creations.“A failsafe,”he’d explained to them, because to him, we weren’t even human. Just tools. Not worthy of conversation.“This way, I can monitor how often they transform. And when they’re spent, they’ll just burn away into nothingness.”He’d smiled at the soldiers’ impressed looks.“After all, the King doesn’t like loose ends.”
Each of us nine dragon chimaera—those who had survived the experiments—had gotten a pendant, an easy visual marker of how much ‘ammunition’ each chimaera weapon held.
I clenched my jaw at the memory. He’d turned us into weapons—dragon chimaera, forged in a crucible of pain and magic.
When I’d first woken from the experiments, I’d transformed involuntarily twice, unable to control the magic running through my veins.
My body had writhed and snapped like a marionette with its strings cut, reshaping itself into something monstrous. I’d woken in a pile of rubble, my vision sharp enough to see the cracks in stone and the grains of dirt underfoot, my body alight with new strength I hadn’t asked for. I was barely conscious, trembling in a mass of muscle and scales, when the mage’s voice had rung out above me.
“Perfect,” he’d said. “Just perfect.”
Perfect for what?I had wondered then. Now, I knew. Perfect for carnage.
I had vowed then to resist that cursed mage.
I had been forced to transform another time when the mage had used his magic to compel me to fight my old friend Pavel, a comrade from my old regiment and one of the other dragon chimaera. The mage had wanted to gauge our individual magical strengths, so that he could better classify us asweaponsfor the king.
Then I had transformed one last time when I had rebelled against the mage, refusing to hurt the soldiers of my old regiment. He was stronger, of course, but I had to try. In the end, he’d thrown me into the dungeons and labelled me a failure, siphoning off magic from me to use in his other experiments. Soon, the pendant at my neck had grown dull with the repeatedattacks on my magic, as I had lain there in the dark dungeons, all alone.
Now, I knew I had just one more transformation left in me. And this time, it would kill me.
My magic was too unstable. By binding the magical essence of a dragon with a non-magical man like me, the mage was forcing the magic to run through my body, causing it to break down more and more each time I transformed.
How could I tell Seranni that I was a beast who was doomed to die, when because of her, I had just started to feel like a man again?
“Kael,” Seranni’s voice was soft. “What aren’t you telling me?”
I paced up and down the room, avoiding her gaze.
“Kael, please. Whatever it is, I won’t judge you for it. I won’t turn away from you, I promise.” Her voice wavered, and I saw how much my silence was hurting her.
With a curse, I turned to look at her. Whatever I did, it would hurt her.
Which was the lesser of two evils? Would it be better for her to realize she was being manipulated by my magic and that I was trying to protect her, or would she be safer if she thought I was simply a boorish man given to flights of moodiness and irrational surliness?
“I thought we werefriends,” she said softly, and the heartbreak in her voice almost had me caving. She’d told me only a little of her life, but it was enough to know that she, like me, had no one in the world to call her own. Left behind by her father and afraid to form true friendships because of her magic, Seranni craved companionship but was afraid of being rejected.
