Page 74 of Dragon 7

My jaw locked. “We must go to her.”

She is angry, but she is safe.

I wanted to put myself between her and whatever had lit that fury. And even more, I wanted to hold my Tiger, press my mouth to her forehead, and let her burn against me so she knew she would never have to face anything alone.

She is angry, but she is not afraid.

My dragon-shadow was correct. There was confidence in the rage. In fact, it landed in my chest harder than the warmth had. My Tiger, alone in a basement with a war on the island, had discarded fear entirely and was victorious in her own battle.

The heat of her rage moved through the bond the way wanting her did—low, insistent, impossible to separate from my own pulse.

I frowned. “She’s. . .different, but. . .I don’t know how to explain it.”

It was not only rage.

I had felt rage before. My own. Other men's. The sort that lived in the chest like a coal that never went fully dark. I knew its texture. Its temperature. The particular way it moved through the blood with intention.

This was not only that.

Beneath the rage there was a quiet that was soft and collapsing.

What is that?

I closed my eyes and sat in the emotion.

Grief.

It pressed against the inside of my sternum the way a hand pressed against a door it did not want to open.

Nyomi's grief.

Inside of me.

I opened my eyes.

Grief for Hiroko? Grief for those whom we may lose tonight?

The forest continued around me—wind through the high branches, the distant percussion of the war finding the island's eastern edge, smoke drifting thin and pale through the dark between the trunks.

I pressed both hands flat against my chest and held them there.

I had drunk from a bowl, bled onto a blade, and she had put her mouth to my palm. And our souls had crossed between us. And I could feel her deeply even though I did not have the language for all of these feelings yet.

The ritual had a name.

The Death Guardian had given it a name.

But names were containers, and what moved through me now was too large for the container.

Her soul was not a thing I could hold in cupped hands.

It was a weather system.

It moved through me like a storm front moved through a city, changing the temperature of everything it touched. Her rage, yes. Hot, aimed, and savage in the most feminine way was threaded with this dark river of grief.

And somehow I understood within this great sadness that she had given more than anyone would ever know tonight, but I just didn’t know what.

And that question was killing me.