Page 56 of Your Final Resting Place

In the chaos, a moment of calm opened up, and Zee poofed back beside me.

“This lightning is fuckin’ wild, right?” He grinned, and right on cue a jagged bolt of purple lightning snapped at the bridge’s tower, and danced down the thick cables, lighting the battle scene in neon purple.

“You know you’re doing that?” I told him. “That’s all you, Zee.”

“It is?” He looked up, and the whole sky was a spiderweb of purple zigzags. “I have lightning powers now? Fuck, yeah!” He flung himself into the fray, slashing Shareen at Cain’s enormous and endless, dark, lashing eels.

We were doing great, beating him back step by step, until Cain’s already larger than normal, human-shaped outline of vicious power gave several sudden, shuddering jerks. The bridge jolted around us. Cables twanged. Cars slid.

The Lost Ones eased off, backing up.

Something had changed.

Cain’s laughter built, howling around us, and the dark sorcerer’s outline began to split apart, swell and crack, then snap again, getting bigger with each twitch.

“Uh . . . Kitten?”

Bigger, he grew.

Enormous, smoky hands grabbed the Golden Gate Bridge’s tower.

“Get off the bridge,” I told Zee.

“Eh?”

Victor blurred to a sudden stop beside me. “Adam?”

“Get them all off the bridge,” I told them both. “Get everyone to safety.”

The bridge gave a larger, sudden jolt, and Zee flung out his wings and tail to balance himself. “What’s happening?”

I peered up, and up. At the giant dark sorcerer who was about to make San Francisco look as tiny as a Lego town. “The random bead has kicked in.”

CHAPTER 17

“Go! Get back!” Victor barked, turning to the ranks of Lost Ones and urging them to get off the bridge.

Zee hung back, uncertain. “Kitten?”

I knew what he was asking. He didn’t want to go. “I’ll be alright, I’ve got this.”

His pained face hurt my heart like an open wound. “I love you, Adam. Always did.” He swooped in and captured my mouth in a kiss I couldn’t help but fall into.

I gripped his hair, and a horn, clutching him close, and kissed him as though this kiss might be our last. Gasping free, I pulled him down, eye to eye. Our foreheads bumped. His horns tangled with my hair. “I’m going to be alright. This was always meant to happen. I’ll be fine. And there’s no way I’m letting Tom Collins run the bar.”

Zee’s grin was all I needed to see. “You gotta come back, Vic’s useless without you.”

“Vic?”

“Meh, I’m trying out new names for Daddy Spice.”

“Victor is a perfectly good name,” Victor said, reappearing next to Zee.

I reached for him, and with my right arm hooked around Zee’s neck, I pulled Victor in with my left. With Zee, I could pretend to be tough. But Victor always saw behind the act.

I hugged them both. I loved them so hard it hurt.

No dragon had ever loved like this.