Page 59 of Blood of Dragons

“I love you too.”

Fire. It burned the city. It burned the world.

The dragons swooped through the darkness and knocked the cannons from the ledges. The bells of the towers were ripped from the stone and tossed into the sea. Screams of dying soldiers pierced the night. We’d successfully captured two dragons with our poorly fastened net system, but once the dragons were on the ground, they were a terror, and we lost a lot of men that way.

We were doomed.

I watched my men die. I watched my city burn. And all I could think about was Vivian—sailing to safety across the Northern Sea, so far away, she couldn’t see the fires or hear the screams. Parting from her had broken my heart, but now it gave me solace.

I ran to the eastern side of the castle, where my father issued his orders. The soldiers at the coastline were led by the general, but they were getting massacred the way we were up at the cliffs.

I reached him just as a dragon swooped down and knocked a line of men aside. One man was snatched in its enormous talons and carried into the sky before being swallowed whole. It was dark, and the riders were hard to see, heavily armored so any arrows that managed to strike them bounced right off.

I reached my father. “We must surrender!”

“Fire.” He issued his order, and a series of cannons fired at a dragon that passed by. Each one missed. “Again.”

“Father, we must surrender!”

He wouldn’t look at me.

“Did you hear me?” I’d yelled it the first time and the second.

“Yes, I heard you,” he snapped. “And no.”

“They’re going to kill us all?—”

“And wouldn’t you rather die than be a slave to a new regime? You know they’ll make a mockery out of us?—”

“But the people we’ve vowed to protect will be spared. Their lives and the lives of their children are more important than our egos.”

Silas stood behind him, listening to the conversation with a ghostly face. “He’s right, Father?—”

“This conversation doesn’t concern you,” he snapped.

I hated that these would be our last moments together, fighting and screaming with each other while the enemies soared through the skies.

“Listen to me,” I said. “We surrender. Then for as long as we’re still living, we try to discern how the dragons have been coerced. King Constantine would never let their kind be used in this manner, so there must be some external force making them behave this way. We figure out what this is and reverse it?—”

“Roooaaaaarrrrrr!”

The world suddenly went quiet. The dragons ceased their attack. For the first time, I could hear the crackling flames because the screams of the dying had stopped. A silence ensued, but it was packed with so much tension that I couldn’t draw breath.

Then he emerged from the darkness into the light of the flames—King Constantine. A charcoal-gray dragon larger in size than the rest, with brilliant scales that reflected like wet oil. He turned idle in the sky, his wings flapping to keep him in place, and then the rider called down to us.

It took me a moment to distinguish his face at this distance when the light was limited and he slowly rose up and down on the idling dragon. But then I saw it, those unkind eyes, that heavy-jowled face. “Uncle Barron…” My stomach tightened and pushed the acid up my throat. I’d been scared the moment of the siege, but now my terror had deepened into something more. A knife slid into my back, right between my ribs, and speared my lungs.

He called down to us from his mighty steed. “Had enough,Your Majesty?” Those unkind eyes had deepened into the gates of the underworld. Evil shone brighter than the full moon on a clear night. His lip was even curled up like he struggled not to sneer.

My father said nothing, staring up at him with contempt.

I’d warned my father, and he didn’t listen—and now we were all about to die.

“Your eldest may be arrogant, but he’s no fool. He saw what you failed to see, and now everyone you love will burn in my flames.” His dragon slowly lowered itself closer to the earth, obeying silent commands. Uncle Barron’s face came into better view, and he was wearing armor that looked nothing like our own. It was black and shiny, made of a material I couldn’t identify. He’d been nothing but an ordinary man my entire life, and now he looked like the mightiest soldier. Once his dragon landed, the other dragons were visible in the air, acting as guards if any one of us tried anything.

Uncle Barron climbed down from the powerful dragon then approached us, his cape flapping in the wind, looking quite a few inches taller and infinitely more powerful. He stopped several feet away from my father, his sword resting on his hip, and he let the silence pass as he enjoyed every second of his conquest. “First—we’ll start with you.”

Stakes were constructed out of the olive trees that had thrived hundreds of years in our courtyard. Butchered with blunt axes and knocked over by the enormous talons of the dragons, they were the first to be massacred.