I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. All I could do was take in what was rising in front of me, larger than anything I’d ever seen before. There were brief flashes, impressions that broke through the haze that had fallen over my eyes and mind—claws and teeth and wing, oh my gods that was a wing—until a great eye turned toward me.
It blinked, slow and unfocused. The eye was bigger than I was, the skin around it cracked deeply. The iris itself was heterochromous, shoots of red and green and blue. Even as I watched, the colors seemed to swirl together, moving around the iris like waves crashing.
The eye itself moved left to right, and the little lights around me flew forward, running along the hardened skin.
The creature groaned, a deep rumbling thing that I felt vibrate from the ground up through my legs and hips until it buried itself in my chest, wrapping around my heart and squeezing.
The eye focused now, sharper, the gaze knowing.
And it was centered on me.
I took another step back.
I opened my mouth once, twice, but no sound came out.
Because I was at a loss. I had all the pieces to put together what I was seeing in front of me, but they were all jumbled in my head. I couldn’t find or sense the pattern in them.
Finally, I did the only thing a person could do if they were in my position and faced with a gigantic hill monster after having been bad-touched by an old lady into the middle of the woods.
I waved and said, “Heeeyyy there.”
The eye blinked.
“I’m just gonna back away slowly,” I told it. “We can pretend this never happened. You… you just go back to sleep. Or whatever you were doing. I didn’t mean to wake you up, and I promise it’ll never happen again. Don’t mind me at all.”
It started to growl.
“Okay, so you do mind me. That’s just swell. I’m going to get out of your hair. Not that you have any hair. No, you just have scales and teeth the size of Tiggy, and oh my gods, why are you moving toward me, you fucking psycho! I’m going to punch both her tits, I swear to—”
The eye tilted away.
Only to have a great gaping maw pointed at me instead.
And even though I was whiting out in terror, I had a vague understanding of the shape of the head in front of me, the way the reptilian lips curled around teeth, the twin slits at the end of the snout that were its nostrils. A hard ridge rose on the top of its head, fanning out in a half-spherical protrusion, like a bony crown. Sharp, pointed juts of bone stuck out from the top of the crown, gleaming brightly in the starlight.
I knew what this was.
It was a dragon.
Bigger than any other I’d seen before.
In the Dark Woods, which meant it was—
It opened its jaws and—
“Sam!”
I jerked my head left. Ryan was there. I was in the castle, staring up at the ceiling. I was in the—
I looked right. The dragon took a step toward me that caused the earth to quake under my feet. Its foot was gigantic, easily the size of a carriage, with wicked sharp claws digging into the ground.
“Sam, wake up!”
“I am,” I said in the castle.
“I am,” I said in the woods.
I said, “I am, I am, I am—”
And then all the sounds in all the world fell away as the dragon spoke. His voice was a deep rumble, as if the words were heaving from the very depths of him. I felt every word vibrating down into my bones.
The great dragon said, “I have awoken, O human child. In this forest deep, in the dark of the wild. And I have seen what is in your heart. Take heed of my warning: you are not ready.”
And then everything was melting, the dragon, the forest, the colors bleeding together as I took in a gasping breath. The ground split apart beneath my feet and I was falling, I was falling, I was—
A sharp crack across my face. My head rocked to the side.
“Motherfucker,” I groaned.
“Oh, now you wake up?” Ryan growled above me. “You asshole. Don’t you ever scare me like that again!”
I opened my eyes as I clutched my cheek. I was on my back on the floor in Castle Lockes, in the same hallway we’d been in before… whatever had just happened. I glared up at Ryan, who was at my side, leaning over me, an annoyed look on his face.
“You hit me!”
“No shit,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do!”
“So you hit me? Who does that?”
“Your eyes were rolling back in your head, and you were shaking.”
I pushed myself up as he fell back on his knees. There were a couple of guards standing a little farther down the hall, watching us warily, but I ignored them. “So the first thing you think of when you see me having a seizure is to hit me?”
“I said your name first,” he said with a frown. “Like… three times.”
“Oh, that makes it better. Sam, Sam, Sam, oh it’s not working. I should probably domestically violence my boyfriend by punching him in the mouth. For shame. We need couples therapy if we’re ever going to survive this.”
He rolled his eyes. “Glad to know you’re just as you always are.”
“Amazing?”
“Maybe not quite the word I was going to use.”
“Yes, well, abusers probably don’t.”
“I didn’t abuse—you know what, no. You are not going to distract me. What the hell was that about?”
And I could see it then, the pinched look on his face, the way the corners of his mouth were drawn down. He looked scared and worried, and even if he beat me, I swore I could change him and make him love me. “I’m fine,” I said. “Your forehead is doing that wrinkle thing when I’ve done something dumb and you don’t know whether to hug me or yell at me.”
“It is not,” he muttered, forehead wrinkling further. “I wasn’t even worried. And fair warning, I am going to probably hug and yell at you.”
I snorted. “I see no problem with any of that. How long was I down for?”
“Five minutes? Maybe a little more. What happened?”
“And I was always here? I didn’t… disappear or anything?”
That certainly didn’t make the expression on his face go away. If anything, his eyes narrowed further. “Disappeared where?”
“Fuck if I know,” I said, scrubbing my hand over my face. “I was in the middle of the Dark Woods, I think. Some place I didn’t recognize. After she—wait. Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan said. “One minute she had you up against a wall, and the next it was like she wasn’t there. You fell and you wouldn’t wake up. You were shaking and I couldn’t—”
I reached up and cupped his face. “I’m okay,” I said.
“I know,” he said, but he leaned into my hands. “It’s just that—fuck. Don’t do that again, okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “I won’t let old women press me against walls and make me have weird visions. Got it.”
“Asshole,” he said, sounding disgustingly fond.
Gods, I loved the fuck out of him.
And I was about to tell him as much when another thought hit me, one far more important. “The King,” I said. “Oh fuck, we have to get to the King.”