“Baby, you can top me anytime.”
“Not gonna happen,” I muttered as he lowered his head and lifted his arm above his neck. I clambered on top of him, sliding between the spikes along his neck until I found the sweet spot on his back that allowed him to move as he needed to without the threat of knocking me off. I settled down between the boney spikes, grabbing one and pulling myself forward. With Ryan and Tiggy behind me, it’d been a snug fit, the half-giant holding us both so we wouldn’t slip off. Since I was alone now, I wrapped both arms around the spike and held on tightly.
I craned my neck to look behind us, half-convinced he would be right there, jaws stretched wide, fire blooming, but there was nothing. I didn’t know if that was better or worse.
“Do you see him?” I shouted down at Kevin, blinking against the rain.
“No. And I’m completely fine with that.”
“Get as high as you can! We need to stay above him.”
“We’ll lose the clouds if we go too high!” he snapped back.
“Just do it.”
“Then you better hold on to something.”
“What? Why are you—oh my fucking gods, you dick!”
Instead of being like a normal fucking dragon and rising gradually, Kevin turned his face upward, his body shifting until it was almost perpendicular to the ground. I held on as tightly as I could, pressing my face against the back spike, trying not to slide off. I started to lift off Kevin, my legs sliding back, and I squeezed my eyes shut, almost biting my tongue clean in half as we rose through the rainstorm. If it went on much longer, my arms were going to be the only thing on Kevin, and they were already tiring.
And then we broke through into sweet, warm sunlight.
I gasped as Kevin leveled out.
I opened my eyes.
The sun was bright. The sky was blue above us. There was a curve to the horizon, and it felt like I could see forever.
“Holy shit,” I said, my voice carried by the wind. “This is—”
It was calm. It was peaceful. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
Below us was a storm that stretched out across Verania.
Everything felt still. Like we’d crossed from one world into another.
“Have you ever been this high before?” I called down to Kevin, breathless.
“Once or twice,” he said. “But not in a very long time.”
“It’s… amazing. I can see why you fly.”
“Usually it’s without the threat of death. Well, that was before I met you. Now it seems like the only reason I’m in the air is if something wants to eat me or if I’m getting wizards blowing their whizbangs and their sparklies at me.”
“Dude. That sucks. My bad.”
“Eh, worth it.”
I took a deep breath and leaned over as far as I dared, trying to see if I could find the dragon before he found us.
I had a dizzying sense of vertigo as I stared down below us. The cloud cover belied how high we were, but what I was seeing wasn’t exactly what my brain was telling me. I saw the clouds below. But in my head, I could see straight through them all the way to the ground below.
“Oh man.” I swallowed thickly. “If I throw up on you, I am so sorry.”
“If you do, I’m going to eat you myself,” he said, glaring back at me.
“Bullshit. You love me too much.”
“Try and see, wizard. Remember the truth corn lady? I left her feet behind. I’ll leave nothing of you behind but the memories.”
“That…. Okay, that was actually quite impressive. Well played. Any vomit I might have had is now firmly back in my stomach where it belongs.”
“Thank you for sharing.”
There was nothing below us. I was starting to get uneasy. I would have thought the Great White would follow us much more closely. Granted, if he was as big as I thought he was, he couldn’t move as fast as Kevin. He would be a lumbering thing, something we needed to use to our advantage.
First I had to find him. I didn’t like the idea of going back down into the clouds, but if we didn’t see him soon, we’d have to. I couldn’t run the risk of him ignoring us and going after the others.
For the next minute, I scanned the clouds below us.
And it was the longest minute of my life.
I heard no voices in my head.
Felt no pulse of something like I had with the others.
And I thought that it was because he was shielding himself. That when I’d felt him before, it was because he let me.
I was about to tell Kevin that we had to go back down when I saw it.
I didn’t know what it was at first. There was something poking up above the clouds, thick and white, offset from the gray storm. It looked to be as wide as Kevin’s neck, which Tiggy couldn’t wrap his arms all the way around, even at the thinnest part, much to the dragon’s glee.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to make sure I wasn’t seeing an illusion. But I saw the way it split the clouds, like a fin below the surface of the water. Or below a sea of sand, and I shuddered at the reminder of the horrors that had hidden below the desert. I was about to point it out to Kevin when the thick white something rose even higher.
It was a boney protrusion.
Attached to the end of a wing.
A wing that made even Kevin’s impressive span pale in comparison.
“Oh my gods,” I whispered.
The wing split the clouds as it rose through them. It took me a moment to figure out that the dragon below us was flying sideways, one wing pointed up toward the sky, the other hidden below us toward the ground. The wing continued to rise through the clouds, getting bigger and bigger, until I was sure it was the biggest thing in the world.
Kevin tensed as he caught sight of the wing below us, the spikes on his back rattling together until he twitched and straightened them out, body rigid, wings spread and coasting on the wind to avoid making any sound. He turned his body until we were heading the same direction as the Great White, trailing behind him enough that we could dive into the clouds if needed.
There was a shadow of a body now, through the clouds. If it wasn’t an illusion, then we were most likely fucked. Kevin had grown in the last year until he was the size of the largest house in the City of Lockes, something that he was quite proud of.
The dragon below us appeared to be bigger than the castle itself.
The wing began to fall toward the clouds as the dragon straightened himself out. For a moment I was sure he was going to dip back below the clouds, but then he seemed to level out, large white spikes rising up from the cloud surface, much larger than the ones on Kevin’s back. I saw the quick flash of a long tail, the tip of which broke through the clouds before disappearing underneath.
But what was most magnificent and utterly terrifying was the hard ridge that rose on the top of his head as he moved above the clouds, fanning out in a half-spherical protrusion. Sharp, pointed juts of bone stuck out from the top of the crown, gleaming brightly in the sunlight.
It was exactly as I’d seen in the vision, down to the last detail.
It’d been real.
All of it.
What Vadoma had shown me was real.