Page 57 of Vicar
Chapter Twenty-Three
TRINITY WAS SURPRISEDby the change she felt in this version of Vicar. The change she felt in herself, for that matter. He was still teeming with internal ruthlessness and the need to battle, but his desire to toy with her and put her in her place had lessened some. While she wasn’t about to tell him as much, it had for her too.
Her need to destroy another, however, was stronger than ever when she shot through the fiery waterfall in the Keep’s Múspellsheimr chamber and remembered how terrorized she’d been. The Múspellsheimr dragon that had snagged her up had dropped her into a sooty talon gash in the rock and imprisoned her with a transparent wall of fire over the top.
“Bastard,”she ground out, wishing this were real. That she could slam her spiked tail right into his throat.“He has no intention of ever letting me go.”
She would remain in this cave all her days, breeding his offspring. Being his grand prize until she had outlived her usefulness.
“Holy hell,”Jade exclaimed when she and Thorulf joined them as well.“How did you ever get out of here, sis?”
Jade looked as furious as Trinity felt. Meanwhile, Vicar tried to snap his teeth around the male dragon’s throat. Naturally, he merely passed through it, but she understood he had to try. It enraged him to a point he wouldn’t normally want her to sense, never mind see.
“Good question,”she said in response to Jade’s inquiry. Howhadshe gotten out of here? Because a full-grown Múspellsheimr dragon couldn’t push past that fire, let alone one so tiny.
Or so they thought.
Beyond enraged now, Vicar roared fire at the male dragon so robustly the ground shook, and tiny Jade’s eyes went wide.
“I sense you,”Trinity said, baffled. She lowered her head closer to her tiny self.“Somehow, even though this is a memory, I sense you.”
“And I sense you,”Vicar replied, going still.“I was in the Realm and had just blown fire for the first time when I sensed your fear. Your plea for help.”
“How is that possible?”Thorulf wondered.“Unless your Múspellsheimr half had begun emerging far sooner than we thought.”
“Or his Múspellsheimr side connected with me because I was in Múspellsheimr and part of a Forge that would someday affect us,”Trinity theorized, curious why she wasn’t put off by that when she would have been hours before. Back when she fully intended to rip out his throat after she usurped him.
“Either way,”Trinity went on,“sensing Vicar gave me unexpected strength and courage.”She looked at him with surprise that he might have been at the root of her better half.“Connecting with you sparked my inner Múspellsheimr. Me. Who I am right now. A dragon who might have been born in Alfheim but was just as affected by Múspellsheimr because I had passed through it.”
“Making you both an Alfheim and Múspellsheimr dragon before you were ever born,”Jade concluded. “Just like Thor said.” She looked between Trinity and Vicar.“That’s all it took to connect you two. One an incarnate, the other, half Múspellsheimr not in blood but in soul.”
She was about to say more when tiny Trinity, very much embracing her newborn Múspellsheimr side, roared fire at her flaming prison. Roared not regular fire but shimmering flames that mixed two worlds together. That, in its perfect balance of good and bad, blew a hole large enough through her captor’s fire for her to burst free. Rather than stand and fight like Trinity knew she wanted to, she decided it was better to harness more strength first. Get her rhetorical wings under her, so to speak.
Which meant finding the little dragon on the other end of the roar that had saved her.
So up she went, staying but a talon’s length ahead of her captor before white light flashed and she vanished. Determined to remind her other self not to be afraid because she was about to revert to her more boring side, Trinity shot after her. Not only was she getting ready to forget her inner Múspellsheimr, but what had happened here. How courageous she’d been. Who had helped her get there.
