Page 168 of I Dream of Dragons
“Oh fuck…” He shoves himself away from me with a groan. He bows his head, fingers spearing into his hair.
“Jai? Are you okay?”
“I don’t know, I… hells. Is this…” He suddenly arches back, eyes widening. “Hells, I remember…”
“Jai?”
“It’s nothing.”
His face is pale but I don’t have the chance to press him, question him, because the heat in my back, the fire, it’s spreading through my body, sprouting tendrils of flame, knifing through me.
I cry out and he grabs me again, holds me tighter.
“Breathe through it,” he whispers, “it’s all right, just breathe through it,makhair.”
“What is happening?” I gasp.
Then it hits me like an iron punch to the stomach, to the head, splintering my thoughts.
My magic.
My magic is back.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
RAE
Scales. Fangs.
The power inside me is tearing me apart. It’s a wild creature caught in the cage of my human body and it’s clawing at the bars, trying to escape.
Jai’s arms around me keep me from breaking into pieces. When I gave my power up, when I accepted the sea queen’s spell that shoved it so deep inside me nothing could detect it, no dragonbone and no telchin’s magic, it felt like a loss but there was no pain.
There is pain now as it cuts its way back up to the surface of my consciousness.
Now memories trickle back, memories I’d shoved deep, bursting out with the resurgence of my power. Memories of the pain I’d felt when the magic had first slapped into me back when I died.
A blade to my neck, and a shove from a cliff into the heaving ocean.
The world had winked out and I’d felt a measure of peace, but then life had returned to me and I had been changed. Turned inside out.
Remade.
I shake and shake, shuddering with every new memory returning. I relive the pleasure of strolling with Mars on the river shore, of playing with my brother, having dinner with my parents. Reading in the library, shopping for fine textiles and jewels from wandering merchants, sailing on the river to do libations and appease the sleeping Gods, watching from afar nokke and mermaids playing in the deepest part of the river.
I’m floating in the dark water and images twine around me, flashing like a heartbeat.
I remember my brother dying in front of me.
I remember my parents’ dead bodies.
Grief fills me, a mass of knives churning inside my chest, cutting me up inside. The grief was muted before. It’s agony now.
I see the fae king’s face. He’s grinning as I stand there, bathed in my family’s blood. I knew it for the truth when Jai told me, but seeing it, remembering it…
He did this.
He did this and then pretended to be my long-lost love, accused Jai of being the culprit, and Phaethon, damn him, played along and insisted. Lied to me. I…
