The monstrosity. The beast that Seth had saved her from. Seth. The name split through her like a lightning bolt—and as if thinking his name had summoned him, she heard the sound of great paws thudding against the ground behind her, saw an enormous wolf come barreling through the Fog to her side.
“I forgot,” she heard herself gasp. “I—wait!” She spun, filled with a sudden gripping terror. That hadn’t been a stranger in the mist—that was Conrad, her friend, the man who’d taught her to be Queen, the man she’d spent half her waking hours with for the last few months… how on earth had she looked into his eyes and completely failed to recognize him? What was wrong with her?
But it was too late. There, where only seconds before she’d seen his agonized face, there was only a pillar of Fog so dense she couldn’t even see through it. With a cry of fear, she lashed out at it with both hands, desperate to pull it from Conrad’s face, to free him from its grasp… but when her hands reached the Fog, they punched straight through, dissipating it like so much water vapor.
“No,” she breathed, staring uncomprehendingly down at her hands in the mist. “No, he was just here, he was—”
“Lana,” Seth said—and she turned to see him, human-shaped again, standing by her side. “We have to get out of here—”
But Lana wasn’t listening. She pointed at him in wordless terror as the Fog began to thicken, slowly but surely, around his midsection. Seth looked down, frowning uneasily, lifted one hand to swat unsuccessfully at the Fog… But she wasn’t going to wait around to watch this happen again. She grabbed him by the shoulders, looked hard into his eyes.
“Seth. Which way is the forest?”
The urgency in her voice must have cut through to him, because he pointed wordlessly behind him. “Why—”
There was no time to explain. She was already shifting, the scales rippling across her body, her great wings punching through the Fog. This wasn’t going to be pretty… but she’d seen enough to know they needed to get the hell out of here. Bracing herself, Lana reached out with her talons to take hold of Seth, as gently as she could under the circumstances. And then, hoping like hell that she wasn’t already too late, she pointed her muzzle in the direction Seth had pointed and beat her wings as hard as she could. The ground dropped away beneath her, though she couldn’t remember attempting to gain altitude—something told her that if she’d searched for a familiar, orienting surface like the ground in the Fog, she wouldn’t have found it. She beat her wings harder, harder, focusing on the weight of Seth in her talons, focusing with all her might on the way he burned in her mind like an ember. The flash of his eyes when they’d met, the heat of his body, the gentle way he’d kiss her in the morning before she’d quite woken up all the way…
There was a sudden crash and a stinging pain in her wings, and she pulled up hard, hissing with surprise and outrage—only to realize what had caused it. A tree—she’d struck a tree, and narrowly dodged another one. Still barely visible in the Fog, but they were trees. She redoubled her efforts, pointed herself at the canopy above, tucking her head a little to protect Seth from the branches and leaves that were whipping at them… and then, finally, she was clear of the treetops and winging her way towards the night sky. Clouds were scudding across its surface, but those were unmistakably stars above her, burning bright and clear and blessedly unclouded by tendrils of thick, gray Fog. And there, beneath the stars, a familiar mountain range loomed on the horizon like a beacon.
Lana had never felt so grateful to see a mountain in her life. She started winging her way towards the peak immediately, wings burning, breaths heaving in and out of her lungs, desperately grateful that in this shape, she wasn’t capable of sobbing. They’d escaped. She and Seth had gotten out of there intact.
But that was more than she could say for Conrad.
Chapter 20 - Seth
Seth was shaking with more than just the cold of their panicky, desperate flight back from the edges of the forest when Lana finally set him down on the solid ground again. He stumbled a little on the rocky ledge outside the Palace, willing himself to stay upright. Then the dragon was gone—and standing in front of him, her dark hair tumbling wildly down her shoulders and her eyes full of grief, was Lana.
It took everything in him not to throw his arms around her, but he was acutely aware that there were at least a hundred pairs of eyes on them right now, and he had a feeling that these dragons weren’t going to take too kindly to a wolf seizing their Queen in front of them. There were dozens of them watching, many of them hovering mid-air above the palace, many more on the broad expanse of stone that lay before the Palace. Above them, he could see dozens more glinting eyes, peering down over their ledges… clearly made curious by Lana’s dramatic descent from the passageway at the peak of the mountain with Seth clutched in her talons.
A handful of dragons rushed forward, surrounding Lana, who waved them away irritably. “I’m fine. I’m not hurt. If anyone’s hurt, it’s him,” she added, pointing to Seth. He glanced down, surprised to realize he’d sustained a few deep cuts—one in his upper arm, one along his ribs, where Lana’s talons had dug into him. The adrenaline of everything else that had happened out there must have blocked the pain. “What are you waiting for? Fetch healers, fetch—”
“Nothing serious,” he said, shaking his head. “It could have been worse. You saved my life, Lana.”
“No,” she said, her tone bitter. “No, I risked it. I risked your life, and Conrad’s.”
“Where is the Prince?” That was Acantha, the Captain of the Guard. “He left with you, Alpha.”
The note of accusation made him bristle, but he stopped himself from snapping a retort. Not in front of all these curious onlookers. Acantha seemed to be thinking along the same lines—he saw her sharp eyes take in the crowd, then her shoulders dropped a little. “The war room,” she said firmly, her eyes turning to Lana. “Your Majesty.” There was only a moment’s hesitation before she added the title, but Seth heard it loud and clear. This was a person who wasn’t going to remain loyal to Lana if she suspected foul play regarding the Prince’s disappearance.
At least his pack was waiting for him in the war room. Just seeing the looks of relief on their faces felt like it took about ten tons of weight from his shoulders. Lana, meanwhile, had already settled herself in at the head of the table. Exhausted as he knew that she must be—it was near dawn, and none of them had slept—there was a steely glint in her eye and a set to her jaw that told him she had plenty of power left.
He hoped these dragons knew they had quite a Queen leading them.
“First—fill me in on yesterday.”
Seth and his wolves joined her at the table… and though there was tension, the dragons took their seats as well, clearly not willing to be excluded from this meeting. It was a strong play from Lana, Seth observed—demanding information from them before she shared any of her own. From the feeling in the room, he knew there was a chance this could backfire badly. All it would take was a single demand to know where the Prince was, a refusal to proceed without him… but Seth wasn’t going to let that happen. Before anyone could speak, he was filling her in on the previous day’s activities. The way they’d all come together here once they’d realized she was missing. How they’d put their heads together, shared information… come to the conclusion that the disappearances had something to do with the Fog.
“How’d you figure that?”
“Cross-referencing weather reports, patrol information and dates of disappearances,” Arric said, clearly unable to resist bragging—the lightbulb moment had been his, after all. “Every disappearance coincided with especially thick Fog, and with patrols closest to the place Queen Lana was found.”
“That’s when Conrad and I went to search for you,” Seth said, aware they were approaching a difficult topic. “We’d planned to stay together to avoid getting lost in the Fog, but… well, he thought he heard your voice and went running off.” Your turn, he thought, sitting back a little in his seat. Lana nodded.
“Prince Conrad saved my life,” she said, gazing around the room—Seth could see her making a point of meeting everyone’s eyes squarely. “I was lost. I’d been taking a flight to clear my head, and somehow I ended up too deep in the Fog to find my way out. I was beginning to get… disoriented. My memory was hazy, my consciousness was… but Conrad found me.” He could see tears standing in her eyes. “And then I watched the Fog eat him.” A murmur of surprise echoed around the room, but Lana hadn’t paused. “Seth saw it too. I realized we’d suffer the same fate if we didn’t get out of there, so I shifted, and I carried him out in my claws.”
“It’s true.” A shiver ran down Seth’s spine at the memory. Conrad had been standing right there… and then, as if by some trick of the light, there was nothing but Fog where he’d stood. As though it had dissolved him completely. “The Queen saved my life.”
“So the Prince is dead?” Acantha, leaning forward with an emotionless expression on her face that Seth recognized as a mask. Lana exhaled shakily, and he saw a tear spill from the corner of her eye as she nodded.