“I need to find the matches,” he said. He couldn’t get used to hearing his own voice again. It didn’t sound exactly the way it had in his head: it was like listening to a recording he didn’t quite recognize. “I’m worried about getting all the animals out if we can’t see them.”
Iz squeezed his hand again, as if in agreement.
Logan squeezed back, and then slowly walked around the edge of the cavern, trying to find the right alcove by touch alone.
Glass: a lantern.
Waxy tube: a candle.
Lantern again. Candle again.
There! The matchbox bumped his hand. It was oddly normal for somebody with Sebastian’s ostentatious tastes, and it was even stranger to think that their successful escape and his first real glimpse of Iz might hang on something so small and ordinary.
As he lit the first match, the flame wobbled in the air. His hand was shaking.
He made himself go all the way around the cavern, stopping at every lantern and candle, before he let himself really look at her. He wanted to give her as much light as he possibly could.
Finally, when he’d lit the last candle, he turned around.
He could see a full range of color again, now that he had his human vision back. After all these months, he’d almost forgotten that the world could come in this many shades.
Iz was all white-golds and bronzes—silvery blonde hair, warm-toned and sun-kissed skin—and she wore a cranberry-red pullover and jeans. He saw the glittering badge at her hip.
The last time he had seen her in this form, she’d been fighting for her life, struggling tooth-and-nail to resist Sebastian shoving her into a cage. She’d burned with an incandescent fury.
Now Logan could see that while the fury could come and go, the incandescence—the sense that she glowed from the inside-out, radiating light and warmth—was just a natural, permanent part of her.
He could see all that ... but he could also see her total, absolute exhaustion, and that had to take priority over everything else. He could admire her later. Even the strongest, most magnificent dragons in the world needed a break after burning their way through the wall of Sebastian’s hell-cave.
He reached out to take her arm so she could lean on him instead of the bars. He didn’t want her to have to touch those bars ever again.
Their eyes met.
Chapter Twelve
Iz’s eyes were a clearblue-green, like some tropical ocean, and they looked just as bottomless. Logan fell into them.