Frostbite (The Dragonian, #3) - Adrienne Woods Page 0,21

tremble but no tears came as I realized it was just a dream.

I looked around the room and both beds were occupied. The alarm clock that Lucian had bought me last year showed that it was 4:30am.

I still felt drained but my body ached from lying in bed. I got up and moved to the bathroom. My hands touched the taps and I watched as water filled the tub.

The ache in my muscles disappeared the minute I lowered my body into the hot water.

I closed my eyes and tried to hold on to the dream I’d had a couple of minutes ago: to make a mental recording of Lucian’s voice. It was already too late as different types of voices filled my head and I knew not one of them was his.

How can someone miss another person this much?

I ducked my head under the water and opened my eyes. I stayed there for a long time and could feel air filling my lungs. I touched the sides of my neck and jumped up as I felt three small vertical openings on each side of my neck.

I HAD GILLS!

My excitement disappeared fast and I sighed again. So drowning was out. That thought should’ve scared the living crap out of me. I never was the suicidal type, but how do you carry on living in a world where your favorite person doesn’t exist anymore?

It was a pathetic thought, I know. Lucian gave up his life for me and I wished that it had been me dying in his place that day. He was so much stronger than me and he would’ve found a way to live each day as if it was his last and I doubted that he would have even considered taking his own life.

I was pathetic.

I lay back down in the bathtub with only my nose and the top of my head sticking out. I thought about the dream again. How much he would have loved to be flying on my back. Why was Blake so evil? Did it mean that he would turn soon? He had less than a year to go.

My mind went back to Lucian again and then it hit me.

Maybe Lucian wasn’t wrong when he said he had to claim the Rubicon. He had been wrong about claiming Blake. I knew it the minute I thought the words. Lucian had been my rider and I was his dragon.

I would never be claimed now, and I didn’t know if that was a good thing or bad.

HAT DREAM REALLY haunted me the next day and I could hardly hear what went on in any of my classes.

After school I met Blake again at the Parthenon dome. I missed the dome, it was a place where I’d felt powerful, and now that I was a dragon I only spent time inside the Coliseum. It was the complete opposite.

Cara didn’t speak to me at all last night and I couldn’t sleep as I wondered about her too. Who was Cara? What if Dad changed my name to keep me safe? What if I was Cara, but then again….no, nothing made sense. It would never make sense. I’d had a human baby form, dragons don’t have one. Why was everything so different with me?

I found Blake in his dragon behind the Parthenon dome. He just stared at me with dark irises that had a red tint around the edges. I knew what he was waiting for and walked to the nearby tree.

When I was sure I was out of view I pulled off my clothes and shifted. It didn’t take as long as it used to in the beginning, but as much as I welcomed Cara now there was still that couple of minutes that I didn’t like. A feeling so enhanced that it made me want to hurl would linger with me. I guessed it had to do with Cara and me, that our feelings clashed in some sort of way that made me ill.

I went back to Blake and the feeling grew less and less. He didn’t say anything but pushed up into the sky and started to flap his wings to take him higher.

“Cara?”

Here, she says as if I was a teacher marking off her presence. Let’s do this. She took over and followed Blake’s lead. I didn’t black out anymore as I watched her through dragon eyes gliding through the sky. She flapped, I flapped and it was done without me taking any instructions from her.