Frostbite (The Dragonian, #3) - Adrienne Woods Page 0,90

who lay a couple of paces in front of me. “Let me guess, Paegeia.”

Cheng chuckled, but the seriousness in his face came back instantly. “We need to get the hell out of here, Elena. They will follow us.” He started to strip down.

“Wait, what promise did you make Tanya?”

He stopped and sighed.

“She told me what has to be done, and she asked me to do it.”

I clenched my jaw. “You want to kill me.”

“Not you, Cara. She’s not supposed to be in there. You’ll ascend, Elena, and it could happen any moment. You will die.”

“I will die if I kill her, Cheng.”

“Not with this.” He took out a bottle with purple liquid in it. “Only she will die.”

I shook my head.

“It has to be done, Elena. You are the only one that can claim him. Your father and mother gave their lives for the both of you. You can free Etan,” he pleaded. “In all our time spent together, there is one thing I’ve come to learn about you. You care more than you should. It’s a fine quality for a princess. We’ve got a way to reunite families, Elena. Think about Constance, Master Longwei, my father might still be alive. If not for Blake, please do it for us.”

I closed my eyes. Why did he have to bring that up? A part of me always wanted to find a way to free

Etan, to pay back Constance by reuniting her family, but never in a million years did I imagine that it was me that would have that ability.

“She will know the minute I turn what we have planned.”

“Then give her the choice. If she loves you the way you love her, she will do it, Elena. It has to be done.”

I pressed my palm hard against my right eye and started to take off my clothes too. I shifted immediately.

“Are we safe?” Cara’s voice filled my head. “Elena what happened, where is Mom? Where are we?”

She had so many questions and refused to look at the images of what had happened.

The picture of me nodding filled my mind. It was followed by the entire conversation of what her mom had done, how she’d sacrificed her life to save mine and how I’d protested at the idea of killing her.

We’d just started to ascend when a net caught Cheng and started to pull him back to the ground.

“Cheng!”

ARA AND I stopped in mid-air. Cheng was growling and fighting as the rope of the net brought him down faster than we could react.

Cara didn’t think twice, she darted back down. The flashes inside her mind showed me a war against the Rubicon and the savages that wanted to capture my friend. I agreed and we dove faster.

I saw Cheng tangled up in nets and another one shot out, aiming for me and Cara. Hot lava boiled inside my core and ran up my throat. A flame of pink fire turned the net into ashes, disintegrating it on the spot. I watched as each little dust cloud evaporated into nothing.

Cheng was dragged at the speed of light into the woods as Cara landed perfectly on the ground.

Through the corner of both my eyes I saw a couple of guards run fiercely toward me. My head snapped back and a snarl I’d never even known was in me growled their way. It blew them a couple of yards back. The ones attacking from the left found the soles of Cara’s feet as she stepped on two of them. The crushing of metal didn’t even hurt my paws as I thought it would. The sound of a weapon going off hurt my ears and I flinched. The bolt of the electricity came next as it connected with my scales.

It didn’t harm my body as they’d hoped and two more guards felt Cara’s wrath as my core and throat lit up once again.

I searched fiercely for Cheng and saw them pulling him with a device to load him onto the back of a truck. He was still speaking Latin and fighting against them with all his might.

The earth shook as I ran back into the forest and trees fell around me like dead bodies.

Every war has its casualties, Paul’s favorite sentence jumped into my head.

The outline of a spear was loaded at the back of the truck. A human figure was making his way behind the spear as they finally managed to slide Cheng’s huge dragon form on board. The sound of the spear releasing