The bellowed word hit Aimi’s consciousness, and she went instantly awake. She wasn’t the only one his yell had triggered. In a blink, she noted a few things, the most important being Brandon gone from his seat, but a gentle tug on her bond showed him not far away.

However, the chaotic mix of his thoughts didn’t reassure. He saw something outside of the plane. A dragon, here at thirty thousand feet? Impossible.

Yet, why did the plane wobble?

Turbulence perhaps. The pilot screwing with them. Or, as a quick peek showed, a hunched and winged figure pulling a gremlin on the wings, hopping up and down, causing some screams.

Before she could even process the improbability of an attack at this altitude, someone yanked on the emergency door mid ship, releasing the seal, and that was when all hell broke loose. Actually, everything that was loose went sucking toward the breach in the cabin.

Many of the humans in economy lost their shit, but Aimi and the other Silvergrace girls were made of tougher stuff. Pushing and shoving—but politely, “Please get out of my way, heifer.”—the girls bolted toward the commotion, letting the suction draw them, their hair whipping around their heads in a halo.

The wild style did not block her view, though, so Aimi clearly saw the smirking redhead, a male about mid-thirties, balding and freckled, grappling with Brand. Behind them, a gaping hole where the emergency door used to be.

“Why did you open it?” she heard her mate yell.

“Glory be to the Crimson Sept, keepers of the Golden Faith.” The ginger-haired fellow pushed away from Brand and flung himself through the sucking hole.

“What the fuck?” Brand braced himself in the aisle, gripping the seats, using his strength to hold himself in place against the wild suction.

Claws gripped the edges of the exit door, followed by a poking serpentine head, ridged and bright red, the eyes a malevolent yellow.

A wyvern. How unexpected.

“Girls, we have company,” she sang as she released the seats she gripped and let herself arrow feet first toward the creature trying to board. She got there too late. A human, who hadn’t buckled like the flashing signs all warned, hit the intruder first. They both flew out the opening, and Aimi followed.

She heard Brand shout, “What the fuck are you doing, moonbeam? Get back in here.” The panic oozing from him made her smile.

Would you look at that, he cares. Behind her, she could hear the shrill cries of her sister and cousins. It seemed the wyvern on board hadn’t come alone. She saw a red shape streak past the doorway

A wyvern shifting in plain sight? She could only imagine what kind of media mess that would cause. But they’d worry about that later. Someone had been brazen enough to strike while they were in the air. A dragon Sept had broken the rules of their kind. The Crimson Sept had attacked, and that demanded a reply. A very pointed and deadly answer.

Aimi gave little thought to clothes when she shimmered into her silvery shape. Who had the time to care about puny fabric trappings when the most beautiful scales adorned her body?

She swooped through the air in time to catch her adversary, a flame-colored wyvern, landing atop the plane. Smaller than true dragons, with heavier haunches, smaller heads, and no innate power, wyverns were the result of a dragon and human pairing. It was heavily frowned upon, as wyverns were half-breeds, incapable of breeding, and not good for much but foot soldier positions. One advantage they did have? Their lack of scent in human shape made them hard to spot as spies. Their major disadvantage? They were quite feral and violent, the biggest reason why their creation was more or less banned.

It seemed the reds were playing with more than just fire these days. The wyvern let out a shrill cry, a coarse sound that lacked the dulcet tone of a true-born.

She replied with a trumpeting flute, the notes piercingly bright. They were also a challenge. With a scream, the wyvern came at her, only to find itself knocked off course as Babette tackled it. Her silver frame was streaked with blue, a hint of her father in her scales.

As her cousin took care of the interloper, Aimi peeked around for its cohorts. She already knew one wyvern wouldn’t attack alone, especially against a half-dozen Silvergraces. She knew there were a few on board, tangling with her family, but she suspected there were others outside the plane, too. Why else open the door?

She dipped under the aircraft, and her eyes widened as she noted the bodies in the sky flapping toward them, the many bodies, and that wasn’t counting the ones that suddenly perched on the plane’s wing. The weight of it unbalanced things, and the nose of the plane dipped. Sweeping past the belly of the craft, she tipped up the other side to see another pair of wyverns on the wings, going after the second hatch and managing to tear it loose.

Nothing came flying out, the first breach having suctioned all the loose items, including at least one unlucky passenger.

There was only one thing left on board without a buckle. Brand!

Before Aimi could head to the plane, some of the arriving wyvern fleet saw her and banked in her direction, uttering shrill war cries.

You want to fight? Bring it. Uttering her own clarion, she swept in to attack.

Aerial fights sounded great in theory. Looked even more awesome on screen. But in reality, they were chaos.

Winds fought against fighting pairs, tugging at their wings, trying to tumble them. They grappled with claws, swiping and trying to grab, and yet, at the same time, being careful not to lock, lest their wings tangle and they both plummet to their deaths. Gravity also played a huge part as it tugged at their weight. They might have the pounds they condensed as a human expanded as a dragon, their bones lightweight and hollow yet tungsten strong, but any kind of weight was subject to gravity.

As Aunt Waida often claimed, “What goes up, always comes down and splats.”

Watching the earth approach at breakneck speed was never fun, not with the memory of her aunt slapping her fist into her hand and making a squishy sound. A good thing an uncontrolled dive was the first lesson a mother taught her dragonling. The first time it had happened, Aimi could at least say she hadn’t peed herself, but her lunch hadn’t fared so well, and neither had the cow it landed on. Cousin Jackie from the Silverheart Sept never did forgive her on account she was munching on said cow at the time.

But Aimi was a big girl now, and while she didn’t have the experience her ancestors did when it came to an airborne fight, she could hold her lunch and her own against a smaller wyvern. Unless there were several attacking at once.

Little bastards. Since they tried to swarm, she screwed with them, letting herself drop straight down and then flipping to her back. She caught the first wyvern by surprise and gutted it, her claws more than just pretty. Adi slammed into a second, easily recognizable even without their bond, given Adi’s dragon form had a short pink ruff on her neck. As for the third wyvern who thought to play unfair? Aimi had to chase it.

As she got within arm’s reach, a shrill bugle of a cry had her putting on the brakes midair.

What’s this? A late arrival?

She craned her head, her long neck twisting, and noted an attacker, a red dragon hovering just outside the plane and the breach.

Aha, there’s the culprit behind the attack. And, apparently, the attack had nothing to do with the Silver Sept and everything to do with her mate. A pair of wyverns shoved Brand into the door. He faced them with his back straight, and was it her, or did he give them the finger and utter, “Fuck you. Come and get me.”

Undaunted. Fearless. And mine.

Until the dragon reached out and snatched her man from the plane. That would not do at all.

He belongs to me. Time to get him back.

Except, Brand freed himself before she could reach him, his closed fist pounding at the claws holding him until, with a screech, the dragon let go, and Brand fell.

I’d better catch him. A plan that would have worked better if the red dragon hadn’t spotted her and uttered a challenge.

I don’t have time for this. The dragoness didn’t care. She slammed into Aimi and hissed. Nice of her to bring the fight, but Aimi wasn’t in the mood, not with Brand free falling and not in a good Tom Petty kind of way.

Let me go. She struggled with the other dragon, the red viper belching obnoxious fumes in her face, and Aimi could only hope she’d already spat her fire, and the flames were now extinguished. Unlike the storybooks, dragons didn’t have an unlimited supply. A good thing, or she might have needed a vat of aloe to soothe her burned face.

Their wings flapped and tucked, alternatively keeping them aloft and coasting the high winds at this altitude, but gravity also pulled, forcing them to flutter lest they get drawn into a death spiral.

Their breaths grew short. They couldn’t wrestle forever, especially since the longer it took, the farther her mate fell.

Scraping Brand off pavement didn’t seem like a good way to start married life.

Enough. Aimi didn’t use her dragon power often. None of the pure-blooded Silvergrace did because it was so deadly and final. Their particular family Sept wasn’t one of the most powerful families for nothing. Their breath could impart death.

Bye bye, bitch.

Aimi pulled from inside herself, pulled at that core within that made her dragon, the silver essence of herself. It tingled.

She blew, exhaled deeply, and let the flaps within her throat open, drawing through them the venom she carried. All dragons had some kind of special power. A poisonous gas, acid, flame, and even ice.

One branch of silver had the Midas Curse, and yes, it was related to the fable humans told, except the Midas legend had gotten a few things wrong in the retelling. First, Midas was a dragon—an uncle several times removed. He was also a king, a conquering one, who turned all those who thought to thwart him to silver—not gold. It turned out to be a lot of people until, one day, he found himself all alone, with only silver statues of people, expressions still screaming, left to keep him company.

Then there were those with the Silver Rain gift. They could literally spit machine gun fire. The Silverleafs? They could shape silver, using it to cage their enemy or create a fine lattice for sale.

As for the Silvergraces, their power was the nastiest of all. They had the Dust.

As Aimi breathed out, she saw the horror in the other dragon’s eyes. The backpedaling as, suddenly, it recognized its mortality.

Too late.

Her exhalation puffed fine particles onto the other dragon. It seemed so innocuous at first. A dust that the opponent sucked in. It didn’t hurt, not one bit, and yet, they were dead as soon as they inhaled.

Much like a virus, the Dust spread to living tissue, consuming and killing it. Worse than killing it, it crumbled into…nothingness.

The red squealed as the Dust took hold, and the reaction was instantaneous. Pieces of the other dragon flaked away, fluttering much like ash. The red dragon thrashed in the air, her color turning gray as more and more of her succumbed to the wasting death.

Back in the day, according to her Aunt Waida, the humans had called it the unmaking, which Adi declared was so much cooler sounding than the Dust, but no matter the name, none affected ever survived.

With her foe no longer a problem, Aimi focused on Brand, a mere speck too far below her. She plummeted toward him, feeling the yank of gravity hastening her plunge. The wind streamed hard into her face, pushing against her second eyelids, the thin membrane that covered her orbs from damage during flight. Her wings were tucked tight to her body, making her as small as possible, anything to streamline her descent.

She moved fast toward the earth, but it wasn’t enough; she wouldn’t reach him in time. Failure was unacceptable, and she uttered a fluted cry of frustration.

And got a reply.

Don’t worry, moonbeam. I got this.