Violet Sanwick bit her lip to hold back a groan of agony as she climbed the stairs to the second floor apartment she shared with Weston. She would never have dreamed of letting on in front of him how much she ached right now, but damn, did her muscles ache.

She wasn’t a soldier, not by training. But the last year had forced a lot of people who weren’t exactly soldiers to fight like they were. Violet had gone to university for several years to become a Wizard Advocate. Advocates worked mostly in offices, handling a variety of research tasks around magical laws and making recommendations on how to discipline wizards who had used these laws in an improper manner. Occasionally, Advocates would be sent out to the field to deal with situations where full humans had accidentally encountered a magical object or the use of magic. Sometimes, these cases might require a memory wiping spell, or subduing a spooked human. But that was about as wild as Violet’s life had been for the first several years of her career.

That all changed when Saul entered the picture. Saul, the evil dragon who also had wizard powers and was threatening to destroy everything Violet held dear. Violet had never been a soldier, true. Nevertheless she had jumped at the chance to join the dragon shifters out in the field, on a mission to find and destroy Saul’s headquarters. She hadn’t realized, though, when she signed up for this gig, that it was possible to feel as exhausted and sore as she did right now.

She’d been given a crash course in fighting right before leaving her hometown of Falcon Cross, and she’d thought she had the basics pretty well under control. But tonight had shown her that she still had quite a lot to learn. Lesson number one: nothing made your ass quite as sore as broomstick flying under threat of mortal danger. Violet winced despite her determination not to, and she reached back to rub her sore tailbone. Luckily, Weston seemed to have missed her expression of pain. He was too busy fumbling in his pockets for the keys to their apartment.

As she watched him, Violet considered, not for the first time, how strange it was to share an apartment with him. She would have been thrilled at this arrangement under normal circumstances. She’d had her eye on this handsome dragon for quite some time. But lately, with everyone so on edge, she was beginning to wonder if perhaps it would have been better if she’d ended up sharing an apartment with one of the female soldiers. Or heck, even with one of the other male soldiers, whom she wasn’t attracted to. She found it somewhat maddening to be constantly in the same apartment with this man, but always acting like there was nothing between them.

There was something between them, of that she was sure. But neither of them would acknowledge it right now. Things were too tense, with a war raging around them, to pay much attention to romantic feelings. And so, they went to sleep in their separate bedrooms each night, never acknowledging that the growing tension in the air wasn’t entirely due to Saul’s evil army.

Weston had found his keys and opened the door, and Violet hobbled in after him. She collapsed on the couch, and, even though she didn’t allow any expression of pain to cross her face, Weston seemed to know that she was aching.

“Where does it hurt?” he asked.

“Everywhere,” Violet said, her voice coming out with a strange groaning sort of sound. She leaned her head back against the couch cushions and closed her eyes, willing the spinning sensation that had filled her to go away. She heard Weston bustling around in the kitchen, and a minute later, she felt her body shifting slightly as his weight depressed the couch cushion next to her. She opened one eye to peek, and saw him sitting beside her holding up a large glass of orange juice.

“Drink this,” he said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

Violet couldn’t keep from grinning. “Juice will help? What am I, a five year old? I was hoping for something more along the lines of some painkillers or something.”

Weston cracked a small smile, but pushed the glass of juice closer. “I’m serious,” he said. “You were flying around like crazy, heart pumping and adrenaline going through the roof. It wouldn’t hurt you to replenish your blood sugar a bit.”

Violet gave him a skeptical look, but took the juice from him anyway. “Since when are you a doctor?” she asked.

He ignored the question and asked one of his own. “Since when do you know how to do explosion spells?”

He kept his voice light, but there was a note of accusation in it. Violet sighed, and took a few moments to quickly drain the juice glass before answering him.

“It wasn’t me,” she said. “I don’t, in fact, know how to do an explosion spell. Not like the one those two wizards did. What you saw tonight, my friend, was a powerful display of dark magic.”

Weston looked confused. “They made themselves explode? Was it a spell gone wrong, then?”

“Oh no,” Violet said, shaking her head back and forth. “That spell went exactly as planned. Your confusion comes from the fact that you think it was an explosion spell. A better name for what you saw would be a self-destruction spell.”

There were a few beats of silence, and then a horrified look of understanding crossed Weston’s face. “They…they self-destructed? Like some sort of kamikaze pilot or something?”

Violet nodded wearily. “It’s a dark magic spell. Saul must have trained all his wizard soldiers on how to use it, and instructed them to make sure they were never taken alive. He doesn’t want to take a chance on us interrogating any of his soldiers and getting inside information, I suppose. Of course, when those two self-destructed it also destroyed any kind of intelligence devices they might have been carrying on them as well. Essentially, any clues they had as to why they were spying or what they were looking for were destroyed. That’s why I was so angry. We kept them from reporting back to Saul, sure. But we lost a chance to get some good intel as well.”

Weston furrowed his brow for a moment, considering. “I see your point. But don’t be too upset. The most important thing we had to do tonight was make sure those spies didn’t have a chance to report back to enemy headquarters, and we did that.”

Violet gave him a long, sideways look. His face was streaked with black soot, evidence of the fire he’d been breathing out while in dragon form. His hair looked like it hadn’t been combed in a month, and there were dark circles under his eyes. She knew he was tired, and that, in some senses, his words were true. The most important task of the evening had indeed been accomplished, and they should be grateful for that. This war had been brutal, and they had to take joy in the victories they had instead of dwelling on the fights they lost. But still, Violet felt frustration rising in her chest. She was tired of struggling. Tired of always feeling like she and her fellow soldiers were hanging on by a thread. Tired of being so damn tired all the time.

Weston reached over and gave her upper arm a reassuring squeeze. The pressure on her sore muscles sent a fresh wave of achiness through her body, but it also made her stomach do a bit of a fluttering somersault. He was so handsome, even in this exhausted state. Why, oh why, had she not had the chance to meet him when life wasn’t so chaotic? And perhaps, more to the point, why should she care that life was chaotic? Wasn’t the midst of the chaos the best time to find comfort in someone else’s arms?

Violet felt her cheeks turning pink with the heat of embarrassment, as though Weston must somehow be able to read her thoughts and know what she was thinking. But if that was the case, he didn’t show it. Instead, he stretched and let out a long, weary yawn before standing up. Violet felt herself shifting slightly again as his weight left the couch beside her. The shift left her with a strangely empty feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to beg him to sit down again, to let them both enjoy the warmth of a friend’s company for a few moments longer. But she said nothing. She set her lips in a stiff line as she looked up at him, wondering how it was possible for a mere mortal to look as divine as Weston did.

“Don’t stress so much, V,” he said. “If there’s one thing you have to learn about being a soldier, it’s that the battles never go exactly like you want them to, even when you win. You just have to keep moving forward and do the best you can. Go get some rest. Things will look better in the morning, I promise.”

Violet grunted noncommittally in response. She wasn’t sure how she was going to sleep tonight, with her thoughts whirling around in such confusion in her head. Weston gave her a gentle cuff on the shoulder as he passed, heading toward his bedroom.

“Seriously, you should get some rest. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day. You know that.”

Violet grunted again. “Night, Weston,” was all she said in response.

She heard him exhale in frustration or amusement, she wasn’t quite sure which. “Night, Violet,” he said. She heard his bedroom door click shut behind him, but she didn’t make a move to get up and go to her own bedroom. She knew he was right, and that the morning would bring a long, tiring day full of frustrations of its own. But still, she sat on the couch for a long time, staring at the pile of papers littering the coffee table and trying to forget the image that kept playing over and over in her mind’s eye—the image of two wizards exploding from the inside out due to the strength of evil forces within them.

She knew Weston thought that her anger was only at the loss of an enemy to interrogate. She’d played up that part of her frustration to mislead him, because she couldn’t find the strength right now to talk about what was truly bothering her. She’d seen, while she was locked in a frenzied battle with the two wizards, a medallion around one of their necks, glittering brilliantly in the light cast by the flames Weston had been breathing. She’d recognized the insignia on the medallion, and it’d caused her heart to drop the instant she’d seen it. It was the symbol of the Pine Bluff wizard clan. Violet had gone to summer camp with some wizards from the Pine Bluff clan as a young girl, and had spent many happy July afternoons swimming with them in lakes after practicing broomstick flying in sweaty summer fields. All of the kids she had played with had seemed so wonderful. How could any of them have grown up to be soldiers in Saul’s army?

Violet worried that this war was going to get worse before it got better. If it ever did get better, that was. Lately, things seemed to be spiraling out of control more with every passing day. Saul was growing his army and taking over strategic hideouts for his evil purposes, while the good wizards and shifters merely sat around debating all of their options until they were blue in the face.

Violet stood with another long sigh, finally mustering up the energy to head to her room and sleep. She knew what she had to do tomorrow, when the leadership of her army met and asked for a report. She had to make the case for moving forward with attacks, and quickly. She knew Weston was going to caution against making quick, foolhardy moves, and she hated to disagree with him. But she could not in good conscience sit there and say that moving slowly and cautiously was a good idea.

When Violet finally crawled into bed and closed her eyes, the agonizing scene of two wizards self-destructing in front of her would not stop replaying in her mind, over and over. She willed herself to fall asleep, but it was a long time before she finally drifted off into uneasy slumber. She didn’t know when, if ever, she would be able to sleep peacefully again, but she knew one thing for certain: the days of playing it safe were over.