It was a fight the Far Travelers would talk about long after both the Great Wolf Mother and the Great Serpent King were gone from their lands. For years to come, they would tell of the red serpent demon landing in their village. Of the fight that happened after. Glorious and terrifying.

But as for Fensa, she witnessed none of it.

She, too, had dashed toward the glacier station entrance, though not nearly as fast on her human feet as Xenon had been in his dragon form. But before she could reach the light at the end of the tunnel, a small body hit hers, its arms wrapping around her waist.

“Go back, Mama!” came her son’s human voice. “Papa say lock us in lab. He no like red dragon.”

So she’d been right about another dragon landing outside the glacier they called home. And it didn’t sound like he as a friend.

Fensa wanted to argue with Eos. As the daughter of a Viking, she felt terrible about leaving her mate to fight an enemy by himself. And a dragon enemy at that.

But she’d seen what a dragon was capable of when she pulled that spear out of Xenon’s eye. She’d also grown up listening to her father’s drunken fireside tales about the slaughter of his family.

Also, there was her son to consider.

The one her mate had named when she’d been too out of it to do herself. Later, she’d find out it was a tradition on Xenon’s planet for the males to name their children. Not because of some lame patriarchal ideal, but because most often mothers didn’t survive childbirth.

“Aurumessssss Eosssss,” Xenon had called him in his strange language as he handed her to him to nurse. And she found she loved the name, immediately adopting it as if she’d come up with it herself.

So Eos he was, even after Xenon explained more than once that he hadn’t named their child. What she’d heard was their son’s title: Aurumessssss Eosssss, or Golden Son. “And half a title at best” the way she said it.

But she called him Eos anyway. And her love for the name translated smoothly into her love for the child. Which is why she did as her mate commanded: she ran with Eos into the station lab, quickly locking them both inside.

There they held one another on top of Eos’s bed of polar bear furs, listening with wide eyes to the conversation raging outside. It was an argument. Fensa could tell, even if she couldn’t understand the collection of shrieks and hisses that made up Xenon’s language. The shrill back and forth screeches cut through the air like giant chainsaws.

Eos did his best to translate, but he was only two. He understood little of what the two dragons were yelling at each other. Only that it had something to do with him, the son who had been so eager to meet a new dragon.

A new red dragon.

That color detail would haunt Fensa for a long time to come.

Meanwhile, the argument outside soon ended in an unearthly scream. Followed by the heavy THWUMPS of huge dragon wings displacing air.

And that was the last they heard from either dragon before, a few minutes later, the entire structure shook with a popping boom. It would take her months of listening and re-listening to the Far Travelers’ fireside retelling to realize the sound had been an explosion. An honest to God explosion like those she used to see all the time in human action movies.

But in the moments following the sound, neither she nor Eos had a clue what they had just heard. Only the certainty that one of the dragons had not survived.

“Wolf Mama?” Eos whimpered, curling his head into her chest.

“Sshh, it will be okay,” she answered, even as her heart beat thunderously.

Even as she whimpered inside for her sister Ola’s comforting presence. She may have been a delusion, but she could always be counted on for support when Fensa hit rock bottom.

But Ola only visited Fensa in her dreams now.

“We have to be strong,” Fensa said. To both Eos and herself.

Then the glacier shook with the familiar muted cannon sound of a dragon setting down outside. But behind the sealed lab door, she couldn’t tell if it was her dragon or the other.

The sound of heavy footsteps followed. A dragon. One who hadn’t bothered to shift, as Xenon always did before he entered the station.

Fensa’s instinct to run was strong. However, reason prevailed. The lab was encoded, so only members of their family could enter. If the wrong dragon had won the fight, he wouldn’t be able to get in. Maybe. She’d learned the hard way that nothing was infallible. Everything that could be hacked had...and security doors were little more than constructs, installed to make the people inside feel safe.

The dragon footsteps were getting closer.

“Mama…” Eos whimpered again, this time not bothering with the “Wolf” part of her title. A sign that his human—not his wolf or dragon—was currently in the driver’s seat of his terrified brain.

“We have to be strong,” Fensa whispered again, holding her son even tighter as they waited to discover who was on the other side of the door.

A long pause. And then the doors slid open to reveal…

…Xenon in his humanoid form.

“Quickly…gather your things. Yours and Golden Son’s,” he pushed into her head without preamble or explanation. “We will begin the journey to Arizona at sunrise.”