“NO!” HER SCREAM seemed to echo in the air, in her mind, and even in others. She felt Haakon and his men fall to their knees behind her, and realized she’d somehow extended her horror beyond herself and connected with other minds in the vicinity.

The silver dreki plummeted after Rurik, cutting through the air like a knife. Freyja slammed her hands over mouth in horror as the silver dreki attacked.

She had never, in her life, felt so helpless.

Rurik fell backward through the air, his claws scrabbling for purchase and his wings splayed flat. Andri almost caught him, claws reaching for him. And just when she thought he would cut her dreki’s unprotected belly to pieces, he tried to catch Rurik’s talons in his.

Andri’s left talon caught Rurik’s right, and it was just enough to turn him so he was no longer flat on his back. Rurik slammed into the shale-covered side of the mountain with his left side. Andri tried to let go at the last minute, but it was too late. He crumpled atop Rurik, then flung apart when they both rolled and tumbled down the slope. Wings flashed and rock flew as both of them vanished.

“Rurik!” She was running before she knew it, watching hopelessly as he bounced and jolted down the shale, his wings held clear. Andri hit with a jarring thud, and slid past Rurik, sending a rain of shale down the hillside.

Freyja found herself caught in it, her boots finding little purchase beneath her. She reached out and the earth slowed beneath her feet as she manipulated it, letting her ride a flat piece of shale to a safe plateau. Freyja grabbed at a boulder and hauled herself to a halt as the avalanche swept past her.

Dust obliterated her vision and settled thickly in her throat. Freyja coughed, trying to sweep it from her eyes. Where was he? “Rurik?” She threw the thought into the void around her.

She couldn’t see him. But she could feel his touch flicker against her own, a smoldering ember against the rush of heat it usually was. Their minds meshed again, just for a second.

“...so tired....”

“Hold on, you stubborn male! I am not done with you yet.”

“Andri...?” She could almost feel him struggle to lift himself. He was protecting her from most of the pain he felt, but the searing edge of it made her head ache.

“I’m not sure where he is.”

The dust began to clear. Freyja glanced around her. The shale had settled, but who knew what would set it off again?

You rode it last time. She wondered if she could do that again, and as she lost her connection to Rurik for the second time, she knew she didn’t have the time to worry about herself anymore.

Freyja’s gaze settled on a flat piece of shale and she hauled herself up, examined the distance between her and Rurik’s crushed form, and then stepped onto it. Steering the earth beneath her feet, she whizzed down the slope again. Her passage set off another minor rockfall, but she managed to reach the bottom in one piece and jumped off, staggering at the sudden loss of velocity.

“Rurik!”

The enormous dreki lay crushed and broken. He struggled to lift his head and she simply couldn’t look at that wing. One section of it was completely shredded.

“Rurik, you have to get up! Why did you take my wave of force upon yourself?” Her skirt tore, and her palms were grazed as she slipped and skidded on the uneven surface. “Damn you, I hurt you!”

“Andri is my... kin. I swore an oath to protect him when he was a boy, and a dreki’s oath is binding, or he may no longer call himself dreki.” Rurik’s golden flanks heaved. The bone in his left wing sheered straight through the skin, making her feel sick.

“He was trying to kill you!” She finally reached his side and hesitated there, not quite certain where to begin. Bloodied gashes marked his flanks, and he wasn’t moving very much, his wings curled in against his sides as though something hurt. Tears heated her eyes, turning her vision to a blur.

“If he’d truly wanted me dead, then he had at least three chances at my wings,” Rurik gasped. The link between them seemed thin and faded, almost like a knot that was unraveling. “He’s as caught in this as I am. Freyja, get out of here.”

“No! I won’t leave you.” She put her hands against his golden scales, trying desperately to hold on to the link between them.

“Freyja.” He managed to haul himself up onto his belly and she saw the wing wasn’t the worst of his hurt. Mottled dark veins bruised his left shoulder, and bloodied muscle protruded through his scales. “This is... not done. Get out of here before Magnus hurts you.”

As if he knew that they spoke of him, a dreki’s scream pierced the skies above them, and wind whipped as the black dreki sailed above them.

A fire began to burn in her heart. Her nostrils flared with anger. That treacherous snake had lured Rurik into an unfair fight. And it wouldn’t end here.

“Will he try to kill you?” she whispered.

“He’ll not stop... until this is done.” Her Rurik sounded absolutely exhausted.

And the logical part of her brain said Rurik had no more fight left in him. He couldn’t handle a twenty-ton dreki like Magnus, not in this condition.

There was no one who could stop the fierce beast.

No one but her.

Cold slid down her spine and sweat broke out on her temples. She had some defenses, but not enough to take on a creature a thousand times the size of her.

But the alternative was to walk away as Magnus assassinated her lover, and that was something Freyja couldn’t do. Something she wouldn’t do.

Shale slid down the harsh slope. Magnus appeared at the top of the ravine, his dark wings spread in a victorious fashion.

“Freyja,” Rurik pleaded, finally moving. But not to flee. No, instead he tried to shield her with his own ruined body.

“You should know better than to argue with me,” she told him, stepping over his tail and facing the black dreki. Her heart pounded in her chest, but she’d felt the earth rouse to her call and she’d wielded lightning before. She was not helpless, and she wouldn’t abandon Rurik. “Don’t come any closer, you mangy cur, or I’ll shred your wings!”

A wave of psychic force lashed down upon her, like a fist slamming into her mind. Freyja screamed and clenched her fists against her temples, but it wouldn’t stop. Her vision blurred and something warm wet her top lip. Just as she thought that she could no longer withstand the onslaught, it suddenly vanished.

She came to pressed against Rurik’s flank. Her nose was bleeding and he was shockingly still, but she could sense the warm cocoon of his own mind shielding hers.

“Run, Freyja,” came the whisper, and that link between them seemed so thin now she feared it would snap. “I can shield your mind, but... not much more than that.”

He was dying. She could feel the heat of Magnus’s psychic attack slamming against Rurik’s shields, and knew he was too weak to withstand them.

Too weak because he’d risked everything in order to heal her father.

Risked it for her.

“I love you,” she whispered, running a hand over his flank. “Keep him out of my mind.”

And then she stepped forward.

The earth began to tremble beneath her as Freyja reached for it. She held her hands out as shale began to skitter across the slopes. Magnus hissed as the ground beneath him began to move. Freyja could feel the currents of it rising to her call. She knew this land. She knew the feel of it, the weight of it, the immense power of it. Rurik might have claimed these lands as lord and master, but she was mistress of it.

“Shift,” she whispered, tearing the earth apart with but a thought.

Magnus danced uneasily as a furrow ploughed its way through the rock beneath them, toward his feet. A thrust of his wings sent him into the sky, but there was no refuge there.

The sky belonged to her too, and the wind that whipped her hair behind her answered her call. For the first time in her life, Freyja lost herself to the power swimming through her veins. No more hiding, or trying to quash her own powers. She flung a hand toward the airborne dreki, and a whip of wind sent him scrambling for the ground again, landing on the haphazard slope. Magnus’s claws scrabbled frantically, but there was no escape into the air, nor any shelter on the ground. As if he realized it, he turned and those vicious green eyes locked on her. He stopped fighting against the slide of shale beneath him, and rode it down into the ravine where she protected her dreki.

Thunder grumbled in the distance. Clouds swam against each other, brewing darkly as she called the winds to her and split the sky with lightning. Its electric lash ran through her veins and when Freyja opened her eyes, she knew they gleamed.

“You foolish girl,” the dreki hissed as it alighted on flat ground. “You think you can turn my own skies against me?”

“They’re not your skies,” she told him in a hollow voice. “And they’re not the only thing I control.”

Freyja flung a fist into the air, and the ground erupted around the dreki in a whirlwind of shale and rock that cut and slashed at him. He screamed in fury, lashing out with his claws, but there was no way to fight a thousand shards of rock.

She caught a glimpse of narrow green eyes and then he lashed out, sending an enormous shard of shale directly toward her.

Freyja jerked her hands up. The shard stopped in midair, then dropped to the ground. So did all of the razor-sharp pieces surrounding Magnus. She lost control of the whirlwind and it petered out, letting her skirts falls against her stockinged calves.

Freyja gasped, her knees trembling. Wielding so much current was taking its toll on her. She’d never mastered so many different elements at once. Only the storm, and she’d been angry then, the night she went after her ram.

“A child,” Magnus chuckled, in a murderous voice that echoed in her mind thanks to the protective shield Rurik encased her in. “Who does not know what she plays with.”

“Play with this,” Freyja spat, and a strike of lightning speared through the skies toward him.

“Freyja, no!” Rurik screamed, and something seemed to encase her. A protective dome of... nothingness.

The lightning hit the ground where Magnus had stood an instant beforehand. The black dreki vanished as light obliterated her vision, and the world clapped around her in a sudden fierce explosion of heat. She realized her mistake almost instantly. She might wield the lightning, but she was not entirely impervious to it. Small fragments of rock cut against the dome around her and as she blinked, still half-blinded, she realized Rurik had probably saved her life.

Between one blink and the other, an enormous shadow reared above her. Magnus. She’d missed him. Magnus began to strike toward her, his razor-sharp claws gleaming in the light above her, and his wings flared as though he were some demon from hell. Freyja suffered a moment where she saw her own death striking toward her with absolute inevitability.

“Fire!” someone bellowed.

Haakon. Freyja glanced up from beneath the arm she’d thrown above her head, and saw iron flash in the shaft of sunlight that suddenly split the clouds. Then the enormous bolt from the ballista sunk into the enraged dreki’s chest, right where his black heart lay.

Magnus screamed, and the sound cut through her like a knife. Freyja slammed her hands over her ears, her blood seeming to vibrate within her veins as the earth had done at her call. She went to her knees and was grateful when Magnus hit the earth in front of her. His wings flapped like a downed bat’s, and he clawed at the rocks, his tongue protruding from his gaping maw. Freyja slowly took her hands from her ears as Rurik stumbled into her, wrapping his right wing around her in a move too slow to prevent the previous strike. He made a mournful sound in his chest, one that sounded akin to a whale’s bellow, and Freyja pressed her hand against his neck.

“I’m fine,” she whispered. “Fine.”

Stepping out from under his protective touch, she saw the light go out of Magnus’s eyes. A green glow began to emanate from deep within his chest, and then it hovered in the air above his fallen form, an enormous wraith of electric green that flapped faint wings at them before it began to fly into the sky above them.

She’d seen those lights before, when the night skies darkened, and the flicker of green and pink began to dance across the Arctic. But she’d never before understood what they were. Freyja watched in wonder as Magnus’s actinic form vanished over the horizon.

A mournful sound echoed behind her, and then a second joined it, as both dreki lifted their heads and wailed.

Andri appeared in a flap of wings, alighting with a limp beside her. Freyja barely had time to step back before Rurik’s growl filled the air, and he somehow hauled himself up onto his feet, and hissed at the smaller dreki.

Those violet eyes blinked at her, then Andri bowed his head before his cousin. Rurik snapped at his cheek, almost in chastisement. “Freyja is mine. If you touch her I will kill you.”

“You’re barely in any condition to swat a fly,” she snapped back, hurrying back to his side and pressing her hands against the hollow of his chest. “You stupid dreki.”

“You foolish mouse.”

“Fierce,” she corrected, stroking his muzzle. Her heart wrenched in her chest. “Don’t ever frighten me like that again.”

And suddenly tears spilled from her eyes down her hot cheeks. Freyja flung her arms around his neck, but could barely reach halfway around. She couldn’t believe he’d survived. I promise you I will never turn from my fate again, if only you heal, she thought, hoping that any gods who were listening might hear her.

Heat shimmered beneath her touch. Power flushed and ebbed. Then her arms clung to the bare, naked shoulders of the man she loved so much. He winced and took a step to catch himself. Freyja clung tightly. “Rurik?” she blurted.

“Take me into the volcano,” Rurik gasped, his left arm curled against his side and his skin mottled with bruises.

“What are you doing?” she demanded. There were dreki hunters here. Men she didn’t trust, not with her dreki’s life.

“Got to... protect my wings,” he replied, and his face blanched of color.

Freyja turned, her gaze locking on Haakon’s. He and his men stood at the top of the ravine, the ballista glaring dangerously down at them. His face remained implacable, but he nodded, once, toward her. An apology, and an offer of amends.

That didn’t mean she trusted him an inch.

Freyja’s eyes narrowed. She reached out and swatted the ballista with her power, and the hauling mechanism cracked and split in half.

“Just in case you have any foolish ideas before my dreki has a chance to heal,” she called up to him.

“Damn it, Freyja.” Haakon curled his fists at his sides. “That’s twice you’ve broken my ballista.”

“Which makes us even,” she shot back, before Rurik groaned and slumped against her. “Now get out of here, before I really lose my temper.”