The new Cassie reacted a little differently, because this wasn’t the first time that I’d been dropped from a height. Pritkin had done it at least a dozen times in training, to help me learn to use the Pythian power even under duress, although he’d always been there to catch me. Nobody was there now, but I didn’t need the help. Not with borrowed vampire reflexes allowing me to snare one of the great claws a split second later.

I held on for dear life, my hands sliding on the thick, horn-like surface, while my body twisted and turned in the freezing air.

The screaming part was, however, was pretty much the same.

I couldn’t hear myself; I couldn’t hear anything but dragon screeches. But I felt every one of those screams, which kept going on and on because the dragon was writhing now, turning and twisting, as if trying to shake me off. Or as if trying to shake someone else off, I realized, finally glimpsing the colossal battle being waged in the skies above me.

For a moment, in spite of everything, I just stared. Because that is what you do when your ex-boyfriend is darting through the air, battling a massive dragon in the middle of the sky. What the hell?

I blinked a couple of times, the cold air forcing tears from my eyes, or maybe that was due to them not believing what they were seeing. Mircea looked like a dark angel, I thought in shock. Or the opposite type of creature, because the wings he was currently using to batter the air were huge and black and leathery, growing out of his back near his shoulder blades, and he held in each hand a wicked looking spear tipped with more of that strange, blue fire.

“—the joints!” Pritkin’s voice was yelling in my head, but I didn’t think he was talking to me. His voice was dimmer, farther away, and harder to make out because of the wind in my ears. “Where the wings attach to the body. Strike there!”

Mircea struck there.

The words were still echoing in my head when he dove, the wings he shouldn’t have had tucked close to his body, the two glowing spears held together and out in front of him, forming his whole being into a sleek projectile that screamed through the air, hitting the huge beast exactly where Pritkin had advised.

And the advice had been good.

I felt the thud of the blow shiver through the great body, almost hard enough to throw me off. And then the beast reacted, and if I’d thought it had been writhing before, it was nothing to this. It thrashed in mid-air, while a spew of red and gold erupted from the huge maw, turning the world above us into a canopy of contrasting fire, and blocking out my view of—