“That’s my battalion’s call,” she says. “Come with me. I’ve more than enough water magery to kill dragons.”

Jules grins as his gaze takes on a fierce light. “Well, it’s a good thing, Lucretia, since I can’t do much but throw a book at them.”

Lucretia returns his smirk, amazed they can be joking at a time like this, the two of them always having possessed an odd talent to default to extreme calm in the midst of the most horrible situations.

“You won’t need that book,” Lucretia says. “I’ll protect you. I’m going to help the Vu Trin blast those dragons clear out of the sky. You can deflower me after we’re done.”

“That’s my girl,” Jules says, a sly look in his eyes to match her own. “Let’s go fight Marcus Vogel.”

CHAPTER FIVE

SHADOW MAGE

Sparrow Trillium And Thierren Stone

Xishlon night, twenty-second hour

“What do you want to do?” Sparrow asks Thierren, both of them so shy to be truly alone on her First Tier apartment’s small balcony, the moon’s lulling purple light cast over the world.

She leans back against the balcony’s metal railing, gripping its edge, hard.

Raucous crowds stream by below, the sky above the dome steeped in a wash of violet stars. Music rises on the air, the ragged beats and sultry chords filling Sparrow with a sweet, almost painful anticipation. Thierren watches her, his breath seeming suspended, as she opens the vial of Sanjire root and places a small tendril of the bitter root in her mouth, a spot of color rising high on his cheeks.

He gives her a secretive smile, his voice a murmur when he finally answers her. “I want to do all the forbidden things.”

A thrill rushes through Sparrow even as her mouth quirks upward in amusement. “Everything’s forbidden in Gardneria, Thierren. That covers quite a bit of ground.”

He breathes a short, silent laugh at this and they exchange a deeply knowing look. Because in so many ways, the two of them have more in common as Westerners than they do with these startlingly brazen Easterners and their lovely, outrageous purple moon celebration of love. Even the purple hue itself is a forbidden thing in Gardneria, one of a long list of “heathen” colors forbidden by the Mage Book of the Ancients. And the gem-hued Xishlon wine Mii Vun left for them...forbidden, as well.

And Sanjire root? Sparrow grows breathless over just the thought of it. That’s in a whole other category of forbidden in both Thierren’s former world and hers.