The female Wyvern's head snapped back. Its jaws gaped to their fullest, its tongue slipping through its teeth and lolling to one side.
At the last moment, its vertical pupils abruptly dilated before losing focus, like a drop of ink falling into water and muddling the color within its entire eye socket. Its body stiffened from the tail upward, spasms rolling from back to front—its hind legs kicked twice, its foreclaws dug into the earth and raked out four shallow grooves, and its wings slammed into a nearby half-rotted stump, smashing half of it apart.
Then it stopped moving.
Crabbe pulled his arm free. A layer of viscous dragon blood coated his bronze-colored forearm, dripping from his fingertips and pooling on the ground. He shook his hand and raised his head.
"Look carefully, big guy! Your wife's dead." Crabbe's voice carried an irreverent lilt, as though he had casually tossed out a joke.
The Wyvern leader finally turned its head.
When the female Wyvern's string of shrill cries pierced its ears, it had paused. It twisted its neck around and saw the corpse with a hole ripped through its throat and its head crooked to one side.
The Wyvern leader's body trembled involuntarily in that instant, as if something had struck a nerve. Even the dragonfire gathering in its chest slowed by half a beat—giving Montague the crucial window he needed to recover.
The scales on his body lit up again, deepening from dark red to nearly orange-red. Then he took a large step forward, the force of his stomp blasting up the sediment beneath his feet as debris scattered in every direction like water splashed by shrapnel.
He did not jump particularly high, less than two meters. But his body folded tightly in midair—his right knee drove forward, his