Secret of the Dragon

by Jessica Drake

  Salcombe lifted his arms to the sky and threw back his head. A necklace dangled from his right fist, and I froze as I saw a huge white gemstone hanging from the chain. Was this the artifact Caor had warned about? My old mentor’s throat worked as he chanted in the same strange language Nole had used earlier, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight on end as I realized what he was trying to do. Panicked, I tried to throw my dragon blade at him, but it bounced off the barrier and I had to drop to the ground to avoid the ricochet.

  The sound of beating wings drew my attention upward, and I looked up to see the silhouette of a massive dragon fly overhead, its red eyes leaving glowing streaks in the sky. My blood turned to ice—the dragon was the size of a small city, ten times larger than any I'd ever seen before. A fell wind whipped through the trees as it passed, and a dozen dragons followed in the colossal dragon's wake. My mouth dropped open as I saw Lessie, Muza, and Ykos amongst them.

  “Lessie!” I cried, leaping to my feet to race after her. Evil laughter echoed in my head, rooting me to the spot as the dragon god’s dark presence swept through my mind.

  “She is mine now, foolish girl,” he said, his deep voice reverberating through my very bones. It was the voice of death, the voice of annihilation, and I fell to my knees as every positive emotion, every bit of hope and love and even anger was stripped from my being. “All dragons on this world are mine to command. She will never answer to you again.”

  I didn’t think the situation could get any worse, until two guards dragged a struggling Tavarian onto the path. “Found him hiding in a clearing about a mile from here, sir,” one of the guards said to Salcombe. It occurred to me in the back of my mind that they were reporting directly to him, instead of the autocrator and the captain of the guard. But then again, the autocrator had disappeared back into his carriage, no doubt cowering in the presence of the dragon god. I might have taken pleasure in the fact if we weren’t in such a dire situation.

  “Good.” Salcombe gave me a triumphant look. “Kill him.”

  16

  “No!” I screamed, lunging for Tavarian. The invisible barrier knocked me flat on my ass, and I swore viciously as one of the soldiers holding Tavarian pulled out his pistol. Was this really it? Was this how it was all going to end—with my best friend turned by the enemy, and my lover shot right before my eyes?

  “Now hang on a minute!” the autocrator shouted, and the soldier stopped. To my amazement, he actually threw open the carriage door and stepped out, pointing an accusatory finger at Salcombe. “You never told me that you were in league with the dragon god!”

  Salcombe stared down his nose at the autocrator. “What does it matter?” he asked. “I have kept my word, have I not, and thwarted the assassination attempts against you?”

  “Yes, but the dragon god is a foe to all of humankind!” The autocrator’s jerked his head to the sky, where Zakyiar was circling. Unlike the other dragons, he seemed a mere shadow, though an enormous, terrifying one. Caor had said the dragon god could never take corporeal form again, but what did that actually mean since he was flying above us? Was he only able to influence the other dragons? Or could he breathe fire as well?

  The autocrator was still arguing with Salcombe when Serpol shot into the sky and proceeded to attack the dragon god. My heart leaped into my throat as I watched him pass straight through Zakyiar, confirming my suspicions that he was non-corporeal. The dragon god roared in anger, and the other dragons converged on Serpol.

  Tavarian—who had been hanging limply—chose that moment to burst into action, taking advantage of the soldier’s momentary lapse in concentration. He twisted out of the second soldier’s grip and shoved him into the first soldier, causing him to misfire his weapon. Soldier number two howled in pain, and more gunshots rang out as Tavarian sprinted away.

  "Stop firing!" Salcombe howled as the horses shrilled and reared up, frightened by the noise. Salcombe was thrown from his own horse, and the autocrator's carriage team leaped away, leaving the Zallabarian leader to choke on their dust. I tried to get out of the way, but one of the horses knocked me sideways and I cracked my head against a tree before slumping to the ground.

  “Zara!” Tavarian was at my side, tugging me to my feet. My head swam as I tried to hold onto him, but he was yanked away by the soldiers again. As he fought them, I stared up at the sky in a daze, where the dragons were doing battle. Streams of dragon fire streaked across the inky blackness, mingling with the blue and purple magic coming from Serpol’s shields. It was a beautiful tapestry of death and darkness, and for a moment, I was transfixed.

  “I can’t hold them off for much longer, Zara!” Serpol cried in my head. He was leading the dragons across the sky in a merry chase, using his magic to keep them at bay. “You need to act now!”

  A shadow fell over me, blocking out my view of the dragons. It was Salcombe, with a wicked looking knife in his hand. He looked a bit battered from his fall, but the fact that he was standing at all told me he was still drawing strength from the dragon god.

  “Time to put an end to this,” he said, his eyes gleaming with bloodlust. There was absolutely no trace left of the man who’d raised me, who’d read me passages from history books at bedtime and filled me with wanderlust and a love for treasure. There was only a deep and terrifying abyss, a yearning for power and wealth that could never truly be sated.

  Whatever bond had existed between us was truly gone now.

  “Salcombe!” the autocrator barked as Salcombe yanked my head back, exposing my throat. I kept my eyes locked onto his as I fumbled for something, anything in my pouches that would help me fight back.

  "What?" Salcombe asked irritably as he pressed the cold blade against my throat. The sharp edge nicked at my skin, and I fought against the urge to squirm as blood trickled down my skin.

  “I don’t want her killed yet,” the autocrator argued. He peered over Salcombe’s shoulder at me, his eyes narrowed to slits. “She might have some useful inf—”

  My hand closed around the perfume vial, and I swung my arm up and sprayed both of them in the face. The two men screamed and fell back, clawing at their eyes, and I grabbed Salcombe’s knife and jumped to my feet, looking wildly around for some form of escape. Tavarian was trussed up once more, guarded by the soldiers who had brought him in, and the others closed ranks around us, pointing their pistols at me.

  “Water!” the autocrator screamed. “This is burning my eyes out!”

  One of the soldiers rushed over with a water flask, and began flushing the men’s eyes. “What did you do to them?” the captain barked at me, looking panicked.

  I shrugged. “I sprayed perfume in their eyes. What does it look like?”

  “This isn’t…perfume…” Salcombe croaked. He was lying on the ground, and he turned his head toward me. My stomach turned at the sight of the bloody sockets where his eyes used to be, at the painful looking bubbles swelling his pasty skin. “It’s some kind of poiso--” his words dissolved into gurgles, his throat working to make the sounds.

  Guess he wouldn’t be calling on the dragon god’s power to heal him from this.

  “What’s the antidote?” the captain demanded. He gestured for the other soldiers to seize me, and they did, knocking my knife away with embarrassing ease. Skies, I’d hit my head hard on that tree.

  “I don’t know,” I said, which was true enough. I had no idea how to counteract the poison. Tavarian would know, but I refused to meet his eyes, not wanting to draw attention to him.

  “Liar!” the captain yanked a knife from his belt and grabbed my left hand. He pressed the blade against my forefinger and glared at me. “Tell me the antidote.”

  I trembled as the blade cut into my skin. “No.”

  He snarled, and cut my finger off with one clean slice. I screamed as hot pain bit into me, and stared at my hand in stunned disbelief. Blood gushed from the stump where my finger had once been, running down my hand and over my arm in thick rivulets. “Tell me!�
� he roared, pressing the knife against my flesh again.

  “I don’t know!” I shrieked, thrashing against the soldiers holding me. They tightened their grips hard enough to cut off the blood supply in my limbs, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to stand here limply and let this asshole cut me to pieces. I would resist with everything I had left.

  “Sir,” the soldier who’d been helping the autocrator interrupted, his voice heavy with dread. “Captain…the autocrator…I think he’s dead.”

  The captain dropped my hand, spinning on his heel. “Dead! He can’t be dead already!”

  But as he knelt beside his leader, I saw the truth. Both Salcombe and Reichstein lay still, their sightless, disfigured heads lolling to the side. The wind shifted, stinging my nostrils with the scent of death, urine, and feces. The captain knelt by the autocrator and checked his pulse, and I knew the moment he realized Reichstein was dead—his entire body stiffened, and his back bowed in grief.

  “It’s true,” the captain said, getting to his feet. He pulled his pistol from his belt and trained it on me. “The autocrator is dead. And so are you.”

  17

  Right before the captain pulled the trigger, I sagged, turning my body into dead weight and dragging down the surprised soldiers momentarily. The bullet whizzed over my head, barely missing the top of my skull.

  "Hold her!" the captain screamed, preparing to fire again. But a deafening roar split the night sky, and we all looked up just in time to see the dragon god writhing in the air. A halo of dark red energy rippled out from the sky, knocking the other dragons back and whipping the clouds into a frenzy. Lightning crackled through the air, and the clouds burst, showering us with a torrential downpour.

  “You will pay for this, girl!” the dragon god shrieked. “You will pay--!”

  He disappeared before he could finish his sentence.

  The other dragons, who had been attacking Serpol, stopped fighting. They hovered in the air for a moment, stunned, but another crack of lightning galvanized them. As one, the swarm dove for us, and the soldiers scattered, crying out in panic. Elation soared in my chest as Lessie swooped low, snatching the captain up in her terrifying maw, and she winked at me as she flew past. The soldiers who had been holding me jumped away, then sprinted for the woods as fast as they could.

  “Zara!” Tavarian yelled over the din. I could barely see him through the rain, limping toward me, his hands still bound. My boot kicked against a body, and I groped for a weapon. Triumph filled me as my hand closed around the hilt of a knife. I yanked it out of the dead man’s belt so I could slice Tavarian’s hands free, then slung his arm over my shoulder and helped him away from the carnage.

  “You’re bleeding,” Tavarian said hoarsely, taking my left hand in his. I blinked down at the bloodied stump where my forefinger used to be—in all the commotion I’d forgotten about it. With trembling hands, Tavarian tore a strip of cloth from his shirt and wrapped it around the wound. We both slumped beneath a tree well out of the way, and watched as the dragons finished off the enemy. They didn’t appear to need our help—they were having a grand time hunting down the soldiers as if they were game, and anything we tried to do would only get in their way.

  Once the dragons were finished, they gathered in a wide circle around us. The rain was still coming down heavily, so Tavarian and I stayed huddled beneath the tree, which provided some shelter. Shivers wracked me, both from the cold and the pain, but I did my best to focus, to try to make sense of what had just happened.

  “Thank you for liberating us from the dragon god,” an unfamiliar voice said in my head, and I jerked upright, startled. “If you hadn’t killed that evil man, we would have been enslaved to Zakyiar forever.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, scanning the dragons. “Umm, which one of you said that?”

  “That was Muza,” Lessie said, sounding amused. “We can speak freely, like Serpol, now that the dragon rider bonds have been dissolved.”

  “Was it the dragon god who did this?” Tavarian asked.

  Muza nodded his great silver head. “Salcombe found a divine artifact that he used in combination with the remaining dragon heart pieces to summon Zakyiar in semi-corporeal form. We felt his presence as soon as he appeared in this realm, and seconds later he cut our bonds and bound our wills to his. We were helpless to resist.”

  “That’s all right, Muza,” Tavarian said, giving his dragon a tired smile. “None of this was your fault. I’m just happy you’re safe.”

  As we were talking, two more dragons joined in the clearing—Ykos and Kiethara. “What the hell?” I yelled as they landed heavily on the ground, tongues lolling out as they panted from exhaustion. “What are these two doing here? Aren’t they supposed to be with Rhia and Halldor?”

  “We were,” a clear male voice said, and it took me a second to realize it was Ykos speaking. “But a strange force compelled us to fly to Zuar City, and by the time it released us we were only a few miles away.”

  “What happened to us?” Kiethara demanded, thrashing her tail. “Why were we summoned here? And why can’t I feel Halldor anymore through the bond?”

  As Serpol began to explain what happened to them, Lessie leaned in to take a good sniff of me. Her molten eyes flared wide with anger and worry as she caught the scent of my blood. “Your finger!” she cried. “What happened?”

  “The captain,” I said. “He was trying to get me to give him the antidote to the poison I sprayed in Salcombe and Reichstein’s faces.” I stared down at the bandage, which was soaking through, and realized I was beginning to feel a bit light-headed. Was the bleeding going to stop soon? I applied more pressure and winced as a bolt of agony rippled through my hand.

  “She needs a healing,” Lessie insisted, looking at Tavarian. “Why haven’t you healed her?”

  “Because that infernal talisman is still blocking his magic,” Serpol said. He jerked his head toward Salcombe’s body, which was lying a dozen yards away, trampled into the ground by dragon feet. “It needs to be removed from the area.”

  “I’ll do it,” Ykos said, flaring his wings out. He bounded over to Salcombe, snatched his dead body up in his claws, then flew away, my old mentor dangling carelessly in his grip. The gem fell from his limp hand, and Tavarian went to retrieve it. I half-wondered if I should give Salcombe a proper burial, then decided to hell with it. Let Ykos dump him in a watery grave somewhere, or beneath a nameless tree. He didn’t deserve to be memorialized, not after everything he’d done.

  “I will have this locked away somewhere safe,” Tavarian said, tucking the artifact into his pocket. “My magic is returning now. Do you happen to have the missing digit, Zara?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know where it went. It’s probably been crushed at this point, so I’m not sure I’d want it back anyway.” I glanced back down at my bleeding hand, then stared at the golden sparks skipping along my skin. “Tavarian…is this you?”

  “No.” Tavarian took my hand in his and lifted it, his eyes narrowing in examination. The sparks raced across his hand, as if testing him, then turned around and sped back up my arm. I squirmed as they tickled my neck, and then I became aware of a warm sensation in the middle of my torso, like there was a glowing core inside my body. “I…I think the magic is coming from you, Zara.”

  “What?” The world seemed to tilt sideways, and I clutched at Tavarian with my free arm to stay upright. “No, that’s impossible. I don’t have magic.”

  “Aren’t all dragon riders descended from mages?” Serpol asked. I blushed, realizing that the rest of the dragons were still there, watching us. “This could be a side effect of the bond breaking.”

  Tavarian’s face went slack with shock. “Do you think the other riders have magic as well, now?” he asked Serpol. “I never considered such a possibility, but it does make a certain amount of sense. Now that the magic is no longer being used to cement the bond, it’s returning to the rightful owners.”

  “This is crazy,”
I said, shaking my head. There had to be another explanation! I tried to summon the sparks again, hoping it had just been a fluke, and I shrieked as my hands lit up like bonfires.

  “Hang on there!” Tavarian laughed as I flailed my hands, then reached out and grabbed my wrists. “Let’s save the fireworks for another time, when we can focus on controlling it.”

  “But I don’t know how to make it stop!” I wailed, truly panicking now.

  “Just breathe.” Tavarian locked eyes with me, grounding me with his intense stare. “Focus on one breath at a time. In and out.”

  I did as he said, pulling in one shaky breath, then another, then another. Gradually, my breathing evened out, and the glow around my hands dissipated. “Incredible,” Tavarian murmured, examining my left hand. The wound had closed completely, leaving fresh pink skin over the once bloody stub. “It appears your magic knew exactly what to do.”

  “Huh.” I stared at my healed hand for a second, then took stock of the rest of my body. I felt sluggish, lethargic, but no longer in pain. I lifted my other hand to touch my head, and found no trace of the wound I’d suffered earlier. “I’d say I’m good as new, but I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

  “Using magic is tiring work,” Serpol pointed out. “I too, am exhausted. But we will have to table this for another time—our work is not yet done tonight.”

  Right. I sucked in a breath, trying to clear my head. “Are any of you able to contact your riders?” I asked the other dragons.

  The dragons shook their heads. “They are all too far away,” a female said, her high voice filled with dismay. “Why is this happening to us? I thought the bond would return since the dragon god is gone, but I can’t feel my rider at all!”

  The other dragons expressed similar issues, and I felt a wave of sympathy for them. Even though Lessie was standing right in front of me, the missing link between us was like an ache in my chest. "Is there anything we can do about this, Serpol?" I asked the free dragon. "What about that spell you tried on Lessie and me, to change our bond?"