by Ann Gimpel
I followed Johan to an alcove off to one side. Several chests had been butted together. After laying a finger over his mouth, telling me to be silent, he pried one open and handed me a big bore, high-powered automatic rifle with a scope.
“Ever shoot one of these?” His mouth was right next to my ear.
I shook my head, and he took the rifle and handed me a pistol. I’ve never been much for firearms, but this was a revolver. Seemed more manageable. He slapped a magazine into the rifle’s stock and handed me bullets. I fumbled around before finding the release catch that let me spin the cylinder so I could load the gun. It was awkward, so I pulled off my outer glove. After that, the weapon felt cold and menacing. I was sworn to do no harm. Could I shoot someone if I had to?
Guess I was about to find out.
Meanwhile, Johan threaded his way behind the chests. I joined him. They were constructed from heavy gauge steel. It should keep us safe enough from Russian gunfire.
I hoped.
Rocks grated against one another, clinking, clanking, and falling. The men were digging their way inside. Should clear the way for us to leave.
Yeah. Once we kill them…
A bucket of ice water over my head wouldn’t have been any more sobering. It was a shorter road than I’d ever guessed from the Hippocratic oath to premeditated murder.
Unlikely my whispers would carry over the racket, so I leaned close to Johan. “Is it the same bastards who dumped us in here?”
“No, but they work together. This batch is the cleanup crew. I heard enough the first time to suspect they’d send someone back. This might be the ass end of the world, but a bunch of corpses would be reported to the Antarctic Treaty Organization.”
“They’d send multi-national militia to investigate,” I murmured.
“Precisely, which would have put a crimp in all the illegal mining.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“What for? If Dame Fortune smiled on us, you would have been outside in a spot you could have hidden.”
I rolled his answer around in my mind. “Not very many hiding spots. You might have suggested I bring a gun.”
A soft sigh rattled from him. “Erin. I was barely holding on. The pain was so intense, I am surprised I remembered anything.”
I touched his arm. “Sorry.”
“Kneel like I am. Rest the muzzle on the chest to stabilize it. Line up the sights and pull the trigger nice and easy. Be ready for the kick. Keep the weapon in a steady plane.”
While I was digesting the information, he went on. “We should not need your firepower. My plan is to wait until all of them are inside. This baby”—he patted the barrel—“will cut a swathe through a battalion. It will be loud, though.”
“Got it.” My stomach burned from bile, and adrenaline coated the back of my throat with a sour taste. I was surprised I had any left after climbing out of the hole.
“I bet they will have a Zodiac on the beach. Once they are dead, we will take it, and—”
“Whoa. Where there are Zodiacs, there are ships.” The specter of a Russian vessel loaded with long-range rifles and scopes scared the crap out of me.
“Some risks cannot be helped. We are not far from the Argentine base, Belgrando. It is just around the headland. We are more maneuverable than a ship.”
“Unless they send a second raft. Plus, that base is often empty.”
He placed a hand over where mine felt like it had frozen to the gun. “One step at a time. Ssht. They are inside.”
I’d been intent on our conversation, but he was right. The cascade of displaced stone had nearly stopped. Disquieting thoughts sent a fist into my solar plexus. The cleanup crew would notice the canvas tarps had been disturbed. Surely, they’d been told how many bodies to collect. Coming up two short would initiate a search.
None of it mattered. Johan planned to gun them down.
A burly man, his head covered by a thick hood, strode into my field of vision. A rifle was slung across his back. He hefted one of the bodies as if it weighed nothing, carted it to where I couldn’t see him any longer, and yelled something in Russian.
“Fuck!” Johan mumbled.
I didn’t need Russian to understand the men had set up a grisly assembly line. One carried the corpses to some kind of sling setup. Other men up top winched the dead guy to the surface. Or dragged him if they didn’t have a mechanical assist.
The hooded man returned for corpse number two. If the out-of-place tarps bothered him, he gave no sign of it.
“What do we do?” I hissed, louder than I meant to.
The Russian stopped dead and shouldered the rifle, turning in a full circle. Someone from outside yelled at him. He yelled back and slowly put the gun down, but he didn’t sling it around his back. He set it where he could get to it and grabbed another body.
I wanted to ask Johan what the exchange had been about. Instead, I focused on holding myself absolutely still. We were so screwed. If we shot the guy ferrying bodies back and forth, the noise from the gunshot would bring the other ones down here on the double.
Or maybe they’d just chuck a grenade into the hole and call it even. Double duty. It would obliterate evidence and kill us at the same time. The music started up again. Stray notes just like when I was nearly out of this hellhole. Next to me, Johan jumped as if he’d been struck.
Odd golden light glittered around the Russian. He crumpled to the ground with his neck bent at an unnatural angle. The body he’d had over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry skittered forward a few feet, landing with a thunk.
I scrambled from our hiding place, intent on making certain he was as dead as he looked. Johan leapt over the collection of chests, covering me with the rifle. Fear pricked me, but I bent over the fallen man. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. His eyes rolled back into his skull.
He was dead, but how? Nothing to trip on. If he’d had a cardiac event, he’d still be clinging to life. I glanced at Johan and shrugged. We needed a plan, and right now, I had zip squat.
The men outside shouted in Russian.
“They want him to hurry,” Johan said.
The musical notes hadn’t abated. They were more pronounced, more melodic than before. The shimmery light returned, and I swung my revolver up. I’d be damned if whatever killed the Russian would get us too.
The music shaded to a man’s voice. Strangely accented, it said, “Welcome to my realm, humans. There is nothing for you above but strife.”
Johan’s eyes widened until white showed all around his dark blue irises. “What the unholy fuck?”
“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I mumbled.
The music turned into a veritable orchestra. In a repeat of my earlier plunge, the earth beneath our feet opened, and we fell into darkness. At least this time, I wasn’t expecting the precipitous descent to crush the life out of me. Still, fear and a deep sense of foreboding made me want to puke. Death was something I understood. Disembodied voices weren’t. Nor was music that had no source.
Chapter 3
Konstantin exchanged a pointed look with his sister. He’d hoped for joy, relief, or at a bare minimum, curiosity, after revealing his presence to the humans. Particularly after he’d obliterated one of their problems.
What he hadn’t expected were anger, outrage, and fear. “Perhaps choosing these two was a mistake,” he muttered.
“No going back now,” Katya pointed out. “You’ve already dumped them in the crystal cave. Plus, it is far too soon to make any sweeping proclamations about failure.”
“But I killed their problem. The man threatening them. They should be looking for me, ready to lay their undying fealty at my feet.”
“They don’t understand such is true, Brother. They have no idea you—or I—exist. All they know is their adversary died—under strange circumstances.” She gripped his lower arm briefly, offering support.
“The circumstances could have been far stranger.” Smoke swooshed
from his open mouth. “I could have burned him to ash where he stood.”
“What you did was better.”
“Why do you think so?” Konstantin trusted his sister’s instincts, but often didn’t understand her reasoning.
Steam from her mouth and nostrils wove with his, creating a captivating pattern. “Humans, the good ones, are easily frightened by events beyond their reckoning. You made it appear the man’s neck was broken.”
“It was,” Konstantin sputtered. “I sent magic in just the proper spot to separate two of his upper vertebrae.”
“Yes, yes.” Katya waved her hands in front of her. “My point was that in the human world, broken necks mean death.”
“And immolation doesn’t?”
She thinned her mouth into a frustrated line. “You asked for my opinion. Do you want it, or was your plan to pick my thoughts to shreds?”
“Sorry. Of course I want to hear your views. Is it because the path I employed was less…dramatic? Did that make it easier to accept?”
“Maybe not easier to accept, but less frightening. If you’d turned the man into a blazing inferno, I have no idea what the other two would have done.”
Far above them, in the cavern he’d just cleared of the man and woman, shock waves blasted his sensitive hearing. Goddess damn humans and their bombs and weapons and destruction.
“I shall return presently,” he told Katya.
“Shall I welcome our, erm, guests?”
“No. Let them wander in circles for a while. Maybe then they’ll be happier to see us when we lead them to someplace more commodious than the crystal cave.”
Konstantin visualized a sheltered cove out of sight of the stretch of beach in front of the cavern. Perhaps revealing himself for what he was would be ill-advised, but he was furious. These men had killed their own kind for sport, and now they’d returned to desecrate the dead. He’d listened to their talk, words skulking behind the blast waves, and they made him ill.
Incendiary devices blowing up the cavern above his realm were the final indignity.
These men did not deserve life, and he, Konstantin, once a prince among dragon shifters, would see they never drew another breath. Deep within him, the dragon’s joy at its freedom filled him with love for the creature who shared his body. His soul. His dragon had shining black scales, where Katya’s was golden from head to tail.
His sister was ashamed her dragon had deserted her. That was why it had taken her so long to admit its absence. Now that he knew about it, though, he and his dragon could address the problem.
And they would. He had faith his dragon could coax hers from wherever it had taken refuge and talk sense into her.
He emerged into a day marked by brisk wind and cloudy skies and summoned shift magic. Bones stretched and altered, skin reformed and grew scales. His jaws elongated, and he clacked his double rows of teeth together.
Fire spewed from his mouth. He flexed his talons, beat his wings a time or two, and jumped into the air. He didn’t hesitate once he crested the spit of land separating him from three men standing around shouting at each other. He’d give them a reason for all that racket.
Bugling furiously, he aimed a strip of fire right in front of them. The men’s heads tilted skyward, and they began screaming as they ran for a black raft a few meters away. Konstantin spewed fire until it encompassed the raft in a sheet of flames. It took a moment before fire engulfed it, burning in smoky gouts.
With their escape route cut off, the men turned to face him and dragged rifles to their shoulders, firing at him like madmen. Cretins! Apparently, they had no idea his scales were impervious to bullets. And blades. Everything else too.
Dragons were immortal.
He waited, fanning the air with his wings and raining fire down on the men until they tossed their useless guns aside. No more ammunition, not that what they wasted before they ran out did them any good.
Konstantin wasn’t a bully by nature, but these men were. He was an excellent judge of character, whether the bearer was human or dragon or some other iteration of magic wielder. After inscribing a lazy circle in the sky, he dropped low, intent on landing.
The men weren’t trying to escape, but where would they have run to? The icy shoreline gave way to snowfields marked by deep fissures. Even with skis or snowshoes, the men would have found travel painstakingly slow as they worked their way around ridges and troughs.
His hind legs brushed the beach, and he folded his wings, regarding the trio staring back at him.
“You can cast your costume aside,” one of the men said in Russian. Like the others, he was garbed in a bulky black suit that covered him from its hooded top to his green rubber boots.
“What if it isn’t a costume?” Konstantin countered in the same language. He spoke all human languages, plus one specific to dragonkind.
The center man doubled up a fist and shook it his way. “Do you take us for fools? I admit your getup is clever enough to conceal an engine of some kind, but—”
The first man made a chopping motion and leaned closer. “I represent a wealthy company. We would pay handsomely to know your secrets. You would have to sign the rights over, but once you’ve done that…” He shrugged and offered a disingenuous smile.
Konstantin decided to play along, for a short time, anyway. He folded his forelegs across his scaled chest and aimed his whirling eyes at the man who’d spoken. The man made a good faith effort to meet his gaze, but gave up.
“To what do you attribute my eyes?” he asked. “Another clever motor?”
“It has to be something,” the man standing in the middle muttered. “Technology gets better every day.”
So far, man number three had said nothing. Nor had he looked at Konstantin. A bit of smoke and ash were in order, so he puffed them around the third man until he was lost in a thick, choking haze.
The man stumbled out of the cloud, coughing and sputtering. “Enough. I see you for what you are. Kill us and be done with it.”
The other men erupted in outraged shrieks, telling their companion to shut up.
“You see me for what I am, eh?” Konstantin repeated the man’s words. “And what might that be?”
The man twisted his neck and trained bloodshot brown eyes on Konstantin. “Any fool can see you’re a dragon.”
“He’s mad,” the man in the middle yelled.
“Don’t encourage him,” the first man chimed in.
“Who is deranged?” Konstantin asked coolly. “Your compatriot or me?”
The men clammed up fast.
“What are you doing on my headland?” Konstantin selected another tactic, more to see what they’d say than anything.
“We were told to clear dead men from there.” The first man waved a gloved hand behind him.
Konstantin puffed more smoke. “Interesting. How did they die? I haven’t killed anyone. Not lately.” He spread his jaws in a parody of a smile—and to show off his teeth.
“They, uh, were stealing from our company,” the man in the middle replied.
“We had to set an example,” the first man added.
“What were they stealing?” Konstantin pressed. “Anything of worth in this region is part of my hoard.”
Three sets of eyes widened. “It, um, it didn’t happen here,” the first man said.
“N-no,” the second agreed. “A long way from here. Our associates moved the bodies here from that other spot.”
“And now you’re moving them again. Quite poor planning, if you ask me,” Konstantin wasn’t exactly enjoying himself, but he was warming to his role as tormentor.
“These things are difficult to anticipate,” the man standing in the middle muttered.
“Anyhow”—the first man extracted something that looked like a radio from within his suit—“we’ll alert our ship to send another raft, and we’ll be out of your way quite soon.”
Konstantin resorted to magic instead of fire. The black plastic oblong box exploded, showering t
he man with sharp bits that left bloody tracks down his face.
“Idiots!” The third man located his tongue. “You’re bigger fools than I imagined. That is a dragon. We angered it by trespassing on its land. It’s toying with us, but none of us will leave this place.”
“How is it you know about my kind?” Konstantin asked, genuinely curious.
“My great-grandmother saw a dragon when she was a small child. It wasn’t black like you, but green.”
“Did it speak with her?”
“Nyet. She hid in her family’s grotto, but the story was passed down in our family. I was certain it had to be true.”
“Why?”
“Because the old woman helped raise me, and I never knew her to lie.”
Konstantin rocked from one hind foot to the other. “One of you believes I am more than smoke and mirrors.”
The first man flexed his hand, and the remains of the radio clattered to the ground. “Whatever you have in mind. Get on with it.”
Nothing like an open invitation. Anticipation swelled as his dragon embraced the moment. It loved killing, lived for it.
“Step back five paces,” Konstantin ordered. The man walked backward, never taking his gaze from the dragon. Before he came to a stop, Konstantin let fire blast from his mouth. It surrounded the man, burning quick and hot. So hot, the man never got a chance to scream.
“Brother, what is taking you so long?” blasted into his mind.
“Nothing. I’m fine,” he answered Katya.
“Our prisoners, uh, I mean guests, grow restless.”
“Back soon.”
Konstantin focused on the other skeptic, who stared at him with mulish defiance. The last man, the one who believed in dragons, scuttled out of the way, anticipating what would happen next.
Konstantin didn’t disappoint him. He sent another volley of fire to consume the man who’d once stood in the middle. Hatred and disbelief blasted from him in waves, even as his flesh liquified. Both pyres added a burnt smell to the clean, marine air.
Konstantin turned to the last man, undecided regarding his fate.
He knelt on ice-coated rocks, head bent, waiting for the end of his life.