A Dragon of a Different Color (Heartstrikers Book 4)

by Rachel Aaron

  He took it, wrapping his freezing fingers around hers as they walked together to the pillar. When they were both standing on the threshold, Marci took a final breath of the Empty Wind’s cold magic before lifting her shivering hand to knock.

  And high above, hidden in the chaos, an enormous swirl of magic shaped like a raven nodded in satisfaction before nipping back into the land of the living.

  ***

  Emily?

  General Emily Jackson, commanding officer of the UN’s Magical Disaster Response Team, and current prisoner of Algonquin, shifted her aching head.

  What, no hello?

  She let the silence answer for her. It was impossible to tell how much time had passed since Algonquin’s Leviathan had grabbed her from the field in Reclamation Land, but she’d spent most of it underwater. She was still there now, wrapped up like a mummy in the Leviathan’s smothering tentacles. Technically, that wasn’t an excuse for staying silent. As a magical construct, she didn’t actually need the oxygen she was hoarding in her lungs, but the air pressure helped keep the water from making its way through her sundered chest and into her brain cavity, where it could actually cause problems. She certainly wasn’t going to waste it opening her mouth to talk, and it wasn’t as though Raven needed a partner for his conversations.

  I see how it is, the spirit grumbled. Just take me for granted. Never mind that I’m risking my life visiting you in the heart of enemy territory. And speaking of enemies… Wings fluttered over her mind to nudge her eyes. Open up. I need to see what’s going on.

  Emily wasn’t sure if she could. Unbidden, her hands twitched, but the movement was only in her head, because she didn’t have hands anymore. She didn’t have arms, either, or legs. It was hard to tell how much she’d lost since she’d been trapped in the Leviathan’s smothering embrace the entire time, but going by the few sensors that were still reporting, Emily was reasonably certain that she was down to just her ribcage, shoulders, and head. The rest was gone. Under Myron’s direction, Algonquin’s mages had picked her apart, meticulously undoing the metal ribbons of coiled spellwork that gave her life. She’d been conscious for all of it, held down by the Leviathan’s implacable weight. Keeping her eyes shut was the only way she’d maintained mental stability as they picked her apart. If she opened them now…

  My poor girl, Raven whispered. You’re afraid.

  Of course she was afraid. She might not be flesh and blood anymore, but Emily’s mind at least was still human, and every human feared death. Being the Phoenix only made things worse. Having died before, she knew exactly how much there was to be afraid of. If she didn’t look, though, Raven would have no information. No information meant no rescue, and so, since the only thing worse than dying was the fear of it being forever this time, Emily forced herself to obey, prying her eyes open.

  And saw something new.

  She jerked in surprise. The few other times she’d worked up the courage to open her eyes, there’d been nothing to see but black flesh and slime. The Leviathan’s smothering tentacles must have relaxed a little after the last unraveling, though, because now she could see light shining down through the murky water. It almost looked like sunlight, but just as her hopes started to rise, a familiar voice trickled through the murk.

  “Bring her up.”

  The Leviathan obeyed, thrusting Emily up, up, up out of the cold water and into the light, but not the sun. The light she’d seen came from a rack of halogen floodlights set up on the stone ledge of what appeared to be a rocky cavern somewhere underground. After a few seconds, Emily recognized the place from the few grainy pictures their spies had smuggled out. She was in the cave beneath Algonquin Tower, the one Algonquin reportedly used to move things she didn’t want anyone seeing between her lake and her fortress.

  Considering how many times Emily had tried and failed to infiltrate this place, that should have kicked off a serious investigation, but she barely spared the cavern a glance. Her attention was stuck on the man standing beneath the rack of blinding yellow-white floodlights. The one she’d once called partner.

  “Myron,” she growled, letting the air out of her lungs at last. “Decided to finish me off?”

  “Not yet,” the mage said, reaching between the Leviathan’s tentacles to check the lines of spellworked metal ribbon hanging from what was left of her chest. When he’d touched each one, he turned to the stream of clear, constantly moving water bubbling up from the stone beside him. “Ready when you are.”

  The water twisted as he spoke, rising up to peer into Emily’s face, giving her a horrifying glimpse of her own startled reflection in the mirror-flat waterfall that was Algonquin’s face.

  “Excellent,” the spirit said, the word burbling like a stream. “Hoist her up so they can see.”

  Before Emily could look to see what “they” Algonquin was talking about, the Leviathan jerked her up, shoving what was left of her body high into the air. After so long underwater, the light and movement made her feel sick. Not actually sick. Even before Myron and his mages had removed that part of her body, Emily hadn’t had a real stomach in decades. Just like her twitching fingers, though, the need to throw up didn’t vanish with the associated organs. Thankfully, it was over quickly. Seconds after it started, the Leviathan had thrust her to the top of the cavern, dangling her like a grotesque chandelier above what Emily could now see was a very large, and very strange, crowd.

  I was afraid of this, Raven whispered, his eyes darting quickly behind hers. It seems we’re the last to arrive.

  Emily nodded, trying not to shudder. The cavern at the base of the Algonquin’s tower was filled with monsters. They were packed in like sardines. Other than the circle of water surrounding the rock where Algonquin and Myron were standing, every inch was filled with limbs, branches, furry paws, and other things Emily didn’t have names for. Even the ceiling was occupied, the stone crowded with things clinging to the arch of the roof like lichen or hanging upside down from it like bats. They were so many, so different, and so piled on top of each other, it took Emily an embarrassingly long time to realize she was looking at spirits. Hundreds of them. More than she’d seen in all her missions combined.

  More than any mortal has seen, Raven said, his presence shifting to the front of her mind like a bird scooting to the tip of a branch. But we always knew Algonquin had pull. What I want to know is what did she promise to lure them all here?

  Emily was wondering the same thing. Now that she’d realized what she was looking at, she actually recognized some of the spirits from Raven’s reports. Particularly Wolf, who appeared as a ten-foot-long timber wolf sitting on its haunches at the front of the mob. Coyote and Eagle were similarly easy to spot, though not nearly as large. But while the animal spirits were easy to spot, others were complete unknowns. Some—like the large pile of moss crawling up the back wall—looked relatively harmless. Others—particularly the long, eel-like creature with a man’s face lurking in the murky water beside the Leviathan’s tentacles—seemed decidedly more dangerous. It was impossible to get a head count when only a few of them had heads and some didn’t even have definable edges, but Emily estimated there were at least three dozen spirits here that were large enough to meet the UN’s definition of a national-level threat. This included Algonquin herself, who’d risen higher from the water, turning to address the crowd like a queen welcoming her court.

  “Friends,” she said, her watery voice colder and more inhuman than Emily had ever heard it. “I know many of you have left delicate domains to be here. Thank you all for coming so far on such short notice.”

  “Save your platitudes, lake water,” Wolf growled. “You called, we came. Now tell us what’s so important.”

  “I hope it’s not her,” the eel spirit in the water burbled, his deep voice smooth and treacherous as he turned his drowned-man’s face to stare at Emily. “We’ve complications enough without wasting our time on Raven’s wind-up toy.”

  Wind-up toy, indeed, Raven huffed. He�
�s never made anything in his life.

  “Raven is the least of our problems,” Algonquin said, her water splitting into two spouts so she could face the wolf and the eel at the same time. “And I called you because we are out of time.”

  “Out of time?” rumbled one of the giant trees in the back. “Impossible. We are the land, the immortal spirits. Time is the one thing we can never run out of.”

  “Normally, yes,” Algonquin said as her split water came back together. “But things haven’t been normal for ten centuries, and if we don’t act quickly, they never will be again.”

  She paused there, but no one seemed to have a comeback this time, and eventually, Algonquin continued. “We are at a critical juncture. As many of you already know, the first Mortal Spirit has risen, and he is not ours.”

  “How can that be?” Wolf growled. “We gave you our children precisely so that you could build your own Mortal Spirit before anything rose naturally. How did you get beaten? What have you been doing?”

  “Exactly what I said I would,” Algonquin replied. “We were actually ahead of schedule thanks to the Three Sisters and the culling of the dragons, but it is impossible to raise the magic of a specific place without spillover, and it seems I underestimated the mortal fascination with death. The combination of these two elements was a rogue Mortal Spirit of the Forgotten Dead who, sadly, could not be controlled. But though I was able to put him down again, his bound mortal and her dragon allies did a great deal of damage on their way out, spilling the dragon blood I’d gathered and destroying months of work. Now, with our reserves wasted and no dragons left in the DFZ to harvest, the window to build up the magic necessary to achieve critical mass on our chosen Mortal Spirit before another rises naturally is rapidly closing.”

  “Sounds like failure to me,” the eel spirit said with a sneer.

  “It was failure,” Algonquin said angrily. “But at least I was doing something. If I’d left our survival up to all of you, we’d sit complacent as stones while the rising tide of human madness swallowed us whole. But I am not complacent. I will never surrender my water again, and I have already found another possible solution, as my new head mage will now explain.”

  That must have been Myron’s cue. He stepped forward with a confident smile, nodding at the monsters as if they were just another audience at one of his conferences. “Spirits of the Land and Animals, I am Sir Myron Rollins, head of magical research and policy for the United Nations and one of the primary spellwork architects of the Phoenix Project. Or, as she is better known to many of you, Raven’s Construct.”

  He motioned with his hand, and the Leviathan obeyed, lowering Emily until she was dangling in front of him.

  “Though initiated by Raven, General Jackson here is the work of many hands,” Myron continued, reaching out to trail his fingers through the exposed silver ribbons of spellwork dangling like streamers from Emily’s sundered chest. “Despite no longer possessing any of her original mortal body, her soul retains the unique human ability to move magic. If she were a mage, this would mean she could pull in magic from the world around her to power her construct chassis and weapons, which, as you can see here, are all spellwork-based. However, General Jackson is not a mage. She cannot use her own spellwork, nor does she have conscious control over the magic required to power her body.”

  “Then how does she work?” the eel spirit demanded. “How does the wind-up toy move if she can’t wind herself?”

  Myron grinned. “The answer to that question is why we’re here. Raven was a very clever bird. He chose General Jackson precisely because she was not a mage. A mage could have fought him for control, a very undesirable trait in a puppet. A normal human, though, wouldn’t be able get in his way. She could only control the results of the spellwork—the weapons and the body’s movements and such—not the mechanisms behind them. Think of her as the pilot in a fighter jet. She can fly the plane, but she can’t do anything about the engine or the fuel that powers it.”

  “But we can,” Algonquin said.

  “Exactly,” Myron agreed, grabbing one of the thin strips of spellwork-covered metal ribbon dangling from Emily’s chest. “The Phoenix is a powerful and intelligent weapon, but because she is not a mage, she can’t pull in the magic she needs to power her body on her own. To overcome this limitation, Raven devised a mechanism that utilizes the unique human ability to push magic without requiring a mage’s capacity for control. By wiring his spellwork”—he held up the metal ribbon—“directly into the parts of her brain that regulate the subconscious human ability to manipulate magic, Raven gave himself the power to push his magic into her instead. It’s just like how doctors use electrical impulses to force limbs to move even if the patient has no control over them. He simply offers up his magic, and the spellwork inside her body automatically grabs it and turns it into fuel.”

  “Leave it to Raven to turn himself into food for his puppet,” Wolf said with a sneer. “He never had any pride.”

  “His lack of pride is our ticket,” Myron said. “In his desire to create a foolproof puppet who wouldn’t fight him magically but would still be capable of operating independently for long periods of time, Raven created something unique: a magical battery. Raven’s Construct isn’t just a weapon. She’s a vessel capable of passively accepting magic from a donor spirit and storing it inside her spellwork, creating a stable well of power that she can access at will. That alone is huge, but what makes General Jackson really special isn’t just that she’s the only spellwork construct in existence who passively accepts magic rather than having to pull it in, it’s how much power she can hold.”

  He pulled the ribbon of spellworked metal through his fingers, unraveling it down from inside Emily’s chest to show them just how long it was. “Mages can pull down magic all day long, but even with the largest circles, there’s only so much we can control without burning ourselves out. Spirits are different. You routinely command magic in sums that would obliterate a human mage. However, since Raven built the Phoenix with his magic in mind, not hers, her spellwork was designed to processes magic on a spirit level. We’re talking about thousands of times more power than any human mage could safely handle, placed in the hands of one woman.”

  “I think you mean a good soldier,” Emily growled. “One who’s loyal to our cause. Unlike certain traitors I could mention.”

  “There’s loyal, and then there’s fanatical,” Myron said coldly. “You were willing to shoot a potential Merlin in the back rather than risk her falling into the hands of a spirit who did not match your narrow vision of the greater human good. I’m far more practical. The world needs a Merlin, and that requires a Mortal Spirit. If Algonquin wants to raise one, that puts us on the same side.”

  “What part of this is our side?” Emily cried, fighting the Leviathan’s hold. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but Algonquin’s killed more humans than all the modern dragons combined. She’s not our ally. She’s a—”

  A slimy black tentacle slid over Emily’s face, silencing her. Down below, Algonquin’s water burbled angrily. “Ignore her,” the lake spirit commanded. “She is nothing. And you.” She turned her reflective face back to Myron. “We’re not here for a lesson. You’ve said enough about how the Phoenix functions. Now tell them why she matters.”

  “I was getting to that,” Myron said irritably, shooting a final glare at Emily as he turned to face the crowd of spirits again. “Emily Jackson isn’t just a combat construct backed by the magic of one of the most active animal spirits. She’s a unique creation, a spellwork machine capable of absorbing and containing magic on a spirit scale and placing it under the command of a human will. If Raven were a Mortal Spirit, General Jackson would effectively be his Merlin, and that is where she becomes useful to us.”

  “How so?” the eel asked, his drowned face sour. “Every Merlin I’ve met has been the master of their spirit, but the Phoenix is a puppet, and a famously loyal one at that. You might have her tied and
supplicant, but Raven’s still in control. He’ll never allow his construct to be used against his precious humans. If you pump her full of magic, she’ll just use it to turn on you the second she gets free.”

  “She would,” Myron agreed, “if I left her in control. But you’ll recall I said the magic that powers her is under the control of ‘a human will,’ not ‘her will.’ Her body serves as the vessel, but again, Emily is not a mage. She has her hands on the controls, but she’s not the one who commands her magic. That’s all handled by spellwork, and that spellwork, the millions of lines of logic that determines who has mastery over the Phoenix’s vast stores of power, is controlled by a single variable. A hard-coded one, but still only one. Change that variable, and the spells controlling all that magic shift to obey whomever we point them at.”

  By the time he finished, Emily was seeing red. The single-variable spellwork that determined control over her body was a known security vulnerability. One that, ironically, Myron had been brought in to fix. Now he was handing it to the enemy right in front of her, and that stabbed deeper than anything else could.

  “You traitor!” she screamed, ripping her face free of the Leviathan’s tentacle. “You’re dead, Myron! Do you hear me? You’re— ”

  She was cut off with a strangled choke as the Leviathan’s tentacle snapped back with a vengeance, wrapping all the way around her jaw and down her neck. She was still fighting it when a flash of light caught her attention, and she tore her eyes away from the slimy tentacle pressed against her cheeks to see Algonquin’s flat, reflective waterfall of a face hovering right in front of her.

  “You have no place to call anyone traitor, little tool,” the lake whispered. “It is because of you that we are in this deplorable situation to begin with. I had the human who commanded the Mortal Spirit under my full control when you killed her. Now we have nothing. Not the spirit I was building, nor Marci Novalli’s, nor the dragons needed to rebuild our losses. You were the one who put our backs to this wall, and it is only fair that you should prove the solution.”