He tightened his hold even more. You will give in, his mind told hers. You have no hope. Even if you manage to fight me off for the moment, I will simply infect you with the virus and you will become my puppet. But that will take hours of suffering. Give in now, and none of that will be necessary.
I’m in no hurry, she snarled back. I have all the time in the world. She’d spent centuries using magic on Mortal Earth, dragging what she needed from the Mageverse. She’d survived her transformation to Magekind without going mad.
She’d endured innumerable horrific visions, the crushing stress of being distrusted even by other Magekind agents. She’d withstood the weight of fear, the constant battle against dark futures -- the Nazis getting the atomic bomb; Nikita Khrushchev refusing to turn the Russian ships around and triggering World War III; the nuclear conflagration following the 9/11 that never happened. Davon’s inexplicable act of betrayal, which had thrust her into the hands of this vicious son of a bitch.
She’d survived all that. She’d survive this.
Alys heard Farek’s laughter as if from a great distance. “You’ll never break her. She is too strong for you.”
“Then you do it. Or do you fear you are no match for her either?”
A hiss of rage. “I would crack her like an egg. But then I’d have to touch her thoughts, and I’d rather bathe in sewage. Infect her and be done with it.”
Bres snarled in frustrated rage. And just like that, the crushing pressure was gone. Alys sucked in a breath. The Fomorian lifted a three-fingered hand, and a long, thin dagger materialized in his grip. She tried to jerk away, but his magic still held her paralyzed.
She could only watch in flinching horror as the king plunged the blade into her stomach. The pain boiled up from her gut in a white-hot explosion that scoured her consciousness. Alys gritted her teeth against the screams that fought to claw up her throat.
Bres smiled at her slowly. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll heal you in a moment. But I dipped the blade in the contagion. Within the hour, three at the most, you will belong to me.”
“It won’t do you any good,” she gasped. “They know I’ve been taken. They’ll have locked Avalon’s shields against me.”
“Oh, I know. But you know how the shield is constructed. I’ll slay the dragonet and use the magic liberated with its life force to shatter the spell. We’ll sweep in and wipe every last Human off the face of this planet.” He smiled, smug and sure.
As the pain intensified, she realized he had reason to be.
The contagion raged through her body much faster than it had the werewolves’. But then, she didn’t have a werewolf’s resistance.
Alys shook and burned, vaguely aware of the dragonet moaning softly in the darkness. Did the hatchling know they were going to kill it? She longed to comfort it, but she was too sick to move. Her every bone and muscle ached as she shook with fever, and her mouth was so dry, her swollen tongue tasted like a dirty sock.
As she grew sicker, Bres wormed his way into her helpless mind. And there was nothing she could do about it, because the contagion had opened a huge hole in her psychic shield. She fought him anyway, trying to drive him out, but nothing worked. It seemed he filled her every cell.
Then the vision hit.
It came pouring from the depths of her mind, images that seemed… odd at first, lacking the usual razor clarity…
Then that thought vanished, drowned in horror.
Farek flew over Times Square, blasting gouts of fire into the towering buildings, which instantly roared up as if they were built of balsa wood instead of steel and glass. Alys rode astride his back -- she was distantly surprised he allowed it -- flinging magical blasts at the mortals fleeing below like panicked sheep. Magekind battled Fomorians in the street, swords ringing on swords amid crackling blasts of magic.
She glimpsed a familiar armored figure, felt the powerful blaze of Excalibur’s magic. Arthur Pendragon, his wife hurling blasts of magic by his side. Heard her own laugh, sounding too deep.
No, not her laugh. Bres’s. He bellowed over the sound of the wind, the screaming, the crackling fire. “There’s Arthur, Farek. Kill him.”
The dragon folded his wings and plummeted, talons reaching. Arthur spun, his head cranking back he stared at the sky in terror. Farek snatched him off the ground in both taloned hands and ripped his body in two. Blood and gore sprayed as Guinevere screamed in mortal anguish. And fell dead, slain by their Truebond link.
Trapped within her own skull, Alys screamed.
* * *
Davon had never had such nightmares. All day long, he dreamed of Alys, terrified and confused, not understanding why he had abandoned her. He dreamed of a dragon’s vicious mockery, a blue face twisted in fury and hate. Crushing pressure on her mind, magic probing, seeking a way in.
Then the flash of a knife. Heat and unbearable pain.
And then Bres. Filling her consciousness…
When the sun set, Davon didn’t so much wake as claw his way from sleep. He found himself on his feet, crouching naked, his lips peeled back from his teeth in an enraged snarl. Fear and guilt hammered him. He hoped to hell nothing he’d seen had been a vision.
Turning, Davon eyed the bathroom, craving a shower with a need almost as intense as his aching desire for blood. But he didn’t know when the fight would start, and he was afraid to risk it.
He couldn’t afford to miss his cue.
So instead he donned his armor, letting it enclose him in magical mail and the sweat stink of his own guilt. God, he burned to see Alys again. Even if she stared at him in betrayed fury, he needed to know she lived. She’d predicted she would, but that was no guarantee.
Once the rest of the suit was in place, he opened the shoebox-sized case and took out Maeve’s gauntlets. At his touch, the opals began to glow, spilling alien magic that made his nervous system reverberate and set his teeth on edge.
Carefully, he drew them on over the scale mail that covered his arms. Alys had altered his suit to accommodate them. With another bone-rattling hum, the gloves snapped tight around his forearms. His skin stung as they sank magical teeth right through the scale into flesh.
Shuddering a little at the sensation, Davon withdrew a long, narrow case from among his luggage and put it down on the bed. Flipping back the lid, he gazed down at the two very different blades stored inside: Reaver, in its magical scabbard, and the Unicorn Dagger. Hopefully, the gloves’ opal power reservoirs would hold a charge long enough to get him through the coming fight.
Lifting the sword from its case, he buckled it diagonally across his back. Davon drew the weapon, then sheathed it again, making sure it slid in and out of the scabbard smoothly.
Next, he pulled out the dagger, with its spiral blade like a unicorn’s horn and the delicate crystal globe that formed its pommel. He’d have to be damned careful not to break it. Davon buckled the weapon around the biceps of his left arm, then checked that he could draw it, too, without it getting caught on anything.
Davon frowned. Alys had said the enchanted weapon should work. Yet she’d also admitted her vision was a little hazy on that point, confused in a way that meant there were many possible futures. He and Alys had explored some of those alternative fates last night, during that interminable training session.
In some of those futures, he died. In others, she did. All Davon could do was trust Alys, trust the plan, and hope they were both alive at the end of it. And pray Arthur Pendragon didn’t kill one or both of them for treason, because that, too, was a possibility.
Restlessly, Davon turned from the bed and walked to the window. The spell Alys had laid on the glass had blocked the light that would have otherwise burned him during the day.
He scanned the street below, looking for any indication it was beginning. Nothing so far.
Christ, he hated this. It was a hell of a lot easier to follow her visions when she was there with him. After all, Alys had four hundred years of experience, while he was barely forty. Which
had sounded old to him until he’d begun hanging around with people who knew Merlin.
She thinks I betrayed her. The thought stabbed him in the heart.
You’d better damn well hope that’s what she believes. Because if she doesn’t, that fucker Bres will know you’re trying to trick him.
Alys feared the Fomorian King would penetrate the spell on her mind and see what she’d attempted to hide beneath it. If Bres saw her memory of the original vision, he’d call off the attack, wait for daybreak on the city of Avalon, and wipe out every witch and vampire in the city. He…
Something flashed past far below, moonlight rippling along a huge, scaly body. Davon jolted out of his preoccupation and plastered himself against the window, looking in the direction whatever it was had gone.
Twenty floors below, a huge green dragon banked and strafed the sidewalk with gouts of flame. A small armored figure rode the creature’s back, firing magical blasts in concert with the beast’s attacks.
Alys, leading the attack as Bres’s puppet. Just as she’d predicted.
Chapter Seven
What he really needed was a good war, Adam Parker thought as he walked into the video editing booth to put together that piece on the newest cell phone.
Cell phones, for Christ’s sake. It was enough to make you miss Syria. I’m a combat shooter, for Christ’s sake. I’ve got to get back overseas. I am so Goddamn bored.
Adam winced, realizing what he’d just thought. Every reporter, cop, EMT, and nurse would tell you the last thing you ever wanted to think were those two deadly words: “I’m bored.” It was an engraved invitation for the news gods to fuck you up the ass.
So he stifled his discontent and threw himself into a chair in front of the bank of video equipment. He was just reaching for the computer keyboard when his cell phone rang. He touched his wireless earpiece, activating it. “Parker.”
“All Goddamn hell is breaking loose in Times Square,” Donovan Cable News night director Carol Jamison snapped. “Grab a camera and haul ass. Don’t even bother with a car, you wouldn’t be able to get close anyway.”
“You got it.” As his heart instantly began to pound, Adam bolted out of his chair, slammed the door open, and broke into a run, heading for the equipment room. “What have we got?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Shit’s on fire and people are dying. Get your ass out there and try to stay alive. Get me some fucking video.”
Jesus Christ! As he dodged a panicked production assistant, he wondered if the news gods were about to give him that ass reaming…
* * *
Even through the thick glass, Davon could hear the screams as terrified mortals ran for their lives. Meanwhile, a thousand Fomorian warriors and their allies charged from dimensional gates all around the square to fall on the evening crowd. An armored centaur ran down a woman in a Statue of Liberty costume, crushing her beneath his great hooves.
Davon stared down, feeling sick. It was all coming true. Why the fuck couldn’t she have been wrong just this once? Though if she had been, it would mean the Fomorians were butchering people in Avalon. And the body count would end up far higher.
Davon spun away and strode toward the gate generator he’d set up at the foot of the bed. He pressed one foot on the device, activating it. The gate spiraled open, and he stepped through.
He and Alys had erected the destination generator on the hotel’s flat roof. Davon stepped out into cool air ringing with the sound of screams and heavy with the smell of smoke and the stench of burning flesh. Grimly, he hurried to look over the parapet. Far below, the dragon strafed the sidewalk with flames. A hysterical chorus of agonized screams rose as people burned and died.
Davon drew Reaver as he watched the dragon intently, trying to ignore what the creature was doing as he watched for the moment Alys had predicted. They’d practiced over and over last night, working on the timing as he fought illusionary dragons in scenarios based on Alys’s visions.
Four times Davon had plummeted to what would have been his death. Future Alys/Bres had decapitated him twice. He had to time this exactly right or this entire thing would be for nothing. Then the death toll would be even greater -- and it was going to be horrific as it was.
The dragon flew in spirals far below, incinerating humans. According to Alys’s visions, a few insane souls were even now shooting cell phone video, and network news crews were on the way. Arthur’s going to be seriously pissed. The Magekind had kept humanity in the dark about their existence for fifteen hundred years, but he and Alys were about to blow that right out of the water.
As the dragon banked, Alys shot a fireball through the window of a Starbucks down below.
And there’s my cue. As Alys had taught him, Davon willed his gauntlets to extrude claws. He flung himself off the roof, aiming not for where the dragon was, but where it would be after the updraft of the explosion caught its wings and pitched it skyward.
Falling like a stone, Davon felt his face draw into a rictus of terror behind his faceplate. Fast, fast, so fast, I’m going to hit the pavement and splat, the vision was wrong, we’re all gonna…
Suddenly the dragon’s back appeared beneath him, shooting up toward his feet. He landed hard, bending his knees and thrusting the claws into the thick armored plates on the dragon’s spine. He hung on for dear life as the dragon twisted through the air, riding out the turbulence.
This time Davon didn’t fall off and get incinerated.
Just ahead of him, Alys perched in a harness astride the dragon’s neck. As she started to turn, he snatched the Unicorn Dagger from its upper arm sheath. If she got all the way around, she’d see him and shield, and he’d be screwed.
He pounced, slapping one hand down on the back plate of her armor. It recognized his magical touch as she’d spelled it to do last night, the scales rolling up into the chest plate, leaving her back bare. Davon raked the knife in a hard, shallow cut across the small of her back, drawing blood, and sheathed the corkscrew blade again in the same smooth motion.
She twisted with an infuriated shriek in Fomorian. Her gaze met his -- impossibly cold and alien. And definitely not Alys Hawkwood. Lips twisting, she sneered in English, “Oh, look, it’s the coward. Did you finally grow balls?”
Shield! he thought at the gloves.
The barrier sprang up around him a heartbeat before her fireball blew him right off the dragon’s back. He plummeted thirty feet toward the pavement. Luckily, the shield absorbed most of the impact, though the landing still jarred every tooth in his head. Davon bled off more momentum with a combat roll and surged to his feet.
Alys and the dragon swooped toward him. His stomach clenched.
Now came the hard part. Nobody else could take the dragon out but him. If he didn’t kill it now, the creature was going to bring down the Marriott. The resulting magical blaze would wipe out Times Square before the Magekind could extinguish it. Davon leaped into a ten-foot bounce, barely dodging the gout of flame as the dragon flashed past.
“Stand and fight, coward!” Bres shouted as his mount banked to wing toward him again.
“Easy to say when you’re flying around over my head, asshole!” Davon roared back in a battleground bellow he’d learned from Arthur. He drew Reaver, and the sword exploded into crackling magical light. “Come get some!” From the corner of one eye, he glimpsed the glint of a camera lens. That would be the news videographer. And not my problem right now.
“That puny thing?” Bres sneered as the dragon started toward him. “I’ll show you flames!”
Here we go… If her vision was wrong, he was fucked. But Alys had told him she’d seen this event five different times in five different timelines, and it was always the same. He’d memorized it like a stunt man practicing a choreographed fight scene in an adventure flick.
The dragon barreled toward him, jaws gaping wide. It blew out a thundering plume of flame. Davon leaped aside, feeling the blast furnace heat of it even through his armor. “Missed!�
��
The dragon whipped its head around, great jaws opening. For a heartbeat, Davon stared at teeth longer than his forearms. He somersaulted backward, avoiding the snap, feeling the brush of teeth across the sole of one boot. He hit the pavement and rolled to his feet, spinning to swing Reaver in a crackling arc. His skin tingled, burning despite his armor’s protective spells. He’d have second-degree burns -- and would be lucky if he didn’t end up with third.
The slice barely missed the dragon. It twisted aside, just as he’d known it would, roaring something his helmet translated as, “You’ll pay for that, human!” As it snapped, its long green neck whipping, Davon spun and leaped, throwing himself one way and then the other. The dragon chased him like a cat after a yarn ball. If it got him, it would fry him into an oily streak on the pavement.
* * *
Adam had spent twelve years covering some of the nastiest shit in the Mideast for Donovan Cable News. But he’d never seen any Goddamn thing like this. It was like being trapped in the middle of a Marvel movie, complete with giant flying monsters destroying Times Square.
He wondered if he was about to shoot his own death, live on national TV. Sweating, he panned his camera over the chaos -- the armored figures chasing terrorized tourists and cutting them apart with swords, for God’s sake.
He’d be lucky if he didn’t end up sushi.
New York’s finest were out in force, periodically blazing away with pistols or shotguns. Trouble was, every time they fired, blue hemispheres would appear around the targets, and the bullets would ricochet.
God, I wish I had my bulletproof vest. But this was fucking Manhattan, not Falluja.
A thought skidded through his mind. If they thought Sandy Hook was fake, what the fuck are they going to say about this?
One thing was for sure, the death toll was going to be a hell of a lot higher. Bodies lay up and down the street, most either smoking lumps of charcoal or surrounded by pools of blood from horrific sword wounds. He had a horrible feeling there wouldn’t be many survivors.
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