Corwyn said, “Give them a taste.”
He made a gesture toward Thorne, and his left arm was suddenly pinned up against the wall. Jean-Claude walked through the shield around him, dipped the metal rod in the vial, and then brushed just the tiniest bit on Thorne’s skin.
For a moment he felt nothing.
Then his skin began to bubble and dissolve. The pain was so intense he almost blacked out, and he gritted his teeth until he thought they would break. A strangled moan made its way out of his mouth.
Jean-Claude frowned. “It should be doing more damage than this.”
More damage? Thorne could see the edges of the wound blackening, and the poison was still burning its way through to his muscles and veins.
“Try some more,” Corwyn said dispassionately.
“Are you crazy?” Rebel said. “I don’t have the Seal. I don’t know where it is. If I did, would I be fucking around in this house looking for it?”
Corwyn gazed at her. “You are the Keeper, are you not? I’m sure you can find it if you simply apply yourself.”
Rebel gave him the finger. “I’m never letting you have it. You really think I’ll let you break Vyrkos, thinking you can control him somehow? You’re insane!”
Corwyn laughed, his mouth a cavern of rotting teeth and flesh. “Perhaps.” He turned to Jean-Claude. “More,” he whispered.
Jean-Claude brushed another bit of the toxin on Thorne. In the same wound.
“Fuck!” he yelled, before he could stop himself. Corwyn smiled. That fucker was so dead. They were both dead.
“Stop it!” Rebel yelled, fighting against her chains.
“You know how to stop it,” Corwyn said.
“Don’t,” Thorne said through his teeth.
The toxin ate further into the wound, boring in like a hideous insect, destroying the tissue. Nothing, not even the serum, had ever hurt like this. He suddenly understood the instinct that caused animals to gnaw their own limbs off when they were stuck in a trap.
The door opened and another minion dressed in modified leather armor came in. He murmured something into Corwyn’s ear.
“When?” Corwyn asked sharply. “How many?”
Thorne couldn’t make out what he was saying; not only was the pain too bad, but it seemed like the toxin was dulling his senses.
Corwyn gestured to Jean-Claude, who was looking at him questioningly. “I need you,” he said. “We have an issue. And maybe watching the Draken suffer for a while will change the Keeper’s mind.”
Chapter 43
Tempest felt like she was about to throw up. She was sitting in the Batcave, surrounded by piles of copies of her stories and sketches, while Zane and Blaze and Tyr sorted and analyzed and tried to make sense of them.
Every now and then someone would call out a suggestion, for where the hellhounds would come from. The roof. The tunnel entrance in the hillside. The portal room in the tomb.
She’d tried them all. Everything kept changing, and nothing she did make any difference. The hellhounds would be inside. Every time she found a way to write it so they wouldn’t come in one way, she got a vision of them somewhere else.
She’d been trying for over twelve hours, and she couldn’t find a way to stop it.
She glanced over at Tyr. He was on the other side of the room, staying as far away from her as possible. She knew she’d hurt him.
Not just his feelings or his ego. She’d hurt him in his heart, when she’d finally told him why he couldn’t be near her.
He kept her from being able to use her power. He kept her from being able to save people. And it killed him that his being with her made her somehow less than she needed to be.
She didn’t know if he would ever get over it.
Fairy tales were true. She was a princess who’d been taken by a dragon, a good dragon, a dragon prince.
And he wasn’t going to get his happy ending. It wasn’t right.
He looked up and saw her watching him. He was gorgeous, with his dark brown hair and cobalt-blue eyes. And he had a sweet, generous heart. Even now, even though she could see the hurt on his face, he mouthed, “You okay?”
He’d hadn’t come near her, but he kept sending zefirs over with food and water and Coke and ginger ale and chocolate and stomach medicine. Anything she liked or wanted or needed, anything that would keep her going.
So that all she had to think about was fixing this.
And she couldn’t even do that right. She wanted him to hug her, and she wanted to hug him back and she couldn’t.
She nodded. “I’m fine,” she mouthed back.
He sent another zefir over with more ginger ale anyway.
But nothing was going to settle her stomach. Everything felt wrong.
Then there was a huge ‘boom’ from somewhere outside, and the entire cavern shook. It felt like somebody had bombed the house.
Tyr and Zane raced to the new security monitors, that showed all the hallways and public rooms in the lair. The mansion was still standing, but all the hairs on Tempest’s body were standing up.
She scanned the monitors along with them. All the entrances. Nothing.
Then suddenly, the monitor that showed the percentage of magical integrity for Vyrkos’ tomb started to inch downward, ever so slowly.
At the same time, hellhounds began appearing all over the lair.
Upstairs in the ballroom.
At the doors to the elevator, up where Tyr and Zane had their rooms.
In the tunnel near the cliffside.
And then, in Vyrkos’ tomb itself.
“Multiple breaches,” Zane said. “Blaze, stay here with Tempest. Tyr, with me.” They dashed out of the room. In a minute she saw them appear on the security cameras.
Tyr was running down the corridor towards the cliffside tunnel, trying to head off the hellhounds nearest her and Blaze. Zane was in the elevator, heading upstairs.
There weren’t enough of them. There were too many hellhounds, in too many places.
“How the hell did they even get in?” Blaze muttered. “Corwyn told us he didn’t have the keys to the new wards. That’s what he wanted from us. I don’t understand…”
Tempest saw Tyr him flame the hellhounds in the tunnel, saw them howl and writhe, falling dead and smoking in the hallway.
Zane was bursting out of the elevator, into the upstairs atrium. He had a gun and was shooting as the door opened, each magic blue fireball getting a hellhound.
Tyr had turned now and was running back towards them, probably heading for the portal room to head off any attack coming from the tomb. Tempest looked back at the hallway he’d just left and saw more hellhounds. Tyr! she shouted. Go back! There’s more!
And there were still more, coming down from the ballroom to converge on Zane.
Where were they all coming from?
Why did she feel so strange?
She studied the monitors, feeling like there was something there she was missing, something she couldn’t quite see.
Draw.
She reached for her sketch pad. Draw what? Wherever she drew the people, the hellhounds were always somewhere else.
Draw the hounds. Her fingers flew over the page. Hounds in the ballroom. Hounds in the lair. Why are they here? What’s the bad thing?
She closed her eyes and just let her fingers move. When they stopped, she opened her eyes, and gasped. It wasn’t here at all. It was Thorne and Rebel. Chained. Surrounded.
“It’s about them,” she said. “It was never about us.”
Blaze was looking over her shoulder. “It’s a diversion?”
Tempest flipped the page and started drawing again. This time she was drawing hellhounds. She sketched one, with a wizard far in the background. And then she sketched the other dogs. But every time she went to fill in the outline, she balked.
“What is it?”
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t fill in the outline. It’s like they don’t have any substance.”
“Illusion magic,” Blaze said. “I’ve never seen anything on this scale. It would take an artifact—some kind of magical generator. Maybe more than one.”
Tempest sat down and started sketching. How to make the illusions stop. Where was the generator? The hillside? The roof? The tomb itself, piggybacking on its magic?
Blaze left the room, but Tempest barely noticed. She was sketching lines of ghostly hellhounds, trying to trace them back to their origin.
A grid. Blaze came running back, carrying a canvas bag. She held it out. “Grenades,” she said. “Have you figured it out yet?”
“A grid.” She ripped the page out of her sketchbook and handed it to Blaze. She took off at a run. A minute later she appeared on the security camera near Tyr, yelling at him and waving her hands.
He scooped her up in his huge forepaws, and then took a couple of running steps and jumped, wings partly unfolded.
He arrowed through the tunnel, skimming over the illusion of the dead hellhounds, and out into the air.
Tempest couldn’t see him anymore. All she saw was Zane fighting hellhounds in the mansion; and the rest of them marching through the tunnels toward her.
They would be here soon. If she was wrong, and they were real, she’d be dead.
Outside, she heard a muffled ‘boom,’ and the mountain shook. Blaze and Tyr must have found something.
She heard another ‘boom,’ and then another. Each one came from a nexus on her grid. Tyr was flying Blaze from point to point, destroying the generators.
There was a fourth ‘boom,’ and the hellhounds in front of Zane suddenly winked out. He looked around, startled.
The ones in the ballroom were next to vanish, and then those in the hallways heading for her. She scanned the monitors. Portal room. ‘Boom.’ Hellhounds gone.
She watched the ones in the tomb. ‘Boom.’ Six generators. That was it.
The hell hounds in the tomb looked up at the camera, eyes glowing red.
The power indicator for the tomb was still dropping.
Those ones were real.
Tyr! She called out. They’re in the tomb!
And then she started to run.
Chapter 44
The door closed behind Corwyn and Jean-Claude, and Rebel heard footsteps receding down the hall. As soon as they faded away, she began working on the shackles.
The chains on the shackles were just barely long enough for her to reach into her boot top. Their search of her had been quick and careless—they were thinking in terms of weapons and magic.
Despite their taunts, they seemed to have forgotten she was a thief.
With superpowers.
Rebel worked a concealed lockpick out of a slim pocket inside her boot. She inserted it in the first lock, and it melted in her hand.
Fucking magical locks.
The second pick was her magical one. “Should have started with that,” she muttered.
She looked over at Thorne, who had wrapped his hands around his knees and was shivering. “Thorne?” she said. “You okay?”
There was no answer, and he didn’t look up. She didn’t even know if he could hear her.
She worked faster, working the pick into the lock until the shackle sprang free. The second one was easier.
As soon as it was open, the magical force shield dissipated. Stupid, keying the shield to the shackles.
She tiptoed to the hallway door and lay flat on the floor, looking through the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door.
She could see the heavy boots of a guard, and hear him breathing. So that was one.
She did the same thing at the other door, the one that led back to the room with the secret passage. There was a guard outside that one too.
Damn. That meant she was going to have to get Thorne on his feet and moving under his own power. She didn’t have her Colt, and if those were hellhound guards, they were going to have her for lunch before she could drag Thorne three feet.
“Why do dragons have to be so damn big?” she muttered.
She went over to Thorne and sat down on the floor, just outside the bubble of his shield. He was lying on his side now, curled up with his wounded arm next to his body.
Cautiously, she reached out and touched the shield.
Her body jolted, and her fingers went numb. It was like touching an electric fence—which she knew because she’d actually touched a couple, in her early days as a thief.
Her mentor had never warned them, if they forgot to check. He figured pain was the best way to learn.
Rebel took a deep breath and concentrated. She couldn’t let herself be distracted, even if Thorne was…
Not dying. He was going to be fine. “You’re going to be okay,” she murmured. “And I’m going to kill Corwyn and Jean-Claude with my bare hands. Unless you want me to leave you one.”
She reached out with her mind, feeling for the frequency of the magical field so she could match it. She’d never dealt with one so complicated; it was like different fields crisscrossing at different frequencies.
Pattern. There had to be a pattern.
She closed her eyes and focused, examining it in her mind. Short choppy waves going this way. Long smooth waves going this way, and this way…
There was an internal ‘click’ when her brain matched the pattern. She put her hand out, and it went right through the shield. Carefully, she pulled and stretched the shield, pulling it over her like a blanket, making herself part of it, then coming out the other side.
She was through.
She was horrified when she saw Thorne’s arm. The toxin was still eating through his flesh. The edges of the wound were blackening, and the center was still bubbling. The stuff seemed to be working its way into his veins, and they were turning a horrible greenish black color down into his hand, and up towards his heart.
She tried to wake him up, but he wasn’t responding. Okay. Shackles first, then she’d try again.
She undid the first shackle—the one with the bracelet on it. She moved that hand to get to the other, and her bracelet brushed against his.
It was the dragon’s voice. She moved her arm away, then touched her bracelet to Thornes’s again.
Rebel’s heart caught in her throat.
Where are you?
Was he crazy? She was sitting here, trapped by an evil sorcerer who could come back any moment, and he wanted her to drift off into the spirit world? For how long?
Dragon's Rebel (Wild Dragons Book 2) Page 20