Winnings were pushed to Cornelius and to me. “Betting on the bank, that’s the way to go,” I decided, laying my chips in the “bank” space.
“The hotel will take a percentage,” Cornelius warned.
I shrugged. “That’s all right. It’s their table.”
The dealer’s points in the next hand totaled nine, letting me win, while the slayer lost again.
“You have a cool head for games,” Cornelius said with a touch of admiration as I calmly stacked my winnings. “I think you’d enjoy Monte Carlo.”
Monte Carlo, the exotic name of another place I’d never been. I hadn’t been most places. I’d grown up pretty much a prisoner in my own house, and now Grandmother Begay didn’t want me out of her sight, unless I was with Janet and her watchful dragon boyfriend. Mick didn’t let me get away with shit, like the big brother I’d never had.
“I’d love to go,” I said wistfully. “But big sis—you know. She’s protective.”
“Well, I’ll just have to speak to her,” Cornelius said warmly.
This was turning into the best night of my life. I was making new friends, winning a bunch of money, and tweaking the nose of an all-powerful dragon slayer.
Who turned to the dealer, stuck out his arm to point to me, and said clearly, “She’s cheating.”
I lifted my hands and stood up, wide-eyed. “What? What are you talking about?”
I’d risen to show that I couldn’t possibly hide any kind of cheating device on my person and that I didn’t have a purse or a phone. And anyway, the cards the casino used were plain cardboard, and the shoe was a simple wooden device. No electronics or magnets could manipulate it, and since the dealer laid the cards out, face up, six inches in front of each of us, I wouldn’t have any opportunity to switch them for different ones.
Didn’t matter. At one push of a button from the dealer, security guards, five of them, materialized and headed over.
Cornelius rose to stand beside me. He held up his hand as the guards neared. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll vouch for her.”
The guards, to my surprise, stopped.
The slayer, now on his feet, growled at Cornelius. “What are you doing? I saw her.”
Cornelius gave the security guards a mild look. “I’m not sure about him, though.”
The guards instantly turned and moved to the slayer. “Sir,” one of them said. “Please come this way.”
I wanted to dance around and do a fist pump but decided to remain dignified. The slayer’s eyes glittered in a dangerous way, but I watched him make a decision to not argue. With another glare at me, he took up his chips and quietly left the table.
“Payback’s a bitch,” I told him, as the guards led the slayer past us.
Yes, it is.
I don’t know if I heard his words projected into my head, or if I simply knew that’s what he was saying. Either way, it chilled me.
I abruptly wondered what he’d do to the security guards once they were out of sight, and started to follow, leaving my chips behind.
Cornelius caught my hand. “No, my dear. Let it go.”
Would the dragon slayer kill the guards? Or simply talk his way out of this to keep his low profile?
Whatever he would have done next became a moot point, because at that moment Colby came in through the casino’s front door, followed by a tall, darkly attractive and very irritated Drake.
The dragon slayer whipped his head around like a lion catching a scent. Power built up in him like a tidal wave, and the guards slid away from him, looking confused.
The slayer turned for Colby and Drake, who had both frozen in shock.
I shook off Cornelius’s hold and started running for the dragons, but too late … far too late.
Chapter Eight
Gabrielle
“Out!” I yelled at Colby as I rushed at the two dragon-men, putting myself between them and the slayer. What the hell were they doing here anyway? “Go, go, go!”
The dragon slayer came swiftly up behind me. I swung to face him as Colby and Drake fanned out in fighting formation.
The slayer had shucked his suit coat to reveal a plain black T-shirt under it—not a great fashion statement, but one that wouldn’t hinder him when he wanted to fight.
I saw that before darkness swallowed him. I didn’t know what kind of weird magic he was working, but it had a suffocating bite that pressed at me.
“You stay away from my dragons!” I shouted. Real mature, but the slayer’s rising power was immense, terrifying. I’d never felt anything like it.
I conjured hot Beneath magic in my hands, squashed it into a ball, and threw it at the slayer.
The white magic hit the black and swirled like yin and yang, before all the magic coalesced into fragments and hurtled back at me.
I dove for the mosaic tiled floor, but not quickly enough—shards stung me as I went down, and I heard a rip as my dress tore. Sequins littered the tiles and smeared blue sparklies on my skin.
I climbed unsteadily to my feet, blood trickling down my face.
“What is wrong with you?” I yelled. “Janet bought me this dress!” I’d fallen in love with it when we’d seen it on a sister-bonding shopping trip, and I’d hounded her to get it for me. She’d done it to be sweet, not because I demanded it. I knew that.
The slayer blinked at my reaction, but fuck him. I loved this dress.
My hands shook as I fashioned the furious power within me into tiny knives and sent them directly at the slayer. “See how you like it!”
I’d meant to cut his clothes to shreds, make him stand there embarrassed and half-naked in the middle of this elegant casino, but my magic never reached him. It ran up against the translucent black miasma around him, once more mixed with his magic, and streamed back to me.
“Now that’s just rude,” I shouted as I headed for the floor again.
Colby and Drake put themselves in front of me, barriers between me and the slayer. So sweet of them. They were trying to defend me, but they’d just die.
I scrambled up and attempted to push past them, but they stood side-by-side, a hard-muscled, dragon-man wall. Any other time, I’d find this sexy, but at the moment my heart pounded in fear.
“Get out of here!” I screamed at them, beating my fists on their shoulders. “He’s a dragon slayer. He’ll eat you for breakfast. I have a limo waiting outside. Go, and I’ll cover you.”
If I expected them to say, “She’s right,” and run like sensible dragons, they disappointed me.
Drake glared at me over his shoulder with sloe-dark eyes. “We know who he is. Take yourself away, and we will deal with him.”
“We heard about your shindig at the other hotel,” Colby put in. “We’ve been looking all over town for you.”
“Why?” I scowled. “I was handling it.”
Colby looked me up and down. “What part of handling it includes getting covered in blood?”
“Colby, this guy’s deadly,” I said desperately. “Would you go?”
The dragon slayer assessed the dragon-men with narrowed eyes. I expected him to gather his powers and enslave them with a gesture, but he only watched them, sizing them up.
Colby’s muscle shirt and low-slung jeans showed off the artwork all over his body. Drake wore a black suit with a silk tie, the ends of dragon wing tatts rising from the coat up his neck to his jaw. He’d caught his long black hair into a ponytail to stay neat and out of his way, and it flowed down his back in a straight, satin fall.
Both men could morph into big-ass, terrifying dragons, but I was scared to death for them. This slayer had Mick cowed and obeying his commands, and while I loved Colby and Drake I knew Mick was the more powerful dragon. Titus seemed like he was plenty deadly, and he was going along with the dragon slayer too, the demon had told me.
The slayer continued to gaze at Drake and Colby, who remained stoically in front of me. The others in the casino were watching in curiosity—or busily ignoring us. Most hu
mans can’t see magic when it happens, so they’d probably only watched me hit the floor, snarling while the three men stood around staring at one another.
My friend Cornelius was heading our way. I didn’t want him to become collateral damage, so I spun away from Colby and Drake and ran to intercept him.
The slayer caught me in the side with some kind of magic torpedo. The blow spun me then lifted me high, higher, and slammed me against the stone wall far above the casino floor. I was pinned like a bug against the plaster, and now everybody could see up my dress.
I struggled to loosen myself, but the dark magic held me fast.
“How did you do that?” I yelled down at the slayer. “This is some really cool shit. Drake, Colby—now’s your chance to run!”
Did they? No. The stubborn pains in the ass held their ground and shot dragon magic at the slayer. Fire arced through the air—hot, deadly dragon magic that would incinerate the slayer where he stood.
The slayer glanced at the two dragons and flicked his finger. The fire hit a wall. The flames became one flat mass, fixed in place, burning nothing.
The dragons snapped off their flames, Colby’s lips parting in shock. “Well, fuck,” he said.
Drake remained silent, but I had the amazing sight of seeing him actually show some consternation.
And then there was Cornelius. He spoke animatedly to the security guards, giving orders like a battle commander.
The security goons swiveled as one and headed for the slayer. Another was on the phone—talking to whom? Paramedics? The fire department? Would the firemen have a tall enough ladder to get me down?
To hell with this. I called up some of my baddest magic, the kind Janet and her grandmother were teaching me to keep hidden and under control so I wouldn’t go around leaving huge craters in the world, ones littered with dead bodies.
But this had gone far enough. The terror that had consumed me when I’d battled Emmett Smith not long ago, and lost, was threatening to engulf me again, and I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t let this shithead dragon slayer destroy people I’d come to care about. He had to go down.
I opened my arms, sucked in a breath, and called to the magic in the deepest part of me.
What I used everyday—the little balls of power to sting people or make them leave me alone, even what I’d combined with Janet to open up the Earth and send all those creatures away—that was on the surface.
I hadn’t told anyone, least of all Janet, or gods forbid, Grandmother Begay, what kind of power, connected to Beneath itself, I could channel through my body. That was the reason Emmett, the Ununculous, before Janet destroyed him, had wanted what was inside me.
Emmett had succeeded in sucking away much of my power. He’d separated me from it, leaving me a broken shell at the bottom of a wash. Drake had found me, and Colby had carried me home, taking care of me all the way.
But Emmett hadn’t been able to steal everything. I’d managed to keep one tiny piece of me from him, the one that had a direct link to Beneath. I’d been crazy afraid he’d find it, because if he’d opened that link and used it, the world would have been finished.
I’d realized as I fought Emmett that night that I didn’t hate the world as much as I thought I did. It had fun people in it, like Colby, and good people like Janet’s father and his girlfriend, and Fremont, Janet’s plumber. I’d done everything I could to make sure Emmett didn’t destroy what little happiness I’d found.
After Janet had battled Emmett, she’d returned my magic to me, but I’d had to lie low for a while at the house in Many Farms to recover.
Even Grandmother Begay had been kind to me—at least at first. Her idea of helping someone get well was badgering them so much they’d haul themselves out of bed and run away in self-defense.
But now I was back, and more bad-ass than ever.
I touched the chink that led to places Beneath and let its amazing light fill me.
“Hey, dragon slayer,” I called down to him. “Slay this.”
I shot my power straight into him.
The dragon slayer wasn’t human. I felt that as my magic touched his. He had once been human, long, long ago and still held that shape, but he was demon inside, a pure Earth-magic demon, an ancient one.
There was a darkness in him, and a heaviness, like the ground trying to close in on me. I smelled muddy dirt and tree roots, as though I’d burrowed into the Earth to get at him.
The slayer stiffened as I opened him up and let Beneath magic fill the cracks I made inside him. The power he used to hold me at the top of the wall snapped off, and I started to fall, but I caught myself with a shaft of magic and slowed my descent.
As soon as my feet touched the floor, Colby tackled me.
I shrieked and tried to roll out from under him. I’d tasked my Beneath magic to seek and destroy Earth magic, and Colby was full of that.
“Let go of me!” I pummeled him, but Colby’s solid flesh didn’t budge. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Stay down,” Colby admonished. “Let Drake deal with the dickhead.”
“The dickhead will kill him. And I might kill you. Get up, you big lump.”
Colby’s face hovered over mine, his light blue eyes glittering with a mixture of warmth, anger, fear, and relief. He was one good-looking dragon, and in any other circumstance I’d love having him on top of me.
But I pushed and heaved to get away from him. For the moment, my magic had dampened—which I think was me instinctively trying to keep from toasting him to a cinder.
I wasn’t sure, though, how well I could control this most dangerous part of me. Grandmother was trying to teach me self-control, but I wasn’t a very good student.
A wailing scream came to us, a bellow of a dragon in pain. Colby was off me in a second, hauling me up and putting me behind him.
The screaming came from Drake. His beautiful suit was in shreds, and blood ran down his face and through his hair, as though something had raked huge talons over him from head to foot. The dragon slayer held his fingers like claws, laughing as Drake bellowed.
Drake’s neat ponytail came undone, his hair sticking to his face as dark blood dripped from the top of his skull. His skin was cracking, heaving, letting out flashes of red-hot light.
He was trying to go dragon, but the dragon slayer’s magic prevented him.
I broke from Colby and ran straight at the dragon slayer, letting my power come. I couldn’t reestablish the link to Beneath again—that needed concentration—but I didn’t have time to worry about that.
I launched myself into the dragon slayer and took him down.
Weird—the scent that came from him was like the deep woods where I’d grown up, after the summer rains. It brought back memories—me running wild as a kid, losing myself in the trees, and then the hell I got when I finally went back home.
The slayer smelled like the bite of winter snow and wood smoke, again scents that held both comfort and fear for me. Winter meant I had to stay inside with my awful dad, but on the other hand, I liked the cold. The White Mountains were a beautiful place.
The memories flashed through me as I looked into the slayer’s eyes, but I fought off my confusion and let my power surge through him. “You leave my friends alone!”
“They’re not your friends.” The slayer spoke in a calm voice, his tone resonant, thick and dark like his aura. “They’re Earth-magic beings who will defeat you. Your Beneath magic will not prevail. The Earth is rising. You woke it, and now you will pay.”
“What?” I shook him. “What the hell does that mean?”
The slayer’s magic bit deep, stirring pain at the center of my being. I understood what Drake had felt, that core wanting to expand and explode, tearing my body apart on its way out.
I squashed the compulsion, but my distraction was enough to let the dragon slayer throw me off, climb to his feet, and run.
Drake roared in pain. He scrubbed at his face, trying to hold himself together, his clothes
in bloody tatters.
“Colby, get him out of here!” I shouted, and raced after the dragon slayer, who was heading for the line of French doors at the back of the casino. “You, stand still so I can kill you.”
Colby wasn’t listening. He started after me, leaving Drake to be surrounded by security guards, who looked like they weren’t sure whether to draw their weapons or call an ambulance.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw dark mists close around Drake, the kind dragons drew about themselves when they were preparing to shift. If Drake went dragon in here, he’d bring down the building.
I couldn’t stop to make Colby do what I wanted. The slayer was getting away.
The slayer ran out of the casino and into the beautiful gardens. I chased him down avenues lined with lemon trees and hedges and around fountains and flower beds.
The slayer ran like a human being, but one who’d trained for marathons. I kicked off my high-heeled shoes and sprinted after him. The gardens were deserted in this hour of dawn, although I startled a couple in passing who’d come out to enjoy a moment of passion.
A gate on the other side of the garden led to a swimming pool. The dragon slayer leapt over the gate, the kind opened by a hotel key card.
I heaved a sigh, grabbed the top, and vaulted over. The iron grill reached up and tore the seam down the side of my dress, the one I’d already stitched back together with magic. Damn this guy.
The pool area was empty, the pool not yet open for the morning. I leapt across deck chairs, gaining ground, and with a furious snarl, launched myself into the slayer’s thick body.
He lost his balance and tumbled straight into the pool, me on top of him. Our clothes were quickly soaked, his dragging him down. I smiled hotly, my ruined dress no more burden than a bathing suit.
Instead of fighting his way to the surface, the dragon slayer wrapped his hands around my neck and started to choke me. I floundered, struggling to get free of him, but he was terrifyingly strong.
We sank, he strangling me. I stabbed him with my magic, but my jabs met the spongy feeling of mud, and he didn’t let go of me.
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