In the past, my reaction would have been why the fuck would you ever do that? But there was something about the tranquility of the human mind combined with 7,000 years of experience that formed a clear picture.
Redundancies. If he couldn’t get rid of us through his deals or his death pyramid, then the Demon King was an excellent backup plan. No doubt they’d crossed paths more than a few times while Marrack enjoyed the hospitalities of Agonia.
It made sense, then, that the Sphinx would know how to contact him.
“All right,” I said, standing up. Argos followed at my heels.
“All right?” Ruby sounded ready to blow a gasket. “You’re kidding.”
“A deal’s a deal.” I gave my arm a vigorous shake. Alfred finally released his claws, landing with surprising grace. “And an asshole’s an asshole.”
“So we let it slide?”
“It’s called skin in the game,” I said as I took lead, .45 ready for alligators and whatever else lurked in Agonia. “The cat is with us now.”
I looked down at the fat feline. “Which means his survival hinges on ours.” I pointed the gun at him, then slowly brought it up to the horizon. “So I have one suggestion.”
“I’m all ears,” Alfred said.
No one moved or spoke as they waited for my words.
“That you find us a way out. Before Marrack finds us first.”
32
In theory, Ruby already had an exit route mapped out before we came down here. But given her lack of dissent about Alfred taking lead, it stood to reason that her path relied on a tunnel which had been reduced to rubble by her old buddy Galleron.
Which meant, in a begrudging twist of fate, all of us owed a lot more to this weird ass cat than any of us would ever admit. If he didn’t screw us over.
I got the distinct impression that Alfred was a classic bandwagoner, always looking to hop ship to brighter pastures.
And the current pastures weren’t particularly rosy.
Frost darted through the air, carried on a brutal wind that didn’t so much gust as slash through the snowy mountain pass. Each step felt like pressing into a swirling maelstrom. But the powder on the icy ground lay still across the frozen tundra.
Argos’s claws scratched against the hard frost beside me.
“Just like old times, right?”
“As long as that hawk doesn’t show up, I think Agonia has one over the north.”
There was a pause and then Argos said, “Thanks, Kal.”
“For what?”
Nothing else needed to be said, so nothing else was said. Alfred, perched on my shoulder, snickered a little. A minute later, I caught him with a left hook, sending him tumbling into the snow.
He muttered curses and threats, but shameless as he was, he soon hopped back on my shoulder. A free ride was clearly preferable to padding along in the ice. His paws weren’t built for the environment.
Neither was his sizable stomach.
“Anything?” I called back to Ruby without turning.
“The energy’s strange here.”
“Anything I didn’t know already.”
“I think the cat is telling the truth.” Resentment tinged the words. “We’re close.”
“You can thank me later,” Alfred said. “Maybe with a kiss.”
“Forgive me if I pass on that offer,” Ruby called back.
“Mutually assured destruction does not incite passion?”
“Because we all know the Cold War was built on love.”
“Point taken.” Alfred’s belly settled onto my shoulder blade as he got comfortable. Every hundred paces or so I made sure to take an awkward step, just to remind him of who was in charge.
A piercing howl soared through the frigid air. The hair on my bare arms stood on end. Wolves, birds of prey, bears—these were all standard and expected. We’d heard many.
But this howl carried the slightest tinge of latent humanity.
“You called the moon-burned vamps down here.” It was neither an accusation or a question. More a flat, understated utterance of sheer disbelief.
“I don’t control who Marrack has on staff.” Alfred’s reedy voice shook, each syllable tremulous and halting. It wasn’t from the cold. “They wouldn’t be my choice.”
I didn’t disagree. The odds weren’t in my favor when I was a powerful half-demon. Now, with all my essence gone—and with it my brute force magic—I had little defense against Blaise’s daystriders.
But I had my wits. Which weren’t sexy or flashy. Still, any tiny advantage had to be exploited. My eyes focused on the pass, which widened ahead to offer divergent paths. One continued into the snowy wilds. The other descended into what looked like a cave. While I couldn’t see inside, we’d just have to find out what wonderful Agonian touches lay within.
Ruby’s shotgun emitted a gamma-ray blue burst, the air quivering. A smoldering pile of ash and guts melted into the tundra, revealing a lifeless patch of dirt.
Shit.
The moon-burned daystriders were no longer even blurs. For all practical purposes, they moved so fast as to be invisible to my eyes.
“Well don’t just stand there.” The shotgun ratcheted, Ruby ejecting an empty shell onto the frozen ground. “Unless you want us all to die.”
My heart skipped a little. Die. As in, forever.
Time to put those wits—or whatever was left of them—to good use.
I dug the cat off my shoulder. “You’re a dealmaker, right?”
“Hey, jackass, you promised.” He fought me all the way down, trying to bite me on the finger as I put him on the ground. His face curled into an intense expression of distaste as he touched the snow, like I’d placed him in the middle of a garbage dump.
“This is me keeping my word.” I knelt down and looked him straight in his shifty eyes. “You’re going to make a deal. With them.”
“I have no powers outside of the pyramid—”
“Can you still lie?” Because I was pretty sure he was lying right then.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“This is suicide.”
Ruby’s shotgun boomed, and the Realmfarer said, “Those are just scouts.”
“You heard the lady,” I said.
Alfred hissed, his arched tail flicking back and forth. “And what would you have me tell these abominable creatures?”
“That’s the spirit.”
I hashed out what he was to do in under sixty seconds. After Blaise—or whoever was running the operation down here—realized his scouts were vamp puree, the second wave would descend on our location like a swarm of carnivorous locusts.
At the end, the cat’s eye lit up, like he’d seen a mouse. “Oh, that is quite vicious, human.”
“I do what I can.”
As Alfred trotted off across the frozen expanse, Ruby came up beside me, reloading the shotgun. “You think that’ll work?”
“Well, look at it this way,” I said as we headed into the old cave, “if they kill him, at least that solves one problem.”
33
The cave was stuffy, hot and stale, like an attic that hadn’t been unlocked in years. Getting out of the cold had felt good—for maybe three seconds. Now I wanted to head outside, where the air was bone-rattlingly chilly, but fresh.
Even after only a few hours, I was beginning to fully understand the peculiar nature of Agonia’s tortures. Hell was an in-your-face and aggressive brand of suck. But without contrast, everyone adjusted. In Agonia, there was no adaptation to your woes, for the savory was juxtaposed just out of reach everywhere you looked. There was no opportunity to forget life’s pleasures, for they were constantly dangled right in front of you.
I touched the lava-carved walls as we snaked deeper inside. That was a mistake, for although the rocks were bl
ackened and hard, they still carried heat—as if they’d never really set, and could simply dissolve into magma at any moment.
Shaking out my stinging hand, I found that even pain lasted longer in a fully human state.
A rumbling roar shook the room.
I shared a glance with Argos, who cocked his head.
“You think Alfred got hold of another microphone?”
“No,” Argos said slowly, his ears flicking. “It smells like a—”
A butane burst of blue-tinged fire streamed through the rock corridor ahead. Even at a distance of a hundred yards, sweat dripped from my face.
“Dragon,” I said, looking down at the .45. I might as well have been hunting an elephant with a bowie knife. Last time I’d slayed a dragon had been a pain in the ass. To be honest, I was kind of hoping they’d gone extinct.
We all should have been so lucky.
“It has our scent,” Ruby said, cool and collected as ever. “It’ll try to scare us into a trap.”
“Then we go straight ahead.” The words sounded good, but my feet protested, each step wobbly and filled with doubt. On the plus side, maybe the dragon would render my plan unnecessary, and simply kill us all.
I didn’t really see how that benefited me, per se, but it might have been a net positive for the world. Depended on how many of those stories about Ruby proved true. Now didn’t seem like the time to ask.
I reminded myself that, checkered pasts or not, we were all that stood between the world and Marrack’s wrath. That gave me the courage necessary to push forward.
My breaths grew halting as I reached the area the dragon had recently torched. A sulfuric rot hung in the air, bad breath and burnt rock forming a horrible new odor. But the dragon didn’t follow up his initial attack.
That was one thing about dragons: they were fucking stupid. Dumb in that distinctively intellectual way, where someone with three college degrees outthinks themselves and can barely handle their job as a barista. Dragons loved setting Machiavellian traps, cleverly pushing their quarry to an inevitable demise. Except they were so big and strong that cutting out all the nonsense and charging ahead was usually the move, given their weight, height, speed and armor advantages.
We reached a four-way intersection, and I stopped to wait for Ruby.
“Shouldn’t you be the leader?”
“Your plan, your rodeo,” Ruby said, holding up two fingers straight ahead. Her Realmfarer intuitions were shining a light that way, apparently.
“So you have to listen to me, now?” I asked as we headed forward, no dragon in sight.
“Don’t push it.”
I shrugged, shoulders loosening. Elsewhere in the cave, I heard the dragon blast off another stream of fire. Laying a trap for no one. I shook my head and smiled. This room even felt less stuffy than the others. A nice, spacious cavern instead of an attic.
Maybe everything was going well after all—
I slammed against the ground as something tackled me from behind. Above, the ceiling erupted into an ocean of flame, like a series of burners had suddenly ignited at once. I was about to launch an elbow backward when I realized it was Ruby, not one of Marrack’s vamps.
Even covered in soot and sweat, she smelled better than the undead.
Argos wriggled beneath my arm as the ceiling blazed, casting shadows on the wall.
Squinting from the sudden light, I saw a towering, scaly beast.
Well, it would seem our dragon friend had not been outwitted. Instead, he was firmly entrenched in front of the room’s only exit. Although, in typical dragon fashion, he didn’t just want us to cook. That was why the ceiling was alight.
No, he wanted to play.
If play meant a fight to the death.
“Kal.” Argos shook. “Do you hear that?”
All I could make out was the crackle of the inferno.
“It’s the daystriders. They’re coming up behind us.”
So much for Machiavellian traps.
Boxed in on both sides, only one question remained.
Which supernatural beast would get to kill us first?
34
“You are different, Kalos.” Blaise’s confident voice snaked through the magma-coated halls, finding its way into my skull like an unwelcome earworm. So Marrack—or his associates who took Alfred’s phone calls—had sent the truly big guns down here to finish things.
Great job, Alfred. Really.
I tilted my head up toward the exit. The dragon stomped its front two feet back and forth, clouds of plumy smoke streaming from its broad, scaly nostrils. Slitted red eyes stared down at us, urging for the game to continue.
It probably would have cooked us right then, but it’d blown its load on the ceiling pyrotechnics. Dragons might have been magical, but like any organic creature, they had limits to their strength and endurance. Breathing fire took a lot of energy; you couldn’t just torch the landscape for days.
I coughed from the smoke swirling around the room, waiting for the inevitable.
Ruby rolled off me and blasted the dragon in its torso. The thick hide absorbed most of the shot without damage. Our lizard friend, however, took it as a declaration of war. The nose smoke turned into steady tendrils of white-hot, simmering flame.
Its feet pounded forward across the room as it bellowed.
Stumbling to my feet, I scooped up Argos and ran toward the wall. Ruby was on her own. I reached the wall sooner than I’d have liked, feeling heat steam off the blackened lava rock. The initially spacious cavern was suddenly feeling very small and cramped.
I did, at least, see daylight at the opposite end. Too bad there was still a dragon—a very angry one, at that—between us and freedom.
So much for plans. The idea had been to draw the vamps through the cave and then bring the structure down to bury them alive. But being trapped with them wasn’t the goal. Not at all.
Ruby racked the shotgun and fired off another shot, this time catching the beast in the eye. The light winked out as blood streamed from the socket. I suddenly got a good idea about how Cerberus might have gone blind.
Unlike the three-headed dog, however, the dragon didn’t react with deference. Instead, dwarfing the ceiling blaze, he unleashed a geyser of blue flame that extended down the corridor where we had entered.
Muted pops and screams came from the vamps caught in the cooker. Being a daystrider didn’t make you immune from thousand-degree temperatures. I watched as the wall of fire leapt upward from the floor, merging with the flames on the ceiling.
Hemmed in. Great. Now there was only one way out: through the pissed off, one-eyed dragon.
“It is too late for you, Kalos.” Blaise howled, progress blocked by the burning corridor. “The world has changed.”
“Send me a fucking postcard,” I screamed back. But I got no reply, the surviving moon-burned vamps abandoning the dragon’s lair to leave us to our fate.
I didn’t blame them. The situation in here certainly looked dire. I was completely cut off from Ruby, and the half-blind dragon didn’t look eager to grant us a reunion.
Argos wriggled in my arm.
I put him down.
He panted loudly and said, “I’ll distract him.”
I peered at the narrow gap between the beast and the wall on our half of the burning cave. Daylight peeked out behind in little slivers.
“You’ll never make it.”
“It’s worked before.”
Not this time, it wouldn’t. I dug the .45 out from my waistband and aimed down the sights. Half the dragon’s head was obscured by flame, the other part—and its good eye—directed toward me. Watching with curiosity as gray smog poured from its nostrils.
Its heavy tail slapped back and forth across the rocks, making the walls shake. A preamble to the finale.
I popped the
clip out of the gun and began ejecting the bullets one by one, barely able to see my hand through the churning smoke. I centered my thoughts on the feel—the tacky rubber of the grip, the cold steel—and continued until I had a handful of bullets.
“Ruby?” It was difficult to be heard over the crackle of flame. I think a couple of Blaise’s vamps were still alive, too, from the anguished moans coming from the corridor.
“A little busy here.” A reply floated through the fiery ether.
“Shoot him in the foot,” I said.
“That’ll just piss him off.”
“Exactly what I’m hoping for.”
I waved the thick smog away from my head and waited for the shot. The blue burst turned the smoke a strange shade of electric, storm-cloud silver. With a great roar, the dragon channeled its remaining reserves, jumping the gun slightly as I sprinted forward.
The haze parted, and I was only a few feet away from its jaws.
It opened its mouth, ready to immolate everything.
I shoveled the bullets inside its gaping maw with a quick underhand scoop. Then I dove for cover.
Nothing happened for a second as the dragon choked on the ammunition, trying to hack it back up. But what was done was done. The bullets drifted down its throat, heading into a stomach churning with readied napalm.
The thing is, when you have an incendiary, highly flammable environment, it really doesn’t take that much of a disruption to cause a chain reaction. One match was all it took to ignite a cache of TNT.
Or a little gunpowder, maybe.
A series of small pops were followed by a burning crackle of a different tenor. Instead of launching the fire outward, the flames rushed through the small perforations in the dragon’s ruined belly, cooking it from the inside.
The force of the smoke popped its baking scales straight off as it collapsed into a heap, fire shooting from its stomach like someone placing a finger over a hose. The cavern filled with the stench of smoldering lizard as the dragon’s good eye went blank.
A final puff of tiny fire came from its throat, then all was still.
Moon Burn (The Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy Book 3) Page 15