by S. W. Clarke
The Soul Hunter had stepped in with that swing of his flail, overextending, and the angel had deflected it with his sword. Now that sword caught my eye as it gleamed under the porchlight, raised high and higher, both angelic hands gripping it tight as though he were lining up a baseball bat.
I didn’t have time to stop him.
I didn’t have time to do anything but suck in a quick, anticipatory breath.
In one singing motion, the blade swept around and sliced the ghoul’s head from the rest of his body. I caught a glimpse of his blue eyes as his head fell, fading to emptiness before his head touched the ground. And then the Soul Hunter’s body crumpled to the wooden planks and didn’t move again.
Chapter 16
The Soul Hunter was dead.
I had witnessed the end of a creature who had lived for thousands of years, who had fought countless enemies and won countless battles, every time surviving, forging on, never knowing that the moment of his death would be this one.
After that long a life, did you ever really expect to die? Really, truly?
I stared down at the ghoul’s body as though it might reassemble. As though the blue eyes—still faintly blue in his decapitated head—would blink and gaze out from under that hood once more.
He had been my hunter. My enemy. And yet that meant nothing to me now, because he’d lived by his principles. I had been a cosmic wrong to him, and in Lust he’d encountered a greater cosmic wrong. And so he had fought her without fear.
He’d fought to his death.
Lust clucked her tongue. “Ah, the ghoul’s neck found the edge of my lover’s blade. It seems his desire to end me did not outweigh the celestial’s desire to protect me.”
I dragged my eyes up to Lust as she took two steps forward and stroked the back of one hand down the hobbled angel’s cheek. He stood with his sword in his grip, the Soul Hunter’s blood still dripping off it. There wasn’t a nick on him, not even a flesh wound.
For all the Soul Hunter’s efforts, the angel only had a small dent in one of his pauldrons—a superficial issue, easily banged out with a good hammer to where you’d never know the armor had been dented in the first place.
And something clicked for me.
Once Percy had burned that front door down, the fight had been over. None of us had posed any real threat to Lust—that much was obvious in the speed with which that angel had dispatched the Soul Hunter.
Which meant she had allowed this to happen. She had allowed it to play itself out.
Why? She was Lust.
I had no real love for the Soul Hunter, but his death stoked an old, familiar fear in my chest.
Lust hadn’t even respected him as a nemesis.
He’d been nothing to her—she hadn’t even offered him a glance. Not even when his head lay at her feet and his flail clanked to the porch.
I understood now what it meant for a mortal sin to walk through the world.
She had no regard for life. She did not care for anyone, because she didn’t have a heart inside that organ beating in her chest. It only served to pump blood, to keep her body in motion.
And if she didn’t have a heart, that meant she was true evil.
True evil was heartless. It had no principles, no softness, no empathy.
I remembered this kind of heartlessness that came from absolute power.
And I remembered my own powerlessness in the face of it.
I gripped the whips harder, as though the feel of them under my fingers could keep me here in this moment. Because right now, I could have been fourteen years old and lying in the middle of the muddy circus grounds as vampires summarily executed every last person around me.
I could almost feel the weight of the vampire landing on my back, pressing the air out of my lungs until I couldn’t cry out. Couldn’t scream.
Reusable meat, he’d called me. Just like Lust had called us insects.
Theirs was an absolute power, one so potent they didn’t even regard their prey as sentient.
Cold, tingling fear iced my spine, and I took one step back, then another, until I stood as far as possible from the Soul Hunter’s lifeless body. No one seemed to notice me, and I was grateful for my own smallness in this moment.
On my left, the flaming doorway beckoned. I could run inside, find a dark, empty room. I could wait until the danger passed, and then creep out when Lust had gotten what she’d wanted and left without another thought to the fate of one little human named Tara.
I edged closer to the door—so close I could feel the heat off the flames. An all-encompassing selfishness had overtaken me, and I knew this feeling well, too.
It was the desire to live. The simple, animal need to persist.
This was what had forced me to turn away from my sister.
This was what had carried me straight out of the center tent.
This was what had implanted a deep sense of shame I’d spend years trying to outrun.
But right now? I didn’t care. It had absolute control over me.
I was about to slip unnoticed through the doorway when Lust spoke. Not to me, but one word in particular pricked my ears.
Dragon.
“The dragonslayer has arrived,” Lust murmured with a particular edge of sarcasm, cutting through the brick of fear sitting at the front of my mind.
Dragonslayer.
I stopped hard at the doorway, Percy’s flames still licking nearby as though to caress my skin.
Lust was referring to Grunt the ogre. He was the dragonslayer. And the dragon was Percy.
I dragged my eyes off the doorway—off the safety that lay beyond—and back toward Lust. Seleema stood beside her, and both were focused on Grunt, who had lunged at Valdis’s angel. The angel sidestepped, and the ogre went stumbling forward down the porch steps with a roar.
Lust watched on with a delicious smile, one hand resting on Percy’s head.
I knew instantly what was about to happen.
She would force Grunt and Percy onto opposite sides of a fight. She would force them to duel over her.
Chapter 17
My fear evaporated like water off a scalding pan. Turns out there are a few things stronger than abject childhood terror, and one of them the absolute love a woman has for her dragon.
The past was swept away. Only my fear for Percy remained.
“Dragon and dragonslayer,” Lust repeated, her fingers on Percy’s head and her eyes on the ogre on the lawn. “Such a battle intrigues me. Protect your mistress, Percival.”
No. Don’t do it, Percy.
Beyond Lust, Percy spun around toward the ogre, his clubbed tail swinging and taking out several of the poles holding up the porch railing.
I wasn’t about to let the ogre hit my dragon with any more stop signs.
“Perce!” I yelled, pushing myself up to one knee. “Don’t listen to her. She’s tricking you.”
A moment later, his claws scrabbled over the wooden boards and down the porch steps. His wings flared as he cleared the overhang, and I could see the blue glow of the moon through their semi-transparent webbing. His jaw opened, white teeth gleaming, and I knew there was no stopping him.
I knew it before the plume of fire shot out of his mouth in a straight line toward the ogre.
To my absolute shock, Grunt rolled out of the way of Percy’s fire. I may be biased, but I would have put money on that ogre being unable to touch his own toes.
But I guess there was a reason his clan were called dragonslayers.
The fire rolled on past him, hitting the enormous tree at the center of the driveway. After a second, the tree caught, its wide trunk crackling as the fire took hold.
The ogre came up to his feet beside the tree. With a glance over at it, he reached up and gripped one of the low-hanging branches.
No way. He couldn’t.
But he did. With both hands, he dislodged the branch right from the tree’s trunk. It came away shivering, what remained of the dead leaves fluttering to the gro
und. And now the ogre clasped his meaty hands around a branch thicker than me and twice as long.
He held it before him like a longsword, leaning forward to release a roar.
For his part, Percy remained standing at the base of the steps, his tail snaking back and forth as though to strike.
I pressed myself up along the siding of the house, everything else forgotten. A motherly instinct blasted through my veins, and I could only see Percy and the ogre.
Maybe I couldn’t stop Lust right now, but I could stop one battle. I had to.
I skirted behind the Soul Hunter’s body, threw my hands atop the porch railing and vaulted over the side. I landed in the shrubbery in a crouch. I took a second to evaluate the hundreds of humans and Others gathered on the front lawn.
Even if the angels and Percy were defeated, Lust’s other minions were ready to close in the moment she glanced in their direction.
They would do anything for her.
When Valdis and the Soul Hunter had gotten into this fight, I’d had the hubris to think the vampire and the ghoul together could defeat Lust.
I was wrong. Completely wrong.
I’ll admit it now: I’d never seen such power. Sure, I’d been in fights with Others, but this was another league I didn’t properly know existed. Here I’d thought Valdis was the worst thing in the world … back before I knew sins walked among us. Back before I knew Lust could bring the world to its knees if she got to Ariadne.
But I had to do what I could. If I could just get close to Percy, I might be able to break Lust’s hold over him. I might be able to save him and the ogre from each other.
I straightened, breaking out of the bushes and pelting across the grass toward Percy and Grunt. But it didn’t feel like my legs moved quick enough; ahead, the ogre had already started rushing Percy.
Fast, Tara. Run faster, GoneGodDamn it.
Not in time.
The ogre closed the distance with uncanny speed, and the tree branch swung toward Percy, on a direct course with his scaled head.
“No!” I yelled.
But it seemed Percy had learned from his first battle with the ogre back in New York, because he ducked and lashed out with his claws, nearly catching Grunt across the chest.
The ogre managed to lean out of the way in time, and the two of them half-circled one another as Grunt’s momentum carried him forward. His branch lodged in the gap between the steps, and he came to an abrupt and ungraceful halt.
Percy’s wings extended, and with just a moment of clawing through the grass and a crack, he rose into the air, wings flapping so hard I saw Lust’s hair blown back.
No, no, no.
He only took to the air like this when he was really deep into a fight. For good reason, he felt deadliest—and most capable—from the sky. Right now, under Lust’s spell, I didn’t know what that meant for those of us on the ground.
Bad things, probably. Real bad things.
Because as I ran closer, I could see Percy’s chest expanding. He was preparing to unleash his fire from above, to rain it right down on the ogre’s head.
And Grunt?
He was still dislodging his makeshift weapon. He was vulnerable.
Even if I couldn’t acknowledge it right now, the underlayer of my consciousness recognized the irony in this. Just over a week ago, I’d stared at Grunt from the other side of a bar in New York City and seen pure, irredeemable evil.
He’d been Scarred. He’d been my enemy.
Now? Now, after I had seen the truth of the night of the GrandExodus, and the choice I’d made to run out of the tent—away from my sister, leaving her to die?
Now I knew I’d been an arrogant, naive idiot.
Grunt wasn’t a good ogre, but he didn’t deserve to be incinerated by dragonfire.
And I could save him.
I yanked the whistle out of my shirt as I ran. No matter what, he’d never ignored the whistle. It had always called his attention, and right now all I needed to do was capture his attention long enough to keep anyone from getting turned to ash.
I set the whistle between my lips and poured air into it.
And for the first time, a hollow, reedy sound came out. That was bad; the whistle wasn’t supposed to make any sound except at a pitch audible to Percy’s ears.
I stopped hard, squinting down at the whistle in the half-light. I turned it between my fingers until I came to the jagged line snaking its way up one side.
It’s cracked.
So that was the noise I’d heard when Seleema had kicked me in the chest. Not one of my bones—Percy’s whistle.
I cursed, my eyes flashing back up to Percy.
I still had one option left to me. It wasn’t graceful or pretty, but I was beyond grace or prettiness.
We had gotten down to the simple matter of life and death.
Percy hung in the sky like an omen, his wings flapping as his mouth opened. I could almost see that cauldron of flame waiting in the back of his throat, could almost see it reflected in the black pupils of Lust’s eyes as she gazed up at her new prize.
I rushed under him, directly in the path of his fire, and raised both hands up into the air, my whips dangling down.
I was the only thing standing between Grunt and Percy’s ire.
As I stared up at him, I’d been right: I could see the fire broiling in his throat like a deadly promise.
“Stop!” I yelled, the word somewhere between a command and a desperate plea. “Perce—baby—please don’t.”
The ball of fire churned in the back of Percy’s mouth, waiting only for the hair-trigger impulse to careen into the world in a plume of indiscriminate destruction.
Believe it or not, this wasn’t the first time I’d contemplated my death to dragonfire.
Back when Percy was just getting old enough to make fire, he’d caught me with a few licks like a kitten’s claws catch you—small, stinging wounds. And then there was that one time when he got real, real mad at me …
Just like now, his eyes had narrowed, his chest had puffed up, that ball of fire appearing in the back of his mouth. And for a second, I thought I’d die to him that day. But at the last moment, he had closed his mouth and resisted the impulse.
Because he loved me. Because, despite his childlike anger, even then he knew it would be worse to hurt me than to satisfy his momentary urge to turn me to ash.
I was all he had. He was all I had.
And despite Lust’s spell over him, that was what I hoped he would remember. Maybe he would remember his love for me, too. Maybe he would blink and be himself again.
But that wasn’t what happened. Not exactly.
Percy stared down at me, and he did blink once. I couldn’t tell if he was staring at me or the ogre beyond me, but I could have sworn I saw recognition in those golden eyes.
“It’s OK, Perce,” I began, waving my hands as though to flag him down. “Just come on—”
He silenced me with an ear-splitting flap of his wings.
Not good. That meant he was really pissed.
With a roar, he sprayed fire down toward us. For a half-second I caught a glimpse of my own end, and it was nothing but brilliant orange hellfire.
So I’m wrong, I thought.
At least it would be quick.
I forced my eyes to stay open. I wanted to see my end, even if that meant consumption by fire.
But that end didn’t come. Not yet.
The fire hit the ground directly next to me, blasting the grass with a wave of scorching heat and sending my hair straight back.
He missed.
He missed on purpose. He definitely missed on purpose.
But I wasn’t out of the rapidly-burning woods, so to speak, because following that came skin-melting heat, like my epidermis and muscle would drip off and leave only my skeleton—and that might melt away, too.
I didn’t even have time to react before the blastwave hit me, and I had the split-second acknowledgement that if I didn’t die of t
he fire itself, I’d die of the heat off it.
You’d think, traveling with a dragon, I’d know how hot dragonfire really is. But I didn’t. Just the heat off it felt like being trapped inside a thousand-degree oven.
A strong arm wrapped around me from behind, pulling me close to their much-larger body. In the same moment, a hand shot out past my shoulder, a semi-transparent silverish shield blossoming to practically the size of me.
At once, the heat dissipated. It hissed off the shield, blackening its surface until I could no longer see beyond it. And for a single glorious moment, I didn’t care who was behind me or why they had saved me.
I was only perfectly, animalistically thankful to be free of the scorching heat.
I went to glance over my shoulder, but that same arm now twirled me away from the fire, and as I stumbled backward, I managed to glimpse Erik’s face in profile.
It was his shield. He had saved me from the heat.
GoneGodDamn World Army tech, I thought with wry gratitude. Whatever that shield was made of, it seemed to stand up against the heat of Percy’s fire.
For now.
I couldn’t help but stare in awe at the brief but unforgettable portrait of him standing beneath a fire-breathing dragon. An archetypal warrior. Fearless. Protective.
A feeling surged in me that I had trouble recognizing. After all my years spent fiercely independent, did I want a man having my back? Not all the time, but sometimes?
I knew one thing for certain: I had never respected him more.
The shield resisted the dragonfire … until it didn’t. Before Erik could back away, the shield’s blackened edges began to crumple as they melted inward. With incredible speed, the fire ate along the edges of the dying shield until the flames encircled his hand.
Even the most advanced tech couldn’t stand up against one of the world’s most ancient, tectonic forces: a dragon’s fire.
“Drop!” I yelled as his hand caught fire, the inescapable blaze surging from his fingertips straight up to his forearm. Everything it touched, it blackened. The pain must have been agonizing; his mouth had opened to a rictus, his eyes going wide and unseeing.