The Fire Eater and Her Dragon: A Dragon Rider Urban Fantasy Novel (Setting Fires with Dragons Book 3)

by S. W. Clarke

“She’s aging,” Erik murmured.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’ll tell you, my gluteus maximus won’t be that saggy for another fifty years.”

  Grunt made a face—whether over Lust or my comment, I couldn’t say. “Ymir, give me strength.”

  “It wasn’t that bad a joke,” I shot back.

  “What joke?” He glanced up at me, swatting my confidence right to the ground. Then he went on, “Do you know why we ogres are viewed as disgusting, evil creatures by your kind?”

  “Because you don’t bathe and you whack people with stop signs?”

  “One of the many reasons your kind is prejudiced against us,” Grunt said, not a flicker of amusement on his face, “is because every year we would do a bloodletting to our god to renew his powers. Lust is using the admiration and desire of her followers to give her godlike powers.”

  Well tickle me sideways.

  “Of course. Why didn’t I see it?” Erik said, yanking a notepad out of his pocket to write on. “This must be how all the sins work.”

  All the sins? GoneGods, I didn’t even want to think about other sins. Avarice? Greed? Envy? Lust was hellish enough.

  My eyes returned to the screen, where Lust faced me as I aimed the hand cannon at her. “So what you’re saying is, she burns her time to make us all lustful so she has more time?”

  “Yes,” Grunt said simply.

  “Now that just doesn’t seem fair. If that isn’t some perpetual motion doohickey, I don’t know what is.”

  Erik kept scribbling. Grunt only returned his eyes to the screen, watching as Lust regained her powers.

  And me? My insides were tickling with the desire to move.

  “All right,” I said, turning to the two of them. “So we defeat her by stripping her of all adoration. Erik, you get your biggest gun with one of those missiles in it, and I …”

  Erik stopped writing, clicked his pen on the notepad. “It won’t work like that, Tara.”

  “I hadn’t even finished outlining the plan.”

  He met my eyes. “We’ll need a much more powerful magic disruptor to defeat Lust.”

  “So get one from the army.”

  “She has the vessel,” Grunt said.

  I glanced at him. “Ariadne, you mean?”

  “Yes. Nothing non-magical can defeat her now that she possesses the vessel’s body.”

  “Not even anti-magic missiles?” I said. “Big ones?”

  “Little girl,” Grunt said like he was reaching the end of his patience, “Valdis died to protect Ariadne. Don’t you have any idea why?”

  “She’s his child. He loved her.” Even as I said it, Valdis’s words came back to me. They were echoed by Grunt.

  “Her capture means the end of the world,” the ogre said. “And no matter what you thought of Valdis, he did not want to see this world end.”

  My eyes had gone unfocused as I remembered what Valdis had said. Now I stared at Grunt, pieces falling into place in a gut-wrenching way. “You’re one of the Scarred, Grunt.”

  He gave a single nod.

  “And why did you join them?”

  “The story is long, and our time is short.” He paused, and I could have sworn he must be the most eloquent, thoughtful ogre alive. “Suffice it to say, Valdis knew evil forces would come for Ariadne. The Scarred worked tirelessly over the past five years to prevent that.”

  Erik shook his head. “How did he know?”

  “He was the first vampire,” Grunt said. “He lived for thousands of years. He joined with a demon. Why would you put such a thing past him? And why, Soldier, do you imagine he had so many followers?”

  The Scarred.

  They were evil. They were thugs.

  They weren’t trying to save the world. Valdis wasn’t a hero.

  My hand came to my chest, squeezing at my jacket. Much as I tried to push the sickening sense my whole worldview was wrong, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. “Did he have any idea how to defeat these evil forces?” I said, feeling as responsible in this moment as Mariana herself must feel. We were, after all, of the same soul. And yet she was silent. Totally silent. I suspected she was in deep grief over Valdis’s death.

  “Immortality,” Grunt said, sending a shiver through me. “He knew he needed time. A great deal of it.”

  “And yet he’s dead,” I said. “He burned his time away.”

  “To make that.”

  We all turned. There stood Nikolaj in the doorway, his eyes ringed and red like he’d been crying. His finger pointed at the grip of the crystalline dagger in my boot.

  I knelt, lifted the dagger from my boot. “You know what this is?”

  Nikolaj’s eyes practically glittered with something like fear as he stared at it. “It’s a creation crystal.”

  “Creation crystal?” I echoed.

  From behind me, Erik sucked in a breath. When I glanced back at him, he was staring hard at the dagger. “The World Army has one of those,” Erik said. “We keep it locked behind three doors and four guards.”

  The chair squeaked as Grunt stood behind me. “The little girl has Valdis’s creation crystal?”

  I took a step toward Erik, turning to keep both of Valdis’s former henchmen in my periphery. Erik kept close to me, a warming presence at my back. I could tell he was ready to defend me if need be. “Why does this sound so ominous, fellas?” I asked.

  Grunt eyed the dagger in my hand. “GoneGods, do you know the power of what you possess?”

  “I’m starting to get a sense of it,” I said, gripping it harder. “But I’d like to hear the full explanation from one of you.”

  Grunt and Nikolaj met eyes from across the room, as though debating who should tell me what, and how much. Finally, Grunt sighed. “What you hold is rarer than an unscratched diamond. It is an object of immense power, and it’s telling that Valdis burned the last of his life to craft it into a dagger for you.”

  “But what am I supposed to do with it?” I insisted, looking between the three of them. “Stab Lust?”

  Silence fell, then Nikolaj said, “Valdis didn’t tell you what to do?”

  “He was kind of busy dying. He just said Mariana and I needed it.” I gestured with my dagger-hand for them to be more forthcoming. “So …?”

  “I do not know,” Grunt said. “You are but a human without magic. I have no idea of his intention for you.”

  I let out a long, slow breath. Enough of this faffing around; I needed answers about this creation crystal, and I needed to know where to find Percy.

  “But,” Grunt added, “I know who gave him the crystal. If anyone would know about its use, he would.”

  I didn’t like the sound of the way he’d said that. It struck me as … reluctant. Foreboding. “Who?” I asked.

  “Typhon. He runs The Restaurant.”

  “Not a restaurant?”

  “No,” Grunt said. “The Restaurant.”

  “And where is this restaurant?”

  Grunt’s barrel lungs took in a heap of air, and he sighed it all out. “New York City.”

  Back where we started. Fitting.

  I already knew I would go to the ends of the earth for Percy; it didn’t take a second’s thought to consider whether I’d trek my way back across the country.

  “Nikolaj,” I said, “take us to the garage. I need a car. A fast one.”

  Nikolaj regarded me with those haunted eyes. “You want to meet him.”

  I pressed my lips together, nodding.

  “I will show you to the garage,” he said. “After the burial.”

  Chapter 24

  “A burial?” I said as I followed Nikolaj through the house toward the darkened office. “Why? Valdis is dead—he won’t care.”

  Nikolaj didn’t even look back at me. “We do not bury the dead for their sake.”

  Sullen heat swelled in my chest, and I said something Mariana would never say. “None of you gave my family a proper burial when you murdered them.”

  Now Nikol
aj did stop. He hadn’t quite crossed through the double doors, and I had to avoid running into him. He stared at me for a second, evaluating me. “I didn’t know your family.”

  “So they didn’t deserve a burial?”

  “I didn’t care one way or another.”

  I resisted tackling him to the ground and throttling him with Thelma. Barely.

  He noticed my fingers folding to fists. When his eyes flicked down and back up, he didn’t move. “You want to hit me? If it’ll make you feel better, do it. I deserve it. But I am burying Valdis.”

  “Why?” I said. “Why do you even care about him? He turned you into a vampire and made you his servant for seven hundred years. Your life hung in Mariana’s hands. You hated her.”

  “You didn’t know him,” Nikolaj said. “He was a killer, but he was like a lion protecting his pride. And I … failed him. When the moment came, I ran.”

  Even through the gauze of my anger, I didn’t miss the misery in his voice. I forced myself to focus on his face. There, I saw the same haunted sadness I’d seen when I had let him out of the grandfather clock.

  But now it held new meaning.

  He hadn’t just been terrified. He’d been stricken with grief.

  I took a step back and felt a form behind me. When I turned, I found Grunt gazing down at me. Even in the soft lamplight, I recognized sadness in his eyes, too.

  “You want to bury him as well,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I would carry him,” Grunt said. “It would be my honor.”

  His honor.

  I took another step back down the hall, bringing the two of them into view. And as I did, my hand came up to my chest. Mariana resided there; the pain I’d felt when Percy left was the same pain I felt now.

  Grief. I was grieving Percy, and she was grieving the loss of her husband and daughter.

  Valdis was already dead. My vendetta was over. Which left three hurting people, and I wanted to begrudge them placing a dead body in the earth.

  What would Percy think of me if he were here?

  “Do what you have to do,” I whispered.

  At that, Grunt and Nikolaj headed into the office to retrieve Valdis.

  “Thank you,” Mariana’s voice murmured in my head. “It means a great deal to me.”

  “I didn’t do it for you or Nikolaj or Grunt,” I said to her. “I did it for Percival. I did it so I might be deserving of that little dragon.”

  To her credit, Mariana said nothing. It was true: she was cooler-headed than me. She didn’t have to fight all the time.

  I stood in the hallway, and Erik appeared at my side. His good hand came to my elbow. “I know.”

  “What do you know?” I said, glancing up at him. Had he somehow noticed me talking to Mariana?

  “The feeling you’re experiencing right now.”

  Oh. “I really doubt that,” I said without thinking.

  He could have gotten prickly with me. He could have walked away. Instead, he gave me a sad smile. “I’m a corporal in the World Army. You don’t think I’ve been where you are, Tara?”

  The sound of my name from him brought a new level of focus. I stared at him—his eyes, his dark eyebrows, his straight nose and lips. For the first time, I spotted a hairline scar right at the corner of his mouth. And another one by his left eyebrow.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, surprising myself. I wasn’t one to apologize, especially not standing this close to someone. “I’m just … a mess right now. I hated Valdis. I’ve hated him every day of my life since I was fifteen.”

  He took all this in, his hazel eyes never leaving mine. “But you’re letting them bury him.”

  I shrugged as Grunt came out carrying Valdis’s shrunken, withered body. He turned toward the front entrance. “Don’t make a big deal of it,” I said to Erik, following after behind Grunt and Nikolaj.

  In this moment, I didn’t want Erik’s hand to leave my elbow. And I was secretly glad when he kept pace with me.

  ↔

  I didn’t want to be present for the burial, but I knew I had to be. Mariana and I were inextricable from one another, and she would want—deserve—to see her husband buried.

  Frank had declined to come out—he was too heartbroken over Seleema. So the four of us came out onto the half-decimated front porch. As we did, I stared down at the Soul Hunter’s headless frame. “If we’re burying Valdis, then we ought to bury the Soul Hunter, too.”

  Nikolaj paused at the base of the steps. “Why?”

  Erik knelt immediately, glancing up at me. He gets it. “Can you help me? I’ve only got one good arm.”

  I knelt with him, and the two of us lifted the Soul Hunter’s body. It was surprisingly light. “Because,” I said to Nikolaj, “no matter what came before, he died for us in the end.”

  Even if he was once my enemy, that meant something.

  We crossed the lawn with the two bodies. It wasn’t the smooth, manicured expanse I had seen a day before; now, an enormous meteor had carved a trench through it. Ghoul bodies lay scattered for us to pick our way through. Scorchmarks had blackened branches and grass.

  We came to an untouched spot around the side of the house. There, a small garden had grown around an outdoor gazebo. The floodlights off the side of the house illuminated a trellis with white flowers grown into its lattices.

  The next hour was spent preparing the graves. Grunt did most of the digging with a shovel he’d retrieved from the nearby shed. He made quick work of the soft Texan earth, and soon we were lowering each body into their respective spots.

  As we stood over the two graves, Nikolaj turned to me. I knew this was the moment I would have to relinquish my body to Mariana. But I didn’t like it.

  “Don’t worry,” she said into my head, clearly feeling my feelings. “I won’t be long.”

  “Not this time, at least,” I said back to her. But eventually, you’ll take over forever, I thought but didn’t say.

  When she took control of my body, she crossed to the trellis and picked one of the blooms. She returned to the grave and stood there clasping it between her fingers. She lowered her head in the sort of soft, mournful way I had seen other people do when they were sad about things.

  Not me. Never me.

  I showed my sadness through movement, action, sound. I wanted to burn the feelings away, to evaporate them like water on a hot pan.

  We really were two different people, Mariana and me.

  Nikolaj and Grunt stood in similar poses at either side of the grave. Erik stayed silent by my side.

  “When I was a child, our village leader always said the same thing at burials,” Mariana began. “He was the oldest man in the village, and we assumed the wisest. He would say, ‘We celebrate their passing, for they go to a better place.’ ”

  Nikolaj made a noise of approval. Maybe the same phrase had been said in his village, too—he and Mariana were from the same time and place, after all.

  “But that’s no longer true,” Mariana said. “Because the gods are gone, and there is no such place. Valdis died knowing this, but he gave his life regardless. That was the man I saw when I married him, when I bore him a child. He would pass into non-existence to protect those who had entered his heart. His love was timeless.”

  But what about those who hadn’t entered his heart? What about love for your fellow man?

  I didn’t realize until Mariana spoke of Valdis how much anger still remained inside me. Because hearing her talk about his “timeless love” only made me think of my family.

  And thinking about how my family died—needlessly, without a second thought—made me want to fight for them all over again.

  No one had given them their burial. No one had acknowledged how brutal and senseless it was. When I’d run away, I had never gone back.

  I should have buried them myself, I thought, not for the first time. Shame spread through my chest like wildfire.

  “He was also a murderer,” Mariana said, and all my thoughts dr
opped away. If I could have held my breath, I would have.

  “I bore witness to countless killings,” she went on. “I cried for the people who passed. I tried to protect others. But I remember them all.”

  Their names entered my head like a mantra.

  Mom. Dad. Thelma.

  Mom. Dad. Thelma.

  And then, unexpectedly, I felt Mariana’s grief for all those who had died by Valdis’s hands. So many more than my three family members. Men, women, children. Even as she cared for Valdis the vampire, she was sincere in her empathy for her fellow humans.

  The two could coexist.

  And for a second, my small world expanded.

  Her fingers tightened. “I believe, at the end, he wanted to atone for the horrible things he did in his life. He wanted to protect Ariadne not just for her sake, but for the world’s sake. He gave all he had—his life—so that ours would continue on.”

  She opened her hand, allowing the small flower to fall into the grave with Valdis.

  By now, Grunt was weeping and sniffing, swiping the back of his large hand against his eyes.

  Across from him, Nikolaj’s chin had lowered to his chest. I couldn’t tell if he was crying or not, but he was certainly different altogether than the times I had seen him before—sullen and angry.

  Now he seemed truly mournful.

  Nikolaj and Grunt said a few words themselves, but my mind was caught on a silly, selfish question. The white flowers on the trellis trembled in a warm summer breeze, and I wondered if they were snowdrops.

  I wondered what it would be like to be remembered and adored for seven hundred years. What kind of person did you have to be? Mariana didn’t seem perfect, but she seemed … kind. Run-of-the-mill kind, even. She had softness and empathy amidst her shrewdness, and that was all it had taken to capture Valdis’s heart for a millennia.

  Was that all it took to earn a trellis of snowdrops—basic kindness?

  And if so, could I even accomplish that? The past five years had been … tumultuous. Full of fire and bloodlust.

  Most people were forgotten within three generations, dust to dust, and briefly—for a few decades—given a name and a place in the world.