by C. E. Murphy
Gancanagh had disappeared. Quel surprise. Méabh’s silver sword barely dented the dragon’s scales, but on the other hand, neither it nor she nor her armor were melting as the monster spat fire at her again. I knew I should leap up and rush to her side, but I didn’t have a damned thing to fight a dragon with. My sword was missing, and besides that, not much use, if Méabh’s was any indication. My power never had cottoned on to being used as a weapon, and frankly, I didn’t think a dragon would be much impressed if I went after it with tooth and nail.
The damned bite flared up again, suggesting I had more tooth and nail at my disposal than usual. I ground my teeth and reached past both pain and temptation—the goddamned thing didn’t hurt when I gave in, at least not once the actual transformation was over—and rather pathetically whispered, Rattler? at the back of my mind. Any chance we can push past the poison for a…normal…shapeshifting?
Perhaps. The magic is there. But the taint is…distracting. My poor snaky spirit guide was really wiped out, if he wasn’t getting all sibilant on his esses. Fix a simple shape in mind, Siobhán Walkingssstick. Something familiar to us both. Something—
“Something that strikes?” I started shimmying out of my clothes. Caitríona dropped her fists to gape at me and I handed her my glasses. “Don’t let them get crunched, okay?”
She took them speechlessly and I interpreted that as agreement. Everything else, including my precious, ruined coat, became a pile on the ground as Rattler coiled himself in my mind. He got stronger the tighter he curled on himself, like he was concentrating his focus so we might shove past the poison trying to turn me into a monster. He balled up smaller and smaller, becoming brighter and brighter, and just at the moment he became incandescent, I snapped the image of what I wanted to become into place.
It was not supposed to feel like the world was being torn apart. Like I was being torn apart. Like my left arm, specifically, had gone to war with the rest of me, resisting transformation with a will of its own. I was a mass of twisting bones, trying to find a shape that satisfied me, but the shape I wanted was at odds with the werewolf’s curse. I changed partway and gasped for breath, caught in a loop of unending shifts.
A hiss erupted from somewhere near the bottom of Rattler’s snaky little soul. He lunged for the wrongness permeating my magic, his jaws gaping in a reminder that snakes could and did eat things three times their own size, and he fastened on to the werewolf’s bite from the inside.
Magic pumped through his bite, spirit animal power at war with demonic determination. That flood of strength backed up my own magic, all the power that had for days been frantically trying to keep me from transforming. Then it superseded my power, freeing up a magic that was working overtime, and between one breath and the next the pain of prolonged shifting was gone. I flowed into my new shape, and struck.
Méabh flung herself to the side as I threw myself into the fray. For an instant she looked as though I might be a fresh new enemy, but Caitríona’s protest reverberated off my ear bones when Méabh lifted her sword against me. Then I was nose to nose with a more-than-slightly shocked dragon, and much like Rattler had done, I dropped my jaw in my own version of a snaky grin. The dragon backed the hell up, all three heads taking a break from breathing fire to get a good look at me instead.
I was pretty sure I was worth looking at, what with being fifteen feet of rattlesnake. Fifteen feet of raspy muscle and rattling tail and, very importantly, of venom-injecting fangs. The dragon was bulkier, but not a lot longer. It had fire, but I was betting I had speed. It had claws, but I had—
—all right, still with the speed, but that was going to have to be enough. I coiled and struck all at once, relying on my peculiar heat-sensing snaky vision to find the dragon’s most vulnerable spots. The throats, in this case: there were heat blooms in all three throats, suggesting the fire it spat was engendered right there. My teeth closed on the nearest throat, quenching the fire a-borning.
Quenching that fire a-borning, anyway. The dragon screamed with its other two throats and flame washed over me. It didn’t burn, my shields as strong in a shapeshifted form as they were as a human, but my muscles kind of melted anyway. Sunshine melting, the happiness of a snake baking on a desert rock. If I’d had shoulders they would have sagged, and as it was, I dragged the head I’d captured with me toward the ground as comfort sluiced through me.
Clearly I had not thought this whole “fighting as a snake” thing through. I clenched my teeth harder, determined not to let the one throat go even if I had to take a little nap mid-battle. The dragon spat flame again, then coiled its other two heads down to gnash at me with multitudinous teeth. I had a much bigger mouth than theirs, and while I could get my teeth around one of their throats, they couldn’t exchange the favor. That was good, since although I assumed poison was pumping through its veins by now, I had no idea how much it took to bring down a dragon, nor was I certain that rattlesnakes poisoned their prey rather than suffocating them. It was possible the poison was just a paralytic to make the suffocating easier, which would be less helpful than it could be if I had one mouth and three necks to choke. And Rattler, who presumably might offer some insight into those questions, had gone quiet inside the confines of my skull. I suspected he might still be fighting the infection, and didn’t really want to disturb him for fear breaking his concentration might send me back to the spasms of conflicting shapeshifts.
The dragon backed up, dragging my melty self with it. I caught a glimpse of the distant blobs that were Méabh and Caitríona, both of them emitting a kind of cool uncertainty that had to be psychic but still registered in my heat-based vision. I wanted to yell to them, to say, “Come on in, the water’s fine!” except I had a mouthful of dragon and the damned thing wasn’t suffocating fast enough. Nor would it ever, with two more windpipes to breathe through. I gave up on the hope of suffocating it, let go and hoped the poison would do the trick before the encroaching warmth-induced sleepies did me in.
To my great satisfaction, the head I’d been hanging on to flopped down in a convincing approximation of lifelessness. Possibly it would pull itself back together, but that was a problem for when it happened. No longer stymied by its weight, I slithered and wriggled forward. Dragon teeth slid off my scales and shields, making uncomfortable sparks but not quite managing to hold me.
The ground was warm. Hot, even. Sun-baked-stone hot. I bet dragons liked that as much as snakes, but the dragon had feet and I had a fifteen-foot-long belly pressed against all that cozy warmth. I didn’t think snake eyes could cross with pleasure, but mine nearly did anyway. I hissed, more to wake myself up than anything else, and coiled up as tight as I could so less of me was on the nice warm ground. There had to be a hot springs or a lava bubble or something beneath us to make it that warm. Not that Ireland was well-known for either of those things. But then, the bleak hell dimension I’d accidentally visited while trying to fight the wendigo had some lava-bubble-like aspects, and I had the uncomfortable feeling we were closer to that place than I’d like us to be.
My blunt nose hit the ground at the end of all that contemplation, and the dragon jumped on me like the vulnerable prey I was. I flattened and, shields or no, felt cartilage crunching under the monster’s weight. The idea that my shields were weakened by my warmth and contentedness swam through my mind. A dragon’s head, all glazed eyes and lolling tongue and torn-out throat, flopped into my vision. It was cooler than it had been, details fading, which probably meant I’d managed to kill one-third of the beast. Too bad about napping through the encore.
Caitríona stalked up and hit me in the face with a snow flurry.
Shocking cold ripped me from my stupor. I surged up, shaking my head—my whole upper half, since snake heads weren’t hooked on the way human heads were—and spat a forky tongue at my cousin.
She blanched, body heat visibly paling, but she stood her ground, hands lifted in the heart of a tiny snowstorm. I hissed again, ready to have the interfering little human
for lunch, but one of the dragon’s still-living heads struck at her and I remembered what I was there for.
Lack of ears or not, I certainly felt Caitríona’s screech as I launched myself over her head to meet the oncoming dragon. The snowstorm stopped, but I was full of vim and vigor again, ready to take the fight to the mat. Caitríona disappeared from my awareness, presumably having ducked under me and sensibly run away. The dragon and I met in midair above where she’d been, and I swallowed its head.
I didn’t exactly mean to. It was just a rattlesnake’s attack came in the form of gaping jaws, and none of the dragon’s heads were very big. It was like the mass of a normal one-headed dragon’s head had been split into three, which meant my head was bigger than its, and my mouth opened a whole lot farther. It all made for an unfortunately literal head-on collision.
For an instant there we both froze, the dragon mid-fiery-belch, me as bug-eyed and freaked out as a snake could get. Then the dragon finished its burp and fire shot down my throat. I had no voice to scream with, and even if I did, I had a mouthful of dragon stifling the sound. Pain and outrage were expressed by my rattle suddenly sounding like a buzz saw preparing to cut the world apart. I thought swallowing fire like that should probably kill me. I also kind of thought, well, insides are wet, probably it’ll just quench the fire, and by some faint grace, my power responded accordingly. Possibly being shapeshifted gave me access to my internal magics, since I was no longer fighting the good fight against the werewolf bite. There was an argument, then, for staying shifted until we got out of Gancanagh’s territory alive.
Which was a questionable outcome, just then. I had no incisors, just two great long fangs, so biting the thing’s head off wasn’t an option. I was grateful for that, really. Swallowing fire was bad enough. I could not imagine the grossitude of a gullet filled with dragon blood.
The dragon, not at all happy with having one of its two remaining heads swallowed, began thrashing and bellowing. It had feet. I didn’t. It could get purchase on the ground. I couldn’t.
I went whipping around, hanging on to a dragon’s neck for dear life. My rattle was going full bore thanks to the dragon’s ministrations: I, certainly, wasn’t the one shaking it. The peat-bog earth was softer than I expected, my body whacking divots out of it as I was slammed up and down. The remaining head kept lashing at me, trying to break through my shields and scales with teeth or fire, it didn’t care. I wanted to bite it, too, but I was afraid to let go of the head I had. It’d taken a couple minutes to suffocate the other one. I didn’t want to release this one too soon and earn only a reprieve, not a victory, against the beast.
Power tingled along the entire length of my spine. I opened my eyes—I hadn’t even known they were closed—and saw absolutely nothing of where it was coming from. Magic didn’t have a visible component most of the time, even if I wasn’t relying on a snake’s heat vision. I could See power in a sort of uninteresting grayscale when snakeshifted, but I was more than a little concerned about what triggering the Sight might do when I was eyeball deep in dragon and Rattler was somewhere in the dark of my mind making sure I didn’t lose control over the shape I currently held. I got bashed into the ground again, bit down harder and decided unless something actively attacked I would assume the upsurge in magic use was from somebody on my team.
Méabh justified that decision by sweeping in and decapitating the head I’d captured. The headless neck fell away and the remaining living dragon head screamed while the rattlesnake part of my brain automatically swallowed. The human part gagged and choked, but it was too late. I had eaten a dragon head. Whole. That was going to cause some serious, serious problems when I turned back into a human, which idea was horrible enough that I gagged again.
Snakes, it turned out, could regurgitate. I’d had no idea. I had also never been so grateful to learn something so disgusting. I spat out a dragon’s head, stared at it and shuddered all the way down the considerable length of my body. I could’ve stayed there the rest of the day, gagging and being grossed out, but Méabh yelled. The sound reverberated off my skin and I glanced up to see her charging the last dragon head with all the enthusiasm in the world. I sprang after her, foregoing the whole biting scenario to wind myself around the beast’s body and haul its head back to expose what I hoped was a vulnerable throat. I was no boa constrictor, but snakes were all muscle, and the dragon was in sorry shape. Méabh, still yelling, struck off the remaining head, and the entire monster collapsed into waves of deep red, almost black, magic. Dissolved, just like the Red Cap had done. I landed in the dirt and magic with a crash while Méabh staggered a few steps back, her body heat peaking and fading as adrenaline crested, then drained away.
Rattler whispered Sssuccesss at the back of my mind, then nudged me. I clung to the idea of my own shape, and slid toward it, shedding the rattlesnake shape as I became myself again. Pain flared in my arm again and I clutched it. I thought you said success?
We defeated the dragon, did we not? he asked irritably, which was fair enough. I sent a wave of apology at him, and he slipped away, leaving a sense of weariness behind. I’d been asking too much of him the past few days. We needed a break, he and I.
A break we weren’t likely to get. Caitríona said, “You took off all your clothes and turned into a snake.”
“Yes. Yes, I did. And you…” I didn’t even know what she’d done. I peered at her through the gloom, hoping for an answer.
She came toward me cautiously, her arms full of my clothes as she mumbled, “Sure and I’ll just set it on fire with me mind,” in embarrassment, and dropped my clothes. I scrambled into them, trying hard not to wonder if Gancanagh was still around and watching.
“You said Auntie Sheila’d said magery was about spell casting and preparation,” Cat said. “I got to thinking the way I’d said it, set it on fire with me mind, so many times, and I thought maybe that was an enchantment in itself. And it was so warm, like the peat was roasting, and I started thinking heat into snow, that’s the way it should go, and then it was on me lips and—and—”
“And then she went without shield or sword to draw you back from stupor,” Méabh finished with great satisfaction. A far cry from the woman who’d been annoyed at Caitríona’s sudden maturity into adepthood a few hours ago, she now all but overflowed with pride. “My granddaughters are warriors indeed.”
“We are, but Cat’s wiped out.” I was only half-dressed, but I managed to half catch my cousin just as her eyes crossed. She didn’t faint, but she thumped down with a woozy groan, and I called another pulse of healing power up for her.
It responded as well as it had done earlier—external magics were still okay, apparently—but it enflamed the werewolf bite again, too. I bared my teeth at it. I wanted the itch to go away. More, I didn’t want to give in again to the bone-deep nagging impulse to transform, and the deeper we went into the Master-tainted land, the harder I thought it would be to stay on the straight and narrow.
Caitríona looked healthier when she lifted her gaze. “Why does that keep happening to me?”
“Magic comes from two places. Within, which is what you’re using now, and which is exhausting, and without, which is what we did with the power circle. You totally saved my bacon, but try not to do that again until I’ve shown you how to build a circle. I’m thinking maybe mages need one even more than shamans.” Or at least more than this particular shaman, but I wasn’t going to get into that. “Méabh, what did you do? The sword wasn’t working against the drag—”
“The Aillén Trechend,” Cat said before I’d even finished the word. Apparently she didn’t want dragons to exist any more than I wanted, say, vampires to. I paused obligingly, waiting for her explanation, and she gave a stiff shrug. “It’s the beast that beleaguers Tara. It rises from the…” She trailed off to give first me, then the dank, warm peat bog a wide-eyed look. “From the bowels of the earth to savage the sacred circle every twenty-three years. Or it did do, in times gone by. Auntie Sheila alwa
ys told me the old stories about it and all the other monsters. Was she…?”
“Preparing you? Yeah, I think maybe she was.” A pang struck me. I might’ve been the one Mom told all the stories to, if things had been very different. Caitríona saw the regret in my expression and looked uncomfortable, obviously searching for something to say. I shook my head. “No grudges, Cat. It’s played out this way. We’ll go with it. I’m just glad you were there for her to teach.”
Her shy smile was worth letting that regret go. I smiled back, then exhaled and looked toward Méabh. “So what’d you do? The sword couldn’t touch the…Aileen Treygent…at first.” Irish pronunciation was not my strong suit, but neither of my family members chose to correct me.
“I called on the power of the land, as I did to bind the wolves. A power circle, Joanne, to guide the sword’s strength. Against mortal enemies the blade is true, but when the taint it fights is older than its forging…” Méabh shook her head.
I finished getting dressed as she spoke, and asked a question I didn’t much want the answer to: “How much older?”
“You already know.” Gancanagh spoke from beside me, nearly earning himself a punch in the nose by doing so. He gave me a wink, a once-over and a sly smile, and I did punch him, because Morrison, who he still reminded me of, wouldn’t have been so crass. He clutched his upper arm where I’d hit him, looking crestfallen, and as if hoping to get back in my good graces, said, “The Aillén Trechend has risen from the depths since the ard rí Bres was stolen from time. This is a blow, gwyld. This is a blow against the dark one.”
Morrison wouldn’t have called me gwyld, either. I almost started to like Gancanagh for that. For differentiating himself. Then I remembered he’d led us smack into the dragon’s jaws, and again lifted a fist to hit him. “You said evil’s lair!” he blurted before I could. “Not Aibhill’s! And we’d reached evil’s lair, had we not? Even the mistress of banshees places guards between herself and the world, and her domain lies just beyond. You don’t want to be without me, not yet.”