Dragon Spawn

by Eileen Wilks

  The two kinds of demons didn’t mix. The four-eyes stayed bunched up together near the entrance jabbering at each other, while the red-eyed hyena types wandered around the big room. Did that mean the red-eyed demons were higher status or nastier than the others? Maybe the two were the same thing with demons.

  A ring of fire three feet high penned in Toby and the kids in the middle of the room. It was real fire, too, not the fake kind Cullen sometimes used. Toby was hot and sweaty from sitting near it, but he didn’t have much choice. Their circle of floor wasn’t very big. He wiped his forehead. Three of the hyena demons stopped just on the other side of the fire and stared at him with those glowing red eyes.

  Their stares should have scared him. And they did, only not enough, because they made the hot, growling presence inside him angry. Made him want to stare back and force them to either back down or fight him. And that was about as stupid as any thought he’d ever had. Was his wolf crazy?

  Ryder babbled something, sounding cranky, and pulled his hair. He switched her to his other shoulder. His arms ached, but he didn’t dare put her down because of the fire. She could move really fast when she wanted. He and Diego were sitting with their backs together, with Sandy cuddled up against them, dozing. Touching each other like this helped. At least it helped Toby. He hoped it did something for the others, too.

  “I don’t think your dad’s coming.” Diego’s voice was tight with the effort of not crying.

  “He’ll come.” Ryder squirmed and whimpered. Toby wanted to whimper, too. He was so tired. He didn’t want to comfort her and change her and feed her and play with her and . . . he just wanted to sleep. He wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep and sleep until his dad showed up. Because he would show up. Toby knew that. He just didn’t know when.

  “Don’t let her start crying again,” Diego said. “She’ll wake Noah up.”

  Diego had it easy. Newborn babies sleep a lot. They weigh a lot less than nine-month-old babies, too. Ryder was pulling his hair again, announcing, “Da! Da!” Which might mean all sorts of things, but added to her squirming, probably meant she wanted to be put down. Toby lowered Ryder to his lap. “Where’s Toby?” he said, holding his hands in front of his face and trying for a happy voice. “Here’s Toby!” He dropped his hands and made an astonished face.

  A month ago, she’d found that hilarious. Not so much now. Cullen said Ryder was at the discovery stage, which meant crawling as fast as she could in exactly the wrong direction, finding objects she shouldn’t have, then scattering them, destroying them, or trying to eat them, and screaming with rage when you took them away. The screaming-with-rage part was supposed to be optional, Cullen said, but Ryder considered it de rigueur. Toby thought de rigueur was probably French for “hardwired into her operating system.”

  Sure enough, she had no interest in playing peekaboo and oozed out of his lap like a chubby snake. “Stand up like a big girl,” he urged before she could escape entirely, taking her hands. Standing up was a new enough skill to hold Ryder’s attention awhile . . . he hoped.

  * * *

  THE ground was hard beneath a liberal covering of pebbles and dust. Lily and most of the others sat on that hard ground about halfway up the side of a slope. Most, not all; Max had already left on his mission and Cullen was about twenty feet away, lying flat at the top of that slope. Watching.

  Quite a view from up there . . . if you liked rock. Rock in pebbles, chunks, slabs, and broken blocks littered the ground all around the dead volcano, the detritus of half a mountain tossed every which way when a demon prince ate something that didn’t agree with her. Their spot was roughly midway between a jagged break in the caldera’s walls— hidden from here by the jumble of rock—and another opening. One much smaller and hidden by more than rock.

  Turned out that Rule’s dragon-imparted map didn’t just cover the tunnels beneath the caldera’s surface, but also some of the land around it. That’s how he’d been able to bring them here.

  Lily shook her head, frustrated. “It’s not working. I’m not getting any pulses back. You’re not thinking words at me.”

  Rule had wanted Lily to try acquiring his implanted knowledge through mindspeech, but mindspeech was not telepathy. She only picked up thoughts framed in words, and not all of those—only the thoughts the sender considered speech. That suggested to Cullen that intention was part of the package, so Rule had tried intending to send Lily the knowledge he’d acquired from the dragon. No go.

  Rule ran a hand through his hair. “Dammit. Why couldn’t Reno have sent the info to everyone?”

  “I don’t see how he could send it at all, so I can’t answer that.”

  He grimaced. “At least you’ll have Gan with you.”

  Lily knew what was really bugging Rule. It bothered her, too.

  Cynna shrugged. Lily hadn’t been sure her friend was paying attention, but apparently she had. “I may not have dragon-implanted knowledge, but I’m a Finder. I can follow a damn map, even that pathetic excuse for one you sketched in the dirt. And I know where the children are.”

  “I’ve been known to follow a map, too,” Benedict said dryly. “Though we can’t rely on Reno’s information too heavily. The physical features, maybe, but not the location of the demons. They won’t necessarily stay where they were.”

  “No.” Rule glanced at his watch. “Two minutes for questions, if anyone has them.”

  Rule had been forced to come up with a plan in a hurry. He’d pulled together a good one, Lily thought, even if she did hate part of it. The same part he hated. She would be in Benedict’s party, not Rule’s.

  Splitting up was chancy when they were so few, but Rule’s dragon-imparted knowledge of the underground ways made it a chance worth taking. That, plus Cullen’s demon bomb and Gan’s gastronomically acquired memories. The moment Cullen spotted the power flare marking Reno’s departure, Rule would lead him, Carlos, Daniel, Mason, and Jude racing loudly into the caldera on dirt bikes. To make sure everyone noticed, they were taking the grenades.

  That’s when Max would contribute his bit by dropping explosives—something called military dynamite—down one of the ventilation shafts. That shaft was well away from where the children were, and right on top of a room that might or might not hold a dozen demons. It had when Reno mapped the place, but whether they were there now . . . anyway, while Max’s boom and Rule’s party drew all the attention, Benedict’s party would descend into the tunnels via a hidden entrance. Hidden didn’t mean unguarded, but Reno’s information suggested a single sentry just inside a small chamber. It might even be the same sentry Xitil had used, which Gan described as a giant spider-shaped demon with suckers on its legs.

  Mason asked about the unused bikes—the ones Benedict’s party wouldn’t be riding, for their target was less than half a mile away. An easy run. Just leave them, Rule said. Daniel asked about the rendezvous point . . . “If we can’t reach the intended rendezvous, shouldn’t we have a backup spot?”

  “If that happens,” Rule said, “the situation will likely be too fluid for plans we make now to be applicable. Lily and I can always find each other.”

  Fluid meant chaotic and bloody. Lily was grimly aware of how often and how radically plans changed the moment you engaged the enemy. Assuming Benedict’s party made it past the door guards, though, reaching the children should be fairly straightforward. Not easy, but straightforward. And they would, as Rule had noted, have Gan with them. The former demon had once eaten one of Xitil’s councillors or courtiers or something—a being very familiar with the palace, anyway. When one demon ate another, it consumed more than flesh. Gan possessed “old Mevroax’s” memories.

  Rule’s party would do their damnedest to make it all the way down to the chamber where the children were, but that wasn’t their only goal. They went in to kill demons. As many as possible. Benedict’s group didn’t just have to reach the kids. They had to get
out again—carrying two babies and a four-year-old and protecting the two older boys. Then they had to get to a stable node and stay alive while Gan went to tell Byuset and the other gnomes where to open the gate, then wait for that gate to open. Best to kill as many demons up front as possible.

  Not that demons were all they’d have to deal with.

  “And if she isn’t as preoccupied as Reno thinks she will be?” Benedict asked.

  “I’ll answer that one. She will be.” Cullen had spoken softly without taking his eyes off his view of the caldera. They weren’t trying for dead silence; she knew they were here. The Great Bitch shouldn’t be able to eavesdrop on them—her magic would be sufficiently repelled by that of Rule’s mantles to disrupt clairaudience, which was one of the more delicate Gifts. But there were several other ways she might detect them, so they assumed she knew exactly where they were . . . and hadn’t sent anyone to deal with them. Which meant this was a trap.

  They still had to go. At least they would have the element of surprise in one important way: Reno. She didn’t know about him, and his departure would alter the situation radically.

  Something Lily hadn’t felt since coming to this place drifted across her cheek. She shivered.

  “What is it?” Rule asked sharply.

  “Just a sorcéri.”

  “Are you sure? If it was some kind of probe—”

  “It felt exactly like a sorcéri. It didn’t feel like mind magic.”

  “I thought there wasn’t any ambient magic here.”

  Cullen responded without looking at them. “Not in the surrounding land, but the caldera’s bound to have sorcéri, with those twin nodes. I’ve seen a few drifting nearby. The wonder is that there aren’t more. By all rights, the ley lines ought to be throwing them like crazy, and they aren’t. I don’t know how the hell she managed that. All the igneous rock helps, but doesn’t explain . . . our Enemy’s a tidy bitch, though.”

  “Back to my question,” Benedict said. “What if you’re wrong? What if she doesn’t give her full attention to the instabilities?”

  “That would mean we all died, making the point moot. We’re talking about hydrogen bomb amounts of power, Benedict, caught in mid-explosion. Multiple hydrogen bombs, because she will have to stabilize two nodes and the magical construct, plus the ley lines feeding it. And all of it chaotic as hell—no, worse than that. To some extent she’ll be dealing directly with chaos energy. You don’t know what that means. I barely do,” he admitted, “but if you think of her task as hopping on one foot across a thin wire strung all the way across the Grand Canyon while juggling a dozen primed grenades . . . in a thunderstorm . . . while someone randomly yanks on your other foot, you’ll have some idea.”

  A moment’s silence. Rule spoke. “You’re not reassuring me.”

  Cullen had shrugged. “We have to assume Reno’s right and the Great Bitch can pull that off. Any other possibility renders our planning unnecessary.”

  “True. And while we will hope that Weng will focus on my group, we can’t—Cynna. Pay attention.”

  Cynna snapped back into focus with a scowl. “I was checking on Ryder.”

  “So I guessed. If you check on her as often when you’re belowground as you have been above, Tom Weng will have no trouble surprising you.”

  “Your bunch is supposed to draw his attention.”

  “If you rely on that and Weng doesn’t take my bait, you make yourself and your party easy targets for him. You all die, and Ryder remains in his hands.”

  A muscle jumped in Cynna’s jaw. She gave a short nod.

  Tom Weng—dragon spawn and sorcerer. Probably a mage rather than a true adept, according to Sam, but “mage” was an extremely broad category, and they knew he was capable of complex and powerful spell-casting. Weng was the reason each party needed someone capable of slinging magic around: Cullen with Rule’s party, Cynna with Benedict’s. Grandmother would be with Benedict’s party, too, but she’d be limited in what she could do magically. A tiger can’t use the oral components necessary to cast most spells. Rule and Benedict had argued briefly about which form Grandmother should be in, but that was a waste of time, as Lily had pointed out. Whatever they decided, Grandmother would do it her way.

  Her way turned out to be remaining on four feet. She’d informed Lily via mindspeech that it took a great deal of power to transform, and she preferred not to expend that much in a place where magic was in short supply. Also, without her, Benedict would be the only member of their party who stood a chance of fighting demons up close and personal. They’d do their best to avoid that, of course, but if they were rushed by enough demons, some might get past their weapon fire. Or drop from the ceiling. Or pop up from the floor. Or find some other way to throw a surprise party for their visitors.

  Lily’s ability should cut down on surprises, but her range would be limited underground. Plus she wasn’t sure she’d notice a whole troop of demon minds if she were busy enough—say, trying to kill a red-eye or two.

  She was really hoping there wouldn’t be any red-eyes. Unfortunately, they didn’t know. Rule couldn’t decipher all the information Reno had sent. The map itself, yes, and the number and location of the demons, but not what kind of demons they were. Trying to decode those thought-tags was like trying to read hieroglyphics, he said. Parts of it almost made sense.

  “All right,” Rule said with another glance at his watch. “Time for talking is over. Lily.”

  He’d said her name in the same even, controlled voice he’d used all along. His eyes weren’t the same. Not the same at all. She looked into them and got the falling-elevator feeling and thought, Down is so much farther down than it used to be, and she stood up and stepped into his arms. “No good-byes,” she whispered fiercely, and he either agreed or obeyed, for he didn’t say a word, just held her so tightly she couldn’t breathe, didn’t need to breathe . . .

  Then he let go. He even smiled. It was a cracked, crooked sort of smile, but the courage of it lifted her heart and hurt it. “We’re good,” she told him.

  He gave her a nod, still wordless, and moved away.

  The motorcycles were propped against the slope leading up to the ridge. Rule’s group headed for them, putting on helmets, checking weapons. Lily, like the rest in Benedict’s group, stayed where they were. They wouldn’t move until Rule’s party went roaring off; by then, the Great Bitch should be too busy to notice that they’d split into two groups.

  There had been some discussion—i.e., argument—over how many would be in Benedict’s party. Benedict had won that one. He wanted all the lupi with Rule because Rule’s party would be actively seeking demons to kill. They’d try to make it to the room where the children were, but they’d do it the hard way.

  Which was why Lily was in Benedict’s group. Oh, it was a good tactical decision. Cynna wasn’t much of a shooter. They’d need Lily’s weapon and her ability to sense nearby minds. But tactics were only part of the story. She was with Benedict because those with Rule were more likely to be injured or killed. Including him.

  * * *

  STANDING up was a big success. Of course, every time Ryder did it—with Toby’s help—she went down again, mostly because she always tried to walk and she couldn’t, not yet. Cynna called her a born overachiever. But falling on her butt didn’t discourage Ryder one bit. She reached for his hand to do it again.

  They’d gone through this routine about three thousand times when Ryder suddenly froze. Toby’s gaze flicked up. Sure enough, the woman with two voices stood just on the other side of the fire, smiling at him. The man was there, too, slightly behind the woman, but Toby couldn’t spare any attention for him. Not with her so close.

  “Such a cute baby,” the woman said in her ordinary voice. “Not that I care much about babies, but I don’t object to them. And my other half—that’s terribly inaccurate, by the way, but I’ve never been good at
math. My other half positively dotes on babies. Especially girl babies. So pure . . .” She sighed in a dreamy way that sent ants crawling up Toby’s spine. “You’re right, you know.”

  Toby didn’t speak. He wasn’t sure he could. Even his wolf went still.

  “Diego should have more faith in what you tell him. Your father is not only coming, he’s here. Quite close, actually. But we can’t make it too easy for him. Where would be the fun in that? Time to cut those traces Ryder’s mommy is using to Find you two.” She pointed at him. This time her voice rolled through him like thunder. “Midello-sha!”

  Toby froze in anticipation of . . . but nothing happened.

  “All right, Alice,” she said sweetly, stepping aside to reveal a woman he’d never seen before. “They’re all yours now.”

  * * *

  “STRETCH out,” Benedict said.

  “But if—”

  Benedict interrupted Lily without speaking a word. He just looked at her.

  Lily sighed and pulled one leg up so she could hug her thigh to her chest. She stood stork-legged for a count of five, then switched legs.

  She knew why Benedict wanted her to stretch. She was strung tight. She hated waiting. She especially hated it when she didn’t know when it would end—in the next second, or not for another fifteen minutes. She hated being so close to Toby and Ryder and the other children and unable to act. She really hated knowing that any one of those around her might not live through that action. Maybe more than one. And that was assuming they didn’t all get blown up in the massive explosion Reno expected to cause in another second or minute or fifteen minutes or whatever unless the Great Bitch stopped it like he thought she would—