Dragon Spawn

by Eileen Wilks

  Troubled out of the privacy of pain, he opened his eyes. Directly overhead was rock, but he was not underground, he saw with relief. Beyond the rock was a dark violet sky, alight with stars. It was not quite full night, but nearly. He turned his head and saw a campfire and a naked woman.

  She squatted by the fire, her back to him. A black-and-silver braid hung down the lovely curve of her spine, tied at the end with a scrap of cloth. She was not young, though he saw muscle in her slim shoulders; her skin held a hint of the crepe of age. Perhaps she felt him looking. She looked over her shoulder and spoke crisply. “You’re awake. Good.”

  He blinked. The naked woman was Madame Yu. This should, of course, have been obvious. His brain wasn’t working well.

  “You need water,” she said, and set something down—a stick with what might have been half a rabbit impaled on it. The source of the cooking-meat smell.

  Rule lacked the human prejudice against nudity, but for Madame Yu to be unclothed . . . that was just wrong. But she’d been a tiger, hadn’t she? She didn’t have her clothes with her, hadn’t been able to bring them along when they . . . came here? Were brought here? “Where?” he croaked, meaning where are we. “The others. What—”

  “Water now, then explaining.” She unscrewed the cap on a collapsible canteen. “I will lift your head. Do not try to help.”

  Abruptly he was horribly thirsty. “I’ll leak.” He pictured the water sliding down his throat only to spill out onto the ground when it reached the hole where his guts should be.

  “I have glued you back together.” She slid one hand beneath his head and lifted.

  She’d superglued his gut? Did she know what to attach to what? “Did—”

  “Gan held you in sleep while I glued. You will not leak. Drink.” She held the plastic bladder to his lips, giving him little choice.

  The water was warm and tasted of dirt. He gulped it down eagerly.

  She moved the canteen away before he was ready. “Not too fast, I think.”

  “How bad . . . am I hurt?” Enough that talking was painful. It forced him to breathe more deeply.

  “Most of the damage was to the ropy part of your intestines. I removed the worst mess and glued together what remained. I trust your healing can regrow what was lost.” The last sounded like a parent’s no-nonsense instruction: brush your teeth, wash your face, regrow your intestines. “There was also damage to the . . . bah. What is the word? The knobby intestine. Jiécháng. It was not severed, however. I glued it closed. I did not see damage to your other organs, but I was in a hurry. We were in the open. Drink again.”

  He did. The knobby intestine . . . the colon? Rule knew a little anatomy, enough for the kind of rough battlefield medicine he might have to use on one of his men. By “the ropy part” she must mean his small intestine. Apparently he would have to regrow a lot of that.

  “You also have a deep wound in your thigh. I used the last of the glue there after Gan and I moved you to this spot. I did not have enough glue to seal it fully, but it is not bleeding anymore.” She withdrew the canteen again.

  He licked his lips, dizzy. “Gan?”

  “She has gone to steal some things. She can go dashtu here, so this should not be difficult.”

  “Steal from . . . who?”

  “There is a village.”

  “Humans?”

  “Yes. This is not one of the sidhe realms.”

  Was that good or bad? He couldn’t think. “How did we get here?”

  “Gan brought me and also Cynna and Lily. You, I believe, were brought here by Lily.”

  He started to shake his head and winced. Definitely a concussion. “Lily can’t do that. And she is . . . far away.” Much too far for his piece of mind or for her to have somehow brought him here, wherever “here” was. Madame still hadn’t answered that one. Maybe she didn’t know.

  “You did not arrive in the same place as Lily because you did not leave from the same place in Dis.”

  “Lily can’t cross realms.”

  “Tch. Gan did not bring you, and who else could? She did bring Lily. You must have been pulled here with her by the mate bond.”

  That . . . made sense, actually. He vividly remembered the Lady’s voice saying steady. Even more vividly he remembered what had followed. The mate bond had vanished, then returned, supercharged. At least that’s what Cullen had said—that Rule was suddenly glowing with twice as much magic as usual. “The Lady,” he said slowly. “She arranged it.”

  “Very likely. You are muddled from your wounds. This is not surprising. You were nearly dead. Is your memory bad?”

  “I remember most of it. I don’t remember receiving this.” His hand lifted two inches to indicate his stomach. The tiny effort exhausted him.

  “I think Xitil did that, but I was busy and did not see it happen. Do you remember Xitil?”

  “Yes.” A mountain of pink flesh towering over him. A band of blue eyes circling a round head. A mad giggle.

  “Do you also remember that the children were not in the audience hall, as we had thought?”

  He remembered the doppelgänger that he’d thought was his son and how it had felt to watch it melt. “He . . . they . . . the children must be in the cells.” He ran out of breath and drew in air slowly. Carefully. There were cells off the audience hall where they’d fought demons, a demon prince, and a dragon spawn. He’d seen Xitil emerge from one. “Couldn’t get to them. Cells sealed by rock.”

  “Not exactly rock. When the false Toby melted, Gan thought to look for the children with her üther sense. It is very hard to hide üther from one who can perceive it. Rock blocks this perception, but Gan tells me the cells were sealed with something like the window we stepped through—ah, but you did not see the window. You may think of it as part-time rock. Part of the time it is rock, part of the time it is not. Gan discovered that, to her üther sense, this part-time rock flickers. When it does, she can perceive beyond it. She did not notice this earlier because the flicker does not happen often. Also, she was not looking in the right way.” Madame shook her head, disapproval blending with forgiveness. “She is very young.”

  Rule had the impression the former demon was at least twice his age. But as an ensouled being . . . yes, in that sense Gan was very young. “The children? She found them?”

  “The cells were empty.”

  All the air left the world. For long, terrible seconds Rule was pinned in a dark, airless void before his chest remembered its job and lifted, letting in air and sending pain ribboning through his gut.

  “This does not mean they are dead,” Madame informed him sternly. “You are not to think so. It is likely they were taken through a gate. Drink again.”

  He let her lift his head—hell, he probably couldn’t have stopped her. But he wanted answers, not water. “Why likely?”

  “Gan says there was a gate. A permanent gate, but closed at the time. She is certain of it. To her, a gate feels like a wind that bubbles instead of blowing. This has little meaning to me, but much for her. Drink,” she repeated, and this time gave him no choice but to swallow or let her dribble water over his closed mouth. She had pity on him, though, and continued talking as she administered measured sips. “Gan found this closed gate when she came out into the hall. She could tell what realm the gate opened into. It was, she says, very bubbly. This means to her that it had been used very recently.” She moved the canteen away, letting him catch his breath. Absurd that drinking water could run him out of breath, but it had. “She thinks this means the children were brought here through the gate. I think this, also.”

  His heart thudded sharply. “They’re here?”

  “Not yet. I explain.” She tipped the canteen to his lips again. “At the time Gan found the gate she believed we would all be killed. I do not say she was wrong; matters were not going well. She wished to live. She wished al
so for her friends to live. Cynna was closest, so first she brought Cynna here. She returned to the audience hall and grabbed Lily and crossed with her. She returned again and grabbed me—not because she counts me as a friend, but I was close. Also, she was impressed when I killed a m’reelo. She could not bring anyone else here because she cannot return to the audience hall from this point, not at any of the critical moments. She is already in all the other times she might have crossed to.”

  He managed one last swallow and turned his head slightly. “That makes no sense.”

  “Obviously there cannot be two of her in Dis at the same instant. You have drunk it all? Good.” She took the canteen away.

  “How could there be two of her at the same time?”

  Grandmother gave that disapproving tch again. “I have just said that could not be. You are not thinking well.”

  “Tired.”

  “Too much talking. Rest. I will get more water.” She stood.

  Madame looked even more naked when standing, though her dignity was unimpaired by the lack of clothing, just as her spine was unaffected by the tiredness he could see in her face.

  “Wait. You said . . . the children are not here yet.”

  “Ah. Yes. Do you remember that many realms do not match with each other in time, even when they touch in place? It is so, and time is very crooked between Dis and this place. This let Gan choose, a little, what time she crossed to. She had to bring each of us to a different time because she could not be here twice at the same moment, and she was in haste, so she is not sure what time she brought us to. But she believes we all arrived here before we left Dis.”

  He was too exhausted and hurting to make much sense of that, but he thought he got the important part. “The children aren’t here yet.”

  “No. We have some time—between one and three weeks. They will not arrive in this portion of the realm, however. We must travel when you are able. No more talk now. I will be gone ten or fifteen minutes. There is a seep. It is not far, but it is necessary to be cautious here when crossing open ground.”

  “Why? he asked. Then, more sensibly—for there were many reasons the open might be dangerous—he asked once more, “Where are we?”

  “Lóng Jia.” Her black eyes were remote, as if she looked out on some private vista, one that held great meaning. Then her gaze sharpened and flicked to him. “In English, you would call it Dragonhome.”

  Eileen Wilks is the New York Times bestselling author of the Novels of the Lupi, including Mind Magic, Unbinding, and Ritual Magic. She is also a three-time RITA Award finalist and the recipient of a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times. Visit her website at eileenwilks.com.

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