Trampolining with Dragons

by S. W. Clarke

  I landed at one of his enormous bare feet as the club crashed into the floor where I’d been. This time I didn’t bother with scanning for weakness—I just drove the knife into the center of his foot and twisted.

  The roar he let out reverberated off the walls, made my ears ring. His foot rose to stop on me like a horse would take out a snake, by instinct, but I’d already yanked the knife out and log-rolled toward the wall.

  When I hit it, I pressed my hands to the floor and got my feet under me.

  No time to waste, Tara.

  My eyes caught sight of the club in the second before it rushed toward my head. I threw myself forward again, the wind off it blowing my braid over my shoulder.

  As Louise’s grip came around, I grabbed it, deactivated the tenterhooks. She came free, and now I had both my best girls in the fight again.

  This battle needed to end. Now.

  When I came up, I lashed Thelma out at his shoulder where the animal hides didn’t cover. She tore at his skin, drew blood.

  He bellowed, shoulder drawing back by instinct, club coming around as he reoriented.

  This was my moment.

  I leapt as the club swung near, landing on the edge of it and rushing up toward his hand. I’d managed to reach the grip by the time he knew what I was up to, and ducked as his free hand came around to grab me.

  As soon as it passed me by, I hiked up to his forearm. Lashed Thelma out at his eyes. His head reared back, eyes squinting shut to avoid the small piece of deadly leather taking out one of his precious tiny orbs.

  I shot Louise out toward his shoulder, tenterhooks extended. She caught an elk’s horn, and I pulled myself up onto his shoulder.

  By now, he’d foregone the club. Both enormous hands reached up and tried to grasp at me. When one came near, I snaked Thelma out at his fingers. She drew more blood from his fingertip. Ouch—so many pain receptors in those delicate handsies.

  He let out the loudest roar of all as I leveraged my way over to the back of his head. Dropping Thelma, I grabbed my other knife from its boot sheath.

  One of his hands found me in the same moment I pulled the knife back and sank it into the spot just below his skull.

  The fingers squeezed, tightening around me, pressing every bit of air out of my lungs as he made to crush me …

  And then he collapsed.

  He went face-first to the wrecked floor, and I rode all the way down with him, gasping for air as his hand released me and flopped to the side.

  That had been close. Way too close.

  I lay amongst a nest of his oily, stinking hair, grateful. That fight with the gogmagog in Prague had taught me one crucial thing about gogmagogs.

  They were impossibly strong, and they were terrible tacticians.

  “Tara?” Percy said into my ear, near panic.

  When I could breathe properly, I rolled onto my back, eyes on the beautiful, arched ceiling. “Here,” I whispered.

  “What just happened?”

  “A gogmagog just happened,” I murmured, one hand over my chest. “Good thing. I’d almost forgotten the nuances of their specific brand of stink.”

  “I should get you out of there.”

  “No.” I squeezed my eyes shut, then pressed myself to my elbows. My whips and knives lay around me. “We’re not done until we have it.”

  “Forget about it, Tara.”

  “Remember what that weird little prophetess said?” I rolled off the gogmagog, began wrapping up Thelma.

  “Isa?”

  “Yes.” I placed Thelma at my belt, slotted my knives one by one into my boots. “She said I would be the one worthy of pulling the sword from the stone. How can you walk away from that?”

  He paused. Then, “She stared off into space a lot.”

  I rose, gazing down the hallway. I was nearly there. “I suppose that’s what happens when you hold the future in your head, Perce.”

  When I arrived in Hallway A, it was empty. Pristine. Too perfect. At the far end, the light from a massive doorway beckoned.

  That gogmagog had just remodeled half of Hallway B. No way the denizens of this shrine hadn’t heard it. They should be here.

  But they weren’t.

  “Tara,” Percy said, “I see movement through the windows. Valkyries heading up to your floor.”

  “I thought you were distracting them, Perce.”

  “Yeah, and then you fought a gogmagog. Even outside I could hear the sound of his club hitting the walls. And don’t get me started on the earthquake you caused—”

  “Got it, Perce.” I flicked a glance over my shoulder. “Next time I see a gogmagog, I’ll ask them to keep the noise down. How long do I have?”

  His answer wasn’t exactly music to my ears. “Maybe a minute,” Percy said. “Run, now. Get the GoneGodDamned sword.”

  I booked it down the hallway, boots tapping on the marble, legs pistoning at an all-out run. I had one minute. Sixty seconds to pull the sword from the stone.

  It would be enough time. It had to be.

  There was no way I was getting a second chance at this. Not after they discovered the one weakness of their shrine: how easily a dragon could burn holes through marble.

  When I reached the doorway, I came to a skidding stop, nearly running into it before I caught myself.

  There, the light of a thousand candles flickering around it, sat the sword in the stone.

  Excalibur.

  Around the sword, the apex of the shrine was beautiful. Stained glass depictions of the gods covered the walls and ceiling, the whole place a devotional in itself, an exquisite offering to the deities.

  But they weren’t my gods. They weren’t my deities.

  Not after the terror they’d wreaked on this world.

  I raced down a velvet runner to where the stone sat on a wide pedestal, climbed up onto the pedestal and set one foot atop the stone. When my hands went around the grip of the sword, I knew Isa had been right. The sword might be as long as I was tall, but the grip felt natural. Right.

  She was a true prophetess.

  Eat your heart out, Arthur Pendragon.

  I yanked—

  And yanked.

  And yanked a third time.

  I cleared my throat. “Uh, Perce.”

  “Yeah?” He sounded half-exasperated, half-concerned.

  “Remind me exactly what Isa said about me and this sword?”

  He groaned. “Don’t tell me you can’t pull it out.”

  I yanked again. It didn’t even give an encouraging budge. “Just tell me. We both know you’ve got a memory like an elephant.”

  “She said, ‘You, Tara Drake, will retrieve the sword and the stone from Excalibur’s shrine.’ ”

  I went stiff. “She said, ‘the sword and the stone?’ ”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not in the stone?”

  “Well, now I can’t remember properly.”

  Noises sounded in the hallway. It sounded like someone was dragging cloth over the walls, but I knew exactly what those were.

  Feathers.

  The valkyries were coming.

  “Perce,” I said, scanning the surface of the stone. To get the stone here in the first place, it was likely they’d had to extract it with force. I just needed something to hook on to … “Remember how we made up Plan B?”

  He growled. “I don’t like it.”

  I leaned over, fingers tracing the back of the stone. There—a bolt. That was how they’d maneuvered the stone from the lake … by attaching a bolt to it and dragging it up.

  “We’ve been over this a thousand times.” I yanked out a length of Ferris’s “unbreakable” cord from my belt, fitted it with one of his equally unbreakable carabiners. “We’ve got to do Plan B.”

  “What if I drop you?”

  I clipped the carabiner to the bolt. “You will never drop me.” When I straightened, they appeared in the doorway.

  Three valkyries, their wings gray and white goose down, gorgeous and so
ft, framing three equally terrifying warriors.

  One of them held a longsword and shield. One held two short swords. And the third held a gleaming spear aloft, the tip pointed at me.

  I spun toward the enormous stained-glass window framing the sword in the stone. Before me, a depiction of Saturn consuming his adult child, the body gone still, the great titan unrepentant and full of hubris.

  This. This was why.

  “Here I come, Perce. You better be ready.” With one quick breath, I leapt sidelong toward the window, shouldering the brunt of the impact with the glass. As I turned, I spotted the spear—the arrow’s head rushed before my eyes, shattering the glass even as I did.

  And then I was outside. I was free falling.

  The cord whistled as it unwound from my belt, shards of glass falling around me as the distant earth neared. Distantly I knew if I hit the end of this length of cord, my spine would break. Even more distantly, I knew if I hit the ground my entire body would break.

  But neither of those things would happen.

  From the darkness, wings cracked in the sky—the herald to a storm, like lightning from on high. A second later, five lethally sharp talons closed over my body.

  And just like that, I wasn’t falling. I was flying.

  Above me, I caught a glimpse of a dragon’s belly. The wings spread gauzy and blue, the moon round and white through their webbing. A single one of those wing bones were longer than the tallest man who’d ever lived.

  “Told you,” I said, breathless. “You’d never let me fall.”

  Percy didn’t answer. The cord went slack at my waist as he grabbed it in his jaws and yanked. At once, the sword and stone came rushing through the shattered window, the blade glinting in the night as it tumbled grip over stone. It dropped into the darkness, and it knew it had reached the end of the cord when it squeaked between Percy’s teeth.

  I unattached the cord from my belt. “It’s all yours now, buddy.” My hand went to Louise, and I yanked her free. Above us, shrieks sounded. “We’ve got baddies incoming.”

  “Get up here, then.” Percy’s talons loosened on me in the same moment I shot Louise up, tenterhooks extended, and she wrapped around his leg and held.

  She only wrapped once. Percival leg was as thick around as an old oak tree.

  When his talons let me go, I gripped Louise with both hands, my legs dangling into the night as we swept around the side of the shrine. I pulled myself hand over hand up his leg, and once I’d gotten to where I could hook my boot over his shoulder, I leveraged myself up.

  I came onto the great swath of his back at a crouch, hands on his scales. Each scale was larger than my head, harder than adamantium. And the spine I used to grip as I rode him was now so big around I couldn’t even sit there anymore.

  Now, I rode on his neck.

  When I found my seat, the whole of the world spread before me. The plains of Indiana raced toward the curve of the earth, and once again I knew the awe and gratitude of my circumstances.

  I was a dragon rider.

  Percy jerked his head, and the sword and stone came racing up on the cord. He caught them in one set of talons like a baby’s rattle.

  Percival made his own mother, the matriarch Yaroz, look like a toy dragon.

  It was hard to believe that my little pup had grown so much. I’d expected him to get public-bus big, not jumbo-jet big. And yet here we were. Must have been all that roasted goat.

  When I glanced behind us, the valkyries looked like playthings, so small as they raced through the air with their weapons aloft, ready. “We can’t let them follow us back.”

  “Hadn’t planned on it. Especially since they tried to spear my mother.” Percy veered left, and I gripped his spine tight as I felt the familiar shift of him entering a corkscrew to bring us back around. For a moment, gravity tugged me away from his back, and then he was upright again and we were racing toward the valkyries still racing toward us.

  Poor things. They had no idea what they were facing.

  I felt the fire before I saw it. Nowadays it began as a rumble I could feel through my body, like a firestorm brewed in his chest. And his scales heated beneath me, the whole of his neck briefly contracting as his head wound up to release holy hell into the sky.

  I braced, my whole body tightening as his jaws opened and the flames surged through the air, rippling outward, blinding and blistering heat so vast and incomprehensible it frightened me every time.

  The valkyries disappeared into the flames, incinerated instantly. It was a better, quicker death than so many received—especially when you decided to side with the baddies.

  I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the power and heat. Had the world ever seen a dragon like Percy? Maybe, but not for centuries. Maybe millennia. He was the most incredible creature I’d encountered in my short life, and not because he was my son. Not because he was good and I loved him.

  Because he was, in his own right, phenomenal. The master of his domain.

  With a flap of his wings, he dissipated the flames before we passed through them. We came through the other side into wide-open freedom, and we left the shrine behind in three cracks of his wings.

  He moved over a hundred miles an hour when he was taking his time. Which was why I yanked my non-fogging, non-charring Ferris Special goggles from my belt and slid them on.

  As I glanced back at the shattered window, quickly shrinking into the night, I shook my head. “Showoff.”

  “Or just efficient.”

  I smiled. “Or both. Let’s get back—I need to have a word with that prophetess about this sword.”

  Percy started us toward the headquarters, a few hundred miles away. His shadow trailed over the ground in the moonlight, passing over decimated towns and homes.

  The war had passed through here six months ago. Forced everyone to evacuate, and those who couldn’t or wouldn’t had been overwhelmed by the fighting. Now, only ghosts remained in this stretch of the United States.

  “Tara?” Percy said after a time.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think we’ll get to meet her tonight?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, Perce. I think we will.”

  Back at the headquarters, we met in the atrium. It was a high-ceilinged room, big enough for Percy to fit inside if he crouched. And after what we’d done for the resistance, he deserved a spot at the table.

  When we flew down through the atrium’s glass-ceilinged entry, the others were already present, sitting in chairs around the large meeting table. Francis, Theo, Hercules, Isa. All the lieutenants. Looked like we’d come just in time for the party.

  Percy landed as light as a bird, setting the stone with the sword still in it before him. And I slid off his back to his shoulder, hopping down to the ground at a crouch. Nodded at the sword, then met eyes with Isa. “Got your pretty blade. Unfortunately, it refused to be separated from the rock.”

  Isa’s dark eyes flicked between the sword and me. A small smile appeared. “You’re quite clever, aren’t you?”

  I straightened. “I do what I have to do. Care to explain why I had to throw both sword and rock out a window?”

  She one-shoulder shrugged. “I saw your face, and the glint of the blade. I assumed you’d be able to remove Excalibur from the stone, but the visions are imprecise in that way.”

  “Imprecise my ass,” Percy said in that liquid baritone, smoke curling out of his nostrils. “You’re a prophet. Imprecise gets us killed.”

  I set a hand on his shoulder. “Son, that’s impolite.”

  Isa looked unaffected, as she always did. The dark-haired encantado had a serene, otherworldly way about her. “I apologize, Dragon Percival. I do what I can for the resistance.”

  Hercules sat back in his leonine, demigod glory, one enormous fist coming to rest on the table. “Speaking of the resistance, when will our fearless leader appear?”

  “Soon,” Isa said. And no one bothered to question it for obvious, prophetess reasons. “In abou
t thirty seconds, actually.”

  This time, Isa was right.

  Thirty seconds later, the doors to the atrium opened. Two figures appeared from the dim lightning of the hallway, one of whom looked like a petite woman about my size, dressed in a leather jacket, jeans and boots. She was fielded by a human soldier, his gait and posture an obvious giveaway, and by the look on his face, he’d seen things for sure.

  But her? I couldn’t tell.

  She wore a strange, almost macabre mask—pink-cheeked, white-faced, an upturned mouth.

  The cherub mask. It was famous now.

  When they stepped up to the table, she slid the mask off in one graceful gesture. Into the light came a pretty face, soft lips, auburn hair in a tight ponytail.

  But the eyes? The eyes were hard. Calculating. Resolute.

  And it was obvious why. This woman had been marred by life. Once upon a time, someone had scarred the left side of her face from eyebrow to chin. I wondered who had done that, and why.

  I wondered if she was seeking vengeance like I once had. This was a war, after all, and powerful emotions were part and parcel of bloodlust.

  She set the mask on the table, but didn’t sit down. She leaned forward on both hands, eyeing us all one by one. When her gaze fell on me, I knew she and I were alike. We had a kinship of ideals—to save this world, whatever it took—and a gritty determination.

  “Hello, Lieutenants,” she said in a low voice. “I’m Katrina Darling. Welcome to the resistance.”

  Whether I knew it or not, I made a decision right there in that room. I would follow Katrina Darling to the ends of the earth. Or the earth’s end—whichever we reached first.

  (Not) The End

  Wanna glimpse of what’s coming … keep reading!

  The Gonegod World Needs You!

  Boy, oh boy – I love that ending. So much more to come in the GoneGod World and with the publication of Trampolining with Dragons, the GoneGod World – PHASE 1 – is officially over!