“Hey!” I waved over a stricken city guard. “Rally your guards and protect these people.”
“What are they doing?” he asked, gesturing at the magic users.
“You’ll see soon enough.”
I waved over two more guards. In the absence of their chain of command, they followed.
“Free your blades,” I told them as they fell into step.
The farther away from the line of chanting people we got, the more the whispers slipped like silk from my skin. I rolled my shoulders, ignoring the urge to climb the nearest downpipe, take to the rooftops, and run. It would be so much easier to be a coward.
Smoke folded around us, not so thick as to choke, but enough to scratch at my eyes. I blinked into the rolling layers of gray and heard it again: a low, rumbling growl. This time, it came from directly ahead.
“Stop.” I put my hand out, halting the guards, and said quietly, “Back up.”
“What is it? What’s out there?”
“Guard the Inner Circle line.”
Armor plates clinked and boots scuffed on the cobbles, but below that, the growls rumbled louder, closer. I backed away, and then froze as yellow eyes glowed in the smoke. Wargs. One pair of eyes … then two emerged from the rolling plumes of smoke. A third to my right.
“Go!”
At my shout, the wargs bounded out of the smoke, their teeth bright white and their eyes alight with rabid violence.
“Protect the line!” I ordered, but there was no time to see whether the guards had heard. The first warg sprang off its haunches. Jaws open, it slammed into my chest and snapped at my throat. I punched the dagger deep into its fleshy underbelly, and for a few messy, vicious seconds, my world narrowed to a blur of teeth, pain, and growls. I had my forearm wedged under its jaw, holding the warg back, but its jaws snapped and saliva splattered my face. Tension burned through my shoulder. The warg pushed, and my arm trembled. I couldn’t hold it.
A roar thundered across Brea from above, shaking the earth and air and everything all at once. The warg stopped its attack and lifted its head. It sniffed at the air and then hunched low, its ears flat. It slunk off me, pressed its belly to the cobbles in a pool of its own piss, and loosed a shrill whine. I twisted onto my front and scrambled to my feet. The remaining wargs bore down on the guards, but it was the shadow against the night sky moving in over the sea that drew my eye. She was the darkness. All but her eyes, so brilliant against the gloom.
“Get to the dock!” I shouted. “She’s coming from the bay, not the city!”
The guards and magic users couldn’t see her. And soon, it wouldn’t matter.
A warg leaped and brought down a guard. The beast clamped its teeth around his armored forearm and tried to rattle the man into submission. I was almost on them when the warg saw me and shied away. Just like its companion, it slunk off.
“Thank you. Thank you,” the guard said as I hauled him to his feet.
“Go inform your guardsmen that she comes from the sea. Go, now!”
The other warg also shied away without me having to do any more than lift the dagger. I might have thought it the dagger’s doing, if all the beasts hadn’t locked eyes with me before submitting. Something had changed their minds, and it had begun when the dearmad had made her presence known.
Cannon fire boomed in the harbor with a staccato one, two, three. The explosive resonance was just as loud as her roar, but the cannon fire sailed into the smoke, missing its target.
Hot beats of wind blasted over the harbor wall, whipping up a squall, and there, lit among the smoke by the fiery glow from Brea, was a great shadow, seemingly as large as the night sky. Her green eyes narrowed on each ship in turn. Their cannons swiveled. Shouts from aboard echoed across the bay, and then she opened her jaws and spewed a storm of flame and devastation.
Panic and chaos erupted on the dockside. People scattered.
“Hold fast!” Anuska yelled, but her line was fracturing. “Hold fast!”
She held aloft her handful of gems, bowed her head, and whispered. Some joined her, while others fled. Black vines crawled across Anuska’s cheek. Her whispers grew to murmurs, then to a chant like the one I had heard on the platform inside the spire. I saw it then, the shimmer rippling around her—an aura of something liquid, yet not quite there. Magic. But it would end her. The blackness crept across her face, down her neck, pulling her skin tight. Mage.
“Free the mages, Vance,” Anuska said. She opened her eyes and locked her glare on the dearmad. “Beneath the spire, go!”
The dearmad turned its great head and observed the fleeing people as if they were ants scurrying from a disturbed nest. Cannons fired again, but in the smoke, I couldn’t see if they hit her. She grumbled, her wings beating the air, and loomed closer, her hungry eyes scanning the dockside.
I stumbled backward. Her size, her overwhelming presence, was too monstrous to comprehend. “Don’t,” I whispered. “By the gods, don’t do this.”
“You would have me spare them, thief?”
The voice in my head was Shaianna’s, but colder, sharper, harder—like the flint from the moors. Laced with a touch of slippery malice, that voice cut through my thoughts, and the urge to drop to my knees and whimper staggered me forward.
“This is not you! Not the real you!” I said the words aloud, and despite the roar of fire, screams, and city bells, despite the madness erupting all around me, she heard.
Her laughter was a cruel, twisted thing. I recoiled. Those of the Inner Circle who remained continued chanting, building strength. The dragon’s vast wings—each five times as large as the tall ships’ master sails—billowed across the dockside, fanning the flames.
“I am the rise of ocean waves, the whisper in the wind. I am her last order.”
“Once, you were.”
She turned her green eyes solely on me and lowered her head. “A fool, you are. A device. Did you think a creature such as I might care?”
I considered the laughing woman lifting her hands to the waterfall and the girl dancing in Calwyton square. The woman who had asked me to show her what it meant to feel. This beast wasn’t her. Somewhere inside the monster, Shaianna lived.
The dragon’s chuckles rumbled the dockside beneath my feet. “I know you, thief. I know your kind. This world is riddled with greed. Greed consumes, as do I.”
She breathed in, reared back, opened her massive jaws, and roared.
I stumbled against a crumbling wall. Anuska and a few others in her line remained standing. The ship guns continued blasting, but they no more bothered her than flies would. Fighting fire with fire wouldn’t work. There had to be another way. Fallford had said as much. Some other way. An opposite. A weakness.
Anuska and her few remaining magic users lifted their arms and summoned a rush of wind. It howled around the spire and poured into the harbor. The dragon beat its massive wings and pulled up, away from the harbor, but it didn’t go far. I could hear her wing beats like the thudding of my heart.
There is another way.
I gripped my dagger and ran into the streets, into Brea. The mages. If I could release the mages, I could buy some time for the city to retaliate, but the cannons were useless. Anuska and a handful of people weren’t enough. There’s another way …
Debris from half-burned houses blocked some of the streets, and lines of wounded and stricken townsfolk blocked others. I quickly took to the rooftops and maneuvered around familiar chimneystacks, eaves, and terraces, avoiding the raging fire to my right and her looming presence somewhere in the smoke and clouds above.
“Run, thief. Run.”
She swooped out of the dark from behind, her snarls chasing me down. I was breathless, bloody, and beaten, and every muscle in my body burned, but I kept the spire in my sights and ran, just as she crooned inside my thoughts. “This city and its people will turn to dust.”
There’s another way.
“And what of you?” I called, eyes ahead. So close. Just a few mo
re jumps.
My boot slipped on a loose tile, and my ankle twisted. I sprawled sideways, hit the roof, and slipped down-down-down. My fingers slid over tiles. I skidded, scrambling to catch a hold of something—anything. The gutter rushed to meet me, and in the next weightless breath, I went over the edge.
Falling.
In a blink, a second, a moment, I would hit the ground. The fall might kill me; it would certainly break me. And the city and its people would burn.
There is another way. This is how it ends.
The ground rushed up to meet me. I hit hard, but the ground flexed, capturing me in an embrace instead of shattering the life from my flesh and bones.
“Mmm …” she purred. Her snout snuffled close to my boots and her eyes blazed as she admired me—ragged and winded—cradled in her claws. “Careless thief.”
The watcher in my dreams. The presence who could stop everything, but would not. “Shaianna.”
“Shaianna is gone.” The thunderous voice boomed inside my skull. “Soon to be forgotten.”
I still had the dagger and turned it slowly in my hand, ensuring each finger had a firm grip on the handle. “She wanted to live. She was afraid of you, of what she knew was coming. She’s part of you, somewhere. The part that feels.”
The dragon’s lips pulled back in what I could only interpret as a smirk. It turned its head side-on and eyed me close with one luminous green eye. Those eyes truly glittered like gems with so many facets—so deep and containing hundreds of years’ worth of knowledge and anger. So much potential. She had said it herself. If only her true self could see its own potential. But it couldn’t. She could not be stopped, not by magic, not by flame, not by cannons.
I thrust the dagger forward and punched the blade hilt-deep into her eye. She exploded with rage and tossed me away. I had a few seconds of weightlessness before pain slammed through me as I hit something hard and unforgiving: a wall, a street—I wasn’t sure and didn’t care. Numbness and nothingness almost stole my consciousness. I could sleep a while, right here in the street.
“Get up, you wretched man. Get up and live.” The roaring rolled on and on, a terrible thunder shaking Brea to her foundation.
Just a moment’s rest. It didn’t seem like a lot to ask. I was so very tired. The fight was lost. It was never going to be won. In the fog of my detached thoughts, and through the drifting smoke, Brea’s spire stood proud. Firelight cast one side in a surreal orange glow, while the other was clad in shadow. The spire. The mages …
Embers and ashes dallied in the air. I should have been in pain, but I felt nothing besides a satisfied peace. I saw her, then, my savior, my fate. She strode toward me through the smoke and ash, just like she had in the alley that fateful night.
This might even be the same stinking alley, I mused.
She held her head high, her eyes bright and her dagger gleaming in her hand. The assassin, the sorceress. The woman with many names, though she didn’t seem to know who she really was. I still had hold of her dagger’s twin. It seemed important that I not let it go. I’d always had it close, needed it close.
“You do not die here today, thief.” Shaianna smiled a soft, sympathetic smile and laid her cool hand on my face.
“You need to stop this.” The words came out fractured and broken. Her cool touch flowed farther than my cheek, deeper, reaching into the numbness and plucking away the apathy and pain.
“I cannot,” she replied.
Fire blazed close behind her, filtering through her loose dark hair and casting her in a shifting reddish glow. But the screams had ceased. Too many were dead. The city was lost.
“Why?” I lifted my bloodied hand and brushed my thumb across her cheek, smearing dirt, grit, and blood across the gem that glowed there.
“I cannot,” she repeated. Her lashes fluttered. A tear broke free. “I do not have a choice. But you do, thief. You do.”
Her touch fizzed against my skin and the numbness cleared, bringing clarity to my thoughts.
“You are free to choose.” Knowledge still sparkled in her eyes. Here, now, she could feel, and dream, and regret. Regret filled those tears shining in her eyes.
I shifted upright, feeling something in my chest push inside, where it shouldn’t, and leaned back against a wall. “Did you use me?”
She nodded. “Yes, and I continue to do so.”
“Did you feel anything?”
“No.” That single word belied the raw sadness in her eyes. “I felt nothing when you made me laugh and made me see—when you brought me to life.” She ran her fine fingers through my hair, brushing it back from my eyes, and then tilted her head.
With her face inches from mine, I saw how the fine lines crowded around her eyes and how her lips pressed into a tight line. So sad, but not yet lost. Her eyes and expression pleaded with me. She couldn’t stop this, but I could.
I closed my fingers around the dagger’s hilt. It had to be my choice. A choice I never would have made if not for meeting her, if not for my sister’s last words. “Don’t make the wrong choices, brother.”
I didn’t want it to end like this, but there was another way, and this was it.
Shaianna leaned in close and brushed her soft lips against mine. She smelled of the meadow outside Arach, of summer sun and rich grasses and a time forgotten. I only wished that it could have been different, but I understood why it wasn’t. Some things are meant to be destroyed.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know.” She sighed. Her breath fluttered warm against my cheek.
I lifted the dagger, swallowed, wondered if I would see my sister again, and punched the blade home, sinking it deep into my chest. It slipped in fast and true. A relentless heated throbbing followed—the sound of my heart. Beating waves rolled over me, blood pumping, sharp and tight, then dull and heavy. I clung on to the dagger, let my head fall back against the wall, and watched as Shaianna staggered out of my reach. Her chest heaved as she tried to breath around the pain—my pain, her pain.
Kill me, thief, and you kill yourself. She had always known it would come to this. The bond. The curse. From the moment I sipped from her cup, this fate had been waiting, watching, ready to catch me when I fell.
She blinked her tears free. “This is the right choice.”
I smiled. “I know.”
She dropped to one knee, then fell forward, bracing herself against the road. “I will be ashes and dust and dreams and nothing more.” She lifted her tear-streaked face. “I am the last, and I do not want to die.”
“But you lived, and you laughed, and you loved.” I swallowed hard. My focus blurred and the throbbing in my chest migrated throughout my body, filling my hearing with the deceleration of my heart. “Rest now. I will never forget.”
In the haze of looming unconsciousness, a swirl of fire and light twisted over her, lifting her up inside a sudden wind around her. I shielded my eyes from the grit and opened them again to find the dragon pushing off and taking flight. But its gait was crooked and its flight hindered. She sent a forlorn roar out into the city, and I knew it would be her last.
I pushed off the wall, crying out as the pain in my chest hardened. But I had to see, to know … One foot in front of the other. Just a few steps. I staggered into the street and turned.
And there, clutching the spire, she had settled. She curled her tail around its base, clamped on with her claws, and lifted her head toward the spire’s tip. Stone crawled up her scales, climbed and skittered and danced up her back, and spread across her relaxed wings. When it reached her head, it captured the dragon as truly and uncompromisingly as only earth could. Her green eyes still glinted high up among the smoke and darkness atop the spire. But she was gone, and so was her legacy.
I fell to my knees and pulled the dagger free. Blood. So much blood. It cooled on my chest and soon crept around the cobbles, finding its way through the crevices into the earth. It would be over soon, and I was glad. I hoped not all was lost. That Brea would l
ive. But I would not see it.
I slumped forward and pressed my cheek against the stone cobbles. One last sacrifice for peace. The life of a thief. A poor price, it seemed. I smiled. The life of the best thief in Brea, the thief who’d stolen a heart of stone.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The ship had creaked and groaned all night like a wretched old woman, and would for the next ten days at sea, Tassen had gleefully told me. At least, on the deck of the square-rigger, the salty air gave me the illusion of freedom and cured some of my rolling nausea, and I wasn’t throwing my guts up anymore.
The Lady Jane merchant vessel was currently powered by steam engines puffing and wheezing below deck. The rigging was stowed away and the crew was busy elsewhere among the ship’s cabins and engine rooms. Tassen had told the crew I was just like any other landlubber paying for passage across the sea to Lanskewly, which meant, as I stood on the deck, dagger tucked inside my long coat, that few paid me attention, even though they should. I had questions. Lots of questions. The most pressing being, how was I alive?
Tassen had taken me aboard his vessel with little more than a raised eyebrow. But he would ask—and soon. Molly too was here. With no heirs, the city had claimed Fallford’s wealth and possessions. Tassen had stepped in and hired Molly as his ship’s cook, and when she saw me, she’d had all manner of questions burning in her shrewd eyes. I had hidden her cleaver as a precaution.
I plunged my hand into my coat pocket and turned over the small ruby between my fingers and thumb. A shiver rippled up my fingers and tingled across the back of my hand. Magic. No whispers though. Not yet. I still sported the knot—Shaianna’s mark—low on my back. I’d borrowed Molly’s hand mirror to get a good look at it. So perhaps the knot would be enough to curb any mage-like urges, or perhaps now that Shaianna was gone, the knot was nothing more than a tattoo.
I should have died on that street.
I had been dying. Death had crept closer with every breath, and then the oddest thing had happened. The dagger and the ruby together had hummed—I couldn’t think of a better way to describe it. They’d resonated in unison, and I had lain there, my breathing strengthening and my heartbeat quickening. My body had become my own again. The ruby and the dagger, perhaps both, had been my saviors on that street that day, and both had woken something inside—the something I had denied all my life. Magic.
Legends of the Damned: A Collection of Edgy Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 68