“You were winging it. Hell, you made it all up.”
“Untrue. I knew those symbols on you had to do something. Now we know what.”
“You played me.”
“Yes, and it worked. You can thank me properly later.”
“I’ll spank your arrogant ass later, that’s what I’ll do.”
“As I said, a proper show of appreciation will come later. Serqet and Aset, conceal us, please. It’s time to take the fight to the Demon King.”
When they arrived, hidden by Aset’s shadow magic, they laid down a line of fire, from one end of the dirt capital to the other, and then a sun fire pit circle around the noncombatants. If they stayed within Isis’s trench and didn’t join the battle, the dragons wouldn’t harm them.
He hoped they understood because Isis’s mercy only extended to non-fighters. The rest of the capital and demons received the brunt of their attack. No one else was spared and not a single demon resurrected by the Dragon Queen.
Demons greatest strength was their overwhelming numbers and viciousness. Their population outnumbered dragons ten to one. Until today, dragons had never used their might to subjugate another nation. It wasn’t their way, which was why Geb and Nut hadn’t done away with Sansabonsom when he’d stolen the kingdom from Queen Taytu. If they’d been less principled and more heartless, their daughters wouldn’t have been compelled to take a kingdom by fire and force.
But Geb and Nut weren’t heartless and, despite it all, Osiris was grateful for their wisdom and leadership. Wadjet and Nekhbet may have left them the scepters as tools of their rule, that didn’t mean dragons should abuse power granted to them. Even now, as they decimated Kumi, Isis had given strict orders to go no further than the capital. If demons in the surrounding areas wanted to join the battle, they could come to them. But she refused to destroy the Demon Kingdom.
“Not every demon is our enemy or a danger to dragonkind. We’ll spare the innocent and the victims of King Sansabonsom’s rule. We’ll make our point, and they’d do well to learn the lesson.”
All in the Demon Kingdom now knew the Dragon Queen’s point: Don’t fuck with dragons, if you can’t handle their fire. Well, all demons except King Sansabonsom.
Serqet and Aset recalled their magic. A hundred and thirty feet in front of them was a demon. His seven-foot height, two-hundred plus pounds of sheer muscle, hooked fangs and feet, burnished skin and dark eyes, bald head, and naked body, the male resembled every other demon. What let Osiris know this demon was King Sansabonsom wasn’t the smug way he leered at them but what he rode.
Osiris had never seen a three-headed dragon. Yet there one was black body and wings. The chest was white and horizontal gray stripes curled around his tail, legs, and neck. The heads matched the diverse colors of the body. The center black, the right gray, and the left white. The dragon’s eyes were a swirl of the three colors.
He heard Isis’s low growl beside him, and his head snapped to hers. She stared at one of the demons, who, like the demons who’d come through the mist with King Sansabonsom, rode atop a goddamn dragon. While the dragons in the tunnel were Geb’s warriors, these dragons had to be what was left of the traitors.
His eyes lowered from the demon Isis looked like she was ready to kill and to the dragon he rode. Not just any dragon but a rock dragon.
Osiris’s skin began to tingle again as recognition crashed into him. He swung his head to Set, who also stared at the rock dragon. When their eyes met, he saw the same question in them as the one crashing around in Osiris’s head. Set had only been three years old when he’d ridden on Makara’s back, too young to fly on his own and avoid capture by the pursuing demons. Had he also been too young to remember their father?
If he were, Osiris certainly wasn’t. The rock dragon, who looked out with ghost white eyes at him, hadn’t changed in the hundred years since the last time Osiris saw the dragon. Forty-five feet tall and a sixty-foot wingspan, the rock dragon, with rigid and thick scales, reminded Osiris of not only Set’s dragon but the way he’d looked before his death.
What in the hell was going on there? His father may be guilty of betraying his king and queen, but the dragon he remembered possessed too much pride to permit a demon to treat him as a tamed pet.
He looked again to Set, who’d inched closer to Osiris, his gaze still on their father. The anger coming from his brother had Osiris turning back to Isis.
Her eyes were on the dragon rider. She had no way of knowing the dragon the demon rode atop of was his father. A disturbing thought came to him, as he took in the silent recognition between the demon and his mate.
“It’s him.”
Isis’s words conjured up two images. One of Isis’s stomach, marked with three healed bullet wounds and the other of Asim’s gravestone.
“Are you sure?”
None of the demons before them would survive, but Osiris needed to know which demon to take special care in killing.
“He smells the same. Compost. Eyes are also the same. Black and vile. I could never forget.”
By right, revenge belonged to Isis. But when she sprayed fire at the Demon King and went after him, he knew she’d left the murderer of their daughter to Osiris.
Faith and trust.
With a growl, he flew at the demon. Set right behind him.
The other demons attacked the Tyets, and the Dragon-Demon war was on.
Chapter 19
For weeks, Isis desired nothing more than to find the demon who stole her precious little girl from her, remove every inch of skin from him with her claws, and then set the demon ablaze. In her morbid dreams, she’d let the demon burn, put the fire out, and then set him on fire again. She would do this time and again, enjoying his pained cries and screams for mercy. He’d shown her and Asim none when he’d released his bullets into her pregnant belly, so the Isis of her dreams repaid cruelty with vindictiveness.
Isis wanted the wretched demon’s excruciating death. The bloodthirsty thought of killing him was what pulled her back from the brink of despair. “Make him pay,” Nut had said, and she’d intended to do just that whenever she had him within killing range.
When she’d finally come face-to-face with her attacker, the raging need for his painful death hadn’t lessened. If anything, the thought of swallowing the puny demon whole, his fragile body engulfed in the pit of stomach lava, sent a shockwave of anticipated satisfaction through her.
Yet, there was Osiris. The night of his attack, he’d killed many demons. Nephthys had found some of their scorched remains. Between the demons killed during the battle at Philae Manor, the ones poisoned by her king cobras, and the demons slaughtered by their mind-controlled brethren, Isis doubted if any of the demons who’d murdered Osiris still lived. The demon who’d taken Asim from them, however, did. So, as great as her craving to end the demon herself, as Dragon Queen, it was her responsibility to take out the biggest threat to her dragons. As Isis, mate of Osiris Ombos, she needed to put his needs above her plots of revenge, which included making sure Set didn’t leave this realm alive.
King Sansabonsom was there. Finally, she saw the face of her parents’, and now her, enemy. Unimpressive, from the look of him. But not stupid. He’d come prepared, with the only weapons that challenged a dragon.
Other dragons.
He rode atop one Isis had heard about as a nighttime story Nut used to tell the twins. A time dragon. The last one was supposed to be dead, or so Nut had assumed when the mentally unstable dragon had left Nebty after slaughtering his family. Geb had taken mercy on the dragon, who had no control over his slow decline into insanity. His violence against his beloved mate and hatchlings was a worse punishment than any the earth dragon could’ve leveled against him.
Isis spat a blast of fire at the Demon King then rushed him. Her mind worked as she fought, although the urge to give into the primal dragon lust to rage hot and wild had her ducking the time dragon’s return fire and raking claws across his side as she flew past him.
“He’s going to have your scales, hatchling, then I’m going to cut you open and consume your insides and everything that makes you a Scepter of Nebty. Then I’ll do the same to that sister of yours. I bet, however, that neither of you will taste as scrumptious as Geb.”
The sun dragon circled around and headed straight at King Sansabonsom and the time dragon. King cobras reared from her body, hissing and snapping as she approached her enemy. Gliding to an abrupt halt, she used her wings to fling the cobras at the dragon and demon.
The black time dragon released a burst of fire from all three mouths, combustible shields her cobras couldn’t survive. She didn’t need them to. All she wanted to do was test the demon’s reaction and the speed of his defensive move. He swiped at the fanged reptiles she kept flinging at him, cutting them with his claws and sending cobra pieces onto the time dragon.
“Your scrawny snakes can’t defeat me.”
“I don’t need them to.”
She evaded the time dragon’s lunge and flew away from him. As she hoped he would, the dragon pursued her.
Isis flew past Osiris, who fought a rock dragon who looked too much like Osiris for it not to be his father. Set was there, too. For a second, she considered going to her mate’s side, in case Set betrayed Osiris again.
When Osiris’s rock dragon roared, loud, menacing, and powerful, she increased her speed, trusting her mate to survive and settle his own scores.
She circled the battlefield, where her Tyets fought the other dragons and their demon riders. Hundreds of years older than her warriors, the former border guards, all color leeched from them like the dragons in the tunnel, stared out from eyes absent of independent thought.
Unlike the demons Osiris and Nephthys had controlled, these dragons weren’t dead. Not exactly anyway. Their bodies may have been in motion, but their minds were frozen, which allowed the demons to use them as an extension of self.
White vultures came out of nowhere, swooping down and lashing out at the demons, who, like their king, used claws to defend themselves.
Her Tyets went in, snatching the demons off their mount with deadly chomping teeth. The sound of crunching and swallowing drowned out King Sansabonsom’s enraged curses.
With no demon rider to control them, the dragons still fought the Tyets. Fire erupted from the six dragons, catching her Tyets full blast. Her warriors tumbled backward but recouped quickly.
Yellow energy blasted into the chest of the closest dragon, followed by a second, even brighter fire energy discharge. Up Merit went, flying high into the sky, and then lighting the night up with her rays of dragon fire light.
Wasting no time, Aset’s shadow dragon charged at two of the pale dragons. Black wings and an even blacker body merged with Merit’s light and disappeared. Black forms, in the shape of the two dragons, seeped from their body, slithering to be free from the corporeal form that held them prisoner. Out they came, as large as the originating dragon, but deadlier.
The shadows attacked, wrapping around the pale dragons like a smothering blanket. The shadows grew the longer they swathed their pale doppelgangers in their unforgiving chokehold.
The sun dragon continued to circle her Tyets, forming the Isis Knot that was their sisterhood and strength. The time dragon followed, and the Demon King was forced to watch and do nothing as her warriors dismantled his pathetic dragon pawns. More, he didn’t have nearly as much control over the time dragon as he thought.
The longer she avoided the dragon’s claws, tail, and fire, the more time she had to think. Time. Time dragon.
Past.
Present.
Future.
The shadow dragon reappeared, just when Merit’s light winked out. Spreading her black wings wide and floating vertically, she summoned the shadows of the two dragons, no longer pale and lifeless but a majestic onyx. She summoned them, and they came, shrinking in a vortex of shadow dragon magic and twirling toward a waiting Aset.
The thatch of purple scales on her chest opened and pulled the twirling shadows inside. When her chest closed, the purple scales glowed and then dimmed. Isis swore she heard Aset burp or that could’ve been the roars of the incoming demon hordes.
The moon dragon shot past Isis and straight into the path of the new group of demon soldiers, her white vultures beside her. Aset followed Nephthys, black fire shooting from her and sinking deep into a group of demons. Through the gaping hole, her attack left in their chest, out trickled their soul, a shriveled length of green mucus that dangled in the air before detaching from the body and falling to the ground. The dead demons dropped as well.
Thunder sent waves of ear-splitting sound through the air. Isis flew faster, working hard to put as much distance between herself and Serqet’s thunder dragon. The distance helped but didn’t save her completely. The sonic wave of Serqet’s thunder attack rocketed through her body as if a rampaging bull was set free inside of her.
Isis’s mistake. She knew better than to be so close to Hathor in battle. They all did.
When she swung back around, it was to see that King Sansabonsom and the time dragon hadn’t fared any better. Blood ran from the demon’s nose and ears, and the time dragon had stopped his pursuit, shaking his head as if equilibrium had abandoned him.
Serqet’s thunderous attack had downed two more dragons. They weren’t finished, but they were plummeting from the sky and toward the ground. Serqet pursued them, her blue-and-silver body a bullet train. Her wide mouth opened for another, more direct attack. The boom came again, but not as loud or as severe to everyone else. From the sudden mist, Isis couldn’t see what happened to the two dragons who had the misfortune of ending up on the wrong side of the thunder dragon’s sonic attack.
Nor could she make out the battle taking place between Hathor and the last of the border guards. But she did see when Merit’s yellow energy dragon flew into the mist, her energy blast preceding her entry.
An explosion of fire caught Isis on her side. Her tail rolled back and countered with a spray of molten lava. She didn’t want to fight the time dragon. He wasn’t her enemy, but Sansabonsom’s victim. She didn’t know how he controlled the dragon or even how the old dragon controlled the border guards, which she knew he had.
It had taken her many minutes of defensive flying to figure out how to tap into that part of her that made Isis the Scepter of Wadjet. Time dragons, she remembered from Nut’s stories, were the only dragons who needed routines. They craved the ebb and flow of the passage of time. The cyclical nature of birth, growth, and death. For time dragons, they saw the world as an endless sequence. Procedures, practices, habits, and customs, they all merged together in the mind of a time dragon.
But inconsistencies in their routine, in their schedule of life, disrupted the pattern they’d come to rely upon, not realizing that behaviors, actions, and beliefs, including their own, meant time wasn’t as predictable and simplistic as they liked to believe.
The past blurred the present and threatened the future.
Isis could sense the goodness, as well as the loneliness of the time dragon. She could also sense his mental detachment from reality. His mind, in many ways, had reverted to a child’s ego state: confused, defensive, dependent. He wanted to go back to a time before life became complex for him, before the weight of time magic leeched into his psyche and contorted his mind. A time before he saw every dragon, including his family, as a threat to his much-needed routines.
Simpler times. Happier times.
Reality didn’t match his need, so his mind slipped even more and King Sansabonsom, the loathsome, opportunistic bastard that he was, had taken advantage. Isis now thought she knew what happened to Geb, his warriors, and
northern Nebty.
She had to be sure, and there was only one way to find out. First, she needed to dethrone the Demon King.
As she’d done before, Isis flew at the time dragon and the demon. Sansabonsom grinned, his clawed hands already up to slice the king cobras he thought she would attack him with again. Never one to disappoint a male who thought he knew a female’s mind better than she did, the sun dragon hurled snake after snake at the Demon King.
Not too fast, not even too many. She didn’t want the heartless creature to die of snake poison. He deserved so much worse than that, and Isis would see that he got it.
As she’d done moments ago, right before she collided with the time dragon, she slowed and decreased her altitude, falling several feet and under the one-hundred-foot dragon. Faster than she’d ever done before, Isis shifted into her hybrid form and bolted up and behind the Demon King, who still fought her king cobras. Slashing out with her feathered wings, she knocked the demon off the time dragon.
He sailed through the air, too stunned to get his bearings right away. Tumbling end over end, Sansabonsom, head bloody from her attack, careened to a halt. His eyes even darker than before.
“I’m going to make you pay for that.”
The way he stared at her, the skin of his forehead creased, Isis knew he was trying to figure out what she was.
She would soon show him, but the time dragon came first.
“Tyets, Nephthys, secure the time dragon. Aset, keep him in the dark. Serqet, lock him in a cell of mists. He’s our future and our past. We need him alive but inactive.”
Isis began her descent, red eyes on the only demon that mattered.
He glared down at her, cocky but also uncertain whether he should follow.
Isis raised her right hand and did something she’d seen her twin do many times when driving. She flipped off the Demon King, knowing he would have no idea what her middle finger meant but smart enough to interpret the human gesture for what it was, an insult.
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