by Melissa Grey
“It worked.” Dorian’s voice floated to Echo through the haze of pain and fatigue that gripped her. Lying there, recovering, she listened as Dorian and Jasper worked to release Caius from his manacles. Echo allowed herself the barest of smiles when she finally heard the chains clatter to the floor.
Caius was free. And together, they were going home.
“I’ve got him,” Dorian said. “Jasper, will you—”
A roar, sudden and viciously loud, consumed the remainder of Dorian’s sentence. It reverberated through the floor, vibrating loose rocks against Echo’s forehead. She pushed herself up to a sitting position, ignoring the aches in her muscles. They all fell silent and still, waiting.
“What the hell was that?” Jasper whispered.
Echo didn’t supply him with an answer. She knew. They all knew, even if no one wanted to believe it.
“That’s not possible,” Dorian said under his breath.
But as the sound of leathery wings drifted up from below, Echo knew his disbelief was futile. The carvings on the walls of the lava room and around the doorframe they had passed through into this room had not been mere decorations; they were warnings to whoever was foolish enough to proceed beyond them.
Echo rose, her legs as shaky as a newborn foal’s, and thought, Here there be dragons.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The ground rumbled beneath Echo’s feet. The pit surrounding the island, previously dark with unrelieved shadows, began to emit an orange glow like the embers of a fire that stubbornly refuses to die. Another roar sounded from deep beneath the surface, so ferocious that the ground shook with it.
Dorian gently lowered the still-unconscious Caius to the ground. “It appears we have awoken the beast,” he said.
“That room with the lava wasn’t what the rune meant by fire,” Echo said. Of course it hadn’t been; that would have been far too easy. “This is pyromaniac cat-bird.”
“It’s Super Mario,” Jasper whispered as he leaned over the edge, craning his neck for a better look. “I told you. That’s Bowser, and Caius is Princess Peach.”
“Who’s Mario?” Echo asked, just as quietly.
“We’re all Mario.”
Echo reached for the reserves of magic within her, but she felt empty, like a car out of gas. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. “So, what you’re saying is, I have to slay a dragon to save the princess?”
“Prince,” Dorian interjected.
“Whatever.” A tongue of flame flickered to life in Echo’s palm. Her exhaustion seemed to double with the conjuring, but she pushed it aside. She could rest when she was dead.
Dorian moved to stand beside Echo. His hand came up and pulled her behind him. A small, rebellious part of Echo wanted to protest, but a much larger and much saner part had little desire to be the first thing encountered by whatever was living deep within the bowels of the temple.
Even the beast below—which Echo was not entirely prepared to accept as a living, breathing dragon—held back its roar, as if giving its audience time to adjust to the impossibility of its existence.
The ground began to tremble again, this time with even more intensity. Echo imagined the great beast rising from its slumber, uncoiling a long, scaly body with slow, languorous movements. Gusts of wind rose from the pit, and the dragon—a real, live dragon—emerged from the shadowy depths. Echo’s brain fought to process what she was seeing. Wings spread wide as the creature stretched, claws brushing the walls of its cave, its scales the pale color of moonlight on a clear night, its tail lashing this way and that. She had always wanted to see a dragon—as any child whose head was full of stories would—but these were not ideal circumstances.
Flashes of memory zipped through her mind. Caius tracing constellations of stars in the night sky, telling her the stories behind them, which gods and other figures from his culture’s folklore they were meant to represent. Dorian regaling a bedridden Jasper with old Drakharin fairy tales, full of dragons guarding troves of priceless treasures and the intrepid young warriors who tamed such wild beasts. All those stories were as good as legend, taking place so far back in history that if there was any truth to them, it had been so thoroughly gilded over by time. The one thing all the tales had in common was that dragons had walked the earth once, but none had been seen for thousands and thousands of years. They were, Caius had explained, considered part of Drakharin history. None, he had insisted, were said to have survived the rise of human dominance.
“Caius told me your people believed dragons were extinct,” Echo said, feeling oddly betrayed.
“We thought they were,” Dorian said. His voice was full of marvel, like that of a little boy who has just learned that Santa is real.
“Does that look extinct to you?” Echo gestured, rather unnecessarily, to the dragon holding itself aloft with indolent flaps of its wings, sniffing the air with a long snout, nostrils flaring. A milky white film—cataracts, perhaps—covered its eyes, though it didn’t appear to hinder the beast much. It could probably smell them.
Dorian shook his head in awestruck wonder. “It’s incredible.”
“Not the word I would have chosen for a thing that’s about to kill us and then probably pick its teeth with our bones, but okay, sure, let’s run with that.” The dragon rolled its neck, a gesture that would have been comical considering just how long its neck was, but it was difficult to find anything attached to the creature the slightest bit humorous.
Never laugh at live dragons. The quote bubbled to the surface of Echo’s brain. Probably Tolkien. How fitting.
The dragon snapped its jaws experimentally, as if testing its range of motion. It looked vaguely hungry. Echo didn’t like that one bit. “How do we kill this bad boy?”
Dorian shot her an appalled glare. “We are not going to kill it,” he hissed. “It is very likely the last of its kind. I will not be the Drakharin held responsible for rendering their species extinct.”
“Okay,” Echo said, keeping her eyes on the dragon. It dipped and twisted, flying around the island. It turned lazy circles, head swiveling to and fro as it rose, higher and higher, until its wings were brushing the roof of the cavern. A long forked tongue snaked out, rasping over lips peeled back from hideously sharp teeth. It was licking its chops.
It was licking its chops.
“Shit,” Echo said, ever the soul of brevity.
The sound of her expletive made the dragon tick its head to the side. Those unnerving eyes narrowed into even more unnerving slits. It huffed and it puffed, raising itself as high as the cavernous ceiling would allow.
A sound rumbled from the depths of its chest, rather like that of a bellows. Gills that Echo hadn’t noticed before opened at the sides of its neck.
But it wasn’t underwater. Why on earth would it need gills?
It didn’t take long for Echo to learn why.
The scales on its neck opened and closed, and through the narrow openings their movement revealed, Echo saw a glow, low and red. It was an angry glow, full of menace.
Echo had half a second to bask in the idea that dragons really did breathe fire before the very real dragon breathed very real fire. Directly at her.
Her own fire responded without conscious instruction from her terrified brain. Her magic coursed through her body, driven by sheer instinct. She felt it spill not just from her hands, but from every inch of her exposed skin.
A wall of fire formed around her, brilliant white chasing away the shadows in the cavern. The dragon’s blazing breath collided with Echo’s own flames, and was overpowered by them. The fire was startlingly mundane, considering it had originated in a dragon’s belly. Echo’s, on the other hand, was pure magic.
The dragon’s fire petered out and Echo felt hers fade in the absence of an immediate threat. Pain flared hot and bright at the base of her skull, so powerfully that in better circumstances, with fewer fire-breathing dragons, she might have vomited.
“Can we kill it if it tries to kill us first?” As it was so clear
ly trying to do. Echo kept her eyes on the dragon as she directed her question at Dorian. The creature seemed in no particular rush to lunge at her again, but one could never be sure. Most of the dragons she’d read about had been mercurial at best, acrimonious at worst. “Then can we kill it?”
“We are not going to kill it,” Dorian hissed.
Before Echo could argue with him, the dragon roared and dropped its massive body into a dive. And that was when Caius woke up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Death would have been a kindness.
Everything hurt. Every inch of skin, every fiber of muscle, every sliver of bone. Caius groaned, and that hurt too, his vocal cords stripped raw by his own screaming. Something hard abraded his cheek as he tried to turn his head. Something hard and solid, pockmarked and uneven. Like stone.
That was new.
He opened his eyes and the world shifted around him. The view was the same, but different. Same rounded cavern walls. Same lonely little door at the end of a narrow stone bridge. Same unrelieved monotony. But he looked at it all now from the vantage point of the floor. Days had passed since the iron shackles had locked around his wrists and he’d been strung up like a freshly butchered pig. He felt like a freshly butchered pig. The welts along his back that had started to heal widened with every movement, however minuscule, and his inflamed skin was feverishly hot compared to the cool stone beneath him.
Voices, familiar ones, drifted to him. With great difficulty, he turned his head toward them, noting the fractured lines of a broken circle in the stone. The glyph. It had been shattered. Thoroughly.
When he saw his friends, he would have wept had there been any tears left in him, had his sister not wrung him dry.
Hair the gleaming color of polished steel. A shock of vibrant feathers in a dozen different hues. Hair the rich brown of dark chocolate pulled back in a messy ponytail.
They had come. They had come for him.
Dorian. Jasper. Echo.
And a dragon.
Caius fought to find his voice, but it rattled around in his throat, scratching at its tender walls.
The dragon—oh, what a marvelous beast it was, with its alabaster scales and the soft golden tinge of its wings—dove toward Echo, who faced it with all the bravery of a knight out of a fairy tale. But unlike a knight, Echo was just a girl. Unarmed and unarmored. She didn’t stand a chance.
With an earth-splitting roar, the dragon gnashed its teeth at Echo. A warning perhaps, or a promise. Wind gusted over Caius with each flap of the thing’s powerful wings, abrading his broken skin. Fire blossomed in Echo’s open palms like the first blooms of spring, pure white and blackest black dancing against her skin.
Stupid, Caius chastised himself. Echo didn’t need a weapon. She was the weapon.
Dorian’s sword was drawn, but Caius saw the reluctance in his stance. He didn’t want to fight the dragon. To the Drakharin, dragons were sacred. They were gods, on this earth but not of it. To harm a dragon was the gravest sin among their people, the highest and most unpardonable form of blasphemy. One who raised a weapon to a dragon would never find peace in the realms beyond this mortal life. They would be damned.
“Stop,” he tried to say, his voice a shattered whisper.
They didn’t hear him. Fire arced from Echo’s hands, twirling through the air like ribbons of light and shadow. The dragon retreated from the flames, its milky eyes squinting against the onslaught of light.
Caius had heard the dragon shifting among the rocks as he’d hung there. There had been a soft quality to those movements, a mindless rustling, like a person in the throes of restless sleep. Caius had convinced himself he’d imagined the noise, that his desperate mind had concocted a creature out of shadows to keep him company so that he wouldn’t die alone, but the dragon was beyond his wildest imaginings.
It would be a travesty to kill it. It had not done Caius harm; it would be poor recompense for his companions to cause it grievous injury.
“Stop,” he said again, louder this time as his voice returned to him, shaken from its tortured slumber.
Echo’s head snapped toward him, her brown eyes wide as she watched him struggle to stand. Her attention was only off the dragon for the barest of moments, but it was enough. The creature saw an opening and took it, dropping its clawed feet to the ground and lunging at her, jaws wide and dripping with saliva. Jasper barreled into Echo and they both went sprawling, missing the dragon’s dagger-sharp teeth by inches.
A hand wrapped around Caius’s forearm and helped him to his feet.
“My prince,” Dorian said. The words were spoken in formal Drakhar, but Dorian’s tone was chipped at the edges with emotion.
“My friend,” Caius replied, letting his weight fall on Dorian. “There’s a dragon,” he added rather dumbly.
“Indeed.”
“We can’t kill it.”
“No,” Dorian agreed. “That would be a crime.”
Caius tried to stand on his own, but gravity reminded him what a bad idea that was. He swayed back against Dorian’s chest. “I have an idea. But I have to do it alone.” He pushed away from Dorian again, unsteady on his feet but mostly upright.
“Drakhanis,” Caius said. The dragon’s head swiveled toward him, its nostrils flaring as it sniffed the air. Perhaps it recognized Caius’s scent—they had shared space for gods knew how many days—or perhaps it simply sensed the frailty of his abused body and didn’t mark him as a threat. But either way, it did not attack. It cocked its head to one side, looking, a bit ridiculously, like a curious dog.
A single tentative step took Caius toward the beast. Then another. And another. Echo shouted his name, but Caius had eyes only for the dragon. He could smell its foul breath—a combination of burnt meat and brimstone—even from a distance.
The cavern was dark, but Caius could just make out the markings on the dragon’s long body: mottled white-gold scales that reminded him somewhat of a spotted leopard. When its wings spread and lazily fanned the air, he noticed the underside was streaked with a dark pattern like the wings of a moth.
Caius approached the beast slowly, arms at his sides, his hands open to reveal that he was unarmed.
“I do not wish to harm you,” Caius said in Drakhar. The tongue of the dragon, as it was known among his people. He prayed that the term was more than just a pretty phrase. The stories his tutors and governesses had told him in childhood burned fresh in his memory. All those tales emphasized that dragons admired strength and cunning and skill, but they demanded respect. Caius dropped to one knee and brought one fist up to his heart, a Drakharin sign of the utmost obeisance. Though every instinct in him screamed against it, he lowered his gaze deferentially. “I am your humble servant.”
The others held their breath, a frozen audience, utterly silent. Not a single soul dared shatter the moment. Not even Echo.
With his gaze still fixed on the ground in front of him, Caius could not see the dragon step forward, but he felt it. The earth trembled with the force of its mass as it came forward in a four-legged crouch. It let loose an odiferous breath, huffing for all the world like a dog. A very large, very deadly dog.
Caius dared not raise his eyes, not even when he felt each lumbering step the creature took. Pebbles rumbled loose from the rocky ground, skittering away as if fleeing in terror. The dragon stopped when it was mere feet from Caius. Air gusted over him as the beast scented the area around him. Fat droplets of pinkish saliva dripped from the creature’s bloodied maw. Caius tried very hard not to think of where—or whom—that gore had come from. He knew that several Firedrakes had accompanied Tanith when she’d deposited him here; he wasn’t certain they’d all made it out alive. It would have been like her to offer one of her own as a sacrifice to the beast she’d left to watch her brother.
It inched closer, if something of such massive size could be said to inch.
Caius’s heart hammered in his chest, beating out a staccato rhythm that screamed its desire to run far,
far away.
But Caius held his ground, eyes still cast down and fixed on the loose pebbles that might very well be the last thing he ever saw. Forepaws with wickedly sharp talons tipped red with drying blood came into his range of sight.
A wet, hot breath gusted over the top of Caius’s head, ruffling his hair. Something slightly damp snuffled at his head. A snout, he realized. The dragon was scenting him.
His skin prickled into goose bumps, but he allowed the inspection. Up close, the beast’s breath made Caius’s eyes water. He took shallow breaths through his mouth, which had gone frightfully dry.
Satisfied, the dragon stepped back and the claws disappeared from Caius’s sight. With slow, incremental movements, Caius raised his eyes enough to see the creature. It sank gracefully to its knees in front of him, bending its enormous body forward in a gesture that looked remarkably like a bow. Its wings draped across the ground like a heavy blanket, spread as wide as the dragon was tall. It dipped its head low, vertical eyelids sliding closed for a moment. When its eyes opened, they were peering at Caius in a way that made him think the dragon was not nearly as blind as it appeared.
Caius met its milky, pearlescent gaze, unafraid.
With exaggerated slowness, he stood. Those unsettling eyes tracked his movements. He raised a hand toward the beast’s head. When it didn’t withdraw, he rested his palm against the ridge of its brow. The scales were warm to the touch, like the embers of a forgotten fire. He’d expected the texture to be rough, but the dragon’s scales were as smooth as his own. The creature twitched, bumping its head against Caius’s palm as if asking to be stroked. Caius slid his hand over its head, tracing the ridges of its skull. Its eyes drifted shut, and it huffed out a satisfied breath.
“It won’t harm us,” Caius said, petting the dragon’s head. A faint rumbling, almost like the satisfied purr of a cat, bubbled up from deep within its chest. As the adrenaline rush dwindled, darkness began to creep in at the edges of Caius’s vision. His wounds ached with renewed vigor, as if affronted that he had dared to ignore them for just a few moments. He wouldn’t last long. Not with blood loss and hunger and dehydration ravaging him from within.