Legend Of The Highland Dragon

by Cooper Isabel

  “I hope you’ll be a sensible girl. I’d like to do this quickly, and I don’t really need to hurt you. Someone should teach you a lesson about sticking to your place and keeping your nose out of the affairs of your betters,” he added, and in the flexing of his fingers and the light in his eye, Mina saw a rage that had passed rationality long since. She shrank back as much as she could.

  Whether her fear had sated him for the moment or he’d just turned his mind to more practical matters, Ward cleared his throat and went on. “But it doesn’t have to be me. Not if you’ll be smart.”

  Mina widened her eyes and raised her head. “Who are you?” she asked, letting her voice slip back into the accent she’d grown up with. “What do you want with me? I ’aven’t done you any ’arm.”

  Ward was a big man, and past middle age, whatever spells he used to keep himself from growing any older. Mina saw his open hand lash out and had time to turn her head so that the blow missed her nose and mouth. It was still hard enough to make her cry out, and it knocked her head back into the pipe, which hurt worse than the slap.

  “Don’t lie,” Ward snarled. “Don’t think you can get away with it. Not gutter scum like you. I can see right through you.”

  He stepped back. He also rubbed his hand, which tempted Mina to smile, as stupid as that would have been. “You grew up in Bethnal Green,” he said. “Then you somehow learned to speak a little bit like a lady and you worked for Professor Carter—until two months ago, when you showed up at MacAlasdair’s in the middle of the night and got taken on as his personal secretary.”

  There was no point asking how he knew. Any of the servants or the servants’ friends or their friends’ friends could have told him. Mina had never tried to keep any of that information secret. Clearly it was time to revise her tactics; the old ones had earned her a bruised face and a throbbing skull.

  She swallowed and managed to get words out of her throat, though it felt clamped shut. “What do you want with me, then?”

  “He wouldn’t have employed you for your personal charms or your skills,” said Ward, and Mina wasn’t sure whether he meant to insult her or Stephen, or both. “You must’ve found out a thing or two about ‘Laird MacAlasdair.’ What was it?”

  The ropes were securely tied and the pipe was solid, with no sharp edges that Mina could find. The half manes stared at her blankly. Off in the distance, a rat squealed.

  She cocked her head to the side. “What’ll you do if I tell you?”

  “Let you go,” said Ward. Mina didn’t believe that for a second, but she tried not to look openly skeptical. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll let them go to work on you.” He gestured to the half manes. “They like live meat.”

  That, Mina believed.

  Her nails scrabbled against the pipe’s surface. Her hands had more hope than her mind, it seemed.

  Looking down, she bit her lip. “I don’t know everything,” she said, very small and very frightened. She didn’t have to fake that. “He didn’t tell me very much.”

  “No,” said Ward, “he wouldn’t. Not even MacAlasdair would be that stupid. Start at the beginning. What did you see that made him hire you?”

  Mina closed her eyes and speculated. “He—he was in a big room. There was chalk on the floor, and—and blood. I think there was a chicken in the corner. And there was something in the middle of the room.”

  “Something?”

  Building from what she’d heard of with Stephen and Colin, she filled in the rest with imagination. “It was a bit like a man.” She talked slowly, trying to sound frightened and reluctant. Every second she took was one more second that she was alive, one more second in which the situation could change. “It had arms and legs and,” she swallowed, “a head. Except its hands had claws, and its head was…it looked like a big frog. With teeth. Its eyes glowed. I remember its eyes glowed.”

  After a moment of silence, she opened her eyes. Ward was still in front of her, but now he was scratching his head.

  “What was it doing?” he asked, finally.

  “Talking to Lord MacAlasdair. I, um…” Mina thought swiftly. The beast she’d constructed wasn’t formed for peaceful work, and Ward would have noticed any mysterious deaths in London, just as Stephen would. “I think he was talking about affairs back in Scotland. An uncle, maybe? I didn’t hear very clearly. I was scared.”

  “When you served him, did you have the full run of the house?”

  “Not his bedroom, of course!” That got her a glare. Propriety was not a consideration here. “And there was a room in the attic.” Thank you, Florrie. “He always kept it locked, but he went up there every night.”

  “Oh? Alone?”

  “Mostly,” said Mina, keeping her options open.

  “What do you mean—”

  THUD.

  The sound had come from above. Mina looked up, but the ceiling itself was too high for her to see. Whatever had landed on the roof was heavy; she could tell that much.

  So could Ward. He seized her by the shoulders, glaring. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Metal squealed above them.

  With no place to retreat, Mina endured. Ward’s hands felt like claws; his breath reeked; and the eyes that stared into hers were almost as inhuman in their rage as the half manes’s. Mina shrank back and turned her face away, the best she could manage.

  “What are you doing? What are you?”

  “A girl. His secretary. I’ve nothing to do with this!” It was the first truth she’d spoken in five minutes, and ironically, it did nothing to convince Ward.

  He hit her again, which she’d more or less been expecting. This time it was in the stomach and with a closed fist. A coldly rational part of Mina supposed that, if she had been casting a spell, that blow might even have been effective—physical pain to disrupt mental concentration. The rest of her knew only pain, breathlessness, and the sudden heat of blood flowing from her nose.

  Much as she would have liked to blame Ward, that last wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t come near her face.

  “It’s not me!” she cried.

  He curled his upper lip at her like an angry dog, released his grip, and stood back. “I don’t feel like taking chances. Kill her,” he said to the half manes.

  As one, they surged forward. Terror broke over Mina, flooding her mind beyond rational thought. She shrieked and thrashed, surging against the ropes with the full weight of her body, knowing it wouldn’t be enough.

  Forty-three

  Metal yielded easily to Stephen’s claws. Brick was only a little more of a challenge. Shrouded in fog, he smashed through the factory roof and plummeted inside, roaring. One taste of destruction had merely gotten his blood up, and he was ready for more even before he heard Mina screaming.

  He dove, talons out. He saw the vats and the pipe that had appeared in his vision. He didn’t see Mina; the hybrids blocked his view. They were advancing toward her, unrushed but far too quickly for all that.

  Stephen tore into them.

  The first hybrid he reached went down in a storm of claws. A swipe of his tail knocked three others back, and Stephen clamped his jaws around the remaining creature. It squirmed in his mouth in a way no living thing had ever done, and the taste was revolting: cold and corrosive. Eating it would probably be a horrible idea, so he flicked his neck and sent the hybrid flying. It struck one of the vats and fell heavily, leaving traces of its shadowy half-flesh on the metal.

  When he reached Mina, her face was white with terror and her eyes were red with tears, but she’d stopped screaming and was holding perfectly still. Her nose was bleeding. The bastard had hit her or had commanded one of the hybrids to do it. Stephen hissed his wrath, but anger was, just then, not the wanted emotion. He stifled it, then carefully lifted one of his hands and brought a claw down through the ropes that bound Mina, slicing through them all with one blow. She stumbled forward a few steps, rubbing at her wrists.

  He wanted to tell her
to run, wanted to at least meet her eyes, but the hybrids were coming toward them again. Stephen roared and spun to face them.

  Ward was shouting. None of it was very coherent, but all of it still sounded confident. Why not? He’d be reasonably certain, now, that he knew Stephen’s secret. The hybrids were powerful and almost unkillable. One, after all, had done some significant damage to Colin, even in dragon form, and while Ward didn’t know that, he’d probably gotten some idea of their capabilities in the process of creating them.

  Neither he nor his creations had yet seen a MacAlasdair’s full strength.

  Now Mina was behind Stephen and the hybrids in front. The building that surrounded them was metal and stone, and there were no innocents to worry about.

  Stephen inhaled deeply, feeling the shift and dance of magic deep in his body. This was as much a part of his heritage as his last name or the red scales that covered his skin.

  He breathed out.

  Fire.

  Two of the hybrids melted, shrieking in horrible bubbling voices. Their bodies writhed, the shadows twisting independently of the flesh. If Stephen had had time, he would have been revolted. A third screamed and writhed as well, but didn’t fall. It staggered back for a second instead, and its shape changed as the clothes it had been wearing burned away. Shadow flowed down its left arm, fusing the charred bits of its hand into something more like the tentacle its manes progenitor would have had. Shadow swallowed its left eye too, and the charred bits of muscle and bone on its side.

  It swept toward Stephen, reaching out with its tentacle and overly jointed arm. Stephen snarled and lashed out, raking claws down the thing’s uninjured side. He couldn’t breathe fire again, not so quickly, but he’d evened the numbers somewhat. That might be enough.

  He felt the impact first, high on his back, and then a rapidly spreading spot of burning pain. He didn’t turn his head—couldn’t, with the hybrid in front of him and the remaining one lurching toward him from where it had fallen below the vat—but he could hear his own flesh sizzling. Acid. Stephen remembered the cloud that had come from “John Smith” and realized that Ward had regained enough of his composure to cast spells.

  Stephen whipped his body to the side, avoiding a bolt of chilling shadow, and took another swipe at the hybrid. This one took its legs, and the thing’s torso fell to the ground, dissolving into shadow. Stephen turned to face the last and heard, from just far enough away that he couldn’t do anything, Ward’s voice raised in a series of blasphemous syllables, all building toward some unspeakable conclusion. Stephen didn’t know exactly what the spell would do, but he knew enough to dread it.

  Then a shriek and a thud cut off the chant. A series of curses came from Ward’s direction, but these were the mundane sort.

  Grappling with the last of the hybrids, feeling the chill of its shadowy hands against his scales, Stephen couldn’t see what was happening with Ward. The sounds gave him a fair idea, though: Mina. He hadn’t seen her move, but his attention had been elsewhere. So had Ward’s, apparently, and he hadn’t been expecting a mortal woman to do anything.

  If Get off me, you filthy bitch was any indication, Mina had tackled him quite firmly, too.

  Stephen snaked his head forward, under his opponent’s outstretched arms, and opened his jaws. The hybrid’s arms came down across the back of his neck, chilling it, but that was no matter now. He twisted his head sharply to the side, saw the hybrid collapse, and spat out the majority of his throat before leaping across the room to the place where Mina and Ward struggled.

  She was on top for the moment. More accurately, she was on Ward’s back, one arm clamped around his neck, and her legs, even in skirts, giving her purchase around his waist. She’d managed to give him several scratches across the face somewhere in the process.

  The problem was that Ward’s hands were starting to glow black, and the darkness was spreading up his arms. It would cover his body soon.

  Mina looked up, met Stephen’s eyes, and somehow read the silent message there. She let go, dropping from Ward’s back with an alarming thud. She rolled out of the way quickly enough, though—out of Ward’s way as he lunged for her with one shadowed hand, and out of Stephen’s as he darted forward.

  Instinct was almost stronger than rage just then. Stephen saw Ward and hated him. The dragon saw a small human figure, one who’d been hostile just recently. It saw prey and lunged.

  Ward probably didn’t even feel it when he hit the wall. His neck had snapped seconds earlier.

  For reasons, silly mortal reasons, roaring in triumph was unwise. Stephen stretched himself out instead, flexing his claws and his neck. The fight had been hard, but wizards were tricky. He had done well, though the acid still burned along his side; the girl was alive and unharmed. He turned his head toward her to be sure.

  “Oh,” Mina said. She was brushing herself off, feeling at her arms and legs, wiping at the blood underneath her nose, but her eyes were fixed on Stephen, and huge. “Stephen?”

  Stephen nodded, as much as he could in this shape, and waited for her to panic. When she looked between him and Ward’s body, obviously dead, he was sure she’d start running. He closed his eyes and thought about his human shape.

  “Hallo, the…er, vile lair of evil!” Colin called from behind them. Stephen’s eyes snapped open. He and Mina both spun to meet the new arrival.

  “I see I’ve arrived just in time,” said Colin, strolling inside as if the warehouse had been his club. “Nice work, well done, et cetera. Medals all round, and a tea with cream and buns, too.”

  Relief flooded out of Stephen with his next breath, almost as strong as the fire had been. He closed his eyes again and focused his will inward. The time for this form had passed, for now. He concentrated on being human again, on a body that was two-legged and smooth-skinned and could hold a woman without crushing her.

  Nothing happened.

  Forty-four

  “Stephen?” Mina’s voice came out hoarse from too much screaming. Her throat hurt now. Most of her body hurt—her wrists and ankles from the rope, her face from Ward’s hand, and the back of her head from the pipe, as well as spots all over her body from throwing herself across the room, grabbing the sorcerer, and then dropping off him again.

  Stephen had actually been fighting the half manes, though. Ward had hit him with at least one spell. Mina could see cracked patches of scales on his back and blood oozing from some of them. She wasn’t sure what they’d be when he turned human again, but she was sure they wouldn’t be comfortable.

  “Are you all right?”

  He only stared at her. In the shadowy room, his eyes shone, bright gold and the size of saucers. Mina bit down on her lip.

  “Are you all right?” Colin asked, turning from his brother. “It looked as though you were in a bit of a tight spot there.”

  “Fine,” said Mina, waving off the question. “But is he?” She glanced back over her shoulder at Stephen, who had closed his eyes again. Her stomach dropped. “I need to tell him about Florrie.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “But she’s—”

  “Under a curse, courtesy of our late friend here. Or was. I’ve taken care of it. Your other sister’s really quite a girl, you know,” he added. His voice wasn’t quite right, and his grin was too flat to be roguish.

  He was trying to distract her, Mina realized, and he kept looking back to Stephen while he was talking.

  “What is it?” Mina asked, and she couldn’t keep her voice steady this time. “Ward’s dead. Florrie’s all right. What’s wrong?”

  With a scraping sound that hurt her ears, Stephen’s claws tightened, digging long furrows in the cement floor. He threw his head back and roared, a world of rage and agony in that sound.

  “He can’t change back,” said Colin when the roar died away. There was no humor in him now. His voice was flat, and his eyes were like dull coins.

  All the blood ran from Mina’s face as she listened. She could do nothing
but listen, and Colin’s words battered against the numbness in her mind even as they made too much sense.

  “It was the fighting that did it, probably, the influence of the manes and the wounds he took. He’s kept enough of his mind to govern his own actions—but you recall what I told you. He can’t stay in London like this.”

  Some of them go away to live…elsewhere.

  As Mina caught her breath, Stephen lowered his head. He’d rid himself of his anger with the roar or had buried it behind a wall of self-control. The huge eyes that met hers were sad but impassive, resigned.

  He crouched again, preparing to take to the air.

  Mina’s heart tried to beat sideways.

  “No,” she said and ran across the floor as quickly as she’d done to tackle Ward.

  Stephen didn’t move when she threw herself against his side.

  “No,” said Mina again. “Not for me. Not you. Not this. People need you as a man, Lord MacAlasdair. I need you as a man.”

  The diary had said that affection for a mortal might be able to reverse the change.

  Stephen had never said exactly what he felt for her.

  She knew only her own heart. For more than that, she just had to hope.

  “If you leave,” she said, and let the tears flow down her cheeks as she spoke, “I’ll come with you—or I’ll find you—unless you tell me you don’t want me. An’ you can’t tell me without being a man, so you’re bloody well stuck with me. But you don’t have to leave. You don’t have to stay like this.”

  The shape against her blurred a little, and her heart lifted—but blurring was as far as it went. Stephen bent his head and looked at her, his form still that of a dragon.

  The memory of Stephen’s mouth on hers, of his arms tight around her as he told her to come back to him, drove Mina on.

  “I love you,” she sobbed, not caring if Colin heard. “I was going to tell you that. And I’ll still love you like this, but oh—” She caught her breath. “I want you to read the paper with me at breakfast and go to museums with me. I want to be in your arms at night. And I can’t do that if you’re a dragon. And you want those things too. I know you do.”