by Karen Chance
“Bring it back?”
“—and therefore must be closer in order to—”
“How the hell do you expect me to bring it back?”
Considering that I was currently dangling from the giant paw of a massive black dragon, I thought that was a fair question. But then Mircea sent me his plan, which had me uttering some of Pritkin’s best verbal explosions, not that anybody could hear them. And then grabbing the damned skirts and using vamp strength to rip them off, giving me a free field of vision.
Which I could have really done without.
A huge expanse of black scales gleamed above me in the weak sunlight. They weren’t smooth like a snake’s but ridged, each having a little mountain in the middle of it, like an alligator’s hide only pointier. It made the creature look like it was bristling all over and would shred any skin that it came into contact with. And I was pretty sure that I wasn’t able to borrow Mircea’s healing abilities, since my hand was still on fire.
This was really going to suck.
“You can’t overpower that thing!” Pritkin yelled, as if hearing my thoughts, and maybe he could. “Use magic!”
“I don’t have my magic—”
“You don’t need yours. You have mine!” And the next second, he sent me a spell so strong and so compelling, that I felt my lips forming the words before I could stop them.
A massive ball of blue flame erupted out of nowhere and shot straight up the monstrous body, as if the creature had been doused in propane. It hit mid-way on the chest, as if I’d just lobbed a bomb into the middle of a 747, and ran over the gnarled old scales like water. In seconds, the entire top half of the creature was burning.
Only no, not burning, I realized sickly.
Because the tough old dragon hide seemed impervious to fire, including the magical variety. Even the great, leathery wings, which were the thinnest and thereby most vulnerable part of the beast, sloughed off the flames like water from a tarp. Huge, burning blue droplets cascaded backward and tumbled off the slick surface, almost hitting me in a few cases, despite my position dangling from a back paw. But most sailed over my head, leaving a trail of blue flame streaming out behind us that I stared back at in confusion.
Not at the visual, although it was impressive enough, but at the thought that we were supposed to be parked in the middle of a ley line. We had been since we passed through the portcullis, taking us who knew how far away from the outer world. So how were we flying off into the sky? How had we gotten back out again? Or had we, because a quick attempt to shift did nothing, my power being as locked away from me as ever.
I stared around at the landscape, seen through the rain of strange, blue fire, and felt my stomach tilt and whirl even more than it had when I’d first been snatched away. Because this looked like Earth, smelled like Earth, felt like Earth, except for the great, fiery dragon flapping through the sky above me. But it couldn’t be Earth, or I’d have been able to shift out of this already.
What if that portcullis hadn’t been a doorway to a stationary bubble, as I’d initially thought? What if we’d gone much further than that? What if the reason my power didn’t work was because we weren’t in a bubble at all, but had stepped through some kind of portal, all the way to—
“Faerie!” I screamed through the link at both men. “We’re in Faerie!”
I didn’t get a reply, or maybe I just couldn’t hear it over the sound of the dragon suddenly screeching overhead, an awful, tearing metal sound that maybe indicated that the fire was doing something, after all. The terrible shriek certainly was, namely rupturing my eardrums, not that it mattered. Corpses don’t need ears, which is what I was about to be, because the creature had just opened its paw.
And the difference between being carried and being dropped was like a shock of cold water to the face. Or a slap of cold air, as the enveloping cave of flesh fell away, and I started to plummet to my death. The old Cassie would have dropped the thirty or so stories to her doom, probably screaming the whole way.
The new Cassie reacted a little differently, because this wasn’t the first time that I’d been dropped from a height. Pritkin had done it at least a dozen times in training, to help me learn to use the Pythian power even under duress, although he’d always been there to catch me. Nobody was there now, but I didn’t need the help. Not with borrowed vampire reflexes allowing me to snare one of the great claws a split second later.
I held on for dear life, my hands sliding on the thick, horn-like surface, while my body twisted and turned in the freezing air.
The screaming part was, however, was pretty much the same.
I couldn’t hear myself; I couldn’t hear anything but dragon screeches. But I felt every one of those screams, which kept going on and on because the dragon was writhing now, turning and twisting, as if trying to shake me off. Or as if trying to shake someone else off, I realized, finally glimpsing the colossal battle being waged in the skies above me.
For a moment, in spite of everything, I just stared. Because that is what you do when your ex-boyfriend is darting through the air, battling a massive dragon in the middle of the sky. What the hell?
I blinked a couple of times, the cold air forcing tears from my eyes, or maybe that was due to them not believing what they were seeing. Mircea looked like a dark angel, I thought in shock. Or the opposite type of creature, because the wings he was currently using to batter the air were huge and black and leathery, growing out of his back near his shoulder blades, and he held in each hand a wicked looking spear tipped with more of that strange, blue fire.
“—the joints!” Pritkin’s voice was yelling in my head, but I didn’t think he was talking to me. His voice was dimmer, farther away, and harder to make out because of the wind in my ears. “Where the wings attach to the body. Strike there!”
Mircea struck there.
The words were still echoing in my head when he dove, the wings he shouldn’t have had tucked close to his body, the two glowing spears held together and out in front of him, forming his whole being into a sleek projectile that screamed through the air, hitting the huge beast exactly where Pritkin had advised.
And the advice had been good.
I felt the thud of the blow shiver through the great body, almost hard enough to throw me off. And then the beast reacted, and if I’d thought it had been writhing before, it was nothing to this. It thrashed in mid-air, while a spew of red and gold erupted from the huge maw, turning the world above us into a canopy of contrasting fire, and blocking out my view of—
“Mircea!” I screamed, my throat raw, but I didn’t hear anything back. Or maybe, as before, my ears were too full of dragon screeches to hear anything.
“Where is he?” Pritkin asked, his mental voice now loud in my head.
I looked everywhere, feeling my heart pounding against my ribcage, threatening to beat out of my chest. But I couldn’t see him. Billowing black smoke and leaping blue and red flames blocked my view, while the twisting of the great beast was slinging me about so hard that even vampire strength was being tested. I couldn’t see him.
“Cassie!” Pritkin’s voice had turned urgent.
“I don’t know; I don’t know!”
The tears streaming out of my eyes were from a different source now. I’d only recently lost a dear friend to this war, the wound still bright and sharp and burning. I couldn’t lose Mircea, too. I couldn’t.
And then the great beast gyrated, so abruptly that my body slung out behind me, and I lost part of my grip. Leaving me dangling by one hand as it spun in mid-air and started back for the castle, I didn’t know why. Until I saw them: a whole phalanx of fey spread out along the ramparts, and nocking arrows.
I stared at them, at the fairy tale castle behind them, at the colorful pennants snapping in the breeze, and my brain went blank. Humans are great adaptors, but not this fast. All I could think of for a second was: “how pretty.”
But I snapped out of it, because I’ve never believed in going quie
tly into that good night. I tried to remember the fireball spell, which hadn’t worked so well on dragon flesh but might do better against fey. But my brain was occupied by rushing white noise, my hand was slipping on the slick, horn-like material of the claw, and my stomach was threatening revolt despite the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything today.
Nothing remotely resembling a spell made it out of my mouth.
Which was why it was surprising to see the line of fey go up like birthday candles, nonetheless.
“Silent spell casting,” Pritkin yelled in my ear, before I could ask. I received a brief, one second flash of him running through the now virtually deserted halls of the castle, with something tucked under his arm. “Anything you can see, I can burn!”
Good to know, I thought, and lost my grip.
It seemed less of a deliberate thing than a reflex as the great beast realigned its legs, preparing to land. Or to crash, which was more likely to be the case here. But that was less of a concern to me than to the burning, panicked fey, because this time, I was falling.
Until, suddenly, I wasn’t.
I looked up, gasping at two shocks in as many seconds, and saw Mircea’s face backlit by the light through huge, leathery wings. “Hold on!” he yelled, clutching me tight.
I held on.
Yet I couldn’t help wondering why we were following the dragon straight down into—
“Heeeeeeellllllll!” I screamed, and Mircea’s grip tightened even more.
But he didn’t let go, or change course. What he did do was to follow the dragon straight back through the side of the castle. Which promptly ceased to be a castle and became a burst of flying blocks larger than my body, of tiny, shrapnel-like pieces as big as my fist, and of dust and screams and blood and arrows, because some of the crazed fey appeared to be trying to shoot the dragon.
This did not work, any more than shooting an out-of-control jumbo jet would have. And like anyone foolish enough to try, the fey ended up getting mowed the hell down. Or slammed against whatever remained of this part of the castle. Or kicked away from us by Mircea, who was still right on the dragon’s tail for some reason.
Maybe that reason, I thought, as we burst out of the shattered building and back into the courtyard where we’d first come in, and where still more fey—did they respawn or something, I wondered dizzily—were rushing to form up.
Only one does not form up before a dragon.
One gets the hell out of the way of a dragon, or one wishes one has.
It was a fact these fey were learning quickly, with the pretty, pretty lines, so shiny and smart, scattering and flying and, in some cases, getting ground into the stones of the courtyard beneath the great belly.
And then continuing to be so as the wounded beast thrashed around, giving me a brief, confused view of leather sheets blocking the sun, of great claws scrabbling at the ground I was trying to run over after Mircea touched down, of the feys’ silver hair streaming like banners in the wind, while we ducked and dodged and tried to avoid the churning caldron of dust and death that the once orderly forecourt had become.
And avoid it we did, because somebody had opened the portcullis, not that I could see it from here. But I could hear it clang, clang, clanging upwards, and more importantly, I could feel it. A blinding, shimmering tide of the Pythian power surged through the opening, as if it had been bunched up on the other side, collecting into a mighty wall as it struggled to reach me, but was denied.
It wasn’t denied now, and it didn’t grab me so much as snatch me up and throw me through the gate, where Pritkin was waiting on the other side, because of course he’d gotten the portcullis open; of course, he had. I snatched him up, too, on my way past, getting rewarded with a flash of brilliant green eyes in a bloodied face, and a triumphant yell as the portal released us and another power took us. My power.
And then we were gone.
Chapter Three
I hit the ground running and almost immediately smacked into a wall. The blow had me stunned for a moment, but I was pretty sure that we’d landed okay since I felt modern carpet under my butt when I abruptly sat down. I was also pretty sure that I’d managed to bring both guys back with me, because a fight had just broken out.
A big one.
The landing pad I usually used in these cases was in my bedroom, so that was probably my favorite lamp, I thought, as something big shattered against the wall. The pieces went everywhere, including down onto me, so I flipped over and started crawling. There were a lot of feet in the way, scuffling around, and some pointy bits that I was fairly sure were the trailing ends of the wings that Mircea should not have had, because contrary to legend, vampires did not turn into bats.
Well, most vampires, I corrected myself, because the old ones had some pretty freaky powers, but I’d seen Mircea’s and that particular trick wasn’t among them.
“Pardon, dulceață,” the man in question said, as he fell into my path.
“Urp,” I said, because my brain didn’t seem to be working right.
Mircea didn’t notice, and launched himself right back into whatever was going on above my head. Didn’t know; didn’t care. I felt funny and I could swear that I saw Pritkin’s legs cover the same bit of floor three or four times in quick succession, as if he was doing some kind of weird dance move.
Michael Jackson would have loved that one, I thought, just as the door to the hallway slammed open and a bunch more legs joined the party.
Mircea’s were directly in front of me again, because he seemed to be trying to shield me from the fracas while still pummeling something off to the side. You had to admire the manners. It reminded me of a story about Marie Antoinette that my governess had once told me, while trying to improve my childish ways.
“She accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot,” Eugenie had said. “On the way to the scaffold. Yet she asked the man for his pardon, nonetheless. Now, what would you have done in her stead?”
“Kicked him in the balls,” I’d answered promptly, which I guessed was not the hoped-for response, judging by the fact that I did not receive pudding that night.
Pudding, I thought, while crawling determinedly for the hallway door. It had been Eugenie’s catch-all phrase for dessert, because I guess British people really like pudding. She’d called it the pudding course, although sometimes it was actually cake or trifle or pie.
Pie. My brain latched onto the idea with enthusiasm. I could really do with some pie. I was absolutely ravenous for some reason, although pudding—
Somebody snatched me off the floor.
—would be nice, too, I decided, dangling from a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt.
“What the fuck did you do?”
“Hello, Marco.”
I was having a problem focusing suddenly. The big, handsome face of my chief bodyguard kept doing the mambo, shifting back and forth every time I tried to catch it with my eyes. Focus, shift, focus, shift, like it was dodging my eyeballs. It was making me woozy, and I guessed I must have looked a little weird, because he shook me.
Urp, I thought again, and tried not to retch.
“Mage Pritkin!” he yelled.
“I am here as well,” Mircea said, sounding slightly aggrieved. Maybe because Marco used to be his vamp, not so long ago. But the former gladiator had thrown in his lot with me, deciding that my court needed more help than Mircea’s did, and making me joke that I’d got him in the divorce.
That wasn’t true, of course. There’d been no divorce, since Mircea and I had never been married in the human sense of the word, and since such things didn’t exist in vamp land, anyway. But even if it had, Marco wouldn’t have been divvied up. Not because he was a person instead of a tchotchke—vamps tended to view their servants and their furniture on something of a par—but because he was a master, too. A second-level one, in fact, one of the most powerful tiers, and the kind who often had their own courts.
Marco could have left Mircea’s service years ago, but he ha
dn’t seen the point when it wouldn’t get him out of the dog-eat-dog vamp world, but just set him up with a new set of headaches. So, he’d stuck around, telling me once that everybody serves somebody, and that Mircea was a better master than most. But then he’d seen a chance to join a different kind of court, where he made the rules, at least where security was concerned.
It had been a win for both of us, with Marco’s six-foot-five-inches of studliness striding around, giving orders that my young initiates cheerfully ignored. They knew that, despite his size, he was a softy underneath, at least where they were concerned. Marco, who had lost his own daughter centuries ago, now had dozens of them, who tended to flock after him like goslings after an oversized mother goose.
You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound vamp, with inch long fangs when fully extended and glowing, amber eyes, sitting quietly while a tiny tot carefully painted his fingernails.
I grinned sloppily at the handsome Italian features and saw him scowl. “I’m too old for this,” Marco muttered, making me laugh. “Are you drunk?” he demanded.
“I wish.”
Marco muttered something else I didn’t catch, and tucked me under the bunch of boulders masquerading as his arm.
But that didn’t please someone.
“None of that,” a voice said sharply. “Give her here.”
The booming voice belonged to my new Eugenie, although technically her title wasn’t governess, because at twenty-four, you don’t get one of those. At least, not officially. But Hilde didn’t seem to know that.
In fairness, the robust older women with the shelf-like bosom, which was currently wrapped in a blue bathrobe, and the head of silver white hair done up in curlers, had been left with the unenviable task of trying to wrangle my out-of-control court. That included shepherding a brand new, largely clueless Pythia, developing training programs for my growing number of initiates, and somehow turning a Vegas penthouse into a war-time base of operations. She’d managed admirably, like she did everything else, so I supposed she could be forgiven for getting a little strident sometimes.