by Erik Reid
Party Assist: 180 Degrees
“Party Assist,” I said, turning my attention to the sky. “In every direction, with no crosshairs. Oscar doesn’t communicate well in 3D. Last time that meant looking up. There’s nothing up there though except… Goddess! Party-up, lady of divine power. Join match!”
The stars twinkled with the same lazy indifference they maintained all night. My eyes scanned the heavens, but nothing changed. “Maybe Oscar’s Remote Access is no good at this distance.”
“Or,” Dani said, “what if Oscar wants us to look down instead?”
She climbed into the deepest part of the sand pit and pulled the broken wooden plank free. It was three feet long, and she used it like a paddle to brush more sand away from the space beneath her legs, forming a long trench that revealed darker sand below.
A white crosshairs appeared in my vision, directly underneath us, confirming her hunch. “Dani, you’re a genius. Dig!”
I cupped my hands and scooped sand up to toss behind us, speeding the rate of our descent into the desert’s lower layers. We uncovered a large crate bound in leather straps and etched with the royal insignia, but cracking it open was a waste of effort. It was all sand, with whatever else it contained long since disintegrated.
Oscar’s crosshairs veered back toward the open sand, leading us further down into the unknown. We splashed sand in every direction while we gradually sank below the embankment we formed around ourselves.
Finally, my fingers grazed something rough. I leaned back. “Dani, I found something. And it’s warm.”
We stared at that spot together, lit only by the moon and the stars. The sand lifted slightly of its own accord, then receded.
“Well that’s interesting,” I said. “Something’s alive down here.”
I continued to brush sand away from the creature’s body with Dani’s help. Its skin was rough and reptilian, with what I guessed was an orange color only a few hues off from the desert sand. A long neck with gentle ridges along its center led to a head twice the size of my own. Large nostrils, closed eyes, and an elongated jaw were all bound behind a leather face mask comprised of overlapping straps and buckles.
Dani stopped brushing at the sand. In fact, she stopped moving altogether and took a long, slow breath before speaking. “There’s only one thing this could be, but I don’t understand how. Kyle, we’ve uncovered a dragon.”
“I thought you said dragons were extinct,” I said.
“The legend holds that they all died out a long time ago.”
“Well maybe they’re just heavy sleepers,” I said. “Or maybe that legend is another lie the draykin crown keeps telling, the same way they’ve kept Oscar secret.”
“The queen would know,” Dani said.
“But I’d rather ask Benoch,” I said. “Something tells me a dragon buried in the queen’s favorite landfill isn’t a coincidence, especially one with such a wicked muzzle. Either way, I won’t second-guess our good fortune. We need to get this guy flying without making him mad.”
“I wouldn’t worry about his temperament,” Dani said. “Dragons are tranquil unless provoked — only then are their attacks swift and decisive. Hence the proverb: a dragon doesn’t start a war, but will surely end one.”
“I don’t think I find proverbs as reassuring as your people do,” I said. “We don’t need it to start or end a war, just get us the hell out of here. If this thing can help us up the mountain, we’ve got to wake it up. Now.”
I started rubbing my hands against the creature’s skin, shaking its body while it half-slept beneath the dunes.
“Be careful,” Dani said. “Never tickle a sleeping dragon. It’s my last draykin proverb, I promise.”
“I think the draykin stole that one,” I said, “from a five-foot-five British woman who really should have stopped after book seven.”
Suddenly the dragon lifted onto its front paws, shaking sand off its forehead and neck, shivering all the way down its back and stretching wide, leathery wings out to each side. Its tail erupted from beneath the sand and slammed back down behind its — oh wait, his body. Naked as the day he was hatched, this was definitely a male dragon, swinging in the wind.
Dani and I scurried backward to give the dragon his space. Dark smoke puffed out his nostrils, but his eyes only half opened. After a few drowsy blinks, he stepped in a small circle and curled up with his tail to resume his desert slumber.
“You do not roll over and go back to sleep,” I said, marching toward the massive animal. “I will bop you on the head until you open those damn dragon eyes.”
Dani caught up to me and put a hand on my arm. “That might provoke it, but I have a different idea.”
She reached between her breasts and pulled a pair of candies loose, wrapped in paper but misshapen as her body heat melted the edges. She approached the dragon slowly and carefully, then pressed her thumb against his lower lip. She pulled his mouth open only enough to tuck her candies inside.
“What did you feed him?” I asked.
“Synappers, of course.”
“I thought you threw all that stuff away.”
“I held onto these two in case we needed extra stamina for the long walk out of here. I was upset, but not suicidal. And what makes you think it’s a ‘him’?”
“Because I caught an unwelcome peek at… nevermind. Just don’t look too close. It’s pretty gnarly.”
The dragon’s eyes squinted tight as the energizing candy melted in his mouth. He arched his back and lifted his head, snorting out twin columns of smoke. He opened his eyes, revealing vertical slit pupils surrounded by bright orange irises that reflected back the moon’s light in a fiery ring. Then he lunged forward in a head-butt that stopped an inch from my torso, warning me to keep my distance.
Dani spread her wings wide and stepped forward. “Ancestor?” she asked, her voice breathy and awestruck. The creature calmed, regarding her carefully as she held his gaze. “Hold still.”
Dani’s long draykin nails were the perfect tool for releasing the small clasps that held the strappy leather muzzle in place. After a minute of careful fiddling, the whole thing fell off and sank into the sand.
“You marvelous creature,” she continued. The dragon let her place a hand against its bare cheek. “How long have you lain dormant, forgotten and trapped beneath the sands in this throwaway desert? And how many more of your kind are here?”
“Dani,” I said. “We should hurry.”
“Of course,” she said. “Dragon, will you help us?”
The beast regarded her for a moment, then turned his head away.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“We should take that as a ‘yes,’ ” I said. “Before he flies off on us. Whether he likes it or not, he’s gotta get us out of here.”
I started to climb up the dragon’s back, but he twisted and thrashed his head around again. Gripping one of the ridges on his rounded back, I reached out for Dani’s hand, pulling her up beside me.
The dragon was not pleased. He bucked back and tried to throw us off, but we held tight and lay flat against his spine. The beast sent up a cloud of sand as he beat his wings in every direction, then he leapt into the air.
At first, I was certain we’d fall. There was so little to hold onto, and passenger travel on dragon-back was bumpy, noisy, and painful. Like RyanAir, but with better legroom.
Still, I held tight and kept my eyes forward, alert to any twists or turns our airborne mount might throw at us.
The dragon screeched as he flew, carrying us higher into the sky.
Clouds sped past us, misting our faces with atmospheric droplets as the dragon cut a path through them. Glimpses of the ground re-emerged as wisps of disrupted cloud cover separated beneath the dragon’s wings. The desert, the grasslands, the northern mountain range — they lay out before us as a world in miniature that only kept shrinking as we gained altitude.
“We can’t control him,” I said. “And we’re not heading straight for A�
�zarkin. We need to jump ship while we’re in range to glide down there on our own.”
“I’ve never flown that far or that long,” Dani said. “I don’t have the strength for it.”
“You have more strength than you give yourself credit for,” I said. “You’re the same girl that scooped up a strange man in the middle of nowhere, held your ground with Momma Jumbo, raced into a burning building, and tried to sneak your way out of a blood debt in front of the frickin’ queen. You’re a badass, Dani. Lean into it.”
“Goddess help us,” she said. “I can’t promise my wings won’t snap and my arms won’t fail me.”
“That’s the spirit.” I stood up on the dragon’s back with my knees bent and my body jerking side to side as I fought to maintain my balance. I spread my arms out so Dani could wrap her hands around my chest, then she hopped onto my back and cinched her legs around my waist. I gripped beneath her thighs and stepped to the side, slipping down the slope of the dragon’s back as it tilted its position in the air.
Suddenly, Dani’s wings shot outward, flapping wide against the wind and lifting us off our dragon mount. The reptilian beast sped onward without us and we plummeted toward the mountain’s jagged face below us.
Dani groaned and shifted, but she couldn’t flatten her body horizontally and glide smoothly with me weighing her down. Her grip on my chest slackened.
“You have to let me go,” I yelled over the onrush of air as we plummeted.
“Never!” she said.
“Poor choice of words,” I said. “My bad. I meant your legs. They’re wrapped around me, ruining your angle. Draykin fly flat. Keep holding with your arms though, please and thank you.”
I brought my hands to my hips and tensed my muscles, waiting for Dani to shift her position. Gradually, she hooked her arms beneath mine and let her legs stretch out behind her.
For a moment, I kicked at the air in a panic, my legs swinging outward to dangle a mile above the ground.
The panic fled an instant later when our trajectory smoothed out and Dani took control of our course. We soared high above the mountain range, gliding smoothly toward the glowing hunk of ice that grew larger in our view the faster we approached it.
“We’re descending too fast,” Dani said. My body lurched as her wings flapped downward, slowing our fall only fractionally. “I can’t make it!”
“You’ve got this,” I said. “Just one more rep, come on, push yourself!”
Dani’s arms started to shake, but she forced her wings to flap downward and back up once more, fighting against gravity and buying a second’s reprieve from its unforgiving grasp.
“Again,” I said. “One more time.”
She struggled to turn our soaring fall into a manageable landing, but she forced her wings to do their job again.
“How many ‘one more times’ are there?” she asked.
“Just one,” I said. “I really mean it this time.”
I didn’t mean it, but no good personal trainer ever told a guy at the gym, “I know you’re tired, but we’re doing five more at the same weight.”
The glacial cavern clarified in our view, the small dots of movement becoming people, and demons, and bloodmonkeys.
“One more time!” I yelled.
“No,” Dani said, panting and sliding her arms down a few inches, losing her grip on me.
“Yes,” I said. “You’ve got this! You’re a fucking dragon, Dani. Now decide: do dragons fall, or do they fly?”
“Dragon.” Her voice was faint, but her arms lifted and tightened against mine. Her wings beat against the air and then held firm, beat and held firm.
“I am a dragon,” she said again, blasting her wings harder and faster, tilting her body so that we aimed at A’zarkin’s hollowed glacier like an asteroid careening toward a deadly impact. The wind rippled my cheeks and the cold forced my eyes to tear.
“And dragons,” she said, “strike back when provoked.”
CHAPTER 32
Moments before Dani and I would have crashed into the ice floor of A’zarkin’s hollow glacier, Dani flapped her wings in a flurry and killed our inertia, turning our bodies vertical together and then touching down in the chamber’s center.
Our landing took A’zarkin by surprise. He spun toward us, bewilderment scrunching up his ugly blue face.
“Oscar!” I yelled. “Come to me!”
A’zarkin’s head whipped toward his son, who sat on the ice throne with Oscar held loosely between his fingers. The glove, however, did not budge.
“Worth a shot,” I said.
“Pakson,” A’zarkin yelled, “hurry up and claim the glove as your own.”
“I can’t get it on, father,” Pakson said. “It resists my clawed nails.”
“Let me help,” Jasmine said, still kneeling by his side but straightening her back and craning her neck to see past his throne’s armrest.
“Fine,” Pakson said, draping his hand toward her. Jasmine took Oscar and the demon prince’s hand, fumbling with his long, blue fingers and the thin, slippery fabric of the onicite glove. It fell from her hand and she scrambled to snatch it up again with fingers that were likely numb, if not frostbitten.
If she was going to help him, at least she was useless.
“The Order will send others, demon,” Lissa yelled. She knelt on the ground with Clara, both tending to Kaylee’s unconscious body. The simki’s skin was peacefully peachy again. A handful of bloodhounds held long spears crafted from blue ice to keep the girls trapped against a far wall.
“And I will drain their bodies of blood and power myself, the same as I will do to you,” A’zarkin said. “Once I dispatch with our would-be hero once and for all.”
I raised my bare fists. “I won’t bury you under a glacier like the last guy. I’m here to kill you, once and for all.”
“That’s why they call him Kyle the Vanquisher,” Dani said. She winked at me and reached for her sword, still sticking up from the cavern’s ice floor.
“Damn fucking right,” I said.
The few bloodhounds and bloodmonkeys that had survived our earlier fighting hissed and screeched, stalking closer to us except for the few that stood guard over the other girls.
“I don’t know how you crossed such a great distance without the Oscar suit,” A’zarkin said, “and I do not care. You are outnumbered here, and soon Pakson will wield the— Hey!”
A snowball splattered across A’zarkin’s face. Then another, and another, until a volley of densely-packed snow spheres all sailed through the sky at once. They came from above, from the red-skinned hands of a horde of kobold givens, standing at the edge of the glacial crater’s upper rim.
“I cannot be defeated with ice!” A’zarkin said. “Why does no one understand this?”
“You guys came back for me,” I said. “I mean, I told you not to, so… bad kobolds! But at the same time, good effort.”
“You told them not to come back until you needed them,” Dani said.
“Hot damn,” I said. “You’re right. But how did they know?”
While A’zarkin and his demonspawn entourage deflected snow projectiles, the kobolds swung into action, sinking their pickaxes into the ice wall that ringed the cavern’s open ceiling and leaping toward us with ropes tied around their waists at one end and those tools’ handles at the other. When they landed, they tugged the ropes, reclaimed their tools, and turned them into weapons against the demonspawn that still roamed the ice cave.
A’zarkin screamed, enraged that his army had been neutralized, each gray, vampiric beast forced to tussle with two — or sometimes three — pickax-wielding kobolds.
Pakson, meanwhile, rested his chin on the back of one hand, leaning away from Jasmine and waiting impatiently for her to finish slipping that glove over his fingers. Her own hands were so clumsy, so numb, that she made almost no progress.
“Get the girls,” I said to Dani. She nodded and charged at the bloodhounds and their ice-spear weapons.
A’zarkin walked casually toward me, lacking any apprehension. I stood my ground and waited for him. There was no running from this fight now. He stopped an inch from me, breathing cold, stale breath into my face as he exhaled.
“All those years, trapped and forgotten,” A’zarkin said. “I deserved my revenge.” He punched me in the ribs and I folded in half.
“You deserved,” I said, grunting through the pain that stabbed into my side, “what you got. They trapped you because you terrorized them.”
I swung at him, but the punch didn’t land. A’zarkin ducked to one side and swatted my arm away.
His demon fist flickered with blue energy, then he punched me in the forehead, causing an instant brain freeze. I staggered backward and he smiled. He was playing with me now, a man without a glove, or a hope in all the world of stopping an immortal demon from finding a new form of revenge against Dani’s people.
“They imprisoned the witch that brought me here,” he said. “All I wanted was to return home.”
“To Earth,” I said through chattering teeth.
“To a realm that banished my kind two thousand years hence,” he said. “Earth was but a single stop on my journey.”
“You’re that old?” I asked. “No wonder you’re bald.”
He punched me in the face again, an attack as painful as it was cold. The only warmth was fresh blood erupting inside my mouth and trickling down my lower lip.
“A being that bends time cannot age,” he said, pulling his arm back for another strike. “We only watch the world as it freezes and burns and freezes again.”
That last punch spun me around the other direction. I hunched over, my hands on my knees and my face dripping hot red blood onto the frozen floor below me.
To one side, Dani and Lissa struggled against bloodhounds with spears of ice and Clara held Kaylee’s unconscious body, cowering from the fight. To the other side, a blur of kobolds fought against vicious bloodmonkeys with severe injuries all around.
Dead ahead sat Jasmine, shivering on the ice while she fumbled to fit Oscar over a single one of Pakson’s long, languid fingers.