Page 1 of Fortune's Blade

Chapter One

Dory

“Dory,” someone was shaking me lightly. “Dory, wake up. We’re nearly there!”

I sat up, groggy and disoriented, and wondered why everything hurt. And then the cart I was traveling in jounced over a rock, causing my butt to slam down hard onto the bench-type seat. Oh, yeah.

Now I remembered.

It was a testament to how exhausted I was that I could sleep like this at all. But camping in another world, which was what I’d been doing for three weeks, was nerve racking. I’d tried to rest whenever we stopped at night, but jumping at every sound made that difficult, particularly when I didn’t know what most of those sounds were.

Like that one, I thought, as something between a rusty trumpet and a bullhorn went off, seemingly right in my ear. I jerked and stared around, but saw only the same vista that had met my eyes for the last two days: jagged mountains topped with snow, scraggly trees twisted into wild shapes by the wind, and expansive, pale blue skies. And a castle of golden stone erupting from a snowcapped peak in the distance, high enough to part the clouds.

Okay, that was new.

I found myself staring at it as we jounced along, trying to make it seem real to my groggy brain, which stubbornly insisted that it was an illusion. It was too tall, too precarious, and too close to the summit of the mountain, which could have been touched from some of the higher tower rooms. It couldn’t be real.

There wasn’t even any way up there. No bridge from this mountain, the only one with a road, no trail winding upward, which would have had to be cut at a ridiculous angle anyway. No gates to welcome friends or ramparts to keep out foes.

Just a golden castle perched improbably high and looking like it might fall off at any moment.

It wasn’t real.

Only it was, and I didn’t know how to deal with that.

And then a shadow fell over us, like a low-lying cloud. It made me look around in confusion some more, wondering what was wrong. And, like somebody being stalked in a slasher movie, to slowly look up.

Where my eyes encountered an acre’s worth of gleaming scales—almost literally, as they were inches above my nose.

I froze.

The creature that the mass of scaley hide belonged to slid by in a sinuous ripple, despite the fact that nothing that big should even be able to get off the ground. It was a brilliant, fire engine red, with the polish on the interlocking plates that covered it so perfect that a manicurist would have wept. They served as a mirror, allowing me to see myself as a tiny, insignificant thing gazing up in awe as the massive belly slowly pulled ahead of us.

As intimidation moves went, it was God-tier. And it was meant to be, since I hadn’t even heard the thing until it was right on top of us. Of course, I’d been in an exhausted sleep, drooling onto my husband’s shoulder, but neither of my companions had heard it, either.

And since they were a half dragon and a master vampire, that was . . . impressive.

It could have sent us tumbling down the mountainside before we knew what was happening, since we’d almost managed to do that for ourselves a couple of dozen times now. The goat trail we’d been traversing was rocky and overgrown and the width of goats. We’d had dirt and rocks frequently cascade into our ride from hugging the cliff too tightly, along with waterfalls spitting at us and animals pausing to peer curiously out of their burrows at us as if wondering what we were doing up here.

I was starting to wonder that myself.

I also was wondering which kind of dragon this was, as these mountains were home to two very different varieties. The way it had been explained to me was that it was similar to the Were situation on Earth. Some wolves were merely wolves, just animals and nothing more. And some were Weres, shapeshifters of the human type who could change in an instant.

Dragons had the same situation, with the animal type carnivorous, wildly destructive, and casually vicious, and the human-type all of that plus intelligent, calculating, and cruel. I wondered which this one was, and if it mattered. Because the animal-type might well decide to eat us, but the human-type might do worse.

Make that probably would do worse, I thought, noticing the set of my roommate’s shoulders in the seat in front of me.

Claire was actually my ex-roommate, since I’d recently gotten married and moved out. But I’d lived with her long enough to know that she didn’t scare easily. In fact, she rarely scared at all, facing down things that would make me blanch, and I’d been hunting monsters for five hundred years.

Yet here we were, with her looking as brittle as I’d ever seen her, with her narrow shoulders clenched and her abundant mop of red curls vibrating with some kind of emotion I couldn’t read. But it wasn’t happy, so neither was I.

I didn’t want to be dragon food.

Louis-Cesare, the aforementioned husband, obviously didn’t either, as he had his hand on his rapier. That was usually pretty intimidating, considering what he could do with it. As a four-hundred-year-old master vamp, he’d had plenty of time to practice.

Yet I didn’t think it was going to help us much right now.

But that might, I thought, when Claire suddenly had enough and erupted from her skin, changing in the blink of an eye into a pewter colored dragon with twisted crystal horns and a riotous lavender mane down her back.

---