Page 53 of Fortune's Blade

“Why? We have a moment to put this on—”

“We have ten seconds.”

“What?”

“I hit the self-destruct. Eight seconds.”

“Merde!”

We ran. And, ladies and gentlemen, when a motivated dhampir and a master vampire run, they do not let grass grow. Not when there was a chance to actually survive this. Because there’s nothing like a reprieve from certain death to get the mental juices flowing.

And I’d finally had an idea.

The parachute changed everything and nothing, because as soon as it opened, we’d be spotted sure as hell. Unless everyone was too busy looking at something else, that was. Something big.

“Find us in this!” I yelled as we jumped into the void, without looking or caring where we were going, because anywhere was better than here.

Especially now, I thought, as the heavens exploded behind us.

I felt the heat on my back, felt us be thrown forward from the sheer force of all the magic being unleashed; felt something slice another piece out of my arm as debris speed by, some of it on fire; and heard Louis-Cesare grunt when another something hit him in the back.

“You okay?” I screamed, only to have the words be snatched away by the wind, before even vampire ears could hear them.

Or maybe he was just busy. We were falling fast, not having had time to open the chute yet, which he was shrugging into while I clung to his chest like a monkey. But even so, it felt like we were right there, at the heart of what was probably the biggest demonstration of human magic ever in Faerie.

We did Earth proud, I thought, as Louis-Cesare slammed the last buckle home, got a grip on me and jerked the rip cord.

It stopped our rapid descent but left us tossing and turning in the waves of magic being thrown around, even this far away. But it was better than what Steen’s people were doing. A whole lot better, I thought, staring upward past the wildly whipping chute.

It looked like the biggest fireworks display in history, one that was trying its best to consume a butt load of dragons. Who were too angry at the snarling, snapping, eviscerating magic all around them to do the one thing they needed to accomplish right then and get the hell out of range. Or maybe there was another reason for that, I realized, when one did break away and headed for open sky—

Only to be turned back by a vicious assault from Lord Den’s people.

He had screeched a warning when the fireworks started, and shielded them with his hie body until they were clear. His hard golden luster had run with the multicolored energy trying to consume his foes, but as far as I could tell, nothing got past him. Allowing his dragons to put some distance between themselves and the mid-air conflagration, and to wait at a safe distance to pick off any stragglers.

That left Steen’s people caught between an exploding rock and the hardest of hard places, and it showed.

A dragon fell out of the sky with his wings burning, leaving trails of boiling black smoke in the air behind him. Another was hit by a giant-sized dislocator, a notorious spell that rearranged body parts into formations not typically compatible with life—if you were lucky. This one attached his head and neck to another dragon’s body, who shrieked in horror and flew off, while the headless corpse followed the fiery one to the ground.

That ground was shrouded in mist just inside the tree line, so I didn’t see them land. I wasn’t so lucky when a flying potion bomb smashed into a third, coating him with a glowing orange sheen. It ran over his scales, obscuring the dark aubergine, until it reached the very tips of his tail and the barbed points on his wings.

And turned him inside out.

The whole mashed up, bloody, pulsating mass fell past us, somehow still screaming despite the fact that the great lungs were currently on the outside of the body, and I seriously thought about passing out.

“Merde,” Louis-Cesare whispered, in awe this time, and I nodded silently.

The display seemed to have made an impression on Steen’s people, too. More of them broke and ran, preferring to take their chances with a fight they understood than with off world horrors they didn’t. Steen was among them, despite the fact that he’d started all this.

I saw him wheel off into the night sky, followed by half a dozen outriders who looked mostly intact, although a few had tattered wings or shattered scales in places. But the same couldn’t be said for the rest, the ones who were a little late clawing their way out of the still-exploding magical cloud only to be met by another—of teeth and claws and wildly whipping wings. They were set upon by Den’s group in a very visceral display of what, exactly, happens when you lose a battle to a dragon.

Something that Louis-Cesare and I were about to discover, I realized, as a bright green dart came shooting at us across the sky.

I reached for a weapon, any weapon, but our attacker was too fast and I was too slow, having been burnt, battered, and possibly broken, because it was hurting way too much just to breathe. And nothing I had on me was likely to work anyway. I felt Louis-Cesare’s arm tighten, acknowledging what I already knew.

We weren’t going to make it.

And we wouldn’t have, except that a lavender streak took that moment to tear through the night, moving so fast that it was literally only a blur across my vision for a split second before plowing into the other dragon.

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