Page 46 of Fortune's Blade

But he was too far away; he shrugged it off and fled, becoming a distant speck in a moment.

But the rest were mine.

“Dorina! Dorina!” I heard someone calling my name, and felt my father’s familiar power flowing across my mind. On Earth, it might have been enough to rein me in; even here it might have, as he had always been stronger. But it seemed that my mind had changed, too, and he was unfamiliar with its new makeup.

So, I threw off his hold and feasted.

Blood spurted, scales flew, claws raked me again and again as paralysis broke—too late. I felt the meat of my body torn, felt bones hard as iron shatter and buckle, felt pain—but I was used to pain. I wasn’t used to this, this exhilaration that came from literally consuming my enemies, or the power that their blood lent me, which healed my wounds almost as soon as they were created, and fed the blood lust that had been sleeping for five hundred years and slept no more.

And then it was suddenly over.

I paused, looking around and heaving, my body blood covered one minute and pristine the next, as all of the fey blood was absorbed in an instant.

But there was no more. None living anyway. The dragonkind were torn asunder, with pieces of their flesh gone as well as their blood drained. They lay steaming on the blackened ground, the fires they had used against me still burning in places, and their bodies twitching but not with life.

And I suddenly found myself exhausted, falling back onto human knees that burned as they hit the smoking ground. I cried out softly, not understanding, and then they were there: Mircea, gathering me up in his arms; Ray, yelling something I couldn’t understand; Marlowe, staring at me as if he had never seen me before; and fey, hundreds, perhaps thousands of fey, screaming one thing, over and over into the midday air: “Dorina, Dorina, Dorina!”

Then darkness overtook me and I knew no more.

Chapter Fifteen

Dory

Okay, that might not have been the best move I ever made, I thought, as all hell broke loose a moment after I grabbed Steen. The worst of it was that I hadn’t considered the fact that dragons could partially change. And that if the human-looking waiters could sprout wings out of their backs, the chieftain of Vitharr could probably grow scales over his neck.

Like in the area directly under my knife.

That would have been bad enough, but he didn’t stop there. He transformed in an instant, going from human to something else faster than I could blink. And sprouting a tail in the process that he used to fling me across the length of the tower, in a blow that felt like it broke my back.

I immediately fell back into slow-time, since anything else would have meant instant death, and even that didn’t help much. Blurred shapes leapt for me from all sides, moving so blindingly fast despite the warped time perception that my eyes couldn’t follow them, forcing me to rely on blasts of flame and displaced air to even guess where they were. And my other senses weren’t doing any better.

All I could smell was fear—familiar, skin-ruffling, sweat-inducing fear; all I could taste was blood on my tongue where I must have bitten it, harsh and penny bright and bitter; and all I could hear was indescribable. Dragons could move silently when they wanted to, despite their huge size, but these had no reason to want to. And the infernal screeches were so loud in the enclosed space, and so stunning in their intensity, that it felt like being in the midst of a hurricane—just an endless, deafening roar.

I hit down, a stunning blow against the far wall, but nowhere near any stairs or doors out of here. And immediately launched myself off the stone and back into the room, getting space to maneuver. But it wasn’t easy.

In seconds, the world had been reduced to fire, scales, screams and claws, leaving me unable to think. I could barely even breathe, and was surviving off of instinct alone—and speed and agility that they hadn’t expected from a human. But it wouldn’t last, and it wouldn’t be enough.

I was as far outside of my league here as a guy off the street facing a master vampire, and was likely to end the same way.

And soon.

Someone scraped claws down my arm, lines of fire that barely connected or they would have torn the whole thing off; someone else threw a blast of flame across the space where I’d been a second before, catching the trailing hem of my pretty new gown on fire; and another blurry form hit the ground in front of me, cutting off my escape and shattering the stone under its weight, shards of which flew up into my face as I turned—

Straight into the path of a pair of gigantic jaws.

I had half a second to see them swooping down from above, so large that they blocked out my view of anything else; to watch firelight glinting off of rows of blood-stained teeth; to smell fetid breath washing over me in a vomit-inducing wave—

And then I jerked my duffle bag over my head and felt the familiar, disorienting flip into another world.

There was a sudden, eerie silence as I lay sprawled on the concrete steps leading down into my arsenal. I could hear nothing except for the echoes of another world ringing in my ears. That lasted longer than it should have, as my hearing usually repaired itself quickly, but then, it wasn’t usually blasted by decibels loud enough to feel like body blows, either.

It was enough to make me wonder if I even had eardrums anymore. But after a few moments, the ringing resolved itself into sounds: my own desperate breathing, the ceiling fan creaking slightly every time it revolved, and the crackle of flames.

I didn’t understand the latter until I realized: I was still on fire.

I leapt for a nearby shelf, grabbed a suppressant potion, and smashed the fist-sized globe into the center of my chest. It broke, allowing the cool contents to splatter all over me. And then to run across my body in a glistening coat of blue-tinted gel that suffocated the fire and soothed my blistered skin.

It didn’t sooth enough.

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