Page 51 of Fortune's Blade

The bastard trying to kill us had just done us a favor, which would have been great, which would have been awesome, if not for one thing.

One very, very big thing.

I had landed on my back, bouncing slightly on the trampoline-like surface of the ruined organ, giving me a perfect view of a vividly green eyeball the size of the moon. It was peering down at me through the tattered remains of the ribcage, where pieces of red meat and yellow fat clung to the bones that arched upward on both sides like a closed fist. A large flap of skin fluttered in the breeze, half obscuring the scene, like a macabre flag, but all I could see was that eye.

And it saw me, too. The head jerked back slightly and the pupil contracted at the sight of the two tiny creatures that had just tumbled into view. It was close enough that I could see myself, a helpless, nothing of a creature, lost in the great mirror above me.

Louis-Cesare was staggering to his feet, was trying to orient himself, was yet to notice the night sky above us, hung with stars, featuring a breathtakingly beautiful death. And I couldn’t tell him. For one of the few times in my life, I experienced a moment of complete, frozen immobility.

I wasn’t sure if it was the almost hypnotic quality of the dragon’s gaze, about ten times greater than Claire’s had been, or the sheer, unadulterated terror coursing through my veins. But I may as well have been glued in place, lying there feeling the remnants of the dead dragon’s stomach acid burn my skin. And watching a brilliant orange light suffuse the throat and spill out of the maw of the creature above me.

Fire made flesh, I thought again, and then I did scream, because it worked the other way, too, didn’t it? Louis-Cesare and I were about to be roasted alive, cooked in our own juices until our flesh dripped off our bones and our ashes blew away on the wind. Flesh made into fire in the most visceral way possible.

“Dory! Dory!” Louis-Cesare was shaking me, because he still didn’t see it. And I didn’t have time to say anything, even if I could have managed it, before a blast of hot air hit us like something straight off of hell.

And finally, my paralysis broke.

I scrambled to my feet as flames formed a fireball in the great mouth, as they danced off the sides of the ruined “cave”, as they scorched my skin even this far away. And as Louis-Cesare finally caught a clue, staring upward for a split second with the same disbelief written on his face that was probably on mine. And then he snatched me up, preparing to demonstrate exactly how fast he could move.

Which, for once, wasn’t fast enough.

Chapter Seventeen

Fire exploded all around us, in a rain so thick and intense that I could feel the heat even through the shield I’d managed to raise again, battering and clawing at the surface like a live thing. One that was as furious as its master, throwing us off our feet and across the floor, with the sheer force of the blast enough to have killed us without protection. And even with it, we were tumbling in an endless sea of red, with no idea where the doorway to my arsenal was, our only possible refuge before my fifteen seconds were up and our barrier cut—

Out, I thought, as the ungodly heat abruptly stopped.

For a moment, I thought that my nerve endings had been seared away, and that I simply couldn’t feel it. But Louis-Cesare’s hand was in mine, hard and strong and undeniably real, and it would have dusted to ash by now had those flames so much as touched us. I stared around, my heart trying to pound its way out of my chest, my mind confused and my eyes completely blind in the pulsing red aftermath, my retinas having had enough and peaced out.

Until Louis-Cesare used the link between us to calm me, and to let me see through his eyes, something we hadn’t done for some time now.

Only what I saw didn’t make sense.

Well, part of it did, namely the blackened and partially missing floor, the steaming walls, and the air so dry when the last of the shield finally gave up the ghost with a pop that it was hard to breathe. Making the burnt-out husk of an organ around us smell like nothing, just nothing at all. But the rest . . ..

“What’s happening?” I tried to say, only my vocal cords didn’t seem to work, with the words coming out only as a faint rasp.

And then I didn’t have to ask, when a new cry tore through the heavens, one so loud and so terrifying that it stopped my heart and almost sent me back to the floor. I thought I’d become inured to dragon cries, having heard almost nothing else for long minutes now. But this was different. This shook the world, as well as the air all around me, and had my bones wanting to liquify in my skin in sheer goddamned terror.

And judging by how still he’d suddenly gone, this most apex of all predators, at least in our world, Louis-Cesare felt the same. But he held on, nonetheless, although the soothing vibes he’d been sending me abruptly stopped. Along with the blood in my veins, the pounding of my heart, and every other thing in this world, as if the entire realm held its breath for an instant.

Until a colossal golden dragon tore out of the sky and barreled straight into Steen.

Lord Rathen had arrived, and he was pissed.

Louis-Cesare was yelling something, but I couldn’t hear him over the terrible screeching, from both Steen and Rathen. I couldn’t hear anything except for my heart, which had started up again with a lurch and was pounding a thudding beat in my ears. And my brain, some part of which had stayed sane in all this, and woke up to observe that dragons must be able to control to a degree how big they became when transformed, like vampires could decide how much of their power they called up.

Because no way would that behemoth have fit into the tower where we’d dined.

Or that one, I thought, as Steen’s form suddenly boiled in the air, as if calling dark shadows to come and join it. And come they did, flying in so thick and fast that they blocked out the moon, like a lightbulb had suddenly been switched off in the sky. It would have been unnerving if I’d had any nerves left, and would have mattered more if I wasn’t looking at the world through vampire eyes.

But Louis-Cesare could still see perfectly, if in dark blues, blacks and silvers instead of the vivid colors of a moment ago. Clear enough, anyway, for me to spot the fact that there were suddenly two monsters bigger than jumbo jets hanging in the air above us. And while I wasn’t clear on what passed for a code of manners in dragon-land, having been here less than a day and been busy almost dying for much of that, it was safe to say that Steen had shattered it all to hell.

And Lord Rathen, or Lord Den I guessed, since he was currently a massive, screeching, golden hunk of impossible, was annoyed.

Very annoyed.

To the point of immediately trying to eviscerate Steen.

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