Page 50 of Fortune's Blade

I switched off the shield, because fifteen seconds weren’t going to help me much right now, but would be needed in a minute when this crazy ride ended. Until then, I’d make do. After all, how much worse could it get?

I got my answer a second later, when the residue of already committed magic faded from my protection, and the wind hit me with its full force for the first time.

And son of a bitch!

It was immediately staggering, furious and painful, like a constant uppercut. I was almost blown off my perch so many times that I lost count, with my body rattling painfully against the rib bone, my hands sliding desperately on half-dried blood, and my legs being sliced to ribbons while trying to cling to the damned scales of the seat.

One that was now above me!

It made spotting a good place to land almost impossible, but I had no choice. I had to separate from the giant body I was riding or die. I had all of fifteen seconds of protection left to keep my brains from decorating a rock in Faerie, assuming that I could time things right; they wouldn’t also protect me from being crushed by tons of scale-covered blubber immediately thereafter!

But it was hard to see anything with the wind slapping me in the face, tears running down my cheeks, and a jutting ledge sticking out of a cliffside and almost sucker punching me in the head.

I jerked back, then tried desperately to catch hold of it, or at least of one of the pine-like trees bristling outward from it at weird angles. But they were gone almost before I’d realized they were there, flashing by in an instant. And the only thing around me then was—

That, I thought, as my ride was grabbed and jerked upward by another screeching monster.

It flipped us, I guessed to grab hold of the spine rather than the huge, shiny plates over the stomach, which offered little purchase. And would have sent me flying in the process, except for the damned wing. It redeemed itself by crashing into me again a second after I lost my grip, flinging my suddenly airborne body back against the scaley hide, which I finished ruining my hands scrambling to grasp.

I managed it—somehow—and was rewarded by the hot potato game starting up again, because the whole battling group appeared to have caught up to me at the same moment. I didn’t bother keeping track of the score this time. It took everything I had just to hold on while my hands and legs were shredded, my breath was continually cut off by vertigo-inducing movements, and my body was battered by the damned, infernal, godforsaken wing!

I clung nonetheless, bleeding from a hundred wounds but not letting go. Because diving off the side and taking my chances with the shield had just been ruled out. Sure, it might help with the dashing-my-brains-out-on-a-rock thing, but I didn’t think it would do much for the being-ripped-apart-by-apex-predators thing that was likely to happen first.

Dragons peppered the sky everywhere I looked, moving like quicksilver and seemingly more at home in the air than on land. Bash my head in hell, I thought desperately, watching them. I’d never make it to the ground to have that chance.

And then it got worse, when the scaley football I was riding was intercepted yet again—by Lord Steen.

It had to be him; it was too big to be anyone else, and no other dragon had that particular black with iridescent green and purple coloring. He reflected the moon and the night and the aurora borealis like a mirror, and was honestly hard to see even this close. But I had plenty of chances to try because he didn’t take off with me like the others.

Instead, he began ripping through the corpse, ignoring the still burning and smoking parts, literally butchering his own creature mid-air. Limbs and the opposite wing went flying, but I think they were accidental, because he was focusing his attack on the torso. He was digging for me.

Even worse, his dragons were keeping my would-be rescuers at bay. They couldn’t get close enough to save me, not before Steen finished tearing me apart. I was on my own.

And then, as if to underscore the point, my ride suddenly acquired a sunroof.

I felt my stomach cramp, and my breath start coming faster and heavier in my throat as panic swept over me.

It wasn’t something I normally felt. Normally, when things got this bad, Dorina came out and saved the day with some of her patented, cutthroat savagery. It might get wicked, it would get bloody, but it would work; it always had.

Only Dorina wasn’t here. And without her, I was falling apart. My hands were shaking, sliding on my own blood as I gripped what were essentially knife blades to try to stay put; my heart was beating, but erratically, as if it couldn’t decide between fight or flight since neither was an option, and kept flipping between the two; and my mind . . . was fog.

Just fog. Just panic. Just nothing useful at all. I couldn’t think, could barely breathe, and was absolutely, positively, flat out of ideas.

But someone else wasn’t.

Someone else had plenty of ideas. Not good ones, mind you, but ideas. And they were being put into effect in the middle of the craziest, most dangerous battle I had ever been in, because my husband was insane.

And the fact that he did not have wings had not stopped him from flying.

I assumed he had hitched a ride with somebody to get this far, but didn’t see who. All I saw was a tiny Louis-Cesare getting rapidly bigger as he sped toward me like a bullet. An unshielded bullet who was about to take an acid bath when he plunged through the gaping wound and into the damned stomach and no, no, no!

He was moving too fast for me to do anything but brace myself, and try to catch him on impact. And restart the shield around us both at the same time, for whatever tiny advantage that might give us. But he’d been flung at approximately the speed of sound, and I could barely see him much less—

I didn’t even feel him hit. I had a second to understand that I’d just gone airborne, to see the reddish “cave” looming up around me again, to feel Louis-Cesare’s arms engulf me, tight, tight, so very tight, like he wanted to fuse us together. And then we fell, unshielded since I hadn’t had a chance to reactivate a goddamned thing before we slammed down—

Into an empty cave.

The impact with the spongy surface was hard enough to rattle me. And between that and the punch that my husband’s body had just delivered, it took me a moment to understand what had happened. Namely that the ocean of stomach acid had drained away, probably through one of the many gashes Steen had been making.

---