Page 120 of Devil's Doom

Oh, gods. He’ll bite right through my neck.

The pressure vanishes, and I fall to the ground, losing my breath. When I look up, the dragon stands above me, looking down with a startled expression.

A clawed, bloodied hand sticks out of his stomach. It pulls sharply back and up, jerking the dragon. I breathe too fast, releasing small moans of fear on every frantic exhale. The dragon coughs once, growing rigid. He falls to his knees, slowly toppling to his side. Behind him, Woland bites into a huge, dark red heart, his eyes on me. He chews just twice. His throat works as he swallows. I forget to breathe.

“Are you hurt?”

His voice is cold, eyes calculating as they take in every inch of me. The blood coating his forearm and palm unsticks from his skin, hovering in the air as it coalesces, then floats into his mouth. The heart jerks, as if still alive, as he squeezes it.

“I… No.”

I keep staring until a loud shout nearby jolts me back to my feet. Woland gives me a nod and turns, vanishing in a cloud of smoke. Lech runs up to my side, blood trickling down his temple. His arm is torn and bleeding.

“There you are!” he shouts, laughing as if he’s not hurt. “Treat me and let’s go!”

I pour magic into him, fixing the damage,fast, fast, fast, and we run off into the smoke. Bodies litter the ground at my feet, some gasping from pain, some dead. I fall to my knees, treating one patient after another, but I no longer heal them. All I focus on is keeping them alive. When my hands begin to tremble, I fish a charged, peeled egg out of the satchel at my belt, and finish it in three bites.

The gaping hole in my chest grows a bit less empty, and I treat another patient, already groping with bloodied hands for another egg.

A ragged cry of pain makes me look up from an unconscious upir, my heart wrenching. I swallow an egg and push another into my mouth, getting up so fast, the world whirls around me like a torrent of darkness, fire, and smoke.

“Draga!” I scream, running blindly into the fighting. “Draga!”

Claws slice toward my face, and I send a powerful cutting spell at the hand before it reaches me, detaching it from the dragon. My chest hollows again, and I swallow another egg as I run, peering into the smoke ahead. Behind me, Lech growls. My chochol guard is lost.

“Draga!”

I find her bleeding next to one of the deep, now abandoned, holes under the fence. The fence here flickers, barely working, and a cube-shaped stone on the bottom of the hole is cracked, probably why the magic here is so weak.

Draga turns slowly onto her back, groaning from pain, and I realize what’s wrong.

Her arm is gone.

“Where is it?” I ask through clenched teeth, looking frantically around.

“Don’t. Know,” she says, each word a bite. She’s in agony.

“Lech! Lech, find her arm!”

But he’s not with me. I look around, but the smoke is thick, the grass red from blood and dirty with loose earth. I can’t see anything.

“Just. Bleeding. Heal. I’ll fight.”

I shake my head. Draga doesn’t get it—I won’t be able to reattach her arm later if I heal this wound. Still, I press my hands to her shoulder, telling her body to stop bleeding here, gently clotting up the flow, even as my eyes search frantically for a muscular, beautifully sculpted brown arm.

It’s no use. I’ll never find it.

Fuck.

“You’ll be all right,” I gasp out the lie, pouring magic I don’t have into my trainer and friend, who was so kind to me, so generous with her knowledge and smiles, who accepted me when everyone else called me names. “Just hang on!”

I heal the wound, sealing her skin. Half of my eggs are gone, and I swallow more in a rush, getting just enough magic to help Draga’s struggling heart. She lost a lot of blood, and I push her body to replenish it until I know she’s stable.

She won’t die, but I doubt she’ll ever fight again.

Exhausted by the strain of magical healing and blood loss, Draga loses consciousness. I get up on wobbling legs, looking around. My vision swims from magical depletion too deep to be fixed with the last three eggs in my satchel. I’m lightheaded and strangely weightless, my body detached, my soul beating against the cage of my ribs and wanting to fly.

Something’s wrong with my head. My eyes go in and out of focus, and everything is so slow and muffled.

---