Page 116 of Amethyst Flame
Breath bated, we waited as the smoke cleared.
The Vegas crowd fell silent and then collectively gasped their dismay.
A man-thing remained, hovering above the water. Except for glowing blue eyes, its face was mash. And I couldn’t make out what was going on with his skin from where I stood, but he probably needed to see a dermatologist asap. Already his wrists were circling, blue lightning forming lassos of power.
If a fucking rocket launcher couldn’t kill him, then we were all probably going to die. The bride and her bridesmaids too, though maybe the responsible maid of honor would escape.
Sleeping Beauty was all I had, though Hive Will did not qualify as a beauty by any stretch of the imagination. How did it go…?
I started the singsong,“Now I lay thee down to sleep…”but the rhyme had four lines… I dodged one whiplash of blue, but another hot lash caught me around the arms and lifted me up, kicking and gasping through the pain.
Dane dove to grab my legs, but his weight made the lashes tear at my skin so badly that I screamed. Dane wouldn’t let me go, though. He rooted me from being pulled out over the water. As I sobbed, I tried to pick up the words to the sleeping spell again, but the agony drove the lyrics from my mind.
So Hive Will came to me, his barbed tendrils of light encircling me over and over as he floated back toward the street until Dane and I were within a cyclone of power unlike any other. Hive Will brought me close enough to see the crusty ridges of bone on his brow. A shiny white spot in the center of his forehead.
This was it. He was going to crush the life out of me, then kill Dane. Help would come too late. The squeeze threatened to bring the hot contents churning in my guts up. The dragons were supposed to save me. Make me stronger. But all I had were tears and regrets.
Thewhomp whomp whompof the EDM grew distant, the world darker. All the people crowding the sidewalks for a show seemed to fall back.
My memory fragmented into pieces: my mom and her stabby scissors that she’d used to protect me in BantaMatrix’s lab. Would she see my fight online? Laughing Swann, who believed I could do anything. She probably hadn’t considered this scenario, though. And raccoon-eyed Bri.
I wanted to know my sister. I wanted to live. I wanted a fucking chance.
The helplessness morphed in a barbed roll of fury because I had power, dammit, but something always was trying to keep me small and weak. Keep me from becoming everything I knew I could be.
Maybe Fate didn’t respect twenty-one-year-old girls just starting out in the world. But Fate would bow to a dragon, even if it killed me as it came into being.
Hive Will’s disfigured face swam in my vision. And, oh god, his cooked smell made me gag.
I switched spells. To the bad idea. Through the pain, my lips shaped the words I needed,“Dragon, I summon thee…”
The roiling heat in my belly threatened to consume me asupit finally came, blistering my throat, my tongue, my teeth.
I had no breath, but the fire came anyway, ignited by my spell. Out of my mouth, a massive dragon made of flame erupted. It rode a wave of incandescent snarls of violet heat.
The dragon’s maw gaped wide, teeth stretched sharp by light, and came down on Hive Will’s head. A high shriek went up as the dragon chewed through him and immolated Will in a frenzy of amethyst flame that left nothing but a rain of dusty char on the pavement.
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
The firewithin died down into a faintly green cough of vapor, and the roar of dragon’s fury in my head transmuted to a roar of voices and applause surrounding me—the crowd, going wild over the EDM’s beat. And somehow, I’d learned to levitate after all.
But no. That was Dane, who still held me tight around the hips though Hive Will’s bands of lightning had disappeared. Dane lowered me carefully and set me on my feet. I didn’t think my legs would hold me, and it seemed he wasn’t confident about that either because he didn’t let me go, but he held me so carefully that he didn’t hurt the stripes of pain left over from Will’s last assault.
Dane’s gaze searched my face. “Are you alright?”
I shook in his arms. “I don’t know.” I wasn’t sure I could trust what I thought had happened because it was impossible. The spells? The dragon? Totally, utterly impossible. Maybe if Dane said it first, then I’d believe. “What happened?”
“You were magnif…” Dane shook his head. “You were magic, Imogen.”
The crowd’s voices started collapsing into a single voice, chanting, “Kiss her! Kiss her! Kiss her!” as they clapped in time with the drum machine.
I had to be certain. “So he’s gone?”
“Will’s gone. You did it. I knew you could.”
And from everyone around us, “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”
Dane smiled. “May I?”
