Page 64 of Dragon Avenger (Age of Fire 2)

That worked so well, Wistala added a roar of her own, not so sharp to the ears, but a good deal louder—even if it came out as a strangled cry. The tide of rats turned, save for a few locked in combat with hatchling and cat. The rat sank its teeth into the soft flesh beneath her jaw. Wistala whipped her head to and fro, but the brute hung on, digging in. Wistala opened her mouth and swung it so its hindquarters flipped up and into her mouth.

Even in death, the rat’s teeth didn’t relax.

Yari-Tab, blood-smeared and wild-eyed, exploded out of the rats and jumped to the top of Wistala’s broad back, clawing up by way of the canvas bags. From there, the cat lashed out with her paws, swatting rats even as she hung on to the twisting hatchling. Wistala bit the rats clamped to her friend’s haunches.

It was over in a few heartbeats. Wistala and Yari-Tab stood panting, the torn rat still dangling from the hatchling’s neck like a blood-dripping ornament.

Only the cloud-eyed rat still stood its ground. Perhaps it hadn’t seen the bloody contest.

“Well?” Wistala asked it, prying the dead rat loose with a claw. It came away with no small amount of flesh and blood between its jaws, its scarred shoulder red with her blood.

Yari-Tab trembled so on her back, it reminded Wistala of the beating wings of her dreams, only hundreds of times faster.

The rat yeeked heartily.

“Did you catch that?” Wistala asked.

“What?” Yari-Tab said. “Oh. My apologies, noble rathunter.” A conversation ensued. Wistala tried licking out her wounds as the noises passed back and forth. Though shallow, the bites hurt abominably. A great forest boar wouldn’t have been able to draw so much blood with its tusks against her scales as the rats could with tiny sharp teeth.

“The meal of it is, he’s going to give you the coin,” Yari-Tab said.

“What’s his price for the rats we killed?”

“Nothing. He thinks it’s good for the hotheads to kill themselves off now and then. More room for the rest.”

Wistala swallowed the remaining half of the brute rat. It wasn’t so bad after all, and she was as hungry as she’d ever been eating bones and claw-thin, fresh-spawned slugs in the home cave. “Even so. No sense leaving bodies lying around to remind them.”

A procession of rats led them to a dank, dark room at the meeting of two sets of stairs where a metal cistern, big enough to hold a clutch of dragon eggs, lay half on its side.

Wistala’s wounds still stung, but less now, and the pain was being replaced by a warm itch that in a lot of ways was worse than the sharper hurt.

Gold and green-covered coins lay within. The spill of metal didn’t shine or glitter or gleam, but even the most tarnished coin made Wistala briefly swish her tail and stand with head erect, saliva suddenly thick at her gumline. A hoard!

Kill the rats! Kill them all! Kill the cat! Kill anything that so much as makes an echo near my glitters!

“Tchatlassat!” Yari-Tab squeaked as Wistala dragon-dashed forward, bowling her over. “Sister!”

Wistala stood with hindquarters to the coin, the shadows around her dark and red and angry.

The rats scattered, but Yari-Tab stood her ground, though she stood sideways, back arched, ready to flee.

“Sister!” she repeated, sounding passably Drakine.

Wistala blinked. The red faded. She took a mouthful of metal, more to give the wet in her mouth something to work on while she set her thoughts in order. She’d never expected the glamour of gold to be so strong!

“Oh! Sorry, tchatlassat, I came over funny. The rat bites are making me moody.”

Yari-Tab said, “Your eyes went all red and fiery. I was worried for a moment that you had the froth.”

“Better now.” She took another mouthful of coin, rolled it around with her tongue until it was good and slimy, then let it slip down her throat. A brief, pleasant tinkle sounded from within as it clanked into the first bit.

“Let’s see how much I can carry.”

The rats regathered to watch.

Within a few moments, she had both bags filled—the pile looked hardly touched. Wistala looked around the chamber. Not a bad spot, actually, with water near and ample food. In the form of rats. But a dragon vow couldn’t just be shrugged off like a dropped leaf. Besides, Father needed the coin worse than she.

Wistala nodded to the rats and trudged back the way they’d come. Yari-Tab jumped on her back and rode, claws dug into the crosspiece for the bags.

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