Page 45 of Wish of Dragons (Dragon Tails 3)

He used one hand to snap the head off of Ere’s attacker and wrestled its clutching hands away from Ere’s torso. He stabbed his sword into the belly of another zombie, pulling up until he split it entirely in two, from navel to skull.

Now, he and Kai sandwiched Ere in between them, guarding the male from all sides. Kai in front, Sorin behind. Together, they inched their way across the swamp.

“Fucking Draugar,” Kai cursed, swinging his axe to keep the swarming undead at bay.

“I’ll never watch movies about the zombie apocalypse again,” Ere huffed with great feeling, still catching his breath from the long dunk beneath the bog.

Sorin and Kai hacked off some more heads and limbs.

“At least they’re not like those White Walkers from the Game of Thrones,” Ere went on. “At least they don’t have those eerie glowing blue eyes and try to infect us with their poisonous bite.”

Just then, one of the zombies clacked its teeth, narrowly missing Ere’s forearm as he jerked it out of reach.

“Oiy!”

Sorin punched his fist right through the teeth to the other side of the creature’s skull, gripped its spine and snapped it in two.

“Spoke too soon,” Ere gasped. “Thanks for the assist, love.”

Sorin didn’t bother wasting his breath to answer, swiping another borrowed sword at the nearest undead.

“Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a pair of wings and a fire-breathing gullet,” Ere said, gluing himself to Kai and Sorin, trying his best to not be a hindrance.

“If only there was a magic mushroom somewhere, so I can eat it and grow a pair.”

Sorin eyed him skeptically, not looking as he dispatched two more foes, his body on autopilot.

“You know, in the Mario video games. Or special power ups and weapons in Warcraft,” Ere explained, as if this was the most important thing to comment on while being besieged by zombies.

“Or a special friend request,” he went on while Kai and Sorin fought hard and dirty around him.

“Except we don’t have any friends here, unfortunately.”

As much as Sorin loved his black dragon, he empathized strongly with Kai at the moment. Both men opened their mouths to voice the same command—

Until unlikely allies on winged steeds swept overhead. Then swopped down upon them.

Valkyries.

And then Sorin thought:

Perhaps they were not allies after all, but ushers into the afterlife.

~ * ~* ~ *~ * ~* ~ *~ * ~

Kai clasped the outstretched arm without thought.

Anything would be better than getting hacked to pieces by the Draugar or smothered in a mountain of decayed corpses.

He might not fear death, but there were far better ways to go.

Instinctively, he pulled at the same time that the arm swung him in an arc. He used his own heft as momentum to leap onto the rump of a flying horse.

Briefly, he realized that his savior was female, her form-fitting leather armor smoothing but not completely disguising her lean, muscular curves.

“Hold on,” the warrioress commanded, turning her face in profile, before nudging her steed to dive at the swamp once more, brandishing a long spear in one hand, the other clutching a fistful of black mane.

Kai wound one arm around the woman’s lean waist, the other still holding his long axe. It was more to bind them together as one body to aid their movement rather than to anchor him to the horse. He stayed on by squeezing the horse’s flank with his thighs and synchronizing the shift of his weight with the rider and steed.

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