Red Hot Dragons Steamy 10 Book Collection

by Lisa Daniels

  “Looks like,” Rosen said. “Morgana and Ellie will be of particular use here, because they both have a lot of experience handling spirits in a combative situation. Talia will help attempt to pinch them from the enemy, same with me...”

  “It won’t work if they’ve bound them securely to their own person,” Ellie pointed out, dubious, nervous, and excited all at once.

  “We don’t have a much better plan, since the military in their encampments have been overthrown each time. We’ve even had some of the dragon shifters and werewolves rampaging through the army, but it’s a little hard to take down an army when they just keep reconstructing themselves, even from specks of ash. We have to find the leader, and he’s keeping himself hidden. Or his people hidden. There’s probably a lot of them.”

  Ellie thought so, too. Mason laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, and she leaned into his touch, though she didn’t dare do anything more than that in front of everyone. There was a time and a place, after all. Wordlessly, they finished off whatever they intended to do in the kitchen, gulping down drinks, a quick break toward the bathroom, and then they were off, crammed into Rosen and Rickard Grieves’ cars as they trundled off to the precinct, ready to deal with the chaos waiting to hit their city.

  “Why can’t we all just get along?” Talia slumped in the seat next to Ellie, looking morose, and Ellie gave her a little shrug of the shoulders in response.

  “People are unwilling to do so.” She scowled, because she wished in some ways this wasn’t the case. But people really liked to be awful at times. It was almost like they went out of their way to be terrible.

  She didn’t know what was about to happen. All she knew was that no matter what, she needed to prepare herself in every way possible.

  At least she had Mason by her side, and her father happened to be safe. He might not have exactly won the Best Dad award at any time within her upbringing, but he was still her father, and some part of him did care. Even if he didn’t really know how to express it. He showed it in his eyes. He cared. She knew it from the bottom of her soul.

  “I think the world would be an easier place if there weren’t any magic,” Talia said, staring out of the window of the SUV her sister drove, watching cars and buildings whip by. “I think a lot of the problems in the world seem to originate with magic.”

  “That’s not true,” Ellie said, vehement in her disagreement. “Even if there weren’t any magic, people would find ways to do awful things anyway. They’d… build bigger bombs or something, or make people slaves like they did in the old days.”

  Talia seemed unable to shrug off her dour mood. Ellie couldn’t blame her, because she knew they were facing an awful foe today. One they didn’t know if they could survive, because it was just a few necromancers like them against what sounded like an entire army. Thousands upon thousands. Too many for them to process. What was to stop them from being simply swamped, like they were little more than bowling pins, ready to be knocked over?

  Not much. So Ellie’s nerves felt like little wriggling snakes by the time they had arrived and were subsequently shown to the bodies they were supposed to revive. It was a horrible, solemn sight, to have so many of them covered in white sheets, lined up outside the yard, hidden by a tall, brick wall and iron railings. Several necromancers walked among them, silent and respectful, probing the Other Side with their magic to speak to the spirits. Mason’s hand tightened on Ellie’s shoulder.

  “Do you think you have a chance?” he whispered to her, and his voice stirred all sorts of pleasant memories. Ones that she was reluctant to part from, to lose. Not when she could be alive for so much longer.

  “I don’t know,” she said, though a part of her wanted to blurt out, no chance. Not from the reports she’d been following. Not from the testimonies of those caught in the advance, and the footage they had managed to collect. Zaimov seemed to be controlling thousands of bodies at once, and she didn’t understand it. By all the rules she’d learned about the magic, it should have been impossible to control so many. He should have been drained of all his magic after a few moments of handling them. He shouldn’t be able to function.

  Yet he did.

  How?

  A familiar brush from the Other Side caused her to gently slide from Mason’s hold to slip into her trance, to embrace the spirits in their muted realm. There were a few on the first layer, including the familiar essence of her mother, who seemed to have broken free of Zaimov’s grip once more.

  “Mother, can we get you to fight with us?” Ellie wasted no time in saying so, wondering if she could somehow override the command. He should be spread out thinly. There should be spirits with a possibility of being stolen from him.

  “No. You can’t. I will try not to fight,” she said, though she appeared slightly dubious as she said it. “But he has harnessed… us. Many of his have the independence of a revenant, but the devotion of a guardian angel. They protect him free of charge. He does not have to use his magic.”

  Ellie let out a little gasp, and she wasn’t the only one to do so. Other necromancers on the same layer as her on the Other Side were also listening in, drawn by the strange guardian angel. Many of them had never seen one, but there were a few familiar with them, like Ellie and Morgana.

  “He doesn’t use magic at all? And he’s being… protected?”

  “Yes,” her mother replied simply. “We protect him, the ones who are gone… even if it is against our wills. He can take us away from our resting place. There is no counter for us, even if we fall back to it.”

  Ellie paled at that. Their chances of success went from a slim possibility to nearly no chance at all. How the hell were they supposed to resist that? What could possibly stop someone who could abuse the power of spirits in that manner?

  “Is there no way to stop him, Mother?”

  The spirit looked sad. “There might be. But I do not know of it. I only know from what the other spirits have been saying, and from my own experiences. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Ellie said, though she took the time to embrace her mother. Two spirits embracing didn’t feel quite the same as a real-world hug, but it wasn’t exactly awful, either. Her mother should have been long gone, she should have been free from the trappings of the mortal world.

  Another spirit entered the first layer, one flickering with darkness, with red and black motifs. Ellie suppressed the urge to shriek out a warning, as she recognized it in that same instant as Talia’s father, Rickard Grieves.

  “Spirit,” he said gruffly to Ellie’s mother. “Can you show me the path you take back to your master?”

  Ellie’s mother regarded him dubiously. “You are on these people’s sides?”

  “I’m on your daughter’s side,” he said. “The revenant in me desires vengeance for what Zaimov has done to him. I am best equipped to answer his dream.”

  There was a long, awkward pause between them, and Ellie’s mother flickered in and out, as if being pulled elsewhere. “I will show you,” she said. Rickard reached out to touch the guardian angel. And just like that, he and her mother vanished, puffed away in a blaze of blue and red light. Leaving Ellie to stare in absolute confusion, and then leaving her to confront a rather alarmed and frightened Talia and Rosen Grieves. Since it was their father, after all, who had vanished. And it wasn’t exactly every day that someone’s father decided to up and out themselves from the world and follow a guardian angel into goodness knows where.

  “Where did my father go? Where did he go?” Talia’s spirit dove in beside Ellie, who could only shrug in response, repeating the words she had heard. Rosen drifted over to listen as well, along with Morgana Hargraves. None of them knew if Rickard Grieves would return. All they knew was that they needed to persist with their game plan nonetheless, and trust that they were doing the best that they could. Nothing else mattered. One by one, the necromancers in that room took over the cluster of spirits, until dozens of bodies were animated at once. It stretched the limits of thei
r powers, and Ellie felt the strain of balancing several beings at once. Usually she had strained herself with two spirits maximum, but now she was juggling about twenty-five of them at once. Which also meant she couldn’t really give them all complicated instructions without wearing out her energy further.

  Back in the real world, Mason watched her with a worried air, and the other non-necromancers in the room, all police and bodyguards, watched as a new army of the undead rose.

  It struck Ellie in that moment how desperate they’d become, to actually rely on this. She also hated to think what kind of havoc it might play with the media, how people would picture the necromancers in all this. It could be they saved the city, but still got an awful lot of people killed. In which case, the people saved wouldn’t exactly be all that grateful about it.

  “This is insane,” Morgana exclaimed beside her, walking with the other necromancers as they shepherded their charges in the general direction of the assault. “We’re actually allowed to use this army and make it roam through the street. Out of all the things I ever expected with my powers and from what people would permit, this wasn’t it.”

  “I’m not happy with this,” Rosen added, her face grim. It seemed like she was grim far too much—some of those frown lines were beginning to mar her face. “I feel like we’re provoking the devil after us.”

  Ellie sort of understood what she meant. It wasn’t every day things like this happened. She supposed she should be grateful necromancers were quite scarce in the general world population, since even one could cause a lot of trouble.

  “I’ll protect you,” Mason whispered into her ear, and she turned to give him a small smile, though she couldn’t dedicate all of her attention to him. After all, she did have two dozen bodies tugging at her energy, and she wanted to make sure a stray one didn’t wander off or collapse. The streets of Lasthearth were a ghost town, with so many people evacuated, though there were still those who stubbornly refused to move. Those who wanted to stay in their homes, and others who took the opportunity to break into other people’s homes and emptied shops to steal goods of their own. The roads and sidewalks were wide, allowing them to drive the herd of undead in front of them with ease. There were some abandoned cars, at least two with the tires removed and the windows busted, and more than a few broken shop windows. Ellie noted some frightened residents peering through their windows, and heard the distant slams of doors.

  They marched onward, and she felt a prickling at her skull. One that indicated the nearby presence of hundreds and hundreds of souls, on top of the ones that were being guided. She couldn’t exactly slip to the Other Side while walking, but highly suspected… and yes.

  There they were. The enemy. Emerging from the depths of hell itself, it seemed. A fast-moving army converging from the opposite side of the town, bearing down on them with flickering blue and red auras. An unusual combination. Hundreds of them. Their own summoned force felt inadequate, though Ellie knew the idea was that their own necromancers would try to filch the spirits from the enemy. It took everything within Ellie not to yell out in shock and run away from the dangerous, all-consuming tidal wave of darkness, and to stand her ground.

  The bodies clashed in an awful, vicious attack, tearing and ripping at each other, though it seemed clear to Ellie, after a brief examination of their troops, that Zaimov’s ones were more skilled, more passionate. Fighting like the guardian angel Morgana Hargraves once had, and like Ellie’s own mother. They had the deadly skill and precision of guardian angels.

  How had he done it?

  In the chaos, as some of the enemy spirits seemed to peel off and join their side, fighting against the endless advance, Ellie felt something nudge her shoulder. She turned, still distracted, to see Mason in his dragon form. The green dragon bowed toward her, front limbs folded in a dignified way, and Ellie stared at him, confused, until she realized what he wanted her to do.

  Ride him into the skies. She didn’t know whether or not this was a brilliant or awful plan. She felt a little short on the brilliant plans sector herself. She much preferred the idea of winding back time and spending those happy moments with Mason again, getting to address the blossoming feelings between them better rather than waiting for the hammer to fall on them. Waiting for something to tear them apart before they had really begun.

  Life could be funny like that. Taking a deep breath, wondering what the hell she was doing, she clambered up onto Mason’s back. She secured a grip on him with her thighs and with her hands lodged into a loose pattern of scales around his neck, which allowed her to reach into the material and not hurt Mason (she’d checked many, many times with him, convinced he was lying).

  One swoop of his wings lurched them into the air. With a ripple of his body, and a few more heavy wing beats, they were launched. The air bit into Ellie’s face as Mason flapped above the heaving mass of fighting undead, and from her increasing bird’s-eye perspective, she soon saw, much more obviously, how the Lasthearth defenders were being pushed back by the aggressive tide of enemies.

  He wants me to search for Zaimov, she thought, the notion electrifying her brain. She gripped Mason harder and leaned forward as he began to do languid movements, with an aim of taking in all the enemy positions, and helping Ellie to look for patterns. Something to indicate a chain of command, a certain flow from an origin point. The most likely place was to check the back of the army, but Mason’s flight over what appeared to be the final, straggling dregs yielded nothing, leaving Ellie the horrible fear that Zaimov was nowhere near the army at all. What if he’d somehow mastered being able to control such things from a distance as well?

  They had no chance, then. He was already defying all the conventions of necromancy as it was. If he commanded the army from a distance, then they might as well give up here and now.

  I have to assume he’s nearby, she thought furiously, eyes searching, scanning, trying to pick up on relevant information. It should still be difficult to control from a distance. Maybe he’s not with the main group, but that doesn’t mean he’s not nearby. Maybe trying to make himself less conspicuous. Acting as a civilian, a police member, a refugee. He could be anything. Which made her pale further at the thought of stopping every odd human she found.

  She was about to give up again in despair after her initial, frantic burst of determination, before something caught her eye. One of these things is not like the others. Words from a famous book, stuck in her head, rattling itself loose. One of the swarm of undead looked different. More red than blue. Most of them had an even mixture of red and blue. Some were blue-gold, like her mother. But only one was red and black without the hint of lighter spiritual toning. The red-colored body, a revenant, presumably, was in the last third of the army, but tucked in just enough to be missed.

  “There!” she said, pointing, though Mason couldn’t see. “There’s a red aura in that pack. Near the blue shop, on the sidewalk, last section of the group.”

  Mason absorbed her instructions and fluttered toward where she indicated, bringing them closer to the revenant. When he spotted the revenant, he dove down, fire gushing out of his mouth, spraying the foe in hot flames. Blue and gold light crackled in front of them, and it soon became clear that his attempts to take down the revenant was causing guardian angels to expend their lives in protecting the revenant.

  Protecting a revenant from harm. They crackled and disappeared, some of them sending beams of light toward Mason, who swerved around some of them with difficulty.

  “That’s got to be him!” Ellie yelled. “No way that isn’t! He’s being protected!” By his entire army. Who will die for him. Then come back. Oh lord. Her heart sank. No wonder the military forces that had engaged with this were unable to do anything. Indeed, now she saw a small strike team wearing army fatigues and aiming guns, bearing down on the rear of the undead horde. They fired into the crowd, but their shots were worse than useless. This strike force had insisted on working with the police and necromancers all the same. The u
ndead just shrugged off bullets. They had a slightly harder time shrugging off the grenades then thrown into their midst. One explosion sent parts flying everywhere, chunking a great hole in the middle of one area. However, within seconds, those chunks flew back and reformed into their bodies once more.

  Since as long as they had energy being pumped into them, they would continue to reform. About the only thing the strike force succeeded in doing was luring some of the undead away from their crush against the friendly forces. Better than nothing.

  Mason continued to puff and spew great gouts of flame on his foe, but it didn’t look like the sacrificing guardian angels were thinning the army at all. Were they returning to control under Zaimov’s services? Assuming this was Zaimov, though Ellie had a pretty good inkling it was.

  So he had given in and experimented on himself after all. He had taken the darkness of a revenant within, and most likely it found a home in his corrupted soul.

  Mason, perhaps tiring from his attack, stopped the flames, instead backing away with lethargic flaps.

  “This is stupid,” Ellie said, gritting her teeth as she felt her energy being hacked at, thanks to forces attacking the summons that she controlled. It didn’t hurt exactly, but it wasn’t a pleasant feeling either, to feel the constant draining of her power. If it vanished, she’d likely fall unconscious, and spin off Mason. “How the hell are we supposed to counter this?” What am I missing?

  The friendly necromancers were doing a great job, in all honesty. Turning some of the guardians to fight for them instead. Perhaps Zaimov couldn’t secure their loyalties in quite the way he intended. Maybe she could use this. Maybe there was a way to salvage this situation. Though if she wanted to join in the capturing of the spirits, she didn’t exactly plan to do it from above.

  “Mason, land me somewhere! I’m going to try to—” She paused. Two spirits had just launched themselves from around the west-side junction, separate from the armies clashing in the middle of one of Lasthearth’s most prominent avenues. One blue-gold, the other a deep, burning red, of a similar stature to what Ellie assumed was Zaimov’s. “Change of plan. Go to where those two people are!” She issued a hasty set of instructions, and Mason flapped over there, his wings and body shadowing the deaths of the military forces who were unable to cope with an unkillable enemy.