Bonded to the Dragon: The Lick of Fire Collection: Dragon Lovers

by Lockharte, Kara

  The hissing sound grew overwhelming. I glanced up, and above the ward, the sky was dark, rippling with black fog.

  And I realized it wasn’t fog, but lots of tiny flying things with too many teeth.

  Grant looked up and then back at me. “You’re not going to try to die on me now, are you?”

  I had been wrong about falling in love with him. I was already in love. “Not now. Too many things to live for.”

  He smiled. My god, I would fight a million spider trolls to see that smile.

  “Good.” Grant leapt up into the sky. With a flash, his massive white dragon form exploded into being.

  I turned back to the wards.

  * * *

  Whatever Grant had done to the ward held back the monsters for a short time.

  There were too many of them, too many glowing, cutting weapons that screamed and shrieked with dark magic against the ward. It was only a matter of time before they broke through again.

  I tightened my grip on the sword and brought it upward. I was ready.

  I heard the cracking of another gap in the ward, this time right in front of me. But instead of those sticklike zombies breaking through to become trolls, black smoke poured in.

  A chill gripped my spine. This was no ordinary smoke.

  The smoke dropped to the ground and solidified into a living black thing, viscous.

  And then eyes, far too many eyes, opened and looked at me.

  The Devourer was here.

  12

  Sophie’s magically fueled voice of outrage boomed across the field. “Traitor!”

  The old man’s voice came back in equal volume. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The dragons are an infestation on this world, one that needs to be cleansed before we can begin again.”

  My own magic swirled around me, and the barrier within me fell away.

  I headed toward the dark cloud, quickly oozing more and more of itself into this side of the magical ward. “I killed the Devourer last time. I’ll do it again,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.

  I would fight the Devourer today, and even if it took me again, well, I had been doing something I believed in of my own free will.

  Even if I never got to figure out what was between Grant and me, it would be a good death.

  A firefly-sized glowing light flew next to me, speaking in Sophie’s voice. “No, you can’t—”

  My magic curled around me. “I’ve killed it before. And I’ll do it again.”

  The cloud drew itself up, searching.

  I ran to meet it, whirling my magic around me.

  And the blob split and streamed over me, around me, surrounding me, in a strange bubble of magic.

  My magic pulsed into my sword, but the bubble was invisible, flexible, and moved with my movements.

  It was heading toward the house.

  “Come on,” I screamed, trying to convey my anger at the sword.

  It flared blue. I knew what I had to do.

  I threw the sword. It slashed through the bubble, popping it soundlessly.

  I looked up at the house.

  Sophie stumbled out, black liquid eating away at her golden glowing armor, and then she stopped moving.

  The ward shattered, and the lines of enemy fighters flew at me.

  I bolted, running for her like I had never run for anyone else. That well of stillness? It was alive, fueling my steps faster than I had any right to move.

  Because True Death was near.

  I grabbed Sophie as she slumped to the ground.

  The Devourer’s ooze closed over me, so cold it burned, etching into my flesh, my skin.

  And somehow, part of me realized that it was eating away at my flesh, at my body at the atomic level.

  You cannot kill the Devourer in the same way twice.

  And clearly, it had figured out how to kill me. I wasn’t surprised. Oddly enough, it didn’t hurt, but was more like a freezing cold, slowly numbing everything.

  Sophie gasped. It was on her too.

  My fingers, my arms, all of me was slowly dissolving. I held on to her as long as I could, feeling the spark of life that was hers, and…the baby. It was dying, it was dwindling, no, no, no, this wasn’t how it was supposed to be—she—they couldn’t die, not when they had everything to live for.

  And the zombies kept coming.

  I heard the distant roar of dragons.

  Something inside me reached for the sparks, drawn to the heat, even as I realized, what I was doing.

  I was Death. And I was going to kill them.

  I tried to stop myself.

  But then the light went out.

  * * *

  The one thing that humans had gotten right about death was its connection to darkness.

  Here I was, back in the cold, permanent darkness, back to the place I had been trying so hard to get to.

  I remembered holding Sophie, reaching for that spark of life.

  Something familiar and monstrous sparked in the darkness.

  Rage filled me.

  In this place with no physics, no logic, I reached for that bit of the Devourer, took it into my hands and crushed it. Under my pressure, the thing burned, separated, until it was nothing more than atoms, dissolving back into the dark.

  And when it was done, I realized that I had no hands, no form, no body.

  Or was it just the fact that it was so dark I couldn’t feel anything?

  An invisible wind sliced through me.

  A baby cried.

  A woman wept.

  I reached for them both, knowing my touch wouldn’t kill them since we were already dead. I had to try to comfort them, knowing I would never be able to find them, knowing I would never be able to reach them, feeling their sorrow, their desperation.

  And yet I had to try. I had to help them find their way.

  They were so close and yet hidden from me.

  Fury ripped me, fueling my efforts. Goddamn it, I would help them, and I would spend eternity if I had to, but I would find them.

  Neither they nor I had any physical body, but somehow, they were there, tiny little sparks of soul.

  In comparison, I realized I was huge—no, not just huge but bigger than immense, so massive I couldn’t fully comprehend it.

  I surrounded a spark, reached for the other one, and brought them together.

  I sensed the baby reach for its mother, the warmth of their love, and it spread throughout the rest of me.

  They didn’t want to be here. They weren’t supposed to be here.

  And then holding them, I saw them. Two lines of fire searching, reaching.

  Save them. A woman’s voice filled my head. She was speaking… Was it Japanese? Somehow, I was able to understand her.

  I looked around and saw nothing but darkness.

  “Yes, that’s what I’m trying to do. But I’m not sure how.”

  There was no sound. But I had the oddest sense there was someone sighing in exasperation.

  Grab the light.

  I did.

  One was meant for the mother and child, that I anchored to them.

  And they didn’t move.

  They can’t find their way back without you.

  “How?”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake, just click your heels three times.

  “I never actually saw that movie.”

  Hold the place and moment in time in your mind. And imagine yourself there.

  The lines of fire crackled around me, burning with life. The lines went taut.

  And we went flying.

  * * *

  I awoke to pain.

  Ice-cold water doused me. I gasped for breath at the freezing cold. I shook the water out of my eyes.

  Hunter picked me up by the throat. I gagged.

  “I’ll ask you once. What did you do to my wife and child?”

  I coughed, struggled, panicked.

  Hunter’s voice was one of rage and sheer anger. “What did you do?”

  Had I f
ailed?

  “Where is she?” I gasped.

  Hunter dropped me to the ground. I fell, and mud sloshed into my open, gasping mouth.

  Fire sparked in his hand.

  Hunter had thought I had been trying to kill them. His voice was barely human. “They’re dead!”

  Agony ripped through me. I had killed them. Despite all my efforts, I had killed them. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was trying to help. I was trying to save them!”

  There was a silence that seemed to drag on forever, before Grant’s voice judged me. “She’s…not lying.”

  Hunter let out a roar of rage, changing instantly into a massive black dragon, and flew at Grant.

  The air twisted sideways, and Grant was replaced by a massive white dragon, bellowing as the black dragon went for his throat. An inferno surrounded both of them, so much fire that air was sucked from my lungs. I struggled for breath as the oxygen vanished.

  Something fragile shattered within me, something I knew better than to try to build, something I had tried to hide from myself.

  I was a demon, a thing of death, and that’s apparently what I was destined to be. I should have known better. Better to destroy this cancer, this illusion of love, then let it grow into something more devastating.

  The coldness inside me cracked open, responding to the heat of its own accord like blood oozing from a cut. It was beyond my control, the power swelling within me, a wave I never had a chance of riding. I heard it coming, heard it rushing toward me, the roaring of power in my ears, undeniable, unbreakable, and utterly unstoppable.

  My vision blurred.

  Galaxies spun before me, each moment a millennium. Life, death, matter, energy, past, present, future, all part of one magnificent cycle.

  And for the briefest moment, I understood everything.

  Nothing was ever destroyed; it was only transformed.

  Pain slammed into me. I was back in my body. Time slowed. Power exploded from me in an invisible blast. I tried to stop it, but it was like trying to stop rain by holding your hands up to the sky.

  I saw it, invisible lines slicing through the torsos of the two dragons, ricocheting against the buildings and into the wards behind us, shattering them with a noiseless fury that hammered me in the deep place where my power pulled.

  I thought I had died; I thought I had experienced all the pain there ever was to experience.

  But not until I stood up and saw Hunter and Grant, in human form, sprawled out on the ground.

  I had killed them too.

  I screamed, rushing to Grant.

  He was alive. Hunter was alive. They both were.

  Relief flooded me.

  I dropped to my knees. Thank you, I whispered, pressing my closed fists to my head, to whatever, whoever was listening.

  The world vibrated around me.

  What had just happened?

  In the grass, I saw my ring gleaming and glowing.

  I picked it up and realized the tiny circlet wasn’t truly metal, but some other strange substance. I glanced at Grant, saw what looked like metallic paint on his fingertips. I rubbed my long-sought ring in between my fingertips, still warm from whatever Grant had done to it.

  My freedom was finally in my own hands.

  But this wasn’t what I wanted. Not like this.

  I put the ring on and looked toward the ward.

  It was gone.

  And the army that had sieged the farm? Piles of bodies.

  Grant began to stir.

  I don’t need a magic fairy ring to find you.

  I glanced at the ring on my hand. I always fucked things up. Sophie and her child were dead.

  I had failed Grant, just like I had failed everyone who had ever been in my life. All I did was fuck things up.

  I turned and ran.

  Right smack into the lizard-deer snarling with teeth longer than steak knives and a forest of sharp antlers.

  The deer-thing hissed at me, pawed, and stamped at the ground.

  And then Sophie’s uncle appeared.

  I had thought I knew what being trapped was like. Despite Grant’s control of me, what had granted a measure of my freedom was his unfamiliarity with shen magic.

  But this was a shen with the full knowledge of their magic.

  Sophie’s uncle snapped his fingers.

  A net of invisible magic surrounded me. I struggled. It strangled me.

  He smiled, sending a chill into my bones. “I was looking for you. Perfect timing.”

  13

  I gripped the armrests of my chair, rubbing my wrists. Thick ropes tied my arms and legs to the wooden chair. We were in the middle of what appeared to be a thicket—no, a fence of bamboo, with the only opening above to a gray, clouded sky.

  He sat across from me at a small square table with a lazy Susan, pouring something hot into two white porcelain cups.

  “Won’t you please join me for tea?”

  I was about to make a remark about being bound, only to find my wrists free. My legs, however, were still stuck.

  He cocked his head and gave me a smile as if to say, Really?

  “I don’t have a choice in this, so stop pretending.”

  He chuckled, so clearly amused and full of himself. “No. But I promise you this jasmine is quite good. But then I suppose your kind aren’t tea drinkers?”

  There was no escape from stupid racist attitudes, even from shen. “My kind? You’re saying that Mexican people don’t drink tea?”

  “No,” he said, slowly. “Death demons. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep.”

  Oh. Right.

  He pulled out a silver cigarette holder, snapped it open, and offered me one. I shook my head.

  The chair moved closer of its own accord.

  He put a cigarette in his mouth and touched his fingertip to the tip. The cigarette lit up. “You have no need of nourishment. You are also immune to poison, so that shouldn’t concern you. But you can still taste. Drink it for the taste.”

  I took a sip. It was floral and grassy. I started to choke.

  He sighed. “Nobody has any appreciation for the finer things anymore.”

  I set the teacup on the table. “Get to the point.”

  “You are extraordinary and unique. There has been no one like you ever in the existence of this world. Well, similar, but not the same.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  He smiled. “I would just like you to open a door for me.”

  I thought of an alien desert, with three moons and a freestanding doorway to a place of no return.

  I spat into the teacup, trying to get that cloying floral taste out of my mouth. He wanted me to kill someone. “Why should I help you? You tried to kill your own niece.”

  “Niece is a very loose term. There are more generations between that spawn and I than exist between primates and you. In any case, it is in your best interest to be willing to help me. I can force you to assist me, but the aftereffects, like madness made physical, can be quite gruesome.”

  Madness made physical? What the hell did that mean?

  The man merely closed his eyes and sipped his tea, leaving me to ponder his statement.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Same old story men told women the world over: Shut up and let me do what I want with you.

  “But if you help me, I will grant you your freedom.”

  Willing or unwilling, the man would have his way.

  I almost laughed. It was a strange twisted echo of what Grant had said to me. Patterns, turns, and despite all that had come to pass, somehow, I was back to where I had been even before I had died.

  Trapped by yet another immortal with powers beyond most human comprehension.

  I should have known—no, wait, I did know it would be like this. This was why death had always been my goal, why death was the best place for me, why my resurrection was a total fuck-you to the world because it was clearly better off without me.

  But I had been lured, misled, and a
lmost even believed…

  Tears filled my eyes, and I swallowed the bitter salt in my mouth.

  None of this went unnoticed by the old man.

  “In fact,” he said, his voice taking on an unexpectedly gentle edge, “I believe that helping me is part of your destiny.”

  He slid a black wrought-iron key, finely carved with geometric designs, to me.

  They moved.

  Just like the designs I had seen on Sophie’s red barn.

  It sang to me, the same strange music I had heard coming from the house I had shared with Andrew.

  Grant hadn’t recognized it, didn’t sense it.

  Because it was a shen key, made with shen magic, which was why Grant hadn’t sensed it.

  I picked up the key, and it begin to pulse with a warm glow.

  “See. It knows that you are meant for this.”

  I stared at the key in my hand. Nothing had ever felt so straightforwardly logical and right. He was so right; how could I ever doubt his wisdom?

  And that complete and utter surety was what told me that this man was a con of the highest magnitude, wrapping some spell of trust around me like a cozy warm blanket. I recognized it, I knew it, because I remembered the feeling when Andrew had asked me to stay and “help out his weird friend,” never knowing it would be the start of my enslavement.

  Sophie’s uncle smiled. “I have grown tired of this life. I would like to be free of it all. But as you know, it is not easy for ones such as us to remove ourselves from existence.”

  I knew he was lying. But I wondered what he meant by “ones such as us”?

  Was he saying I was a shen? But hadn’t he just called me a death demon?

  Or maybe shen were demons.

  Fuck it all, none of it mattered anyway.

  I set the key down. It clinked on the tabletop as if it were made of glass though the appearance was that of engraved wood.

  “This…doorway. You want it open so that you can die?”

  He smiled a sharp smile. “Death is but another beginning.”

  I shuddered at the thought.

  Still…I had only managed to reach that in-between place in the company of others.

  I wondered if I could do it at this moment.