by Jada Fisher
Well, we had saved the day. I guess a little bit of a nap was understandable.
But, you know, a pillow would be nice.
20
The Start of the Not-so-Great War
Davie
I was still getting used to waking up. I guessed after months of being a noncorporeal spirit, there were still some things I needed to get a handle on, but slowly, ever-so-slowly, I felt the call of consciousness and allowed myself to float upwards.
I felt warm and a bit fuzzy as I opened my eyes, and the first thing I realized was that I wasn’t in my room anymore, but guessing by the pristine white all around us, some sort of infirmary.
The second thing I noticed was Bronn sitting by my bedside, looking quite stern.
“Oh, hey there,” I rasped, mouth dry. “Good morning.”
“It’s afternoon,” he said flatly, stretching out his hand to take mine.
“Ah. How long have I been out?”
“Two days.”
“And everybody else?”
“Still sleeping, but fine.”
“Huh, I guess I really wore them out.” He didn’t crack a smile at that, so I sighed a bit guiltily. “You’re mad at me.”
“Yes. And no.”
I wanted to ask a million and one questions, but I could tell that he was trying to put together his words. I didn’t think that Bronn had ever openly told me he was unhappy with something I did, so this was new territory for the both of us.
When he finally spoke, his voice was cautious. “I heard you in my head.”
“Yeah. I think a lot of people did if that worked right.” Ugh, maybe humor wasn’t the way to go, but it was like I had a switch in me that I couldn’t turn off.
“Why didn’t you tell me what you were planning?”
“Because you would have wanted to help me, and I needed you to lead your people in case I failed, or the shield didn’t hold.”
“You don’t know that.”
I could have just given him a look and told him that I did, but that wasn’t fair. Instead, I squeezed his hand and looked him right in the eye. “If I told you that I was going to go up on the roof and fix your shields myself and then declare war, would you have stayed with your troops or gone with me?”
“…I see your point.” I didn’t think it was possible, but his expression grew even more serious. “But I need you to stop making these decisions for me, Davie. I know that you can see the future, and you can read people like nobody’s business, but I need you to let me decide what I will or will not do in these cases.”
Another gentle squeeze of my hand, but I heard his voice quiver and saw the slightest bit of tears gather in the corner of his eyes. “I did what you asked of me last time, and it nearly broke me. I don’t know if I can do that again.”
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, sitting up slowly so that I could rest my forehead against his. “I hurt you, and I know that. Please don’t blame yourself for what I did to save you all.”
“How can I not? If I was stronger, or had just planned better, I cou—”
I cut him off as best I could, pressing my lips to his. Just like before, I felt my heart throb and a bubbling, rushing sort of happiness drench my soul. He was all of the good, happy things in life, and I couldn’t understand why he would possibly want to kiss me, but I certainly wasn’t complaining.
When we parted, he had the tiniest of grins on his face. “You know I love you, right, Miss Davie Masters?” he asked, completely serious.
I laughed lightly and rested my forehead against him. “How about you decide if you feel that way after the shock of me coming back from the dead wears off.”
“I don’t need that to know how I feel. Do you?”
“Well…no,” I answered, blushing. “I’m not sure I know exactly what love is, but I’ve never felt about anyone the way I feel about you. You make me feel happy and content. Safe.”
“That’s something, considering in my presence you’ve been in endless danger and even died.”
“I’m never going to live that down, am I?”
“What? Dying? You seem to be doing a good job of doing that so far.”
I laughed. “I see what you did there.”
That seemed to break the last of the solemn mood and we just sat there for a good while, holding each other.
For the first time since I was dead, I felt hope. I felt joy. I felt warmth. I knew that tomorrow was going to come with its own host of issues, but those were for tomorrow.
Surprisingly, it was Bronn who broke the comfortable silence first. “So, did you plan on declaring total war on Baelfyre specifically, or were you caught up in the moment?”
“You know, I’m still not quite sure on that.”
“You were pretty frightening, you know that?”
“Good. Maybe they’ll think twice about attacking us.”
“I doubt that. If anything, you’ve made them angrier.”
“Do you disapprove?”
“Not at all. It will most likely make them sloppier. Baelfyre loses his edge when he’s angry, and if we’re taking the war to them, then we’re going to need every advantage we can get.”
I nodded, feeling determination rise up to mix with all of the pleasant feelings within me. We were going to have one hell of a fight on our hands, but I was ready for it.
It was time to make them pay.
Death Follows
Dragon Oracle, Book 5
1
You’re Supposed to Look Before You Leap
Everything was dark.
No… Wait.
Everything was blue.
My heart would have let out a mighty thump in my chest if it was actually beating, but it was just as cold and still as the rest of me.
No.
No!
This couldn’t be happening. I had gotten free! I wasn’t dead anymore! I wasn’t!
A low, sickly sort of humming filled my ears, but I couldn’t turn my head to see where it was coming from. The sound reverberated deep within me, rattling my still, still body, until finally, spiderlike veins of insipid, ominous black began to bleed through the blue all around me.
The crystal around me groaned, trying to cling to me, to keep me where I was, but I willed my power outwards, bursting like a star that could not be contained. I was alive, gosh darn it! I had planned and plotted and done the impossible, and I wasn’t giving any of that up!
The cracks increased, building into a crescendo until, finally, it exploded in a rain of shards.
I stumbled forward, gasping and heaving, hitting the ground with all the force of my heavy human body. I was still whole, still my size sixteen self, and still very much alive.
I groaned, my head spinning as it tried to figure out what was happening, only to hear the humming dissolve into soft chuckles.
Now that I was released from my prison, I knew that sound, and it made my very much alive skin shudder with revulsion. Fighting to my feet, I wasn’t surprised to see the rotted dragon laying across the broken, fallen remains of what looked like it had once been a magnificent building.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” I snapped, lips going back in a snarl.
Maybe it was a little overly gutsy to verbally throw down with a malevolent being that had brought on the ruin of dozens of dimensions, but dying had ironically made me a whole lot less scared of a whole lot of things. What was he going to do? Kill me? I was in some sort of dream…or vision, maybe? Whichever one, it wasn’t someplace he could actually hurt me.
Or…at least I was pretty sure he couldn’t.
Maybe it would be best not to gamble, but my mouth was going off on its own plan.
“You’d be surprised how fluid time comes when you’ve been outside of it for as long as I have. Certainly, you had at least a taste of that in your temporary death?”
“You know about that?” I asked, bravado flagging ever-so-slightly.
“Of course I do. It’s not often that a seer i
s able to summon the spirits of the past and utilize some of the power that used to be so rife through your people. Tell me, was it worth it, sacrificing your soul? You didn’t even get to move on to the afterlife, did you?”
I didn’t answer, instead glaring at the great beast. I was pretty sure I preferred it when he was cryptically threatening Armageddon at me instead of remarking snidely on my not-so-life-after-death.
“What a shame. Death is supposed to be the ultimate rest, where you can be reunited with all those souls you’ve lost, and you didn’t get any of that, did you?”
“How do you know that?”
“Such is the fate of one who gives such a sacrifice. You cut off an entire realm, you sealed a portal. You essentially realigned the cosmos, and all to save your sister. Your sister who has more secrets than you could ever know.”
“Secrets?”
“But the really interesting part is that you came back. And you don’t even know the consequences of that, do you?”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t recall finding any consequences in all my universe searching, conversing with ancients, and floating through the cosmos. But maybe I hadn’t wanted to see them. Being dead was tricky, and reality was often sifted through a specific filter that was entirely structured around what I wanted or needed.
“What do you want?” I ground out. The rotted dragon, with all his malevolence and venom, had never sought me out in a vision or dream unless he was planning on threatening me, or trying to wheedle some sort of information out of me. He had to have a purpose for being in front of me.
Unless I was just having a regular nightmare.
Not that there was anything regular about my nightmares.
It had been a solid week and a half since I had been resurrected and declared war on Baelfyre and all his kin, and it hadn’t exactly been easy. Although I was released from the infirmary a few hours after Bronn and I kissed, there had still been a lot to get used to with having a corporeal form again.
For one, I still had to mostly obey the laws of physics, which was pretty inconvenient. And one of the best things about being dead was that there was no thigh rub even in the strange, crystalline purgatory I was in. Not to mention managing my bladder, being hungry, my hair. In fact, you could call having a human body pretty darn inconvenient…
…even with my entire closet filled with designer clothes and a fleet of servants to feed me the finest food, and everyone I loved to flock around me whenever I needed. It wasn’t that I was unhappy to be alive. It was just that I had been so set on defying my death, I had forgotten how inconvenient existing was.
“Focus now, little one.”
I blinked and looked back to the rotted dragon. Right. He was in the middle of threatening my life. Probably. If past experiences were anything to go by.
“Is there a reason for this, or did you just want to chat?”
“Chat?” He chuckled, and it was an oily, disgusting sound that made my skin crawl. Oh yeah, I definitely had skin now. All the better to get the heebie-jeebies with. “Oh no, I just wanted to watch.”
“Watch what?” I murmured in confusion before trailing off, a dark shadow coming over the both of us.
My hair instantly stood on end, and I looked behind me to see a dark, shadowy…something descending toward me. Not quite man, not quite woman, maybe a little like a storm cloud, it came closer and closer, the temperature dropping as it did. It wasn’t until I saw the glint of the unreasonably large scythe in its gaunt, skeletal, blue-gray hand that I realized what I was looking at.
“There’s no such thing as a grim reaper,” I said, scuttling backward until my back hit something with a squelch. Putrid, warm stink surrounded me, and I realized that I was pressing into the rotted dragon’s chest.
Crap.
He let out a laugh and his legs came forward, claws wrapping around me. “Of course there aren’t, little lost girl. But Death? Oh, she’s far more real than you would think, and you’ve stolen something from her.”
The creature came closer, its body solidifying in my mind the more I stared. She was like candle smoke and ash, parts of her wisping in and out of existence, the billowing, tattered cloak she was wearing more like a storm cloud than fabric. Her face was a skull, terrifying and decrepit, but at the same time, it was strangely beautiful, as if a translucent mask were hovering over the horror.
And she was coming straight for me.
“Let me go!” I cried, struggling against him.
But the rotted dragon held strong, his talons biting into me. “If you want to go, then just leave. I’m not stopping you. But, while I might be trapped in this plane, it is wise to remember that she is not. And Death… Death comes for us all.”
With a broken cry, I wrenched myself free. I saw the glint of flashing metal in the corner of my eye, but before it could land, I gripped hold of what I knew was reality and yanked as hard as I could.
The next moment, my eyes snapped open, a scream forcing its way out of my mouth as I jolted. Mickey was already there, of course, gripping my face gently and talking to me.
It took me several seconds to catch her words, I was so terrified, so confused. But bit by bit, they came to me, and I found my heart slowly settling, along with my short, terrified pants.
“Shhh, you’re gonna be alright. It was just a nightmare. None of it was real. You’re here now, and you’re alive. We’re all alive. Take some deep breaths with me, okay? Okay?”
I nodded and breathed along with her. It took several moments, but eventually, I felt myself ease off all the adrenaline.
“Goodness, that was a bad one, wasn’t it?” Mickey asked once I was more or less back to normal.
I nodded, my throat still a bit constricted from all the panic and unshed tears. Thankfully, Mickey didn’t remark on that. I’d been having nightmares pretty much every night since I came back from the dead, but my sister was there to walk me down from the edge every time.
“It wasn’t what I would call pleasant, exactly,” I said, my voice much more raw than it should have been. Oh geez, had I been screaming in my sleep? That was embarrassing. I wondered how many times the guards posted outside my door had tried to come in, or if they had grown used to my caterwauling.
“Here, let me get you a glass of water.”
Mickey leaned to the side to the nightstand, pouring me a cup from the pitcher that I had left there the night before. I probably could have done that myself, but it was nice to be pampered a bit.
She handed the glass to me, and I went to take it only to have my hand bounce off it with a clink.
No. That wasn’t my hand.
Blinking blearily, that same ol’ adrenaline started pumping again when I realized my lower arm was entirely coated in blue crystal.
“Davie!” Mickey yelped, jumping to her feet. “Davie, what’s going on?!”
“I, uh, I don’t know.”
“You’re not… You’re not—”
“Dying? I don’t think so. I think that would feel a bit different… Right? Here, let me just—” I cut myself off and held my breath, focusing on the strange, slippery power running through me. I stared at my arm, willing life and warmth into it. Willing it to be me.
Bit by bit, the crystal cracked, just as it had in my dream. Once there were several fissures running through it, I concentrated harder until it finally shattered, falling onto my bedspread in a layer of blue dust.
“You saw that, right?” I asked, panting as I looked to Mickey. I wasn’t sure which answer I wanted. If she hadn’t seen it, it meant it wasn’t real and that was good. But it also meant that my visions were bleeding over into real life and I wasn’t able to tell the difference.
If she had seen it…. Well, it meant that it was real and for some reason, the same crystal that had claimed my life once was trying to take me again.
Oh boy.
Mickey sat on the bed next to me, worry etched into every single one of her features. “What does this mean?” she asked, trying
to sound brave and strong like she always was. But I knew her too well and could pick up on all the little tremors she was trying to hide. “Why is this happening?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said wearily, sinking back into the lush bed. Suddenly, I was so exhausted. I felt as if I could fall right back asleep, but I was afraid of what would happen if I did close my eyes. “We’ll just have to keep an eye on it and hope for the best. It’s not like we don’t have a whole war between dragon clans to worry about.”
“Davie,” Mickey said warningly. “How are you not more worried?”
I shrugged. “I’m plenty worried. But if there’s anything I’ve learned from my not-so-eternal-slumber, it’s that you should only worry about what you can change. Everything else is just information for another day.”
“I’m not sure I like that.”
I looked down at my hands, which had just been bright blue and stony. “Me neither.”
2
Broad Declarations
I sat at a table in the kitchen, slurping down the hardy stew that one of the cooks had made for me. Apparently coming back from the dead and resurrecting their shield made me a bit of a celebrity among most of the castle folk. It was a stark difference, going from being an outsider who most people were suspicious of to someone who was borderline revered, but I wasn’t complaining.
“Hey, there you are!”
I looked up, mouth full, to see Mallory coming through the same servant door that I had, a concerned expression on her face. It wasn’t that I didn’t love being with my friends—after all, I had defied the laws of nature to be reunited with them—but since that night where my hands turned to crystal, my nightmares had been getting worse. There usually wasn’t a time that I was able to sleep through the entire night and whenever I did wake up, it was usually screaming and covered in sweat. Mickey and Mallory took turns watching me, refusing to let Mal or Krisjian give them any relief, leaving the three of us fairly exhausted.
