Celia followed up with a series of blows of pure force directed at the Keeper himself, which the oak-solid old Fae ignored as he bore down on the Unseelie Noble. Celia blanched at the lack of effect of her strikes, each strong enough to blow holes through concrete.
Talus charged forward before the Gille reached her, conjuring glamours of armor and weapons around himself. A yard-long sword materialized in his hand as he struck, slicing down at Owen’s wrists as the Keeper reached for Celia.
The preternaturally keen sword bounced as it hit him, but the strike threw Owen off balance, allowing Celia to escape. Talus focused more Power into the blade of illusion and force and then struck again.
Owen disappeared before the strike could land. Talus watched the old tree Fae flow into the root network that encased the cavern then reappear twenty feet away, standing by the strange multi-barrelled German weapon Talus had seen in the hotel.
He scooped up another rocket launcher as Celia closed on him. The Unseelie Noble wrapped her fists in flame and power and struck at him. He ignored the first blow, letting it land solidly on his flesh, which sizzled under the magical flame.
Celia’s second blow was intercepted with the bulk of the bazooka, her fists leaving inch-deep dents in the metal structure of the weapon. The old Fae sidestepped the third blow and caught her fourth with a free hand.
For a moment, Celia exerted the full strength of a Fae noble, a physical might matched by few creatures in the world, against the ancient oak resistance of the Gille. Then Owen released her, allowing her strength to send her flying at the sudden lack of resistance.
The Keeper used the force from releasing Celia to turn around and level the bazooka on Talus. He’d almost reached the fight, losing precious moments to cross the distance the Gille had travelled through the roots.
The barrel of the bazooka seemed large enough to swallow worlds, and the Keeper’s timing was perfect. The rocket blasted out as Talus started to move, and slammed into him with the force of a hundred hammers—and then exploded.
A lesser creature would have died. A different creature would also have died since the rocket was laced with silver shrapnel that would have ended a vampire or werewolf. Pain was Talus’s world for a short eternity, his flesh seared and his bones broken as he was thrown across the room by the force of the blast.
Celia screamed wordlessly and charged Owen again, her fists now encased in an icy-blue aura that sucked all the heat from the air around them. The Keeper met her with the oak-solid resilience of his kind, absorbing and blocking her strikes, but slowly gave ground.
Talus slowly, ever so slowly, regained some measure of consciousness and realized the Keeper was tricking her. He was giving ground towards another box of weapons—one with a loaded Thompson gun sitting on it.
The Seelie noble was grievously wounded. Even he would take time—hours at best—to recover from a wound of this magnitude. Forcing through the pain, he dragged himself forward, only his Power sustaining him.
He reached the box moments before Owen, pulling the gun to himself with telekinesis. The Keeper, having fallen back far enough, dropped his defense and dived backwards for the gun.
His hands closed on empty space, and he barely turned in time to face Talus before the Seelie leveled the gun.
Only an Unseelie or a madman taunted the defeated. Talus simply fired. He emptied a sixty-round drum into the old Fae, and even his oak-solid flesh yielded before the ancient iron bane of their kind.
The ground rumbled again as Owen fell, and Talus collapsed against the crate he’d grabbed the tommy gun from, looking around.
The big dark-skinned man standing by the detonator rigged to fire the bazookas looked at the two remaining Fae with his hands spread.
“Third tripwire,” he told them gruffly. “You all got about a minute, and then that thing is here. You got a plan?”
“Where are those aimed?” Talus asked, gesturing at the rocket launchers wired up to fire. The motion caused his splintered ribs to spasm, and he involuntarily whimpered. The engineer stared at him in a horror for a moment before replying, his voice uneven.
“There’s a set of three big black stones by the entrance. They’re all aimed at that.”
“He promised you a full share?” Talus asked as Celia moved to check out the stones.
“And got me out of a one-way trip to the asylum,” the mundane agreed. “Name’s Joe—Joe Costa. Didn’t know he was setting no one up.”
“You’ll get your share,” Talus promised him.
“Found the stones!” Celia shouted. “And I can hear the big bastard coming!”
A fourth explosion rippled through, dumping more stone on the dragon. Now Talus could hear the slam of stones on scaled flesh as the roof caved in once more.
“You’ll have to lure the bastard onto them so Joe can fire the rockets,” Talus told her. “I can’t move enough.”
The blonde Unseelie sighed and turned her gaze on Joe. “Don’t fuck this up, mundane. Believe me, I can kill you before the beast guts me.”
“Just get him on the stones,” Joe told her.
With that, a spray of debris from the cave-in announced the dragon was free, and the immense creature lunged into the cavern Owen had torn out of the guts of the earth.
For the first time, Talus saw the dragon in full light. The black and gold feathers on the wings, spread to stabilize it as it ran, glittered like precious metals under the brightness of the faerie globes entwined in the roots above. The scales that clad the beast’s mightily thewed legs glistened like freshly oiled steel. The fangs Talus could see, the smallest easily the length of a child’s leg, were iridescent black, rainbow colours flickering along their surface.
The eyes were bright silver in the dark-grey scales of the long-snouted face, their expression surprisingly humanlike—and easily read. Wariness and annoyance lit the great creature’s face, and it trained its snout on Celia, who was standing in the center of the chamber with the focus of a determined hunter.
The Unseelie noble held her ground atop Costa’s marker stones for several moments, and Talus couldn’t help but be impressed by her courage. His own wounds hammered him as he moved, trying to get into a position where he could do something—anything—against the dragon.
The dragon huffed, and a ball of fire burst out from between its front fangs, blasting towards Celia. She didn’t move fast enough. Her trench coat burst into flames. For a moment, Talus thought she was gone, and then the glamour collapsed.
Dropping the other glamour concealing her from view, Celia loosed a bolt of flame of her own from where she actually stood—a good thirty feet back from the marker for the rocket launchers.
Finally prepared and expecting her enemy, Celia attacked with the power of a Fae Noble. Ice and lightning and fire blasted from her hands, the fury of the worst winter storms man had ever seen.
The dragon stopped in its steps, sparks playing over its metallic skin and frost framing its iridescent feathers. The hammer blows of force pushed it back a step, then another. The great beast awkwardly half-hopped, half-flapped back a third time and then stopped Celia’s attack in its tracks with a sudden shield of pure force between it and her. The storm blasted against the force for a moment, continuing to chill the entire chamber.
Then a blast of force from the dragon picked Celia up and threw her across the chamber. The storm cut off instantly as she threw her power into slowing her flight and managed to land on her feet, though Talus could hear her heels gouging out trenches in the ground.
A ball of flame followed her, which Celia batted aside with a wave of force. With a surge of power, she coalesced water and chill into a long spike that she spun and hurled like a javelin. Fueled by her Power, it punched through the dragon’s shield and slammed into its shoulder.
The dragon screamed, a terrifyingly human sound but with a volume to break eardrums and shatter several of the magical faerie light globes above. Lowering its head, it charged forward.
Talus took a breath, waiting for the creature to approach the black stones marking Costa’s targeting point, and then hit the beast with a stiletto-thin line of force. The telekinetic strike stabbed through the dragon’s shield and slammed into its other shoulder. It wasn’t enough to hurt the beast—but it was enough to draw thick, black-looking blood from where it struck.
The dragon turned its face as it ran, then it slowed to a stop as its gaze found Talus and locked onto him. Grimacing against the pain of his still burnt and shattered torso, the Fae Noble threw it a thumbs-up and a huge grin.
It was on the marker stones.
Talus heard the solid thud of Costa slamming the detonator down, and then the chamber was filled with noise.
Owen and the engineer had mounted dozens of rocket launchers on the wall, and the gap between the first and last firing was only barely perceptible even to the inhuman senses of a Fae Noble.
The impacts were one long explosion, a rippling pyrotechnic of orange and blue as silver and salt lit up in the explosions of the rocket warheads. Smoke and flame obscured the dragon, and it screamed again, a long, agonizing sound.
Celia never saw it coming through the smoke. It emerged right on top of her. Its black and gold plumage had been burned to ash, and massive gouges were torn out of its flesh. The mighty beast oozed thick black blood from a dozen and more wounds, and its right eye was gone.
It screamed in rage that gave it back any speed its wounds had cost it, and a mighty wing swung out with brutal force. Celia never had a chance to dodge, and Talus heard her spine snap from across the room as that burnt and mangled limb slammed into her torso.
Despite all the arsenal of human ingenuity, the dragon was alive—and it was angry.
Talus’s wounds were probably as bad as the dragon’s, but Celia was going to die if he didn’t act. He forced himself to his feet somehow, casting about for a solution.
Owen’s corpse showed him the answer—the Keeper had fallen almost on top of the strange multi-barrelled launcher, the Luftfaust. A flick of force brought the heavy eleven-barrelled weapon to Talus’s hands.
The dragon reared up over Celia where she’d collapsed on the ground, unable to move, and presented him a glorious target.
He fired.
Only the inhuman strength of a Fae Noble kept the weapon on target as the first six rockets blasted away, slamming into the dragon with more orange and silver fire. The creature screamed again, but as it turned to attack Talus, the remaining five rockets blasted forward.
They hit the dragon in the center of its chest, tearing aside the mighty armor that the dragon had grown there, exposing flesh and organs… and still the creature screamed. Pain and fury lit its remaining eye, and it charged at Talus.
He could feel the power the dragon wrapped around itself, the mighty magic that created a bowfront of force that would pound him into paste and shatter the cavern around him. In answer, he did the only thing he could.
Talus charged back.
The Fae Noble started on foot, his entire body screaming with pain, but he reached for his glamours as he charged, wrapping an ancient archetype around himself. Armor and arms of illusion and force materialized around him as a horse of the same raised him up off the ground.
The ancient archetype of the White Knight encased Talus as he charged, and he threw all of his power into the point of the archetype’s mighty lance.
His lance point and the dragon’s wave of power met and passed through each other. The crashing force of the dragon’s magic hit him, and only the harsh training his uncle had put him through let him hold the glamour, let the armor he’d woven around himself shed the dragon’s might, and let him hold the lance on target.
All of his power, all of his fear, his rage, and his pain, focused onto one six-inch lance point forged of illusion and magic.
It struck where the Luftfaust’s rockets had torn apart the drake’s armor and exposed its great heart, and exploded with power.
Fire and ice and lightning exploded inside the dragon as the lance point came apart and took the dragon’s heart and lungs with it.
The glamour-horse lasted long enough to carry Talus past the dragon, and then his strength failed him. His entire glamour of the Knight came apart, dumping him unceremoniously on the floor, grinding gravel and dirt into the still exposed wounds on his chest.
Behind him, the dragon collapsed to the ground, its death throes shattering the remaining boxes of weapons and throwing more gravel around the cavern.
Finally, with an all-too-human whimper, the dragon died.
It seemed like a very long time before Talus was able to move under his own power. Joe managed to get him up, leaning against the wall so he was at least not rubbing more dirt into his wounds, but sheer exhaustion held him immobile.
The big Italian had to carry Celia. Even a Fae Noble would take days to recover from injuries of her magnitude. By the time Joe laid her down next to Talus, she was unconscious, her breathing slow and shallow.
“She’ll be fine,” Talus told the worried-looking engineer. “She’s in a healing hibernation—it’ll be a day or two until she wakes up, but she’ll be mostly healed.”
“Mostly healed?” the mortal half-squeaked. “I’m no doctor—but I was a soldier. Her pelvis is shattered and her spine crushed.”
“And she is a Fae Noble,” Talus told him. “Joe, I have an inch-deep hole in my chest, and I’m still talking to you. She’ll recover.”
The human dropped next to him.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“When I can walk, we do just that out of here,” Talus told him. “With the Keeper dead, I’ll have to directly claim audience with both Lords, both to claim the hoard and to explain how Owen died. You know the way out?”
“Yeah,” Joe told him. “It comes out in a cave in Central Park.”
Talus poked at his chest and winced. The ribs had finished reknitting, but the skin was still half-missing and exceptionally sore. “I’ll need a coat to not be obvious.”
Joe looked at him in shock as he slowly rose to his feet.
“There should be one around here somewhere,” he said.
Two days later, a fully healed Talus wished Joe goodbye in the front hall of the Plaza, one of New York’s expensive and luxurious hotels. The heavyset Italian wore a perfectly fitted suit but still looked uncomfortable. The initial estimate of the assessors of the Seelie and Unseelie Lords on the dragon’s hoard was a mind-boggling number.
Much of it would take time to find appropriate buyers for—ancient Greek marbles and scrolls from the Library of Alexandria were not easily liquidated—but Talus had already arranged to cash in a single chest’s worth of gold and gems. His one-third share of that chest alone had made Joe Costa a millionaire.
“What will you do?” Talus asked him.
“I have no idea,” the Italian told him honestly. “I think I can trust your people to make sure I get the money from the hoard wherever I go, so I think I’m going to go back home to Italy. Buy an estate—maybe a boat. After that, I’ll have to think about it. I never expected to be rich.”
“You aren’t going to be rich, Joe,” the Fae Noble told him with a grin. “You are going to be disgustingly, ridiculously filthy rich.”
Joe shook his head.
“Not what I was expecting when my team got killed on me,” he admitted. “I was heading to an insane asylum before Owen came along.”
Talus nodded slowly. “I wish he’d told us what was going on from the beginning,” he admitted. “Even an eighth share in the hoard would have been more money than he could possibly have needed. But once he’d betrayed four of us to their deaths…”
Costa shivered. “Your people scare me,” he admitted. “That’s one reason why I’m going to go very far away—no offense, but I don’t want to be within a thousand miles of any of you that I know about.”
Talus considered telling him that there was a Fae population almost everywhere in Italy outside
of Rome, then decided against it.
“Good luck, Joe,” he said instead, shaking the engineer’s hand. “Enjoy it—you earned it. Not many mortals have ever helped kill a dragon.”
With a nod and a firm grip, Joe stepped outside into the rainy street, waving down a cab as he went. With a small smile, Talus crossed to the elevators, heading for Celia’s room on the top floor to see if she’d woken up yet.
The penthouse room was the nicest the Plaza had, and a few extra hundreds of dollars had guaranteed Celia her privacy—the last thing anyone needed was the staff realizing how badly she’d been injured before and then watching her walk out.
“Sneaking into my room?” she called out as he walked in. “You should be more careful—Unseelie are notoriously paranoid.”
“So I’ve heard,” Talus said with a smile as he saw Celia walk out of the bathroom, drying her hair.
The fluffy hotel bathrobe did a poor job of concealing her lithe figure or motions, though it did preserve her modesty.
“The Lords agreed with the reasons for Owen’s death,” he told her, “and signed off on the hoard claim. You are a millionaire dragon-slayer, Miss Celia of the Unseelie.”
“And it seems I have a Seelie pretty-boy already sucking up to me,” she replied, a smile playing around her lips.
“Well, I’m a millionaire dragon-slayer myself, as it happens, so we have that in common,” he agreed, crossing to her. “How are you feeling?”
“Like a dragon smashed my spine into pieces and I’ve been unconscious for two days,” Celia told him. “Mostly healed up, though—and not that sore in the pelvis, if you’re wondering.” She winked at him and closed the remaining distance.
Talus kissed her, and she leaned in against him.
“You saved my life,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Miss Celia,” he told her formally. She laughed and shrugged off the robe.
Fae, Flames & Fedoras Page 4
