Something the earth believed Dax needed, because it had been driving him back to that chamber again and again and again over the centuries.
The push was stronger now than it had ever been. Every part of him felt both driven and pulled toward that chamber deep in the heart of the volcano. What lay there was waiting for him, and he could delay no longer. The strength he needed was there, offered up to him if only he had the will to claim it.
He dispatched the wards surrounding his resting place and shifted into a clear mist, traveling swiftly through the lava tubes and fissures in the rock, descending deep into the earth until he reached the superheated chamber. A small section of the floor on the far side of the chamber had cracked, and molten rock from the adjacent magma chamber was spilling into the room, thick and glowing orange. The pool was rising rapidly. It wouldn’t be long before the entire chamber was completely filled.
In the center of the room, its hindquarters half submerged in the deepening magma, lay the petrified remains of a dragon. Immense and breathtaking, the creature lay curled tightly, wings tucked against his back, tail curled around his body, head resting on diamond-clawed forepaws. The entire dragon had crystallized, its body turning to ruby and diamond in the intense heat and pressure of the volcano. The dragon’s chest was destroyed, crushed. Huge chunks of faceted crystal spilled around the petrified carcass.
The heat rising from the magma made the air around the dragon ripple, distorting Dax’s vision until the entire crystallized carcass seemed to tremble and move.
Take it. Take what remains. Take what is offered.
The whispers filled Dax’s head, making him dizzy. Before him, the heat waves rising from the magma pool seemed to shimmer and take on a translucent fire-red hue, but the shimmer was . . . dragon-shaped?
Dax shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and looked again. The image was still there . . . hazy, translucent, a dragon formed of insubstantial red mist. He stretched out his senses, but could detect no concentrated stench of evil.
The Old One offers you his strength. You were not ready before, but we have made you so. Take what is offered. Without it, you cannot defeat your enemy. Take it. Quickly, before it is lost to the volcano. The earth continued to whisper to him, pushing at him to take a chance that could result in his death.
Dax moved closer. The heat from the magma was so intense, he half expected to burst into flame at any moment, yet his burnished skin didn’t even blister. Another step brought him close to the dragon’s head and a mere five feet from the widening magma pool. Now, he could sense the power radiating from the crystallized dragon. Where had it come from? He’d been here in this chamber before. He’d found the crystallized dragon, half-crushed but still an awesome discovery, but he’d never sensed this pulsating energy. It almost felt alive.
Stepping closer still, Dax reached for the shimmering veil of energy. The instant he touched it, a raw, savage wildness roared in response. Power slammed into him like an iron fist, plowing into him with enough force to knock him off his feet. He landed hard and pain streaked across his back and jaw, which had taken the brunt of the strike.
Take the power. Take what is offered.
“That was an offer?” Dax got up, dusted himself off and rubbed his aching jaw. “No offense, dear friend, but whatever that is clearly doesn’t want to be taken.”
Without the Old One’s strength, you cannot win. You must take it. But first, you must prove yourself worthy.
“Wonderful.” Dax moved his head, stretching the tendons and cracking the joints in his neck. He regarded the translucent image of the dragon shimmering in the hot air. “So be it, Old One. Let us roll the bones.”
This time, as he approached the crystallized dragon carcass and the veil of energy hovering above it, he braced himself for attack. The blow, when it came, struck twice as hard as before. Power tore into him with diamond-hard claws. The sheer intensity of it threatened to rip him to pieces, but he set his jaw and leaned into it, firing back a blast of his own, meeting power with power, force with force. The shimmering dragon roared and flexed its wings.
And the fight was on.
Waves of energy swirled around the room. A powerful force built underneath and around him. The walls of the chamber began to tremble. Tiny particles of rock and sand fell from the ceiling. Dax thrust calming waves into the ground, stilling the rupturing earth.
The flow of magma into the chamber increased, forcing Dax to step back. Gases bubbled and spat in the magma pool. The heat increased. The air sparked. The gases caught fire in a flash of boiling orange flame. Dax closed his eyes and flung up a shield. Heat poured over him like an ocean wave.
A voice that sounded like thunder growled and rumbled in his brain. Only the strongest may hope to hold a dragon’s soul. How strong are you, Danutdaxton of the Carpathians? The dragon spoke in his ancient language, Carpathian, allowing Dax to understand him.
Each word boomed and burned inside his mind as if a hammer made of flaming lead were pounding against his skull. Dax fought the urge to cover his ears, knowing it was useless.
“As strong as I must be to defeat my enemy,” Dax replied. A dragon’s soul. Was that what fought him now? Or had Mitro found a way to trick him after all? “Do you think me your enemy?”
Does a lion name the flea his enemy?
“A flea, am I?” Dax was mildly insulted at the thought. He reached for the heat rising from the magma, drawing it to him, shaping it between his hands into a ball of fire, which he flung at the center of the insubstantial creature. But rather than punching a hole through the shimmering red mist, the fireball exploded against the surface, spreading out in tongues of flame that were swiftly absorbed. The red-mist dragon seemed to grow larger, as if the flames only made it stronger.
The enemy of heat was cold. Dax tried to drain the heat from around the veil of mist, but the heat was too intense for him to do more than cool the room a few degrees.
“If you mean to help, Old One, then help,” Dax said. “There is a great evil locked inside this volcano. While I fight you, it is trying to escape.”
What should I care of this evil thing? You have awakened me from my resting place and I care nothing for your troubles.
Dax puzzled over that for a moment. The dragon had no reason to care. His time was long past. All that he knew and loved was gone from the earth. Even his body was gone.
Perhaps there is no reason other than you are a dragon, and a great warrior, or so I have been led to believe.
There was a moment of silence. A dragon’s soul is a mighty power. Only the strongest of vessels could hope to contain it. All others would shatter.
Power slammed toward Dax again, but this time he tried a different tack. In his years of training with the ancients of his race, he’d learned when to stand firm and when to bend like a tree in the wind. He ducked the dragon’s main blast and rolled forward beneath it, coming up close to the beast’s shimmering presence.
His feet sank into the edge of the magma pool. Fiery pain streaked up his legs as flesh scorched and burned. Dax shuttered his mind against the agony and tried to absorb and use the heat as the dragon’s soul had absorbed and used his fireball earlier. His hands shot out, tracing wards in the air, spinning and twisting energy and the molecules of air in the room into a shining web that he cast around the insubstantial mist of the dragon’s soul. A rainbow of light reflected through the room as the energy swirled around his opponent.
Determination and calm rolled through him as the net settled over the dragon. He could feel the spirit gather itself, like any creature would before it strikes. He spread his fingers wide and held them, palms out, between himself and the dragon. Gently, he touched thumb to thumb, then forefinger to forefinger, completing a circle of power, and through that circle, he drew his net of energy tight.
The b
east thrashed and roared in outrage, but the bonds of his net held fast. Slowly, relentlessly, Dax pulled the net tighter and tighter. He inched his way backward, dragging the protesting weight of the dragon with him.
Heat jetted out, splashing over him like a geyser. His skin burned. His hair singed. He did not release the net. He kept pulling it through his circle of power, drawing the dragon’s soul in tight, folding it in upon itself, pulling it away from the magma pool that he suspected was feeding its strength.
As he pulled, he began to weave new, cooler threads of power over the others. And with each precisely woven thread, his connection to the dragon’s spirit increased. He could feel its consciousness pressing up against his own. Each writhing fight, each blast of heat and power, was as much instinctive self-protection as it was a test of Dax’s own strength. As the last bit of Dax’s net passed through his circle of power, a great force snapped out, but this time the power didn’t strike him; it raced up the flows binding it, following them back to Dax.
“No.” Realizing its intent, Dax straightened abruptly and tried to weave protective wards. But his efforts were too late, and in speaking he had left an opening, a second circle of power, only this one led into him. The soul rushed forward, a blazing pulse of light and heat that shot into his mouth and down his throat. Energy, heat, power flooded him, burning him from the inside out. He staggered back, releasing his now empty web of power.
The dragon’s soul was inside him, searing him. An immense fiery presence that threatened to burst his body asunder. Dax spun a new web, only this time around himself, drawing the threads tight around his own body, adding even more strength to the skin and bone made dense by his centuries locked inside the volcano.
His skin turned dark and began to shudder. Red scales rippled down his arms. Dax held up his hands in surprise as his nails grew crystal clear and lengthened like claws . . . like the dragon’s own diamond talons. The change didn’t feel like a normal Carpathian shapeshifting. It felt elemental, as if the transformation was happening at more than a cellular level.
Dax fought back, unwilling to relinquish his own body to the soul that had leapt into him. He willed his hand to change back, his nails to soften and shorten. Inch by inch, he fought back the change sweeping over his body, fought to keep his own form.
Inside his body, a second, similar battle raged, only this was not a battle of flesh, but a battle of minds. The dragon’s soul surrounded his own and tried to absorb him into itself. It tried to dominate him. But Carpathians were predators, not prey, and Dax was a hunter of immense skill and drive and determination. He did not surrender. Not when fighting the most powerful and heinous vampire the world had ever seen, and not while fighting a powerful, ancient soul for control of his own body.
The dragon rifled through Dax’s memories, tearing into his brain, past his substantial inner barriers, ripping through the outer hunter into the depths of Dax’s soul. The life of aloneness. The friends and fellow hunters who had turned to evil. The other hunters who had feared and avoided him once they realized he could tell which of them was about to turn vampire. He’d known before they did. Known, and waited close by to kill them before they could harm others.
The Old One found his memories of the friends loved and lost to Mitro Daratrazanoff’s evil. The family who had taken him in after his own parents were killed by yet another friend turned vampire. The wish, long forgotten now, for a lifemate of his own. The beautiful Arabejila, companion and friend for more years of life than any unmated Carpathian warrior should ever have to endure. And yet with her, all things had become bearable. The years had not weighed so heavily. The emotions lost to him as he aged had always seemed close at hand when she was near. He had always admired her. Honored her gentleness. Respected her quiet strength. And she had been strong. As strong as he was in her own way. She’d had to be to endure the ruined life Mitro had left to her.
Never once had Dax heard her complain. Oh, he’d seen her eyes grow dark with sorrow. Heard her weep softly in the day when she thought he was asleep. But she’d never complained. Just as she’d never blamed him for not killing Mitro when he had the chance.
Dax had always known Mitro was not right. He’d always stayed close by, waiting for the darkness growing in Mitro’s soul to spill over. But when Mitro’s soul recognized Arabejila as his lifemate, Dax had thought them safe, thought the power of that bond would keep Mitro from the brink, would heal what was broken inside him.
Instead, it had unleashed the monster. And Dax, who had been lured into a false sense of security, had not been watching as he should—as he would have had Arabejila not been Mitro’s lifemate. He’d thought her strong enough to heal him, as she so effortlessly healed all things and all people with just her presence.
She was of the earth. The dragon’s voice thundered in Dax’s head again, pounding at the edges of his skull.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “Stronger in her gifts than any I ever knew.”
She sent you to me.
“No, Old One. She is dead. She died long ago.”
She is of the earth. She and her daughters. She sent you to me. She sends a daughter to you now.
It surprised him that the dragon knew about the approach of Arabejila’s descendent, but perhaps it should not. The dragon, after all, had been buried in this mountain much longer than Dax. It had become the mountain; its flesh had become the mountain’s stone; its fire had become the mountain’s fire.
“That daughter will not arrive in time. That is why, if you have strength to give, I ask that you give it to me now. If I cannot stop the vampire, he will destroy this world. So tell me, Old One, will you help or hinder me? There is no time left. Decide now.” Dax drew a breath and dropped his defenses, baring his mind to the dragon’s consciousness, everything he and Arabejila had fought for all these years, everything he had loved and lost, everything he believed in, everything he fought for.
As the dragon’s mind had pillaged his mind, its power had tested his power, its strength, his strength, now its soul invaded his, peeling him down to the barest essence of his being and examining him with ruthless thoroughness.
Dax felt like he was drowning in the fires of hell. Before, when the lava had burned him, he’d managed to compartmentalize the pain, push it from the forefront of his mind and ignore it, but now there was nowhere that was not wide open and raw and throbbing with agony. Sweat poured down his body, turning to steam against his superheated skin. Dax hardly noticed. An inferno raged inside him.
Hoping to escape the indescribable agony, Dax transitioned into pure energy, a skill normally used to heal someone else, but even as his body became a white glow of light, he could not escape. The vast, fiery redness of the dragon’s soul was there, searing him. Body, mind and soul were invaded with burning heat and energy. A latticework of magic and energy led back to every particle of his being, connecting them. That latticework grew tighter, pulling Dax’s light form and the dragon’s shimmering red soul together, closer and closer until they touched.
In that instant, for a brief flash of time that seemed to stretch to eternity, the dragon’s memories sped through Dax’s mind. Eons of existence. Soaring flights. Fiery battles fought between winged behemoths dominating the skies. Dense, savagely beautiful jungles, a world that had existed long before the first footsteps of man. A mate, sleek and beautiful, with wide, wind-filled wings and sharp, curling talons. Then man with his steely spears, hunting the creatures he feared. The beautiful mate fallen to the spears of men. Rage. Fire. Blood and destruction raining from the sky. And finally, age and weariness . . . a wound draining ancient strength. A choice to sleep in the heart of the volcano until the world passed away.
The Old One was ancient indeed. A vast, primordial power. An ancient intelligence birthed when the world was still young. Red dragon. Fire dragon. No wonder it had chosen a volcano’s heart for its f
inal resting place. The wonder was that it even considered sharing any part of itself with Dax at all.
And share it did. The dragon’s long life, each moment of thought or feeling, instinct and craving before this one became part of Dax’s memories, part of him. The two became one. Not two beings merged together, but two souls connected by a single body. They could feel each other, move with one another.
The magma pool rose to fill the chamber, and the crystallized remains of the dragon melted back into the liquid earth’s blood that had spawned him.
Centuries of living deep in the labyrinth of caves meant Dax had explored every inch possible. He knew the river of lava flowing beneath the earth, a long ribbon of bright orange and red magma and the long tubes that formed the underground subway. He knew every chamber, some with walls of crystalline beauty and others under steaming water. Mud pools bubbled and spat while pools of hot mineral water sent steam rising like fog through caverns.
The problem was that Mitro had had the same time to explore his environment as well. Dax could no longer separate the evil scent from the living abomination; the stench of the undead was everywhere, making it impossible to track him—unless you were a dragon.
Dax felt the Old One stretch, testing senses. Suddenly, like a stick puppet, Dax’s body whipped around awkwardly and began moving toward the lava tube on his left. He staggered, his body impossible to control, falling sideways into the wall. The sharp edges of rock scraped at his skin, peeling off the top layer. In the glare of the magma pool, his burnished arm appeared covered in overlapping ovals of red gold. He blinked down at the strange patterning and then touched them. The ovals felt hard, like armor. With his strange diamond-hard nails he tapped them tentatively.
Scales? Like a lizard?
At least it kept him from bleeding. That could come in handy in battle. He’d evolved there in the volcano, and clearly now there would be more changes. The enticing whispers of the earth hadn’t disclosed that his body would be altered on an elemental level if he allowed the Old One’s soul to share his physical form.
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