by Rhys Ford
“Did you actually believe Tanic created you without adding something else into the mix? That is how the spell works. A bit of sidhe, a dab of unsidhe, blood, death, and a pinch of something extra—our genesis, our own beginning—a dragon’s egg.
“You might as well put your weapons away, little monster, because it will be so much easier to make a new one of you if there is more of your body to work with,” Aisla said, flicking her hand out with a sharp snap. “Oscar, get it for me.”
Funniest thing about dragon eggs is most lizards are negligent layers, shooting out hard pellets of yolk and whites without doing anything to kick-start a new generation. They’re like large, predatory chickens, with little brain power and a ravenous carnivorous appetite. Dragons lay scores upon scores of eggs, sometimes gulping them down even as they’re laying them to satiate their never-ending hunger. The draconian species would overrun us all if they were more interested in sex than food, but luckily for the world’s continuing existence, a female lizard would as soon have breakfast served fresh out of a nest—be it her own or her neighbor’s—than sit on an unfertilized clutch.
The operative word there being unfertilized.
Because once a dragon has flown and mated, a nest of fertilized eggs becomes a female dragon’s primary focus, and she will tear through entire cities to retrieve one of her stolen treasures.
Which is why any Stalker with a brain cell in their head never ever plucks a matte-finish dragon egg out of a nest.
And they sure as shit don’t stick around the immediate area to find out just how invested the momma dragon is in her little reptilian offspring.
Unfortunately for me, Ryder, and Malone, this particular momma dragon wouldn’t give two shits about which mewling sack of wet meat took her precious egg. She was just going to make sure the last thing we saw was her gullet, and if we were lucky, we’d all be dead before she shat us out against the mountain’s rocky crags.
The dragon hit us hard and fast, a pearlescent ebony blur of scales, teeth, and rage. She came down silent, only the faint whistle of her wings beating the air alerting me to the incoming danger. The keen of her wind-filled membranes jerked me into moving, and I shoved the Glocks away, then launched myself at Ryder in a desperate hope to hide us from her hate-filled gaze.
And I went flying into a wall when I tripped over Malone’s damned unconscious body.
The room was in shambles, large swaths of tiles and spackled walls tumbling down on top of us. I couldn’t see for a moment, as massive dust clouds kicked up from the floor and the room dimmed, losing some of its light when its blue moss covering fell beneath the dragon’s massive body.
A heart-wrenching breath later, the roofless chamber was open to the cavern’s ceiling, and the cobalt speckles valiantly fought to cut through the rising dust storm, but the gray motes were thick around us. There was also the small matter of the dragon’s bulk blocking out a good portion of the glowing moss as she circled around again for another strike.
Someone was screaming in terror, and I assumed it was Aisla, but through the high-pitched keening and the magnificent ear-shattering roars of the enraged dragon, I heard gunfire and a ribbon of Mexican words more suited to a schoolyard challenge to jump rope than a life-and-death battle with a giant flying lizard.
Cari came in hot, spraying the air with shotgun blasts as she ran into the room. Her hair was wild, tufted out from her head, and a few bits of glowing moss glistened from spots in her dark locks. Her focus was on the dragon, and I caught a bit of movement sliding around near the long blood-speckled counter.
Oscar.
And his mockery of a gaze was locked right on me.
The dragon dove again, all silence tossed to the wind, and she came in screaming, her hot rage only matched by the long threads of cold purple fire streaming out of her gullet. Like most things from Oighear Bhais, her coloring ran to a stygian pitch, but with sprays of bright star fields beneath the gloss. An odd blend of legs and serpentine coils, she was a classical draconian queen, broad belly scales a deep midnight violet against the black pearl covering the rest of her body. Her talons were black, as were her raptor feet, easily blending into the rocky ground. I’d never seen her type before, but I knew her form and her purpose.
Because I wore her markings and her wings on my back. The seeping scar sticking my shirt to my flesh was a near-exact match for the hematite span of her membranes and the hooked claws at their bend. She landed hard, shaking the ground with her mighty weight, and as she tossed her head back to shriek her challenge, Oscar struck.
Straight for Cari.
She responded with a round of iron pellets that did nothing to slow the damned thing down.
“Son of a bitch.” I grabbed at the fallen Glocks and struggled to stand with some authority. My legs were unsteady, and there was a curious hum under my skin, one I couldn’t seem to shake off. Ryder was moving slowly and waved me off when I called out his name.
“Go help,” he coughed out, tossing me a spare clip. “I’ll see to Malone.”
To say the dragon was an obstacle was like commenting on a spray of mist hitting my face during a hurricane. There were several tons of pissed-off scale and furious meat between me and Cari, but the lizard didn’t seem all that interested in me when I skirted around its back legs. Her tail whipped up, nearly taking my head off, but her focus was on a pile of rocks where the smaller formerly human ainmhi dubh lay partially crushed beneath a large boulder. Its legs were twitching, running for its life even in its death. I didn’t know who the man had been, but I could only hope he was free of the nightmare Aisla trapped him into.
I had no words for the profanity of his new existence. What she’d done went beyond anything I’d ever imagined one person could do to another, and the transformations she’d wrought on the two men settled any doubt I had that she was Tanic’s get.
But Aisla was nowhere to be seen, and hoping she was under the pile of rocks with the other ainmhi dubh was just too much to wish for.
I came around the dragon’s rear and into a fierce dogfight. Cari was pinned up against the counter, one hand holding a revolver and the other a long knife glistening with a stream of murky red blood. There was so little humanity left in Oscar’s eyes now, their edges beginning to flicker crimson around his blown-out pupils. I spotted the dragon egg lying beneath a section of pine supports, and Oscar lunged forward when the dragon’s claw swiped at his side.
He was slowly changing as we fought, his skin mottling with dull slug-colored patches, and his hands were cramping in, the flats of his palms curving as his bones began to knit together. His mass was growing, bubbling out into new muscle, and ridges of bone formed along his spine, raw white slabs breaking through the thinning skin along his back.
His jaw cracked as he sank his teeth into the lizard’s leg, his savagery muted by the dragon’s steel-hard scales. Slamming her leg down, she threw Oscar loose, and he bounced once before landing on his hobbled paws. The dragon’s eyes turned molten with anger, spinning copper swirls through her pupilless purple eyes, and she screamed as her wings snapped out, one tip glancing off my shoulder to spin me around.
Then she took to the air again, blocking most of the light as she went.
The wind from her launch was strong enough to blow Oscar off balance as he turned to attack us. The floor beneath his evolving feet was wet with blood, and a gash on his shoulder, probably from Cari’s knife, began to weep, marbling his skin with rivulets of watery pink.
Lifting one of the Glocks to shoot Oscar in the head proved to be a mistake, as my arm went into spasms, twisting my muscles. My shoulder blades were tightening, either seizing up from the compromised scar tissue under my skin or healing up wrong, tangling into the gauze and fabric covering my abrasions. Huffing past the pain, I held the muzzle steady and squeezed the trigger.
It was a clean shot, plowing a bullet right between Oscar’s eyes and shattering the broad ridge of his newly formed muzzle. He twitched with the shot,
the bullet’s momentum spinning his head to the side, and blood blossomed from the smoking black hole marring his marbled skin. I squeezed the trigger again and again, hitting first his left eye, blowing it out of its socket. Then another bullet pierced the soft flesh of his nose pad, turning it to a rosebud of mangled meat, but Oscar kept coming.
I was about to take out his right eye when a pile of rocks near the entrance moved and Aisla shoved her way clear of the debris.
There was no time to alter my aim, and to be honest, I wasn’t all that worried about the flesh-shaper, not when I had her pet dog barreling down on me. Cari was more of a concern, as she leaped onto Oscar’s back, digging her blade into his shoulder blade then twisting the handle about. Whatever foul-tempered god looking after ainmhi dubh decided to up his game, because the blood pouring from Oscar’s wounds was now viscous and leaving smoking scallops on the ground where it dripped. Cari’s knife began to melt into his wound, and he shook hard, trying to throw her off.
My arm was still shot up with tingling spasms, and somewhere above us, an angry black-pearl dragon was about to make another dive into the shattered chamber. I couldn’t risk looking for Ryder or even yelling at him to leave Malone to be eaten by the dragon or even Oscar, if there was any space left in his stomach after he chewed us apart, depending on whether or not we could kill him.
So Aisla was the least of my damned worries, especially when she limped to the middle of the room, dragging her right leg behind her and peering out at me over swollen, bruised cheekbones.
The very least of my worries.
Until she raised her arms, hooked her hands into the air, and let loose a slithering ululation of arcane unsidhe. Then my world went red with pain and my broken soul became hers.
Twenty-One
FEAR TASTED exactly like blood.
Sure, there were subtle differences. Blood packed a bit more tang, where fear skirted the edge of lightning and sulfur, but the base flavors were the same—a sickly thick liquid meat taste heavy enough to pool on the back of my tongue and edge into the ridge of my throat, closing off any chance I had to breathe around it.
I’d swallowed a lot of blood—and fear—over the years, except this time I was also choking on Aisla’s fist as she tightened her grip on everything I’d ever been and would be.
She owned me, and I couldn’t find a way out of the chains being soldered shut around my soul.
Aisla poured everything into me, a hot, slick steel river to cauterize my will and slice me off from the life I’d built for myself. Bits of my core were snapping free, severed by Aisla’s spell. I was unraveling, my memories slowly being picked away, flicked off like faded petals from an overblown rose with decayed, moldy hips.
I now knew how the ainmhi dubh felt when I’d wrested control from the unsidhe Hunt Master Aisla killed only a few hours ago.
She peeled me apart, undoing layers of my life, then plunged her ethereal fingers into my core. I lay more open and vulnerable than I’d ever remembered, my bones crinkling with the memory of being a different shape, different forms, and my nerves were awash with a fiery pain, forked embers crawling through my body and reaching deep into my flesh.
I remembered my wings.
My shoulder blades itched and seeped. There was an emptiness along my back, one I couldn’t comprehend. Then came the molten pour of blood into my body, followed by a lightning storm of magic, until I became something else—something I wasn’t supposed to be—and what I should have been was burned away by….
Tanic.
A part of my mind screamed for the skies, for blood and for meat to sink my teeth into. I was ravenous for the wind and the arrogance of being a predator feared by every creature beneath me. All of that slipped away, carried off by a weaker flesh but a more powerful shaping. I lost my claws, and my brain grabbed on to a slender thread of mutation so far buried in my makeup it’d been lost in time.
Aisla found that thread and yanked on it, pulling at the damned twisted strand of the elfin blood in me until I couldn’t hold back my raging screams.
She was going to take away more than my wings and scales. She was going to end my existence, erase the Kai Gracen I’d forged from the chimera monster Tanic cooked up using the spells dug into the room’s stone counter.
And I couldn’t do jack shit about it.
“Kai.”
A speck of light hit me, a drop of sound in the middle of the dark and red. I swallowed, catching my throat on the swell of my tongue, and I choked, struggling to breathe. Another drop struck, shock waves of sidhe in the chaos of Aisla’s magic.
“Kai, get down.”
I tried to laugh. Every god knew I tried. My limbs weren’t my own, and there was a foul stench in the air, a sour, dead skin reek I knew belonged to an ainmhi dubh. My eyes worked first, filling with blue motes of light, then a rush of ebony scales, tipped purple and frost, and I found myself falling into an abyss, screaming through the void enveloping me. I couldn’t even yell as I tumbled into the forever, my carved-out wings useless as the wind rushed past me.
Ryder.
Damn him. I told him to get Malone and get the hell out. Instead he was right next to me, shoving me to the ground, spitting out sidhe curses near my ear. Something hard gouged my stomach, and the pain jerked me loose of Aisla’s hold, and I breathed in, a hard rush of air full of sweet, slightly travel-sticky sidhe lord.
I was still holding a Glock in my hand, fully loaded and primed to kill. What worked once was going to have to work again. I was betting my life and soul on it.
My aim was off. Hell, my whole brain and body were off, but my senses were full of Ryder and fear, so there was little to lose in squeezing the trigger. And the boom—the huge, earsplitting boom—rattled the air, and Aisla’s shoulder fountained with blood.
Her spell snapped, and my mind pulled back its unraveling tendrils, binding me back together in a rush of throbbing pain. Every inch of my body ached in some way, and my fingers were clenched so tightly around my gun I couldn’t seem to unbend my knuckles. Ryder’s hands were under me, trying to lift me to my feet, and I gurgled a bit around my tongue, spitting out a mouthful of dust and debris.
I was free.
“A little help here!” Cari shouted, breaking me further, and I staggered to my feet, weaving a bit as I brought my Glock up again.
“Wait.” Ryder shoved the ammo he had into my back pocket and steadied me, giving me time to shake some sense into myself. “You’ll need this.”
Oscar had broken loose during my seizure, the wound on his back eating away at the stub of her knife embedded into his spine. She’d gone for her shotgun, trying to reload as the mutated human clambered over the rocks to reach her.
Hitting an open patch on the floor, Oscar rushed in for another attack, his bloodied paws slapping at the ground. His form wavered, the flesh on his side sagging as his legs worked to carry his bulk forward. A few feet away, Aisla was crawling over the rocks, clutching at her injured shoulder to staunch the bleeding. Snarling, she barked a line of unsidhe, and Oscar’s limbs firmed, his mottled skin tightening over thickening muscles. Her outraged screams were no use. A step later, Oscar’s paws elongated, and he lost traction as his fingers reemerged, long, flapping boneless snakes, slick with blood and ichor.
His teeth, however, remained sharp, and the acidic dribble from his jaw burned Cari’s flesh when his spit splashed over her hand. Her hands trembled as she cocked the shotgun, but Cari was a second too slow, a bit too late. Her finger was barely on the trigger when Oscar hit her, and they both tumbled over chunks of broken wall. Cari landed wide, but Oscar’s bulk caught on the debris, dangling him over her sprawled-out body. She wasn’t moving, or at least not that I could see, and my already torn-up heart seized up again.
“Go to Cari,” Ryder shouted at me, heading toward the stumbling unsidhe. “I will take care of the unsidhe!”
I had both hands on my gun and half staggered over, running as hard as I could, scrambling over the
mounds of rock and tiles. Catching sight of Oscar’s head as he lifted himself up from the rubble, I planted a bullet into the back of his skull. The metal cracked bone, and he jerked sideways, his now fully crimson eyes wild with rage.
A shotgun blast came from behind me, too hot and too near for my liking. The pellets tore into Oscar’s flank, digging deep into the muscle. He yelped, a high-pitched yip sharp with alarm, then turned to face me.
Or rather us—as Malone hobbled out from the archway holding a shotgun in front of him.
He stared me down, a scarecrow of a man with fright bleaching the color from his skin. The freckles across his cheeks were dark embers against snow, and his mouth trembled as he sucked in a breath. A bit of blood ran down his jaw, but all things considered, he was pretty much intact.
One of the bullets in my Glock had his name on it.
I just didn’t know if I wanted to use it.
A bloodcurdling roar echoed above us. Somewhere in the vast chamber, the dragon glided on silent wings, angling for another attack. I saw the cave moss lights go black in areas, vast lizard-shaped regions, then flare back to life when she passed. I couldn’t worry about the dragon. There was nothing to fight her with, and we had more immediate concerns.
Namely, a damned unsidhe flesh-shaper and the toy poodle thug she’d made in my ancestors’ basement.
The ainmhi dubh padded out of the rubble, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Ryder hemming Aisla in. She had a knife, and he was armed probably only with his arrogance and sharp wit. While dangerous to my sanity, he was outclassed unless he had something on him I couldn’t see.
“I’m sorry,” Malone mewled.
He sounded contrite, but backstabbers always did when they were caught. Oscar was weighing his options. Cari was stirring behind him, but we were his immediate threat. Or at least I was.
“Please, Kai. They were going to hurt my family. Aunt Sarah—”
“Day’s not over yet,” I promised. “Still time to return you to your momma in a body bag. Go help Cari and stay clear.”
