I stumbled as the floor buckled and cracked underneath. Instantly, Hunter’s arms were around me, steadying me, my back against his chest.
A chorus of unearthly wolf-like howls surrounded the house.
“The Devourer’s monsters. They’re here,” said Hunter.
“They won’t breach the wards.”
His arms tightened around me. His voice was strangely gentle. “Sophie. You broke your grandmother’s wards.”
Something crashed through the window.
With shen-like speed, Hunter picked it up and threw it back outside.
Light and fire erupted. The windows exploded.
I saw the jagged reflection of myself in the shattered window glass. Grandma would have had a fit at the mess.
I hooked my arm around Hunter’s. “Can you fix the wards?”
“No. Shen magic is different.”
Fuck. For the millionth time in my life, I cursed my lack of magic.
There was another loud cracking sound and then something fell.
Hunter yanked me to him as something crashed behind me. I glanced back and saw the heavy wood ceiling beam in the place I had been standing.
His arms held me tightly. “We have to get out of here.”
“No.” I fought to break free, but he wouldn’t release me. “Let me go!” Tears filled my eyes. This place was all that remained of Grandma, all that remained of my family. If I left, I would be leaving them, leaving her, behind.
There was a loud thump on the roof.
Hunter threw me to the ground. Too fast to see, Hunter exploded into a massive black dragon. It rose above me, spreading its wings, shielding me from the chunks of wood and green fire suddenly raining down. A cold wind sliced between us, and I realized I was staring at open sky.
The roof had been ripped off
A wall of green mage fire roared around us.
The black dragon that was Hunter made a rattling sound, opening massive jaws to reveal teeth longer than my arms. Something mammalian within me froze in fear, utterly convinced I was about to be eaten.
Fire erupted from the dragon’s mouth, hitting something in the sky. There was a haunting, resonating howl.
Then a massive claw wrapped around me, and the dragon sprung skyward.
I let out a scream as he ripped me from the ground. Just as my stomach caught up with me, I found myself falling onto the grassy lawn outside the remains of my grandmother’s burning house. Acrid smoke burned my lungs. Through the tears in my eyes, I saw a barbed arrow the size of a rake piercing the membrane of Hunter’s wings, pinning them together.
“Hunter!”
Incomprehensible anger and heat rushed through me. Hunter was hurt because of me. My grandmother had been taken, and was either dead or dying because of me. My parents had been killed because of me.
All because of me.
It would be better for everyone if I had never existed.
Claws dug into my armor, knocking me over. The massive jaws of a shark-wolf snapped at my face. I screamed, and somehow managed to yank out a knife from my harness, forcing my anger, my frustration, through the knife and into the side of the shark-wolf’s neck.
Dust went into my mouth and nose, choking me. What the—
I heard the whistling approach of multiple shark-wolves and staggered to my feet.
A pack of shark-wolves watched me with glowing yellow eyes. Behind me, Hunter roared and I could hear something screaming and flesh tearing. I knew if I turned to look, I would be dead.
I pulled out another more knife from the harness. It would be a good death, to die on my grandmother’s land.
“Come at me, then!”
The pack of shark-wolves attacked.
But while I was convinced I was about to die, it seemed that anger and grief had given me the power to live. Never before could I anticipate my attackers’ moves so well, even if they weren’t human. Never before did every punch, every kick, every slash land precisely where it needed to. My granduncle, the god of kungfu who’d refused to teach me, might have even deigned to give me a nod of approval.
I fought until all that remained around me was a circle of gray ash.
I held myself alert, ready for the next onslaught, searching the darkness.
And I suddenly realized how quiet it was.
“Hunter?”
I looked around and spotted him in human form on his knees. I ran to him. “Hunter! Are you okay?”
When I got closer, I saw Hunter’s hand in a man’s chest. As I approached, I saw Hunter’s forearm tighten. The man screamed.
My ancestors had been the monsters and gods of ancient humanity. Some of them had killed, sacrificed, and even eaten humans. Something like this shouldn’t have bothered me.
But I had spent too long living among humans.
“Hunter!” I said, the horror evident in my voice.
Hunter didn’t look at me. Instead, the man’s chest began to smoke and the scent of burnt flesh filled the air. Hunter’s voice was grim. “We are coming for you, Devourer.”
The man’s screams turned to laughter, as its voice changed into something gurgling and not of this world. “Come for me, then, dragon. I await you.”
The man’s entire body went up in flames.
Hunter looked up at me, fire still flaring in his hand as he burned away the blood. “The Devourer had already taken control.”
I closed my eyes. “I know.” I had no cause to criticize for the shen had been manipulating humans for their own gain for as long as humans had existed. But the Devourer ate their personalities, enslaving their minds and bodies as if they were meat puppets. “What about your wings?”
“I’m fine,” he said with all the brusqueness of a man who didn’t want to talk about his pain.
With shen, injuries suffered in one form carried over to other forms. But was it the same with dragons?
There was a crackling behind me, and I turned to see a wall of the cabin collapsed, green flames eating away at the timbers even as the walls tried futilely to rebuild. It was a testament to the brilliance of Grandma whose magical algorithms sought to protect themselves even as they were being destroyed. I dropped to my knees, sorrow wrapping itself around my throat.
I couldn’t even protect myself or my grandmother’s house.
In the trees, a flash of high beams blazed, then I heard a vehicle coming along the dirt road, fast.
Hunter’s hand was on my back. “Sophie, our ride is here.”
I was frozen, unable to tear my eyes away from the burning green flames engulfing the cabin.
“All I have left of my family is there,” I said. “My grandmother’s place is gone. My father’s sword is gone. My entire childhood—all of it, gone.”
A massive black SUV pulled up. The window rolled down. He had a lion-like blond mane with shoulders and biceps that bulged almost obscenely from the sleeves of his gray T-shirt. But there was that particular fire in his eyes that said that he was no shen. “Hey,” the man said to Hunter. “It’s a bitch to find this place.”
“It’s meant to be,” he said. “Sophie, Lucas, Lucas, Sophie. Both of you stay here. I’ll be back in a moment.”
He headed toward the flames.
Wait, what was he doing? “Hunter!”
He didn’t even turn; he just kept going as he called back, “Dragon, remember?”
I stared at the burning building. “It’s mage fire!”
Green flames embraced his naked form. “A dragon fears no fire.”
Mage fire was said to be another creation of the Devourer’s. But as with the shen, sometimes stories were wrong.
“I thought mage fire was designed to kill dragons,” I said to myself.
Lucas, who had gotten out of the SUV, came to stand next to me.
“It is,” said Lucas.
Lucas kept looking at the burning cabin, which seemed to roar as if it were a living thing. “We have some protection from mage fire, but it generally feels like being ea
ten alive by a colony of fire ants. Ones that are actually magical and on fire. Whatever he’s going in there for must be important.”
Yup, Lucas was definitely another dragon.
Time slowed, and it felt as if hours.
Suddenly, the house shuddered and crumpled into a pile as flying sparks filled the air.
NO. “Hunter!” I tried to run toward the house, but found a large male hand clamped around my wrist.
“Let me go!”
“Wait,” said Lucas. “Look.”
I yanked my wrist away and turned toward the green inferno. There was an odd flicker of red flame. The flicker became a figure, a tall, bright figure of red and yellow fire, striding out of the green inferno, which snarled around him a dozen green tentacles.
The figure had a bright, gleaming sword in his hand.
I wanted to run to him, to hug him, but I was suddenly aware of Hunter’s glorious nakedness and Lucas’s presence.
He stopped in front of me. “I’d hand you the sword now, but you should wait for it to cool.”
I balled my fingers into fists because if I didn’t, I’d end up touching him. “Why did you do that? It’s nothing but an ordinary sword now.”
His gaze was full of meaning. “Just because something doesn’t have magic doesn’t mean it’s not of value.”
"Hey,” said Lucas, his voice slightly bored, as if he was used to picking up naked and dirty people from flaming buildings in the middle of the night on a regular basis. “You both can keep eye-fucking each other in the back seat. Let’s get out of here.”
Hunter shot him a dirty look. Lucas ignored him, opened a back passenger door, and gestured me in. I slid into wonderfully heated black leather and set the sword on the floor of the car. Lucas closed the door, and Hunter opened the door on the other side.
“There’s the duffel with your clothes back there.”
“Got it,” said Hunter. I looked out the window towards the burning cabin, as the SUV started.
“Are we really going to just leave a magical fire burning in the middle of the woods?”
“Mage fire will die quickly without the presence of dragons,” said Hunter as he unzipped his bag. “Any news?”
Lucas sighed. “When the Devourer took the kitsune, she left a magical trail that was basically a map to the Devourer’s base. Daniel confirmed the base.”
Grandma. I looked out the window. I couldn’t believe I was really leaving the cabin.
“Is she still alive?” I asked.
“Unclear,” said Lucas. He paused. “Though before this piece of the Devourer went dormant a decade ago, it liked to keep those it took alive for experiments.”
I closed my eyes, and swallowed hard. I had forgotten about that. Another one of the many rumors spread by the remaining Shen about the Devourer. It had no form, no it was invisible, it was all-seeing, it could read your mind, predict your actions, it experimented on its prisoners, and so on and so forth. The Devourer was the stuff of nightmares, but real.
Maybe it would be better if Grandma was gone.
The thought loomed in my mind like a gathering storm. I would cry if I thought anymore about it, and I didn’t want to cry in front of them.
So I changed the subject. “Who is Daniel?”
“Another member of our small group.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Four,” said Hunter at the same time Lucas said, “Three.”
“Lana is not going to be a part of this,” said Lucas with ice in his voice. “She’s human.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s not important.”
There was a low, warning rumble from the front seat. I got the feeling they’d had this discussion before.
Hunter’s hand covered mine. “I’m working with friends, and we’re going to find the Devourer and end its existence. We’ll find a place for you, Justice or not. We’ll figure out how to help you.”
“I don’t understand how you think three dragons can succeed where an army of dragons failed,” I said.
“Whoah whoah whoah,” said Lucas. “Did you just call her a Justice?”
“Yes,” said Hunter.
“A Justice,” said Lucas. He was silent for a moment. “Well, that calls for a change of plans. I’ll let Daniel know he needs to hide the magical silver.”
“Magical silver?” Silver was inherently not magical. Actually, it was the exact opposite and repelled magic.
Like me, I suppose. Apparently, I was the equivalent of shen silver.
Lucas kept talking. “You know how humans have a saying to hide the silver. We’re gonna have to hide the magic weapons so you don’t erase them.”
Hunter shook his head. “Lucas hasn’t spent as much time in human society as I have.”
“That was a very nice attempt at humor,” I said.
Lucas groaned. “Even I know that’s sarcasm. So I hear you’re a practitioner of Krav Maga. Why Krav Maga? Isn’t your granduncle the god of Shaolin Kungfu or something?”
That much was common knowledge among the shen. What wasn’t as well known was exactly what he thought of me. I gave the easy answer, cloaked in enough truth to be believable. “Yes, but he’s not the god of subways. The Krav Maga studio was an easier subway trip on the R.”
“Has Daniel figured out where the menace is hiding?” asked Hunter as he threw on a shirt.
“An island in the Caribbean. It owns it through an array of shell companies, but Lana was able to track it down. The sat images of the compound are in the tablet back there.”
Hunter pulled out the tablet from the pocket behind the front seat and swiped at the screen. He tilted the glowing screen at me. “Do you want to see where the Devourer is?”
I took the laptop from him. There was a sprawling complex of white rectangles on a small island surrounded by a crystalline blue sea. It was the complete opposite of where I had imagined the Devourer would hide.
I handed Hunter the tablet back and looked out the window. Hunter wasn’t my only option. Though the number of shen relations I knew I could actually rely on were less than the number of people in this vehicle. Finding them would be another journey in itself. In the past, they had always come to Grandma.
Grandma.
I tried to stifle the sudden clench of pain and bitterness in my throat. Hunter and Lucas started talking about their plan of attack, and I knew I should have been paying attention. But maybe it was the aftermath of the magic and exhaustion—maybe it was Lucas’s terrible driving—but the weird roiling in my belly made me feel as if I was going to throw up. I closed my eyes to concentrate on not embarrassing myself in front of Hunter.
9
White noise surrounded me, yet Hunter’s voice seemed to cut through it all. “No, I didn’t feel any different.”
Another male voice spoke. “Are you sure she’s a Justice?”
I blinked and realized I lay horizontal on a couch, with a warm gray blanket over me.
“She blew out the internal wards of the kitsune’s Den. She literally turned the avatars of the Devourer into dust. When I went back into the cabin, the plants that had not burned withered and the magics that held the den together literally faded from existence.”
I looked around at polished wood, grey leather seating, and the tell-tale row of small porthole windows lining curved walls. An omnipresent hum of white noise filled the background.
I went to a window and saw lights far below us in the dark, clouds hovering by.
The other male spoke again. “That could be useful.”
Voices lowered, and there was more discussion that I couldn’t hear. I looked around me. This really was a plane. A private deluxe jet by the looks of it, with the expensive hallmarks of the same interior decorator of Hunter’s place.
Hunter’s voice cut through the white noise again. “Not like this.”
I stood up and walked towards the voices. I passed a divider. Around a large brown conference table, Hunter and Lucas sat, along with another
man with light-brown skin who looked as if he should be strutting down catwalks in Milan.
Next to the unknown man was another woman, her skin a lighter shade of brown than mine, her dark hair tied back into a ponytail. She wore a gray Wellesley sweatshirt. In front of each of them was a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. There was a dizzying array of cables, wires, and devices in the middle of the conference table, some technological, some clearly not of this world.
They all looked up at me.
I looked at Hunter in disbelief. “A private jet? Really? Who are you guys, Batman? ”
“Batman is singular, not plural. Also, he works alone, and doesn’t fly, and doesn't have superpowers,” said Lucas.
“Thank you, Mr. Comic Book Dictionary,” said Hunter, getting out of his seat.
“Hi,” said a girl waving to me from across the table. “I’m Lana, the human.”
“Like Clark Kent's hometown girl crush,” added Lucas, suddenly fascinated by the buttons on his wrist.
Lana rolled her eyes at Lucas. “You must be the fairy princess.”
I blinked. Fairy, fae, demon, devil: humans had many words for us. As different as we looked, ultimately, we were all shen. And we had no royalty in the way of human rankings. I inhaled deeply, tired of checking off another box for the convenience of human understanding. “Um, sure,” I said. “But I’m not a princess.”
“Your grandmother is the Last Great Lady of the East,” said Lucas.
“That’s what others called her, not what she called herself.” It was a name she hated, actually, because it reminded her of everyone she had lost.
I didn’t want to think of Grandma because thinking about her would make me burst into tears. “Lana,” I said, “how did you get dragged into the superhero club here?”
“Rather unwillingly.”
“We all knew Lana as children. We were friends.”
“No,” said Lana, not looking up from her screen. “I was the housekeeper’s daughter,” she said firmly. “And we didn’t grow up together. You were in boarding school. You saw me once a year.”
Betrothed to the Dragon (Lick of Fire) Page 7
