Breathing Fire (Heretic Daughters)

by Rebecca K. Lilley

  No one had followed me into the storage unit, but they all hovered near the open door, giving me strange looks.

  “I missed this. Jillian talking to herself again feels like old times,” Christian said, a way too happy expression on his face.

  I glared at him as I passed by, Torst clutched tightly in both hands. I didn’t trust the thing not to turn on me. That had been way easier than I had expected, which made me tense as I waited for the other shoe to drop.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  You People and Your Special Weapons

  I stood poised at the opposite end of the stadium from the creature, axe balanced on my shoulder. Caleb and Christian flanked me, posed identically, long swords held chest level, pointed at the enemy. You knew things had gotten serious when Caleb traded in his guns for a good old-fashioned sword. Sloan had shifted into bear form, and it was eery how quiet and still she stood behind us in her massive shape.

  He makes an ugly dragon, I thought, my mind trying to shy away from looking directly at my sister, who so obviously lay in dire straights. My eyes, however, kept stealing glances at her body. She lay in a pool of blood, completely still. She was blocked largely from sight by the monstrous dragon almost completely in front of her, but I could still make out some worrisome details. For one, her eyes were completely missing, bloody holes all that remained of them. And lying beside her was a glowing blue battle hammer that I knew of all too well. If the hammer had somehow been used to help remove her eyes, it would be a real problem.

  Villi screeched at us, drawing my attention back to the issue at hand. His mustard yellow wings flapped restlessly. The awful color was darker closer to his torso, and almost brown at his chest. His scales were large, disproportionately so. He drew back, his long, too thin snout twitching like he had a tick.

  Gods, he was ugly. It was ironic, because his human form was ridiculously good-looking. With long white hair, and the most perfect alabaster skin I’d ever seen, he had put even other dragons to shame. He was tall and thin, with the cold, pale-blue eyes that all of us shared. It was likely him that had turned Lynn and I off of blond men, I mused.

  His dragon form was huge, appearing to cramp his side of the arena. That could be an advantage for us, though.

  “My Lord, he is ugly.” Christian voiced my thoughts out loud. “I sure hope your dragon form is prettier than that thing.” He pointed a negligent hand in Villi’s direction. I turned my head slightly to look at him. He sounded way too cheerful, considering what faced us. He was casually talking trash to me, as though we were headed to a party, and not a bloodbath. His eyes glittered as I’d never seen before, his nostrils flaring, his white teeth showing in a grin.

  “It is.” My voice was calm. “If I looked like that thing, I’d just ask you to trance me into a coma and go turn myself into a mountain,” I joked, referring to his claim about dragons and mountains.

  He laughed, a way too happy sound.

  “Whenever Christian is done enjoying his slayer hard-on, we should probably get to work here.” Caleb’s voice was deep and quiet. He was back to his own form, to my great relief. I eyed him up. He looked just as excited as Christian, in his own stoic way. I could see it in his eyes, and I knew he had caught sight of the hammer.

  “You can have it if we live through this, Caleb,” I told him, referring to the hammer. If there was anyone in the world that could keep that thing in safe hands, it was Caleb. Talk about making a deal with the devil. Handing over that kind of power to a psychopath… But if there was anything I knew about Caleb, it was that he wasn’t interested in any form of Godhood.

  He met my stare, his positively glittering with anticipation. “I’m glad you said that, Jillian. I would hate to have to fight you for it.”

  I pointed a finger at him. “You better keep it secure.”

  “Oh, yes.” He took a deep breath, as though savoring the moment. It was possibly the most animated I’d ever seen him. It was an alarming sight.

  My eyes moved back to the dragon. I took a deep breath, preparing.

  “Take his head. And whatever happens, don’t let him touch you with that hammer,” I told them, watching Villi carefully. We charged.

  Villi completely ignored the others, his focus solely on me as his dragon form ran at us, letting out an ear-piercing screech before he began to breath blue fire directly at me. This was a pointless move. Half of us were completely resistant to flame. And he was expelling this force solely at me. He had to know it was nothing more than wind to me. Intimidation, perhaps? I couldn’t remember a moment of my life when fire was something that I feared. I was fire.

  Torst positively glowed as we drew closer to our goal. Drink, drink, drink, was it’s mantra in my head. This was the problem with Torst, the reason why I had put him away. He didn’t just make me hear his thoughts, he made me feel them, until I didn’t know if it was his hunger or my own. But I wanted blood, and I would have it. That was his power, and it was perfect for the problem at hand.

  I jumped before the dragon reached me, swinging down with all my strength and the force of my fall as I dropped back to the earth. The axe hacked brutally at Villi’s neck, actually drawing blood with the first swing. I was shocked. Dragon scales were diamond hard and resilient. To draw blood on the first blow was a stroke of luck I had never expected.

  Torst sang with triumph at the taste of blood, drawing back again quickly, hacking again and again. No human eyes could have followed the speed at which I was swinging. I would be surprised if even the non-humans with me could keep up.

  Villi careened around, throwing me a good fifty yards away with the force of his push. I landed with a strong whoosh, the air knocked from my lungs. I had been so focused on just mindlessly hacking away that I’d let him catch me at a disadvantage. And that, of course, was the catch with Torst.

  Villi skittered towards me clumsily, an angry bear attached to his nose, gnawing away through the scales. He tossed her off, throwing her in the opposite direction of me. It was easy to see, though, that she had done some damage, blood dripping down to the ground from his wounded nose as he approached me. Good job, Sloan, I thought, a little surprised. Getting past the scales of a dragon that quickly was no small feat.

  Just short of his goal, Villi froze oddly, and I quickly saw why as a bright blue glowing sword appeared out of his belly, followed by a bloody Christian.

  He had literally gutted the dragon, I saw with shock. It was then that I finally realized that Lynn must have been at him with the hammer before we got here. It was the only thing that could possibly have Villi so weak so fast. Go sis, I thought, with wonder. She had somehow laid the groundwork for a hell of a dragon slaying. Somehow she had managed to hand us the upper hand, even though Villi had had the hammer. I couldn’t imagine how, but the how was not the important part.

  Villi’s head careened oddly to the side, snapping from a blow too quick for me to see. Suddenly, Caleb just appeared, wielding the hammer for another blow to the dragon’s head. I should have known he was up to something. It was when you couldn’t see Caleb that you knew he was up to the most trouble.

  All of this had happened in the few seconds it took me to stand up. I staggered to my feet, stalking forward purposefully to rejoin the fight.

  Christian hacked at the beast’s neck with gusto, yelling curses at the prone dragon between blows. He was truly in his element today. I joined my axe to his sword, knowing decapitation was our best bet. And the sooner the better.

  Torst fed hungrily as I chopped away. The dragon’s neck was thick, but we were making short work of it. The huge bear roared as it lumbered back into the fight, tearing great hunks from the dragon’s neck.

  I quickly decided that three bloodthirsty fighters were enough to take the head, and made my way to the second most important goal.

  Christian had already cleared a lot of my way to the heart with his precise gutting. Finding a heart still pumping blood through a body was one of Torst’s specialties. All I had
to do now, really, was get messy.

  I hacked at the flesh around that precious organ tirelessly from an awkward position below his underbelly. I finally just took a deep breath and waded into the disgusting, bloody depths of his insides. I submerged myself just long enough to see exactly where I needed to go. I surfaced, gasping. I pointed Torst in the right direction, and let it do the rest of the work. It was alive in my hands, chopping away at the twisting flesh and bone of the beast’s ribcage. Every part of Villi was weakened, and the muscle tissue gave way in short minutes, like so much butchered meat. I finally pulled the beating mass free from it’s intricate cage.

  It was a full armful, and I fell on my ass as I finally got it separated from the body. Still, as awkward as it was to pick up, being the size of my entire torso and heavy as hell to boot, it was smaller than I would have thought a heart would be inside of that giant hideous beast.

  “Caleb,” I screamed, and I knew I was a sight, covered in dark blood and entrails. He appeared quickly, swinging his new toy casually. He gave me a quizzical look. “Use the hammer on the heart. It will help further immobilize him, until Christian can cast his spells.”

  I heard a bear roar, and Christian whoop happily, and I knew they had severed the head. He still wasn’t dead, but damn, it had just been too easy so far. Caleb started hacking at the heart without preamble. He pounded it again and again, and the hammer glowed that horrible, eery blue that I associated with my sadistic father.

  Christian appeared from the other side of the prone dragon, dragging the severed head slowly. “Help me line this up next to the heart,” he told me. I obliged. “I’m not sure you should be real close by for the death-spell.”

  I nodded curtly, heading to Lynn’s prone figure. It had been a struggle this entire time not to go to her.

  Sloan almost beat me to her, in human form again, already re-dressed in black. She had to be the most efficient being on the planet. “Healing is a strength of mine,” she told me. “Let me check her out.”

  Lynn was in rough shape, as I had known. She stirred a little as I sat beside her, holding one of her limp hands.

  Sloan’s breath hissed out in a curse when she knelt by my sister. “Can you regrow body parts? Like, say, eyes?”

  “Yes.” Like druids, we could regenerate body parts, eventually. “But if that hammer was involved, I have no idea.”

  “You people and your special weapons,” Sloan said with disgust, as though I had done it.

  Lynn was battered and bruised and broken. Sloan was able to help with a lot of the damage, but the eyes were a lost cause, for the moment. Possibly forever. It didn’t bear thinking about. We needed to finish up and get out of there. There was no way our epic battle had gone unnoticed.

  “I got the jump on him, Jillian,” Lynn whispered to me as she came to. I laughed, painfully relieved.

  “We saw that. We took him out easy, thanks to whatever you did to him.”

  “I reversed a spell at him, then beat the shit outta him with that hammer. Christian better finish his ass.”

  I looked to the slayer at her words. He knelt on the ground, one hand on the dragon’s heart, one on it’s head, which I could see they had beat to a bloody pulp, as well. With the hammer, I assumed. He was chanting. I would kill to know what he chanted, but I just couldn’t hear it from that distance. And getting closer might be bad for my health.

  Suddenly Christian roared and whipped out Dragonsbane, pointing it high in the air. The sword had swelled to a size I had never seen it before, the fiery blue blade as long as Christian was tall.

  All at once, my lungs felt emptied of air, as though it was all being pulled like a magnet into Christian. Wind swept past all of us, from gods knew where, rushing at the slayer in a furious tidal wave. I was stunned but pleased as Villi’s blood and gore was pulled off of me, swept up with all the rest.

  Dragonsbane, poised gloriously above Christian, seemed to absorb it all.

  All of the gruesome pieces of Villi suddenly burst into vivid blue flame. They shimmered like that for long moments before the flames were sucked into the slayer relic like the wind. The weapon was absorbing Villi’s power. The powers of an ancient being with abilities we could only imagine. Christian was naturally powerful, but now he’d be a force to be reckoned with. I was more happy than ever to have him on our side. I had a very good feeling that this wasn’t the last time we’d be doing this.

  As the storm seemed to pass, a sonic boom shook the valley. The Vegas Valley. All of it. “Fuck,” I groaned. “We need to get out of here. There’s no way that didn’t bring us to their attention. We’re just damn lucky we caught Villi alone long enough to take him out.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Bitter Pill

  I picked Lynn up awkwardly, heading back to Christian and Caleb. Sloan followed silently behind me, a solid, steady presence. Damn, but she was good backup.

  The men were carefully scouring the ground where Villi had lain. There was no blood left, only what looked like tiny yellow diamonds, scattered here and there. “What the hell are those?” I asked them.

  “All that’s left of a dead dragon. I need to bury them quickly, for the death spell. I know just the place.” Suddenly Christian looked up at me, grinning unabashedly. “I’ve been fantasizing about this day for awhile. Like, my whole life. I feel incredible.” I just blinked. Strange reaction, though I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  The men finished gathering the tiny jewels, doing an extra sweep to be sure none were left behind to resurrect the monster. Christian packed the jewels away in a small black pouch, giving us careful directions on where to meet him. It was a good two-hour drive into the middle of nowhere.

  “We need to split up. We don’t even know for sure how many of them there are, and we can’t risk it. There’s no way that magical storm didn’t draw someone’s attention. So we need to run fast. We’ll meet up at the burial site. I’ll take Lynn, and we’ll go the long way. You guys take his remains. Whatever happens, don’t let them have those remains, or the hammer.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Sloan said quietly.

  I nodded at her. “Thank you. This is not going to be pretty.”

  We split up, and I made it to the car carrying Lynn.

  We took Sloan’s car. I laid Lynn in the backseat, and took shotgun. I shot a glance at the guys, who were casually jacking a sports car from the parking lot. Damned miscreants. But hell, what else could they do?

  Sloan pealed out of the stadium’s lot with speed and skill.

  If anyone was after us, they would undoubtedly follow Lynn and I. Which gave Christian the opportunity to finish the death spell, no matter what.

  Sloan made it quickly out of the stadium parking and onto a small dirt road, speeding like the demons of hell were behind us. It was a good possibility that they were.

  Her ridiculously fast driving didn’t make me the least bit nervous. There was nothing Sloan didn’t excel at, I recalled.

  We hadn’t made it five miles before I saw the black SUV following us, and I knew, just absolutely knew, that it was my relatives. Every hair on the back of my neck raised, and I gasped. How many of them were in that car? As if the thought had manifested it, another, identical car turned onto the small road behind them. “Holy shit,” I muttered.

  “What’s going on? Try not to distract the driver here, please. Especially if you’re not being particularly informative,” Sloan snapped.

  “It’s them,” I said, feeling an almost overwhelming sense of despair. How could we outrun them with no head start at all?

  Sloan had spotted the cars in the rearview mirror. “How do you know? Those cars could be druids sent to help us.”

  Lynn spoke for the first time from the backseat, her arm flung over the spot where her eyes should have been. “It’s them. I can feel it. And if it was druids, I bet you would be able to feel that. Can you see how many there are? We know there were at least three other Norse dragons in town with
Villi. At least. And the Chinese dragons had at least three.”

  “The windows are tinted too dark. That’s gotta be an illegal tint,” I muttered.

  Lynn laughed, albeit weakly. “Yeah, I’m sure they’re real worried about it.”

  Shit, shit, shit. “Guns. Everybody give me guns. I’m gonna blow out some tires, buy us some time.”

  I rolled down my window. Not surprisingly, Lynn was unarmed. Sloan had two small pistols. I only had one small handgun from my usual ankle sheath. Neither of us had extra clips on hand. Guns hadn’t been the order of the day. There was an arsenal in the trunk, but it didn’t do us any good back there now.

  At the back of my mind was always Torst, chanting about stopping and facing them, to drink all of their blood. As always, the axe had a very high opinion of his own abilities.

  I started with my own gun, the most familiar weapon. I leaned out of the window, facing our tails, and took careful aim. Bang. My first bullet took out a front tire of the closest car. It careened sideways wildly. I shot twice more, taking the two tires facing me fast. I shot the car five more times, aiming for the fuel tank, but had no luck with a big explosion, like in the movies. Dammit, but that would have been convenient. And I’d always wanted to do it. If only we hadn’t gone through all of the explosive rounds in the necro fight. But the first car was in a ditch now, out of commission. I immediately took aim at the second car. It was careening back and forth, trying to avoid the same treatment. Oddly, no one was firing back at us, not even one shot. Why weren’t they? It’s not like they could possibly care if we were injured.

  They had underestimated my aim. I took out the tires of the careening vehicle nearly as quickly as I had the one before.

  “Well, that bought us at least a five minute lead.”

  “Five minutes is better than what we had before,” Sloan reassured me.