Sirrahon’s tail spikes smashed into the Protector’s side. They impaled Liam and then withdrew, leaving him bleeding on the floor. I screamed his name over and over as I crawled towards him on all fours. Blood and bile from punctured organs dribbled from the hole in his gut.
The dragon’s heavy tread approached. I lay on my side and raised the Demon once more. I was out of ammunition, but a crazy part of me thought that maybe I could bluff.
Sirrahon smacked the weapon out of my hands, ending that idea. Galen’s invention spun away into the darkness as I fell over onto my back. The dragon reached out and drove his elephantine talons into the floor around me. The marble cracked under the weight of those talons, which pinioned me on both sides of my torso like a pneumatic press.
This was it. This was what had been prophesized. I lay broken on the ground, pinned like an insect to a board.
I was dead, dead, dead.
In desperation, I called out to Sirrahon as his scaly, pockmarked face came into view.
“You don’t dare kill me!” I shouted, as I beat my arms against those stone-hard talons. “I’m a vertice! You do that, and another will rise in my place! You’ll never be able to–”
Sirrahon let out a tsk. “That foul talk will cost you a couple of your ribs.”
He squeezed ever so slightly.
A snap, like ice in a warm drink.
Then a second snap as a another of my ribs gave way.
It felt like I’d inhaled liquid fire. All I could do was flail my arms and kick one foot in agony. I’d never been hurt so badly, so casually. I felt the ends of bones grind against one another, like broken pieces of pottery.
The vise-like grip let up for a second. I gasped for breath. Each movement brought me equal parts air and pain. My head spun with feelings of terror and despair.
“I suppose you were right,” the dragon said. “I was worried about what would happen if I killed you. But then I heard of a better idea. An idea so perfect that only a creature who serves the Darkness could appreciate it. And now is the right time to set it in motion.”
The ruby crystal stopped pulsing. Instead, it shone out in all directions, bathing everything in bloody, arterial red. And something moved inside the crystal itself. I had to crane my neck, but I saw it.
The black shape that had haunted my dreams since the day I’d seen it in Crossbow Consulting’s warehouse.
The little imperfections I’d found, the ones that described a door, turned into a glowing rectangle. Then the light faded away, leaving a void. The black shape moved towards the opening.
I forgot any pretense that I was a vertice, or a Hero, or anything else except a trapped and badly injured woman. One who was scared out of her mind. I let out a moan of pain, of fear.
I shut my eyes.
An evil-sounding clack echoed off the ceiling as the thing stepped out of the Scarlet Crypt and onto the marble floor.
I held my eyes closed like a seven-year-old girl trying to block out a nightmare. But I didn’t have a light to turn on. I didn’t have parents to come to my rescue. I didn’t even have a blanket to pull over my head.
Another clack. Now I heard heavy breathing. It was larger than a man, I could tell that much. It was teeth and claws and appetite, and it would dismember me piece by piece as I lay helpless.
Two more clacks. I could sense whatever it was standing over me. Deciding which part to tear into first.
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I opened my eyes.
For a moment, all I could do was stare.
Then I started screaming. My screams turned into sobs.
“No, no, no! Not you! Not you!” I howled. “Anyone but you!”
The thing from the Scarlet Crypt finally spoke.
It spoke in an all-too-charming French accent.
“Ah, Dayna,” Destry said sadly. “It looks like you have a bad case of the frights, ma chére.”
Chapter Forty-Five
I knew all too well what Destarius de Revasser could do.
Even the slightest brush with his power could re-write one’s life. Just the backlash alone from one spell had thrown Shelly into a manic state. One that would’ve eventually driven her to death from exhaustion.
McClatchy had been hurled into a spiral of madness. He’d been put into the maximum-security wing of a mental hospital for the criminally insane. From what I’d heard, he would require regular sedation, forced feedings, and nightly restraints for the rest of his life. A life that was arguably a fate worse than death.
So what about now, when Destry had been charged up with the magical energy of the Scarlet Crypt?
I doubted there were any limits to his power at all.
That terrifying realization made me start struggling again. But I was as helpless as an insect caught on flypaper. The dragon’s talons had trapped me in a vise. Each movement brought waves of pain that shot up from my ankle and wrapped around my chest from my broken ribs.
Finally, I gave up and laid as still as I could, trying to take in little sips of air.
“Your being a vertice troubled me for so long,” Sirrahon said, his voice rasping and rumbling in my head. “But then I realized that I didn’t have to kill you, so long as I could convert you to my way of seeing things.”
“Convert me?” I said, between gasps of air. “Sorry. You’re not that persuasive.”
“No, I am not,” the dragon agreed. “But once again, I knew that eventually I could turn your stubborn nature in my favor. You follow your own mind, without question. And that mind will be convinced to serve me…once it’s been pulled apart and put back together again. From the inside.”
I wish that I could have come up with some snappy comeback. But I was out of ideas, and it hurt to talk by then. My eyes felt wet as I realized that Destry had the power to do that very thing. To take whatever made up the ‘me’ inside and shape it like wet clay.
Say goodbye to Dayna Chrissie. Say hello to whatever Destry felt like putting in its place.
I shook my head back and forth, frustrated and helpless. I couldn’t even scream without feeling burning agony shoot through my body. And Destry’s soft, calming voice didn’t help matters.
“We have a great deal of work ahead of us,” the pooka said, though I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or the dragon. “And we have so little time to do it in.”
“Long time or short, just complete your task,” Sirrahon ordered. “I gave you the power to reach directly into the deepest part of her mind. Make my image the one thing that’s burned into her soul. Tear her down to nothing and build her anew.”
“I promise you, I shall do that.”
“Try not to damage her intellect too badly,” the dragon added, almost as an afterthought. “A drooling idiot is less useful and requires more supervision.”
Destry’s hooves clacked once more as he stood right next to me. I screwed my eyes shut again. As if that was going to help.
“Very well,” he said. “Temps de commencer.”
I let out a gasp as I felt something grip the nape of my neck. Something slick and slimy and cold as an eel. It then wriggled its way up across my brow, touching here and there at my temples, at the crown my head. Little touches at first, then insistent ones.
The touch of icy fingers turned into the soft, rubbery beats of a reflex mallet. Then the painful taps of a ball-peen hammer. I gritted my teeth as I felt the blows rattle my skull, faster and harder, making blobs of color burst against the inside of my eyelids.
The hammering stopped for a moment.
I opened my eyes. My breath came out in a series of ragged wheezes. A runnel of warmth ran down the side of my upper lip and then along my cheek. I touched my tongue to it and came away with the taste of salt and iron.
It was blood. Blood that ran freely from one of my nostrils. I felt its heat pulse down the side of my face as it dripped onto the floor.
“Chére, you are fighting me,” Destry chided. “You do not want to do that. Trust me.”
<
br /> It hurt, but I managed three little words. “Go to hell!”
“Do you know what mindbreaking is?” the pooka asked me. “That is what happened to Master Wayfarer. You do not want that happening. Stop resisting or you shall only make this harder on both of us.”
Amazingly, I was sorely tempted to do just that. The first exploratory touches of Destry’s attempt to get inside my head had hurt. Hurt me in a way that reminded me of being in a dentist’s chair. Hurt me in the way of being trapped in place while someone shoved a drill into me, boring and scraping away bone and tissue.
But unlike the dentist, this wasn’t being done to help me. It was to tear me down. To reprogram me like I was a wet, fleshy robot who needed a new memory card.
As I closed my eyes again, I imagined heavy metal doors slamming shut inside my head.
Destry let out a nicker that, to my ears, sounded rueful.
The pressure began again, this time on my forehead. No eel touches or hammer blows, this time. It started out with a slow, grinding ache that only got worse from there.
A migraine’s worth of agony exploded between my temples. Then a cluster migraine which tore something between a shriek and a whimper from my throat.
It felt like someone digging claws into my forehead. Flaying skin from bone and then taking a power drill to the blood-smeared skull. My jaw sagged as the doors in my head turned white-hot, smoking from the assault.
Something finally gave way with a soundless crack.
I screamed one last time as Destry flooded into my mind. A welter of pain and blood, feeling and memory and instinct churned together as his energy poured into me. Mixing it all as if my brain had been pried loose and tossed into a blender.
Images of people and places flashed before my eyes. A dark undertow pulled me down, choking me. I cried out with desperate pleas for forgiveness to all those I’d let down. Shaw, Galen, Liam, Thea, Fitzwilliam, Nagura. And my last thoughts were of the first two I’d utterly failed. Hollyhock and Perrin.
It was like fighting to stay atop a tsunami. I finally went under.
Everything came to an end.
Chapter Forty-Six
I sat up as I let out a full-throated scream.
The book I’d been trying to read for the third or fourth time today slipped off my lap. Heart beating frantically, I kicked my feet against the warm sand. My shoulder bumped the beach umbrella, almost knocking the damned thing over.
I flexed my ankle. Then I gingerly touched my ribs, seeking breaks that weren’t there.
It had only been a dream, I realized.
You’re wrong about that, my brain helpfully corrected me. That was a full-on effing nightmare, make no mistake.
I leaned forward to rest my elbows against my knees and focused on getting my breathing back under control. Everything had been so incredibly vivid. The pain, the weariness, the desperation. I’d been trapped in a room that had been dimly lit by a demonic red light, as someone slowly crushed the life out of me.
That hellish place was as far away from here as possible.
All around me, sand glittered like powdered sugar under the warm noonday sun. The beach curved in a graceful arc that was marked by an informal border of palm trees. Gentle ocean swells of the purest aquamarine rolled in with a soothing sound. They came with a hint of foamy lace and kicked up a little flurry of sand as they broke.
My nose picked up the pleasing scent of toasted coconut from my suntan lotion. The bouquet of the lotion mingled with the complex smells of salt, seaweed, and the island’s lush greenery. On the whole, it was the perfect place for a placid ocean to roll up to and gently nibble at the shore.
It wasn’t a bad place for a nap in between impromptu tanning sessions, either.
Instead of browning, my skin used to do what I called ‘burning in stages’. But for some reason, out here on the island, I didn’t have a problem. My pale sixteen-year-old self would’ve killed for the olive-brown tan my legs sported now.
I laced my fingers together and gave my arms a big stretch to wake them up. I felt a weight on my right hand, so I paused to look. A heavy metal band bearing an inset ruby shard perched on my ring finger.
Movement caught my eye. A man walked along the beach in my direction. I replaced the bookmark where I’d left off and set the book aside. Then I quickly adjusted my bikini top so I wouldn’t suffer a wardrobe malfunction. The two-piece I’d chosen for my trip out here was cute, and it bore the color of ripe tangerines. But the spaghetti straps were almost as flimsy as cooked strands of pasta.
The man heading my way was tall, bare-chested, and with more than enough muscle to make a second glance worthwhile. His skin was as dark as obsidian, and his exotic facial features made him look like a statue recovered from the depths of an Egyptian tomb. But any claim to ancient ancestry was offset by the man’s khaki cargo shorts and the bright purple knapsack slung over one shoulder. Not to mention the shock of wild, bristly hair that the lead singer of a punk band would’ve envied.
I moved over a bit as the man came up and sat down under my beach umbrella. Teeth as straight and white as piano keys grinned at me. His voice was sonorous, kind, and laced with the warm French accent I’d come to enjoy listening to.
“Looks like you had a bad case of the day-mares, ma chére,” he said. “Be at ease, Dayna. You are safe now.”
“Destry, I don’t know what happened,” I confessed. “I had this horrible dream that I was being smothered or tortured or something. There was this cathedral-like stone room that was lit up like the underworld, and there was pain and death and…”
He raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“And the worst part was that it felt so…I don’t know…real. Like it really happened.”
“That bad?”
“That bad. When I woke up, I wasn’t even sure what was real – the torture, or this beach.”
Destry let out a Gallic chuckle. “You have encountered the problem of Monsieur Zhuang. He was a sauge ancienne who once dreamt that he was a butterfly. But when he woke, he could never be quite sure: Was he a man that had dreamt he was a butterfly, or was he a butterfly, now dreaming that he was a man?”
I smiled ruefully. “I suppose I never appreciated what a dilemma that might be, until now.”
“In truth, this was not wholly unexpected. You have suffered what is called an ‘abreaction’ by the hypnotists. It is catharsis, no? A release of pent-up emotions.”
I frowned. “But…isn’t it a release of emotions from some past trauma? Something I already experienced?”
“Let us put it another way. Dayna, what do you remember about your life before coming here, to la vie joyeuse?”
I squinted out into the blinding radiance of the sky and sea as I thought about it.
“Well, before I left, I’d been working at the Los Angeles OME with Shelly Richardson and Alanzo Esteban,” I said. “The newly elected Police Chief, a fellow named McClatchy, could give me heartburn just by being in the same room. I’m just glad that I didn’t have to put up with him for long, since I resigned my position so that I could come down here.
“I remember buying the plane ticket for a direct flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu, then switching to a puddle-jumper for French Polynesia. I had a layover of three days in Papeete, where I was tempted to vaporize my savings by buying a Tahitian black pearl necklace. I was waiting until I could charter a boat to the Tuamotus, and even then, it took two water taxis and an outrigger canoe to get all the way here. But it was worth it. The last three months have been a dream come true.”
“There is a reason they call this place the Île de Rêverie,” Destry pointed out. “But we are in one of the most isolated places in the South Pacific for one very good reason.”
And then Destry pointed to me.
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, but I felt vaguely flattered.
“It’s strange,” I acknowledged. “But I’ve always felt that something was missing from my life. It’s why I
decided to come, after meeting you…”
My voice trailed off. Destry raised an eyebrow as I tried to make heads or tails of the strange mixture of feelings that ran through my mind. A whole set of aquamarine wavelets washed in and receded before I spoke again.
“I put my whole life on hold for this. Yet I can’t remember where we first met!”
“And that is also for a good reason,” he said heartily. “I have put a block on those memories. Because it would interfere with the reason you have traveled all this way.”
“I suppose…”
Destry rubbed his chin, as if considering. “Does that bother you?”
“I don’t know. I guess, maybe? I mean, they are my memories, after all.”
A flash of white teeth against dark skin. “In my native tongue, memories are called souvenirs. After all, what are they but a curio, a relic we use to make the past come alive again? Rest assured, they shall not be kept from you forever. All I need to know is one thing: Do you trust me?”
Gulls soared by overhead as I pondered that very thing. Some had wings tipped with black, and a couple flew so high that they were little gold or white dots against the limitless blue above.
“I get the sense,” I said slowly, “that we were at odds at one point. But a deeper part of me says that you’ve always been a good person. Maybe you did the wrong thing once, but for the right reason.”
Destry looked troubled for a second, but that passed. “Perhaps I did.”
“If it was for the right reason,” I puzzled out, “then your intent was good. So…yes, I trust you. I came here for you to…do something for me. To teach me, right?”
A nod. “I promised to tear your pre-conceptions of the world down to nothing, and then to build you anew. To pull apart your mind and put it back together again. From the inside.”
With those rather grandiose words, Destry slipped the knapsack from his shoulder and set it on the sand. He threw back the bright purple top and began to rummage around inside. Finally, he came up with a thick, leather-bound book that had been browned by exposure to the elements.
Dragon with a Deadly Weapon Page 23
