The Adversary

by Thea Harrison

  Pia’s breath shook. Yes, they were close. And Dragos didn’t know what they were going to do.

  Her own words came back to haunt her. The only way Senusret was going to leave her son was if he was forced to.

  They either had to find some way to kill Senusret, or he has to believe Liam is going to die.

  No pressure at all.

  The white dragon came into Dragos’s line of sight. He was still a few miles away, but Dragos could see the steady, plodding nature of his flight, the measured rhythm of the rise and fall of those massive wings. None of it looked instinctive or natural.

  How had Senusret accessed Liam’s Wyr side? Did it cost him to maintain control over it, as he maintained control over Liam’s consciousness?

  He sincerely fucking hoped so. The more tired Senusret became, the quicker this confrontation would go.

  Up ahead, at a bend in a river, the sentinels had gathered to wait for their arrival. Dragos said to his passengers, “Hang on.”

  A few moments later, he sloped into a downward descent. Whenever he had passengers, he had to fly like he was driving a Honda minivan so he didn’t dislodge anyone, and right now he burned to shed that restriction.

  Once he landed, Eva and Morgan slid to the ground, but Pia didn’t. Dragos waited a heartbeat longer, then he told her, You need to get down now, lover.

  I don’t want to, she whispered.

  He felt badly for her. You can’t go with me for this next bit. Just like I couldn’t go into the seraph’s realm with you.

  Sometimes I hate it when you’re right, she hissed. She leaped off his back. “I need a gryphon!” Then, as all three gryphons stepped forward, she said, “Not Graydon or Rune. Bayne, you’re not mated. Will you take me up?”

  “Of course.” Bayne crouched so that she could climb on.

  “We’re still going with you, cupcake,” Graydon sounded annoyed.

  “No, you’re not,” Dragos said. “None of you are. You’ve tracked him this far. You’ve done your jobs. The more of you who are involved at close quarters, the more opportunities he has to possess someone else. Stay back a good half mile.”

  Since soul repositories were not something he had experience with, he glanced at Morgan for confirmation. Morgan nodded. “I think that should be safe.”

  Pia looked grim and terrible. She was blood streaked, her clothes torn and grass stained, hair tangled and missing a sizeable chunk at the back. She was, now and always, the most beautiful thing Dragos had ever seen.

  “Give me the shackles, Eva,” Pia said.

  The other woman looked furious, but she handed the backpack over. Pia shrugged it securely onto her shoulders and belted it to her waist.

  Morgan strode to Bayne and Pia. “You need me. Like Dragos, Senusret can’t possess me if I’m on guard against it. Not even while I hold his scepter.”

  “Fine,” Dragos bit out. While he appreciated everything that Morgan had done so far, every decision led them into needing to trust Morgan further, and he didn’t like extending so much faith on a largely unknown entity, especially over something so important.

  Morgan leaped onto Bayne’s back.

  Dragos didn’t wait for further discussion. Freed from constraint, he shot upward and lunged through the air at his son. Every wing beat brought him closer.

  The cloaking had worked for them so far, but at some point Senusret would hear the thunderous beat of Dragos’s wings.

  Or would he?

  Dragos doubled down on climbing in altitude while still working to overtake the other dragon, going higher and higher until he could look down at the sunshine glinting off Liam’s white hide. As he strained to gain the position he wanted, the weight of a body settled on his back, at the juncture where the base of his neck met his shoulders.

  Awareness of who had joined him chilled his bones. I don’t want you here.

  Get over it, said Azrael. We have flown together many times before, and you know we will again. Besides, you may need me.

  My son is off limits to you, he growled. Do you hear me? You cannot have him.

  You know that’s not how this works, Death replied.

  Live or die. Kill or be killed. It was the only rule in the animal kingdom. Every herd, pack, lone predator, and species that developed venom and adaptive coloring knew the code.

  As the Great Beast, Dragos knew it better than anybody, and most of the time he was just fine with it. Most of the time Azrael didn’t bother him in the slightest, and sometimes Dragos invited him to the battle.

  But sometimes he hated Azrael with all his heart. Azrael was the one person he could not outrun or outfly, the one person he could not block from entering a room. If Dragos threw him off his back, Azrael would simply appear at the scene in some other way.

  But dwelling on old resentments wasn’t going to free Liam. Setting his resentment aside, Dragos kept an eye on the white dragon below while he waited for the right moment. Counting the passage of time in his heartbeats. One, two….

  The white dragon stretched out his wings to glide for a few moments, giving those powerful shoulder muscles a break before he resumed the hard work of flight.

  …. There.

  Folding back his own wings for maximum velocity and extending all four feet with talons outspread, Dragos plummeted. He dropped from the sky with the speed of a small airplane. Several tons of force slammed into Liam’s back. There was no room for error. Even as he struck the other dragon, he grasped hold of the juncture where Liam’s wings met his body and broke the bones with a resounding snap.

  You’re not flying anywhere with my son’s stolen body ever again.

  The white dragon screamed. The sound trumpeted through the sky. Dragos mantled, trying to brake their downward fall, but the other dragon struggled so violently, he flipped them end over end, and together, white dragon and bronze, they plunged to earth.

  The force of their impact drove outward like a bomb, leveling trees and stamping a deep crater into the ground. The breath drove out of Dragos’s body and one of his hind legs snapped. Straining to move at his top speed, to drag the air back into his aching chest, he twisted in a gigantic roll and came to his feet.

  He couldn’t put weight on his broken leg. It felt like it was on fire. Pain was pain; it wasn’t death. Ignoring it, he brought his focus onto the other dragon and readied for battle.

  Lying in a twisted, awkward position, the white dragon convulsed. Liam. With a leap, Dragos straddled the other dragon’s body. “Come on, son!” he roared. He searched the white dragon’s blue eyes for any sign of Liam.

  Recognition flashed across Liam’s face. He half-growled, half-gasped, “Do whatever you have to. Just get him out of me!”

  Then that brief glimpse of Liam vanished, and the white dragon began to laugh breathlessly. “Really, Dragos, what are you going to do now?” Senusret asked. “He’s the ultimate hostage… and you can’t pry my arm away from his neck. I’m killing him from inside—you know I can—if you want your son to live you have to let me go….”

  Rage and terror paired flawlessly together, like the world’s most poisonous wine.

  “I already told you once,” Dragos snarled. “I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

  Snaking his head down, he closed his jaws around the white dragon’s throat and squeezed. Liam’s hot blood filled his mouth. The white dragon fought, raking Dragon’s underbelly with those long, razorlike talons. Bright, hot pain filled Dragos’s mind.

  He clenched down harder. Leave him, you bastard.

  Pia, Morgan, and Bayne raced into view.

  “He’s going to disembowel him.” Bayne dove to wriggle between the two straining dragons. Somehow, mostly, he got those raking talons to stop digging into Dragos’s belly.

  Get ready, Dragos said to Pia.

  Get ready to heal him.

  She still wore the backpack with the null spell shackles. She couldn’t have possibly heard him, but she crouched near their heads.

  “I’
m here.” Pia sounded clear and steady. “Liam, if you can hear me, Mom is here. Everything is going to be okay. We’re going to get you safe.”

  If I kill my own son, she’ll never forgive me, he said to Azrael. She might want to, but she never will. I’ll never forgive myself.

  Azrael knelt by Liam’s head. He laid a hand on the hard jowl. “They are fighting inside. You can’t let up.”

  The hot sun beat down. Gradually, the white dragon’s struggles grew weaker.

  Morgan pulled out the scepter and held it in front of the white dragon’s eyes. “Senusret, you have another choice. You don’t have to die with Liam.”

  “Get out of him, you monster!” Pia screamed.

  The raw pain in her voice. Closing his eyes at how unendurable it all was, Dragos squeezed his jaws tighter.

  “Dragos may not negotiate with terrorists, but I do,” Morgan said, his voice filled with alluring, seductive Power. “If you leave him, we can get you a body. Perhaps a coma victim will do, or maybe a baby who doesn’t have a personality formed yet. You won’t have to struggle all the time just to stay alive. Think of the possibilities, Senusret. Life is right here waiting for you.”

  “And so is Death,” Azrael said. “This is your only choice. There will never be another.”

  The white dragon stopped moving.

  No.

  Something subtle and invisible flowed out of Liam’s body.

  Azrael straightened from his crouch. “I’ve got him now.”

  Rearing back his head, Dragos roared, “WHO DO YOU HAVE?”

  Pia collapsed on Liam and sliced her hand open with a pocketknife. She must have cut deep, because her blood flowed freely and fell into the gaping wounds at Liam’s neck. “Come on, baby,” she sobbed. “Stay here with us. Liam, I beg you. Don’t leave me.”

  “They’re both gone,” said Azrael. “No—wait.”

  Dragos wanted to claw at the world. “Wait for WHAT?”

  Death smiled. “I have never seen so many seraphim before. They have Liam, and they’re bringing him back.”

  As they stared, the wounds at Liam’s neck began to heal. Nausea hit. Dragos managed to shapeshift into his human form and roll off the white dragon before vomiting violently. He retched, spat, and retched again, fighting to get the taste of Liam’s blood out of his mouth.

  His useless leg and the long, raked wounds along his abdomen were a fiery agony. His throat burned with stomach acid, and he couldn’t see anything for the tears that sprang from his eyes and streamed down his face.

  Kill or be killed. Live or die. This was life at its ugliest, and he would take it.

  He would take every painful, stinking, puking, bloody moment of it.

  Because his son would live.

  Chapter Eleven

  Once Pia was absolutely fucking certain that yes indeed Liam was healing, and her baby was breathing on his own, she left his side to race to where Dragos half-sat, half-lay hunched over, one arm wrapped protectively around his middle.

  He looked ashen, wrung out, one leg twisted awkwardly. She eyed with dread the foamy red vomit nearby. “How bad is it?”

  Glancing at her and then at the vomit, he shook his head. “That looks worse than it is. I accidentally swallowed some of Liam’s blood. My right leg is fractured in a few places, and there’s this.”

  When he lifted his arm, she stared at the deep gaping wounds that scored his washboard stomach. Wet exposed muscle glinted in the sunlight.

  She couldn’t take her eyes from it. “Bayne? I need help here!”

  A shadow fell over her, and Morgan crouched beside her. “Bayne and the other sentinels are inspecting Liam’s wings to make sure the bones healed properly. Will I do?”

  She gave him a wild-eyed look. Morgan stared at her, his own eyes wide with wonder. He had already proven that he was a very smart man. Realization was another sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  Oh gods, not another one. The more things happened and the more she healed others, the more people came to know the secret of her Wyr form. At the rate they were going they might as well post an announcement in The New York Times.

  Despite the pain he was in, Dragos must have realized it too. He turned his killer look onto Morgan. She gripped his shoulder, digging her fingers into the hard muscled flesh. “Don’t do anything rash. He has helped us every step of the way.”

  “I understand now why your Wyr form is such a mystery.” Not very many people could stare their own death in the face with as much calm as Morgan showed. He said steadily, hazel gaze fixed on Dragos, “I swear by the life of my own young king, dead now for so many years and whom I loved like a son, that I will never betray your secret.”

  The truth rang in his words like a clarion. Pia heard it plain as day, and if she had, Dragos must have too. But it was still a long taut moment before he gave a small, grim nod of assent.

  Immediately she slipped an arm around his neck and helped to ease him onto his back while Morgan turned his attention to Dragos’s twisted leg. “I’m sorry, but this is going to hurt.”

  “Do it.” Dragos’s mouth was white. He stared up at the sky. “Pia, if you’re going to heal me, you need to do it fast.”

  She had seen enough battle wounds to know that his, while difficult and painful, were not life threatening. “What do you mean, if I’m going to heal you….” Her voice died away as she noticed the direction of his attention and twisted to look up.

  In the distance, a rapidly growing cloud of avian Wyr winged toward them. Oh, shit. The good, loyal Wyr who had followed them to battle were about to arrive. There must be a hundred or more.

  Morgan looked too, briefly, then turned back to Dragos’s leg. Bracing one hand on Dragos’s hip, he asked, “Ready?”

  “Yes,” Dragos bit out.

  With a powerful flex of his shoulders, Morgan pulled the leg straight and aligned the broken fractures. Dragos grunted and closed his eyes. The pain had to have been excruciating. Frantic to finish the job, Pia asked, “Is it good now?”

  “He’s ready.”

  She placed her bleeding palm over the wounds on Dragos’s stomach, and she and Morgan watched in silence as the wounds knit together into a seamless whole.

  Dragos grabbed her wrist. He said to Morgan, “I need your shirt.”

  Morgan didn’t waste time questioning him. Instead, he stripped it off and handed it over. Long fingers flashing rapidly, Dragos wiped Pia’s hand and bound it, then tried to cast his own healing spell over her.

  Goddammit. It didn’t take.

  “Take off the backpack!”

  Eyes flaring with realization, she stripped off the pack and dropped it to the ground. Dragos tried a healing spell again, and her cut smoothed over.

  Once he was sure that she was no longer bleeding, he scrubbed her palm, then his own abdomen, and asked her, “What about Liam’s throat?”

  She looked at the white dragon where the sentinels had swarmed over his giant form. “I don’t see any blood. I think someone washed him.”

  “I took care of it. He’s clean,” Rune called out without looking up from his inspection of one massive wing that Aryal, Quentin, Bayne, and Graydon moved carefully back and forth, extending it out and folding it back into place. Avian Wyr typically did not survive irreparable damage to their wings. Liam’s broken wings had healed when Pia had healed his throat, but they hadn’t set the bones first and they were taking no chances.

  Dragos put pressure on Pia’s wrist. Obeying the wordless prompt, she sat back. He held his fist with the bloodied shirt away from her, and his Power flashed. The shirt caught fire. He, Pia, and Morgan watched as the flames engulfed Dragos’s fist. The fire did not die down until the shirt had fallen into ash.

  Pia said to Dragos, “I need you to be okay now, baby.”

  “I’m okay.” Propping himself up on one elbow, he gave her a quick, hard kiss. “Go check on Liam.”

  Leaping to her feet, she raced over to the white dragon. Part of her se
nsed the seraphim, one on either side, who came with her. In those few brief seconds, her racing thoughts gave her all kinds of doom-filled scenarios.

  Kathryn Shaw, the talented surgeon who had saved Aryal’s wings, had mated with Oberon, the King of the Dark Fae, and now lived two Other lands away.

  When Kathryn had worked on Aryal, she’d had to rebreak the malformed injury, and Pia had helped to heal the harpy afterward. Even if they could get Kathryn here as quickly as possible, how on earth could she do surgery on such a giant patient? Pia’s imagination stuttered. It would take cranes or something to lift those giant wings and hold them stationary.

  She skidded to a stop by Rune, who had placed both his hands on the juncture where one of Liam’s wings met his shoulder. “How bad is it?”

  He shook his head slowly. “His wings are quite perfect.” He looked up and met her gaze. “He was lying on one of them while it was broken, out of alignment, and then healed. I don’t think this is scientifically possible.”

  She stood still, staring at Liam, while her ragged breathing gradually slowed.

  Hop. Ta-da. Jazz hands.

  The seraphim had caught Liam’s soul and given her not only one miracle, but two.

  She whispered, “Thank you for the life of my son.”

  Something faint and gentle brushed along her arm.

  A few moments later the avian Wyr arrived, and they had come prepared for the possibility of a protracted battle. That meant, along with carrying all their weapons, the larger ones had also brought snacks.

  They passed canteens of water and jerky around, which Dragos, Eva, Morgan, and the sentinels consumed hungrily. Pia didn’t begrudge them any of it, but avian Wyr were meat eaters and there wasn’t anything suitable for her to eat so she had to content herself with drinking her fill of water. As refreshing as it was, she’d only had a few bites of food before Senusret had grabbed her, and hunger was beginning to make her feel hollow and lightheaded.

  She settled in a sitting crouch, leaning against the unconscious white dragon’s cheek, and dozed in the hot sunshine while the others milled about, talked together, slapped each other on the back, and said congratulatory things. Dragos was off somewhere doing whatever Dragos did after battles.