by Ann Gimpel
“What am I supposed to see?” He didn’t have the time or inclination to play guessing games, but he assumed she meant the serpent that was still writhing and roaring.
“His scales are splitting. Your task is to seed the gash with fire.”
Fire spewed from his mouth, painting a vertical line down the serpent’s belly. Kon’s dragon was far more accommodating than he would have been. He resented the hell out of the Queen of Faery ordering him about.
His whirling gaze spun faster as the gouge in the serpent turned into a burning crater. Where his fire connected with what he presumed was Sidhe magic, sparks flew. With zero warning, the serpent imploded in a booming blast.
“Neat trick,” he told Titania.
“Our people have fought together before. Apparently, you were not yet born.”
He ignored the dig. “Do you have enough arrows to dispatch all the serpents?”
“Yes, but insufficient magic. They must work together.”
“Do what you can,” he told her and flew toward a group that looked to be in deep trouble.
“They might have told us about their arrows,” his beast groused. “I, too, was unaware of them, and I have lived at least as long as Titania.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Konstnatin replied. “What we need to know is how much magic it takes to ignite an arrow. And if the Sidhe can replenish themselves as we do.”
“No. They must return to the Dreaming.”
Kon considered asking how his bondmate knew that, but it didn’t matter, either. He flew lower, aiming a flood of flames at two serpents who chivvied a wolf between them. Yle flew low, directing his pointed pterodactyl beak at the serpents’ eyes, but they anticipated him, swinging their heads out of harm’s way whenever he got close.
Two more wolves growled, hackles raised. One leapt onto a serpent’s back. Its claws slipped on the slimy scales, but it recovered. No matter how the wolf closed its powerful jaws, it couldn’t break through the serpent’s tough scales. Before it could try another angle, the serpent bucked it off. The wolf rolled to its feet, barking its fury, and gathered its powerful hind legs for another leap.
The air grew dense with smoke, fire, and the stench of various magics. Konstantin had never figured out why the rancid reek of dark magic trumped the clean smell of his own. He bugled. Fire streamed from his jaws, but he had to be careful not to hit the trapped wolf.
The serpents were playing with him, getting high on his panic and pain and impotent fury. The wolf jumped and spun, trying to leap sideways out of the serpents’ trap. They brayed laughter and tightened the magical web they’d built between them.
Kon’s dragon was incensed, but its fury matched his mood. Killing cleanly was one thing, or trying to, but playing with your victims was unconscionable. Below him, the wolf’s eyes widened until white showed all the way around. It was only a matter of time before one of the serpents caught him in their jaws and crushed something.
The wolf wouldn’t die. But he could suffer forever, and he knew it. Kon bugled at Melara, a dragon in the group below. She bolted skyward, silvery scales reflecting every shade of the rainbow.
“Keep them busy,” he told her not bothering with shielded telepathy. The serpents shared enough dragon magic, they’d hear whatever he said.
Melara understood him well enough. She hated the sea-serpents even more than the rest of them since she’d been one of the dragons trapped as a breeding ground for their hybrid horror show. Another dragon, this one red, joined her. Together, they initiated strafing runs, mixing up their angle of attack until the serpents’ attention had to be divided between their shifter captive and protecting their flanks from fire.
Kon waited. Timing was everything. He added more fire to a blast burning a hole through one of the serpents’ backs. When the soft tissue beneath its scales caught fire emitting a noxious stench—roadkill that had spontaneously combusted—he swooped low, carved through the serpents’ spell, and snatched the wolf with his taloned forelegs.
Long before the wolf was done thanking him, he dropped the shifter well behind the battle lines and returned to see if he could finish off the serpents. Or at least the one that was on fire.
Skidding to a halt a meter away, he chanted furiously, intent on drawing the serpent’s human form forward. He repeated what he’d done when he and Erin had come across shifters many days ago, except this time the bastard just leered at him through whirling dragon’s eyes.
Fuck!
They had no right to look anything like him. It was an affront to all that was good. To the purity of his magic.
Konstantin upped the ante on his spell, borrowing shamelessly from the shifters ranged around him. He was puffing fire, ash, and smoke like an old-fashioned locomotive before the serpent’s gray scales took on a hollow aspect. A different strain of power threaded with his just before Yle landed on his shoulder.
The mix of dinosaur earthbound magic with his own forced the serpent’s human form into ascendency. A tall, rawboned man with long, greasy gray hair stumbled upright, shaking a fist at Konstantin. “You will never win this war, Dragon.”
His scales clattered as he shrugged. “I seem to be holding my own, Serpent.” He did his damnedest to make the word sound like the curse it was. Konstantin changed up his incantation to what he hoped to hell would kill the fucker sneering at him.
The other serpent who’d taunted the wolf had begun slithering backward. “Do not let him leave,” Kon shouted in between the stanzas of his casting.
A chorus of, “We won’ts,” and “We’ve got this,” allowed him to focus everything he had on the serpent in front of him.
“Your breeding farms are gone,” he said. So long as he had this serpent as a captive audience, he may as well troll for information.
“What makes you think you found all of them?” the serpent jeered.
“Third world. Seventh world. Ninth world.” Kon dusted his forelegs together. “Clean sweep.” He watched the serpent carefully but didn’t glean any clues. “I could be persuaded to spare you. In exchange for information.”
The man skinned his lips back, baring yellowed teeth. “Nice try. Go ahead and finish me off. Betrayal isn’t on today’s menu.”
“Others weren’t so quick to toss their lives onto the trash heap.” Konstantin beat back elation. The serpents were still mortal as human. Or else the serpent wouldn’t have invited Kon to finish him off. Had their magic become so perverted it had turned into a permanent flaw?
Getting ahead of things here. I’m probably wrong about that.
“Who?” the serpent growled. “I would have names of the traitors.”
“What makes you think I know any of your names?” Konstantin folded his forelegs across his scaled chest.
“Descriptions, then.”
Konstantin seeded compulsion into his next words. “Appears I have something you want, and you have something to trade for it. How badly do you want those descriptions?”
“You first.” The serpent tossed his head.
“Ha! You must think me stupid. You first, or we have no deal.” Konstantin relied on bluster since he knew full well he had zero information about serpent traitors.
The battle raged around him. Shifters who’d been part of this standoff had moved to other nearby skirmishes, adding their magic where it was needed. He’d been doing spot checks on Erin. She was more than holding her own, and he was proud of her.
“What do you want to know,” the serpent gritted out.
“How many dragons are part of your ranks? What incentive convinced them to join you?”
“Not today, Dragon. Not tomorrow, either.” Harsh laughter blatted from the serpent. He was still howling, doubled over laughing, when Konstantin tired of the game he’d set in motion. A judicious blast of dragonfire turned the serpent’s laughs to screeches of agony, but soon even they fell silent.
He scanned the headlands. He’d figured by now they’d be well on their way to a full-scale rout with
serpents teleporting away as fast as they could pull power.
No matter how much he wished it to be true, he was wrong. From the looks of things, they’d be damned lucky if today ended up a draw.
They couldn’t lose. The initial battle was always a bellwether. They’d just have to try harder. Where the fuck were the goddess-be-damned faeries? He didn’t give a crap if they burned every Sidhe’s power down to dregs. They were going to get all the mileage they could out of those magic-imbued arrows.
Johan
Not that this will come as a surprise to anyone who’s actually fought in a war, but reading about battles is nothing like slugging it out in the mud. Or in this instance, ice. I don’t know what I thought would happen, but I had faith in magic. I figured we’d hit the serpents hard and heavy and be done with them in an hour or so. Perhaps less.
I seem to have miscalculated. Badly.
My dragon has been amazing. He clearly knows a whole lot more than me, so I’ve just turned him loose. He loves tossing fire about. I suspect he’d love it a whole lot more if the serpents died, but we’re working on that aspect. The Sidhe arrows seem to do the trick when mixed with dragonfire. Only problem is the faeries ran out of magic—or something—a while back. And vanished.
“They went back to the Dreaming,” my bondmate told me.
“Why? It is a long way.”
“You’re thinking with your human brain. Do you recall how fast your magic recovered in the Highlands?”
“Of course.” There’d been a mild euphoria that had come along with our time in the Sidhes’ cavern. Perhaps it had been a by-product of tapping power from the Dreaming.
All the while we were talking, my bondmate was dipping and weaving and coating every serpent in sight with fire and ash. Not that it even slowed them down, but at least it felt like we were making a good faith effort.
The harsh astringent stink of the serpents’ poison occasionally snuck through, but it hadn’t incapacitated any of us. Not yet.
The wolf Kon rescued had joined my troop or brigade or whatever we were calling our various contingents. He seemed none the worse for wear, but I suspect he was embarrassed for causing so much furor. We surged forward as a group intent on attacking three serpents, who hissed at us. And then we withdrew and did it again.
“Why are they not employing the aerial poison they used when you were by yourself?” I asked Katya. “I smell it, but it hasn’t knocked any of us out of the sky.” When I’d found her that time, she’d been in bad shape with a black, suppurating hole in her side the size of my fist.
“It didn’t force me to land that day, either. I’ve warded everyone in our group. Once burned, twice shy, and all that.”
She sounded happy. Just like my bondmate. I wasn’t miserable or anything, but we weren’t making any headway. Not much, anyway. My tactician’s brain was in full rebellion, shrieking we needed a different strategy, or we’d be here forever.
I’d been hopeful once I discovered the Sidhe arrows were lethal, but they hadn’t killed more than a handful of serpents before the faeries slipped away.
Konstantin stood perhaps a meter in front of a serpent who’d shifted to his human form. I suspected Kon had forced the shift. What I didn’t understand was why he hadn’t killed the serpent yet. The bastard was laughing his ugly head off.
“Duck!” Katya screeched.
My bondmate didn’t require encouragement. He’d feinted down and to the left before Katya shouted a warning. We came out of a dive face to face with a jagged slice someone had ripped in the ether.
A gateway to somewhere.
Low-key buzzing grew louder and louder until my bondmate closed off a membrane that protects our ears. The slice ripped open a few more meters, and a gaggle of giant bees with bird wings shot through. Their stingers were at least half a meter long, and I could smell the poison from where I hung suspended in the air.
Different from the serpents’ toxin, but I bet it was just as lethal.
Fire roared out of me. Three of the bee things plunged to the ground as their wings burned to cinders, followed by the rest of them. My dragon capered about, picking the hybrid horrors off as soon as they became visible. He was beyond thrilled at something that died so obligingly.
“I want in on the fun.” Erin flew next to me and killed the next four bees.
“This doesn’t require two of you.” Katya said.
Something about her tone, even in the dragons’ raucous tongue, alerted me she was worried. I left Erin to it and flew next to Katya. “What?” I still didn’t trust my non-mastery of private mind speech.
“Too easy. It’s a diversion. The problem is, I don’t yet know for what. It’s also a message we didn’t locate all the hybrid breeding farms.”
I was annoyed with myself. I should have made that connection immediately, except I hadn’t. “Did the Sidhe really go back to the UK?” I asked.
She nodded amid plumes of smoky ash. “They burned through their magic shockingly fast with those arrows. I expected they’d last through at least a dozen, perhaps as many as fifteen serpents, but they were done after five.”
“Did they used to be stronger?”
“Much.”
“Will they return?” I asked. It was Kon’s job to deploy our resources, but I was still running my own mini war in my head, complete with a mock-up of pseudo computer-generated probabilities courtesy of my gaming days.
She turned her spinning gaze my way. “I have no idea.”
Which meant we needed a master game plan that didn’t include them. If they returned, great. If not, we had to come up with another way to force the serpents to retreat. They were still emerging from the ocean. It was a lot less frozen than it had been. Not so much slabs of ice anymore as chunks.
The serpent who’d been channeling Comedy Central had turned into a flaming pyre. But one less serpent was starting to feel like one less ant on the occasions my kitchen had been overrun with them. Maybe not quite that bad. But almost.
A quick count yielded fifty serpents, give or take a few.
The bee things had slowed down. What was left of their charred bodies littered the ground. The slash in the air was pulsing, moving in and out as if it were breathing. The analogy creeped me out. I imagined a dark puppet-master lurking on the far side of the hole clapping glove-clad hands and saying. “Hurry now. You’re up next.”
Kon was flying toward us. He cast a disgusted look at the portal, and a ribbon of blue-white magic streamed from his upraised talons. The gateway shuddered and folded in on itself.
“Why’d you close it?” Katya demanded. “They’ll just open another one.”
I wanted to ask who “they” were, but I was pretty sure she had no idea.
Her twin didn’t answer. A peremptory bugle summoned us all to a spot well removed from the crowd of sea-serpents. “This isn’t working,” he said.
Something that had been tightly wound within me relaxed. Not that we were safe or home free or anything like that, but at least our commanding officer viewed the world through my set of filters.
The next obvious question was what would work better.
I gave myself a harsh mental slap. Good thing I’d never been conscripted. The first time I piped up with ideas that contradicted authority, I’d have been court-martialed.
“Where are the Sidhe?” Kon asked, having obviously noticed their absence.
“We suspect they retreated to the Dreaming,” Nikolai replied.
“How many serpents did it take to drain their magic?”
I furled one scaled brow, impressed. Konstantin was on top of a whole lot of things with a knowledge base I’d gladly have killed for.
“Five,” Nikolai said. “No. Six.”
Smoke poured from Kon’s slack jaws. “Damn. Did they say if they would be returning?”
All around me, heads shook back and forth.
“At least we know what we have to work with,” Konstantin continued. “By the time we get back to th
e shoreline, we can count on at least ten more serpents having showed up. We need to track down where they’re coming from.”
“What about the gateway?” Katya asked. “The one you just shut.”
“It’s a diversion, nothing more. A ruse to drain our power on inconsequentials. And to make certain we know we didn’t kill off all the hybrids. Don’t waste magic on whatever emerges from them, just close off the portals.”
“Who is behind them?” I asked, unable to keep my mouth shut.
“A very sound question.” Kon switched to telepathy. “They are working with someone who is very strong magically. I believe it’s how they convinced dragons to join their side.”
“Yes, but who?” Erin asked.
“I have a feeling we’re going to find out, but probably not today,” Kon replied. He shook his head until his scales clattered. “The serpents seem lethargic to me, not fighting back as staunchly as I’ve seen them do before. It was difficult to force one into his human body, though. Much harder than I expected.”
“Maybe it was easier to change things up at that end than to make them fully immortal again,” I suggested.
“I thought the same,” Konstantin said. His ready acceptance of my assessment warmed me. Good thing because his next words poked a hole in my happy bubble. “No more telepathy for you until you have a better handle on limiting its spread.”
“Got it,” I mumbled in dragonspeak.
“You’re doing really well,” my beast spoke up.
“Thank you, but I need practice. A lot of it.”
Katya hovered protectively next to me. From time to time, I felt her make adjustments in the warding she had draped around me, Erin, and herself. It was chauvinistic and stupid, but I vowed there would come a day when I took care of her, not the other way round.
Brilliant light forced my third eyelid shut, and I instinctively bent my head against the glare. Not good if it was another of those blasted portals. The magic had a different feel, though. One I recognized.
Sidhe, but a whole lot more of them than before.
Sure enough, a gateway blasted into being. No wasted time with shimmers or a slow burn. One minute it wasn’t there, the next it was complete with utilitarian silver edges and a veritable army of Sidhe pouring through. Every single one had a bow and a quiver of arrows. I recognized Titania, but this time a man stood by her side. Black hair streaked with silver and beaded with gems that made my dragon drool fell to his waist. A golden circlet sat atop his brow, and his robes glittered as if crafted of pure gold.
