Between (37 page)

The blow left a trail of black down her opponent’s shoulder. Mellisande roared with pain, shifting her weight to relieve pressure from the damaged limb. Awkward and ponderous, Vivian dragged her unfamiliar body to the right, slowed by the need to move four feet at once, distracted by the unexpected weight of her tail.

Mellisande’s teeth tore into her side.

With the onslaught of pain, Vivian was seized by a battle frenzy, a thirst for the dark blood of her foe.

Beating her wings, Mellisande thrust her body upward, taking all the weight on her back legs. Front claws extended, she spurted flame from her open mouth with a blast of heat that seared Vivian’s eyeballs, half-blinding her.

Heat roiled in her belly in response; her body became a furnace, building to an agony of pressure that had to be released. Taking aim, she spat out a gout of fire that enveloped the other dragon’s head in flame.

Mellisande’s body recoiled, twisted, the scales of head and neck blackened. Her wings beat an uneven rhythm, rapid and desperate, lifting into the sky. Vivian followed, buffeting her foe with her wings, engulfing her with blasts of fire, driving her higher and higher.

The wounded dragon breathed hard, her wings laboring. Black blood ran from her wounds. Vivian rolled onto her back and raked the underside of the pale belly above her with all of her talons.

Mellisande twisted away, evading, but she was slow and Vivian was strong. She repeated the maneuver, drawing her talons through the wounds she’d already made, through skin and muscle and deep into the belly. Waiting her chance, she watched Mellisande blunder through the air like a bat in daylight. Opportunity presented, and Vivian darted in, jaws wide, and crunched down at the base of one wing, biting, tearing. The damaged wing collapsed, twitched, refused to stroke. The other wing continued flapping, throwing the gigantic body into a lopsided spiral. For a moment it hung in the sky, a huge whirligig, moving neither up nor down but careening in a drunken spin. And then the good wing tucked into the body, blackened and distorted and broken, and Mellisande tumbled and spun like a giant meteor toward the earth. Her body struck with a concussion that shook the stadium. Dust billowed up amid smoke and a sudden burst of flame.

Vivian swooped downward to land on the body of her fallen foe.

T
he apocalypse began without warning.

Zee was on his feet before his eyes were open. The chamber shook in the grip of a giant spasm. Chunks of stone rained down from the high carven ceiling and shattered on the stone below. The earth groaned and creaked. A crevice opened in front of his feet.

Pressing his body back against the wall to avoid the falling debris and keep his balance, Zee waited for the earthquake to settle.

It didn’t.

A chunk of stone the size of a small car plummeted down onto the dais in the center of the chamber with a deafening crash, sending a cloud of dust and debris into the air that set him coughing.

And then the locked door burst open and a man dashed through it, rending long crimson robes and wailing, “The dragon is dead. The end of all things is at hand!” He scrambled up the stone steps to the ruined altar, a flaming torch in one hand, a long staff in the other.

The earth shook with new intensity, flinging Zee sideways. With both hands pressed against the still-solid wall at his back, he kept his feet, but the man on the stairs stumbled and fell. The staff rolled away from him, clattering down the stairs, but he managed to hold on to the torch.

Zee edged toward the open door.

The man clambered up the rest of the stairs on hands and knees, hampered by his long scarlet robe and the torch he continued to clutch in one hand. He picked his way to the top of the fallen rubble, spread his arms wide in a gesture of invocation, then held the torch to the flowing sleeve of his robe. The fabric combusted, instantly turning him into a pillar of flame. The earth shook once more, and a wide crack opened in the stone floor. The priest dove, flaming and screaming, down into the chasm.

Zee reached the door. He was through, scrambling up a steep stone staircase that gaped and cracked beneath his feet. Chunks of stone fell around him. Flying shards struck his face, stinging, drawing blood. The step directly beneath his feet cracked and fell away. A sickening moment of nothingness, and then his upflung hands caught on the step above. He clung there by his fingers, refusing to fall. Hope drove him on and he found the strength to swing himself up to safety.

Just a few more steps. Almost there. And then a dead end—a solid obstruction at the top of the stairs.

It must be a door, but there was no handle and it was locked, or blocked. Beneath him, what was left of the staircase swayed like a rope ladder in the wind. Steps cracked and broke in chain reaction, stone fragments bouncing and rattling into the killing drop. Zee pressed his back against the wall as though he could stick to it, like Velcro, eyes scanning for a way out, one last escape.

As the step beneath him broke in three places, he unwrapped the thing that George had given him, because he couldn’t see any way that this was not the end. Then, falling, he whispered one last word.

“Vivian.”

D
isoriented and cold, save for the heat burning up through the soles of her naked feet, Vivian stood in her own human form atop a massive wreck of scales and broken wings. She was naked, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Grief choked her. No victory, this.

The Warlord dead. Mellisande slain, and for what? She, Vivian, had allowed herself to turn into a dragon, and in that form had killed not Jehenna, not her true enemy, but instead this pitiful creature long enslaved in the dark and so newly freed.

From somewhere below, a shriek of rage and grief reached her ears, distant and nearly irrelevant.

Through a heavy torpor that enveloped both limbs and brain, Vivian walked over the dead dragon’s side, careful not to cut her feet on the sharp edges of scales, and looked down to see Jehenna kneeling in the blackened grass, both hands on Mellisande’s head as though she could somehow restore life with her touch.

Something was wrong about those hands. Bony, blue veined, the skin spotted with age. The face that had been young and so dangerously beautiful was withered and wrinkled; the hair hung lank and gray over a bent and crooked spine.

Jehenna looked up at Vivian and shrieked, “Look what you have done!”

Words were still far away, and Vivian could only stare as Jehenna held out her hands, turned them one way and then the other, and shrieked again, “Look what you have done!”

The Sorceress got to her feet and hobbled up the dead dragon’s neck, reaching out with bony fingers to scratch at Vivian’s face.

“You’ve grown old,” Vivian said in wonder. “And weak.”

An easy thing now to trap those wrists, thin and frail, and hold Jehenna off like a fractious child. To shove her backward and away. The Sorceress stumbled, collapsed to her hands and knees. Clumps of hair drifted from her scalp. A dry racking cough shook her, and she spat teeth out into the palm of her hand.

“You’ve killed me,” she gasped. “So close to the Forever, and now it’s lost, all lost.”

A deep rumbling groan rose out of the depths beneath them, and the earth shook. Vivian kept her feet with difficulty. Jehenna fell onto her belly and began to slide backward over the sharp-edged scales, feet first, hands scrabbling for a hold. When she hit the ground she rolled, labored onto her hands and knees, remaining crouched in the black ashes. Her face was a grinning skull, wrinkled skin stretched over bone, gums toothless, her eyes filming with the white of cataracts. The royal robes hung loose and shredded over a skeletal frame. Her hands bled, cut by dragon scales during the long slide down.

Vivian walked carefully across the swell of Mellisande’s belly, down the slope of the shoulder and onto the neck, and from there down onto the ground. She looked around for Gareth, but he seemed to have vanished.

“You were connected to Mellisande somehow. Tell me.” She used the Voice, saw Jehenna stiffen against it, then shrug and acquiesce.

“An ancient blood rite. We share a death, Mellisande and I.” Her mouth stretched into a toothless grin. “And Surmise. You have killed everybody in this kingdom.”

The earth rumbled and shook. A section of the stadium wall cracked and collapsed into the arena with a crash and rattle of cascading fragments of stone. The seats warped and buckled as though they had grown liquid, then began to break under the stress, sharp retorts ringing out like machine-gun fire.

The few remaining people screamed and struggled toward the stairs. Some of the wounded crawled on their bellies. Vivian had been staring blankly into the chaos for several minutes before she noticed the bloody figure swaying on its feet at the center of the field. It lurched toward her, dragging its right leg. One arm hung limp. The body was blackened with dragon fire, the face covered in blood. It seemed impossible that he should be moving, but moving he was, one slow step after another. He wavered and almost fell, then caught himself and took another step.

The Warlord.

Vivian realized she was stretching her arms out toward him, uselessly, willing him on. She got her feet moving in his direction, saw his face change and heard his warning shout. “Behind you!”

Vivian spun to see Jehenna still crouched, but with the stone knife clutched in her hand. Her arm was drawn back, her face twisted with malice.

“It is too late for me, now, Dreamshifter. Even if you had the key I would be dead before we reached the Way. If I must die, so must you.”

Vivian thought to run, but the dead dragon blocked her. Legs as big as tree trunks fenced her in on either side. She could scrabble up and over, but it would take too long.

The knife left Jehenna’s hand in a slow and lethal arc.

All the world slowed.

Vivian had more than enough time to watch the blade fly arrow-straight toward her heart, but not enough time to duck. Her scream stuck in her throat.

And then, with an impossible leap that carried him into the air, arms spread wide, the Warlord flung his broken body between her and the knife.

A small, wet sound as the blade entered his body. A grunt as he struck the earth.

Time returned to normal and he lay at Vivian’s feet, the hilt protruding from his chest.

With a wordless wail of grief and denial, Vivian sank to her knees by his side, eyes locked on his, so beautiful still in a face burned black by dragon fire. His lips moved, as if to speak, but he only sighed and did not breathe again.

Vivian placed both hands on his face, gentle on the damaged skin. Even as her medical training kicked in, as she listened for breath, felt for a pulse, denial ran through her, like a litany of grief.

This is the part of the story where the fallen hero appears to be dead, but really isn’t. This is the part where he looks at the heroine and proclaims his love for her at last, where she saves him from the wound that is not quite fatal. This is the part where unsuspecting magical powers kick in and the hero is snatched from the jaws of death.

But he lay as he had fallen and did not move. The strong heart no longer beat. No breath moved in and out of his lungs. His open eyes stared straight upward at the sun.

The power that Vivian had, to open and close doors, to shift into a dragon, could do nothing to save him.

Jehenna’s cackling laughter coiled around her like bitter, choking smoke. “Enjoy your life, little one. May it be long, and lonely.”

Vivian withdrew the knife from the Warlord’s chest. Closed his eyes. Stroked the blood-matted hair back from his burned forehead.

“It all ends with me,” Jehenna said. “You are the Dreamshifter. Walk through one of your doors, and live to remember that you killed thousands in order to get to me.”

Vivian felt like she was choking. She shook her head, unable to find her voice.

“Think, little girl. Surmise is my weaving. It dies with me. And with it, every single soul who has found their way here.”

Her heart felt flat and cold inside her chest. A small thing, beating out the rhythm of a small life.