Even more reason to start crafting new gear from the dragon’s remains.
“Lily.”
Rathiel’s voice drew my attention, and I turned to find him crouched near our bedroll. Or rather, what remained of it. He didn’t say a word. He just held my gaze, then slowly lifted something from the ash.
Shadow’s Embrace.
Or rather, the two jagged halves of it.
The blade had snapped clean through. If I had to guess, the dragon’s fire—or hell, maybe even mine—had superheated it. It wouldn’t take much after that to break it, just one stomp from a massive dragon.
Strangely, I felt nothing. Perhaps I was numb inside thanks to Sable’s death. That sword had been with me through everything. Seeing it like that…
I lifted my gaze back to Rathiel, jaw tight, then gave a single nod. Guess I was a single-sword fighter now.
I turned away from the wreckage and forced myself to think this through logically.
Step one: I needed answers.
“I’ve never seen a dragon here before,” I said, nodding toward the corpse. “Are we looking at one of Lucifer’s newest monstrosities?” My father truly did love to create, after all.
“A dragon,” Levi said, rolling the word around in his mouth. “Is that an earthly creature?”
“More like fictional,” Eliza muttered.
“Fictional?” he asked.
“Not real,” I said. “At least, not that I’ve ever seen. But they exist in books.”
“Which begs the question: How would your father know about them? He must have created this. So he must have drawn inspiration from somewhere,” Rathiel said.
“Who knows with him,” I said. “Maybe Deidre told him about dragons when she was on Earth searching for me.”
Calyx straightened from his bedroll, his wing still crooked. “Lucifer created it a few years back.”
I raised a brow.
“Back in your rebellious days, I was stuck listening to him bitch about thedamn hellwyrms—his words, not mine—and how they were especially loyal to you. They wouldn’t obey him, and he didn’t like that.”
No, he wouldn’t. My father saw no need foranythingthat didn’t obey him.
“They’d rather eat their own tails than take orders from him,” Calyx continued. “Every time he released one from its cage, it would turn on him. It was truly great entertainment.”
I scowled.
“At the time,” Calyx amended. “Different perspectives and all that.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway. He and Tavira theorized that because the hellwyrms are native to Hell and possess free will, they can choose not to obey him. But what if he created something else? Something larger. He wanted something obedient to him that could rip your little wyrms in half.”
Considering this unholy creature had doneexactlythat, I wasn’t in the mood for Calyx’s quips. But before I could say anything, Rathiel cuffed him upside the head. “Show some damn empathy.”
“Not that kind of angel, brother,” Calyx retorted. He shrugged. “I’m not sure where he got the idea for a dragon, but he created it, then used Ezrion’s essence to give it fire.”
“Perhaps he didn’t learn about them,” Levi chimed in. “Perhaps he thought of them himself. Built them himself as his own creation. He has his clever moments, after all.”
“Wait, he used Ezrion’s essence?” I asked. “As in, these dragons are a hellspawn variant? He put a condemned human soul in this creature?”
Calyx just shrugged, clearly nonplussed over this.
I stared down at the dead beast, disgust twisting my stomach. He’d forged this creature, and then he’d sent it out to hunt us down. Now it was dead. He had absolutely no respect for anything other than himself. Why didn’t that surprise me?
