But Jaxon had also been wounded in the Gathering attack, according to Rohtt, with a broken arm that had left him unable to defend himself when they’d discovered him holding a mighty golden sword,the hilt like a scorpion’s tail poised to strike.
They’d taken the blade from him without a fight, Cade certain that its weight in gold would be worth something, somewhere across the stars.
But even in his pain, Jaxon had offered Rohtt no information. Only a cruel smile and four whispered words.
The Devil will come.
Cade looked back to the sky now, the planet’s rings dancing in the distance. Colors so beautiful, he knew Karr would have longed to capture them in one of his drawings.
His hands clenched into fists. And then his heart clenched, too, as if it were a fist of its own. As if it wanted to squeeze every drop of terror from his blood until Cade had nothing left.
“There,” a soldier said. “Movement.”
Cade’s head snapped up.
He followed the flow of the wind towards the Bloodhorns that held Geisinger’s Antheon beneath. Tricky, to uncover the hotspot of its power,the Queen of the Hive,as Geisinger said. For it seemed the Antheon’s energy moved. Appeared sometimes on the tracking radar, then faded the next, like it was a living thing.
“I don’t see anything,” Cade growled.
“There it is again,” another soldier said. He lifted his rifle. “The black wyvern.”
“Weaponsdown,”Rohtt commanded.
Ghostly, those Bloodhorns, with twisted mountaintops that looked like jagged glass capable of carving a hole in the sky.
Cade shifted his gaze as a dark mass lifted from between two peaks, the moonlight cascading down to show the arched back of a dragon.A mighty head, sharp scales curving from the top of its neck down to a barbed tail that flicked and twisted as the beast soared across the sky.
First, there was no sound but the wind. But then the beast’s roar arrived, and the great flapping of its wings carried across the pass as it grew closer. Andlarger,every second, large enough to take up half the loading dock with its sheer size.
“Hold your fire,” Cade said into his helmet com, grateful that his mask of indifference held in place, for he’d seen plenty of alien beasts before.
But never dragons, not until Dohrsar. It was a beast that matched the night, spiraling downwards, snapping out its wings to catch the wind as it landed upon the dock. Its mighty talons screeched against the metal as its wings hovered overhead, casting them all in shadow.
Upon its back sat three figures.
A man wearing a wide-brimmed leather hat to match his duster coat, the shape of two blades visible as he slid down from the dragon’s back with ease, keeping a hand upon its sinewy side.
Next, the young woman called the Devil, blue-haired and ferocious with a too-large leather hat on her head and a cerulean sword hanging at her hip, the same one that she’d driven into Karr’s heart.
And then Karr himself.
He was there atop the dragon, his hands bound, a hood over his head, but it washim.Cade would know that lazy posture anywhere, from his gangly arms to the scar that was visible just above the cut of his shirt, protruding from his collarbone.
The Devil climbed down from the wyvern’s back. It huffed out a mighty breath,two plumes of smoke trailing from its snout, and the smell whooshed across the platform, even through his mask’s filtration system. It reeked with the stink of death. Its eyes, easily the size of Cade’s head, focused on him. Dark and pupilless. A low growl rumbled in its throat.
“Easy, old friend,” the prisoner Jaxon said from beneath his hood. As if he knew that growl well and feared it not. “We’ll be reunited soon enough.”
The wyvern whimpered. Then lowered its head to the platform, eyes watching him intently.
Cade swallowed, wondering if perhaps he’d made a mistake in bartering the life of a man who commanded a wyvern as a child would a family dog.
“Welcome, Devil,” Cade said to the blue-haired woman. His voice remained strong, even with the howling wind. “I believe you have something of mine, just as I now have something of yours. We can do this trade quickly. No harm need come to anyone.”
“Save your diplomacy for the next planet you invade,” she said. She marched towards him on worn boots, that sword remaining on her hip as silence seemed to sweep across the landing dock. The soldiers leveled their guns at her.
“Hold your fire,” Cade commanded, lifting a hand.
They froze just as she did.
