“This is it!”Lydia yelled.
The crater breathed, but the desert fought back.
There was little more than a blip of light, then the land split.Not a crack or a crevice, but a parting of the sand and everything below it.
Forced to breathe before I passed out, I gulped at the stagnant air.There wasn’t enough, but I had to try.
I could barely breathe.I barely existed.I could only watch.
There was no explosion at first, only the soundless tearing, like fabric ripped by invisible hands somewhere deep in that fissure.Lines of molten light carved a macabre mosaic across the desert floor as the Earth peeled open.
In the blink of an eye, a fiery red mushroom cloud erupted from the crater, heat blasting outward in every direction.It climbed higher, grew wider– angrier– shifting from bright red to ruby, then darkening to the thick, rich hue of blood.
There was no fire, only fury– ancient and alive.
Thrown backward as the fissure widened in a violent jerk, my ass hit the ground.I dug the heels of my boots in as hard and deep as I could.There was no way I was going down without a fight.Gasping and scrambling backward, I couldn’t even scream as sand and stone were dragged inward as if Mother Nature had turned on a giant Shop Vac.
A bolt of lightning shot from the sky, a jagged scar ripping through the Ether from the Heavens above.
The earth gave one final push, but it was of no use.
The hellmouth tore itself open with a mighty roar.
4
Making a hard left, I was glad I’d taken the time and spent the money on new tires as I flew off the crumbling asphalt and over the packed dirt and weeds that served as the shoulder of what some called a road in our little slice of Hell.Through the thick tufts of three-awn grass, and tall, and spiny creosote bushes, I forgot to swerve before the heavy, wispy seed pods of the clumps of buffelgrass smacked me in the face, but at least I wasn’t fighting to keep my Harley upright.
Eyes never wavering from the deep crimson mushroom cloud growing on the eastern horizon, the closer I got, the more off-kilter, upside-down, inside-out, just plain wrongeverythingfelt.Not dangerous or threatening– neither my instincts nor the Dragon with whom I shared my soul were itching to pull the Sword of the Culloden Bronze Dragon Clan from the Ether or get scaly and let Lou kick some ass.
Nope, it wasn’t like that.However, it was foreboding.It was growing.And it was creepy as hell– but it wasn’t aggressive.It was simplywrong.
“Everything okay, Old Man?”I mentally called to him.
Lou was bothered.I could feel it.He didn’t answer– not even a growl nor a grumble.Hell, he didn’t even say, ‘Shut the hell up, Lad,’and if I knew anything, it was that he never missed an opportunity to tell me to shut my damn mouth.
No, all I was getting was a restless, uneasy stirring coming from my couple of millennia-old partner in crime, and that was as far from normal as I was from a frozen tundra.
Then I felt it– the scales running the length of his spine raised like the hackles of my dad’s German Shepherd, Dutchess, when a raccoon stalked the garbage cans.That hadn’t happened in centuries– not since right after my first Shift when the Rebel King Modthmar’s troops were advancing across the Kyle Rhea Strait towards the Sound of Sleat in the south with designs on using Loch Alsh as a way to sneak onto the Isle of Skye and attack us in our sleep.Something had shocked the Old Man as much, if not more than that, and well, that shit was hard to do.After all, he’d been alive for more than two thousand years.
“King Anluan,”I’d hoped using his given name, an extremely formal form of respect that I hadn’t used in years, would shock him enough to at least snarl at me.
Unfortunately, it didn’t.Still just dead air.
What was happening?What was he doing?Why was he…?
Oh shit!There it was.Something I hadn’t noticed before.Something that was right under my nose– or in the depths of my psyche, as the case may be– that I just plain missed.
Lou was listening.He was gathering information.He was on guard but not yet sounding the alarm.
“Alright, Old Man, you just let me know when I need to duck and cover.”
Once again, I only received silence for my trouble, but at least I knew he wasn’t about to come forth, take control, and blast everything in his path with Dragon Fire.
“Gotta take the positives where I can find ‘em.”
Exhaling an exasperated breath, I gripped the throttle tighter and pushed forward.The air thickened the farther I rode toward the horizon.Through a small tunnel of red clay, sand, and muck created by years of erosion, everything was dark for a split second before a blast of heat smacked into me like a Mack truck as I came out the other side.Pressing on my chest and wrapping around me, it squeezed with such force that my lungs literally burned.
Magic– wild and uncontained– rolled across the desert in waves.It set my teeth on edge and raised the fine hairs along my arms.This wasn’t a fire.Nor was it an explosion.
