“Marci’s not a weapon!” Julius roared. “She’s a person.Myperson!” He bared his sharpening teeth. “Youmurderedher!”
The general didn’t deny it. She just stripped off her jacket, revealing a pair of obviously artificial arms beneath a sleeveless shirt. That was all Julius saw before the fire consumed him.
Even in his rage, that was a surprise. He’d never had fire when he’d changed before. Other dragons did, but he’d always assumed it was a flashy trick to impress others. Now that it was happening to him, though, Julius understood that others had nothing to do with it. The fire came from inside, from the flames that raged when he finally unleashed the desire to kill. Julius hadn’t even known he had feelings like that until they bit down hard, devouring his grief and anger until he was nothing but fire and the desperate need to bite back. And that was what he did, dropping his Peace Keeper Fang on the ground before it could freeze him as he lunged for Emily’s throat.
She blocked him easily, catching him under the jaw and slamming him into the ground with inhuman strength. But Julius was used to this treatment after a lifetime of being his family’s punching bag, and he rolled right back up, lunging at her again. And again, she caught him, though not quite as quickly this time.
“Stop this,” Emily growled, fighting to keep him pinned. “You have every right to be angry, but fighting me won’t—”
Julius stopped listening. He had no interest in talking or reason. The only thing the fire had left in his mind was the all-consuming need to burn, so that was what he did, blasting his enemy with a flame so hot and explosive, it blew them both away. Unlike the human, though, Julius had wings to check his fall, changing direction in midair to dive straight at his prey as she hit the ground.
Under any other circumstances, that attack never would have worked. He didn’t know what Emily Jackson was exactly, but she was clearly an old hand at fighting dragons. She wasn’t even singed by his fire, and she wouldn’t have gotten bitten either if Julius had been himself. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t just raging, either. His attack was neither wild nor crazed, but purposeful and calculated, the sort of precision strike he’d never been able to land in training because he’d never wanted to kill. But things were different now. He’d never wanted anything like he wanted Marci back, but that was never going to happen. Because of this human.
So he was going to kill her.
Young or old, big or small, a dragon with an all-consuming desire is the most dangerous enemy in the world. A whelp like Julius would have had no chance against the UN’s Phoenix on a normal day. Today, though, the day his Marci died, even Raven’s famous weapon was in over her head.
The moment she hit the dirt, Julius was on top of her, biting down with all his might. She still managed to turn in time to dodge his top fangs, but the bottom landed exactly where Julius had planned, stabbing into her ribcage from the back, which turned out to be a blow for him, too. Humans were supposed to be easier to bite than dragons, but biting through Emily was like biting into an enchanted support beam. The metal ground his teeth even as her spellwork burned his tongue, but the pain only made him more determined. He didn’t care if he broke every tooth in his mouth, he was going to finish this. He was clenching his jaw to do just that when a new, much larger set of fangs grabbed his body and ripped him away.
Julius went flying. He tumbled through the air, almost landing in the bloody pool beside Algonquin before he got his wings open. When he managed to flip back over, a huge, soaking wet, and very pissed-off dragoness with matte-black feathers was standing between him and his prey.
“Enough, Julius!” Chelsie snarled, baring her dripping fangs. “You don’t want to do this!”
But he did. He’d never wanted to kill anyone more in his life.
“Don’t interfere, Bethesda’s Shade,” Emily ordered, getting back to her feet, or trying to. She was having trouble standing thanks to the line of fang-shaped holes Julius had left in her legs and chest, none of which were bleeding. Even in his single-minded fury, that struck Julius as odd. He’d known the general was heavily augmented from the moment she took off her coat, but there should have beensomeflesh left. No human was all metal, and yet there was no taste of blood on his tongue. He couldn’t see any of the usual organs through her wounds, either, not even white plastic synthetic ones. Under the thin veneer of Emily’s human shape, there was only more metal, an intricate clockwork of interlocking parts covered in massive scrolls of super-complicated spellwork Marci would have bowled him over to get a closer look at.
Except she couldn’t. Because she was dead. She was dead, and Julius would never see her bouncing with joy over spellwork ever again.
That was enough to make him see red. He lurched forward, smoke curling from his fangs as he prepared to blast the wounded general with a fire that would melt even her metal insides. He was still fanning his fire up to temperature when Chelsie tackled him, launching straight up off the ground to knock him out of the sky before slamming them both back down in the muddy grass.
“Let me go!” he roared, biting his sister savagely.
“Stand down!” General Jackson ordered at the same time. “This is my fight. I don’t need your help.”
“I’m not doing it for you,” Chelsie snarled. “I’m doing it forhim.” She glared down at her brother, blood dripping from the shorter feathers on her neck where he’d bitten her. “You arenota killer, Julius, and I won’t let you become one. Not over this.”
“She killed Marci!”
“She did,” his sister said sadly. “And I know that hurts. But if I let you kill her for it, it’ll hurt you even more.”
Julius didn’t see how anything could hurt more than this, but as his sister spoke, he knew that she was right. Killing the general wouldn’t bring Marci back. It wouldn’t do anything except add more death to a world that was already choked with it. And as that truth worked its way into his brain, the fire of his rage finally burned out, leaving him with nothing. He didn’t even feel sad anymore. Just empty. Empty and alone with the cold, hard truth that Marci was gone, and even if he lived to be as old as the Three Sisters combined, he’d never see her again.
With that, Julius collapsed under his sister, curling his feathered body into a tiny ball in the mud. He was preparing to stay that way forever when a watery sigh cut through the now-quiet air, reminding him that they still had an audience.
“What a supremely disappointing display,” Algonquin said, looking down on them from her perch on the Leviathan’s tentacle with a rippling face that was no longer even attempting to appear human. “I never knew you were such a killjoy, Bethesda’s Shade. I was looking forward to watching the UN’s dragon killer and your loss-maddened brother tear each other apart.”
She paused there, waiting for the inevitable comeback, but Chelsie didn’t bother. She just crouched lower over Julius and lashed out with her tail, wrapping the delicate, feathered tip around the hilt of his dropped sword. She scraped the ground with her claws at the same time, digging the tips—which Julius only now noticed were covered with the curving, bone-white blades of her own Fang of the Heartstriker—through the grass, tearing a hole in the world. The moment the crack was open, she yanked him through, dragging Julius and his Fang out from the bloody field and back to Heartstriker Mountain.
***
Emily stared at the closing hole the Heartstriker had ripped in the world, cursing herself for not following them down it. That little dragon was more than she’d bargained for when he was in a rage, and Bethesda’s Shade was a fight she’d worked hard never to get cornered into, but she would rather take on the whole of Heartstriker Mountain alone with her chest full of holes than remain stuck here alone, deep in enemy territory.
Not alone,Raven whispered.I’m always here.
“Really?” she said, pressing a hand to her sundered chest. “Then where were you when the dragon was taking a bite out of me?”
You deserved that,the spirit said grimly.You shot our best chance at a Merlin.
