Chapter Seventeen
Blake and Max stood side by side. The other dragons were standing along the top of the tower’s roof. Below them were the Orcs, so many that they literally darkened the entire ground. Heather and Christy stood behind them, and Blake held one hand out. Christy’s fingers closed around his, and he took a deep breath.
This was what he had been waiting his whole life for. Love, and the only thing standing between him and it were the damn Orcs swarming that ground below.
He said, “Max?’
“Yeah?”
“Ready when you are.”
Power pulsed from Max. The younger dragons, the ones who had inherited magic, began to cast the spells too. Blake changed, his wings coming out and his body growing larger. Scales burst through his skin. Fire, heated in his veins, ran along his throat.
The Orcs came, and the dragons and the humans met them with fire and steel.
Christy, armed with a short and sharp sword, took to his back. He let her guide him. His heart, that fiery thing, beat faster in his chest. The wind his wings made sent a few of the smaller Orcs flying backward, and she was off his back, the sword glinting in the sunlight.
A half-dozen Orcs rushed at him, and Blake let his fire hold them off. Christy was right there, the weapon she held cutting through another Orc that had somehow managed to come up on one flank without his noticing. She shouted, “Watch out,” and he ducked just as a club came hurtling toward him. He batted it away, and his claws seized an Orc that was rushing up behind her.
Max was fighting to his right. Heather, along with other women, were dragging the humans who had already been wounded, back toward the castle walls. The witches were busy trying to hold the Orcs off with their spells. Marlene, who was powerful, was in front and blue fire crackled off her hands as she cast a spell that sent several Orcs rushing at them into the air and then over a cliff. The sound of steel hitting steel and flesh was loud in the air.
Magic crackled and burned. The sky went black and then white. Thunder rolled, the aftermath of their combined powers causing havoc with the weather. A hard rain began to fall. His skin was soaked, but he ignored that. An Orc had Christy pinned to the ground, and he grabbed it up, snapping its spine in half before throwing it over the cliff and to its death.
In his veins flowed the blood of a knight who had fought hard battles. His skills had been honed over centuries. He fought hard, and he fought for the woman lying on the ground, covered in mud and blood and who got to her feet and then threw the sword at something to his right. She shouted, “Turn!”
He did. Her sword had missed, and the dozens of Orcs coming at him were coming fast and hard with one, a huge male, very close to him. His tail lashed out and swept them back. Marlene’s spell hit them the same time his tail did, and they died, their screams holding agony.
He grinned and managed to take flight, his back claws grabbing Christy and lifting her off the ground just as a battalion of the Orcs swarmed into the spot where they had been standing.
He dropped her by the walls and shouted, “Help Heather and the others!”
He went back into the fray. He threw fire at a troop made up of at least ten of the Orcs, and then he roared in pain as something sharp and vicious slid against the skin of his back foot. An Orc he had thought dead was very much alive, seriously wounded, but alive, and it had just stabbed him!
He spun, blood flowing, but before he could kill the damned thing, Christy was there. She screamed, “Get off him, you rotten sonofabitch!” Then she brought down the club she had picked up from the dirt and cracked it right into the Orcs head.
He muttered, “Well it’s dead now.”
Christy shouted, “You’re hurt!”
He called back, “I’ll heal, and I told you to stay with the others!”
In response, she pointed past his shoulder. He turned and found himself in the midst of a swarm of the Orcs. Christy joined in, using an Orc club to kill several, something that amused him despite the grimness of the situation. Max was there then, breathing fire and using his teeth to help keep the two of them alive.
The ground became even more slippery with blood, and then they were all racing for the castle walls to help a group of humans, fighting with swords and knives and farm implements, to escape death at the hands of a large number of the enemy.
The sun came out but was quickly obscured by clouds swirling and dark with more rain. The rain felt good on his face and body, and he paused for a moment.
Christy was helping to drag a wounded witch to the doorway of the castle and as he watched, fear came in again. What if she died here today? How would he live with that, and without her? He had to get her off the field. The O
Orcs were still coming, swarming over the lip of the cliff and threatening to take the outer walls. How many of the damned things were there?
The rain came down harder, and he changed, running for the walls where he took a sword. He needed to be in the thick of it, to feel steel in his hands and to stand before the walls that his father had helped to erect, to be the wall before the woman that he loved. Blood was still seeping from the wound he had received from the Orc, and he looked down and saw it but knew he would heal. It was a clean gash and already knitting together thanks to his dragon blood.
The sword sang in the air and came down on a club held by a grunting Orc. His teeth clenched and he lifted a foot, kicking the Orc dead in the chest before burying the blade in its heart.
Christy had a little trickle of blood coming from her forehead and he shouted, “You’re hurt!”
She looked at him, and he saw that she did not even know. He groaned, changed, and then caught her up as well as the man she had been trying to take to the walls. He lifted them both up and over and said, “You’re bleeding. Stay here. I mean it!”
