Page 100 of Dragon’s Rebel

“How the hell did they even get in?” Blaze muttered. “Corwyn told us he didn’t have the keys to the new wards. That’s what he wanted from us. I don’t understand…”

Tempest saw Tyr him flame the hellhounds in the tunnel, saw them howl and writhe, falling dead and smoking in the hallway.

Zane was bursting out of the elevator, into the upstairs atrium. He had a gun and was shooting as the door opened, each magic blue fireball getting a hellhound.

Tyr had turned now and was running back towards them, probably heading for the portal room to head off any attack coming from the tomb. Tempest looked back at the hallway he’d just left and saw more hellhounds. Tyr! she shouted. Go back! There’s more!

And there were still more, coming down from the ballroom to converge on Zane.

Where were they all coming from?

Why did she feel so strange?

She studied the monitors, feeling like there was something there she was missing, something she couldn’t quite see.

Draw.

She reached for her sketch pad. Draw what? Wherever she drew the people, the hellhounds were always somewhere else.

Draw the hounds. Her fingers flew over the page. Hounds in the ballroom. Hounds in the lair. Why are they here? What’s the bad thing?

She closed her eyes and just let her fingers move. When they stopped, she opened her eyes, and gasped. It wasn’t here at all. It was Thorne and Rebel. Chained. Surrounded.

“It’s about them,” she said. “It was never about us.”

Blaze was looking over her shoulder. “It’s a diversion?”

Tempest flipped the page and started drawing again. This time she was drawing hellhounds. She sketched one, with a wizard far in the background. And then she sketched the other dogs. But every time she went to fill in the outline, she balked.

“What is it?”

“I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t fill in the outline. It’s like they don’t have any substance.”

She paused and stared at Blaze. They said at the same time, “They’re not real.”

“Illusion magic,” Blaze said. “I’ve never seen anything on this scale. It would take an artifact—some kind of magical generator. Maybe more than one.”

Tempest sat down and started sketching. How to make the illusions stop. Where was the generator? The hillside? The roof? The tomb itself, piggybacking on its magic?

Blaze left the room, but Tempest barely noticed. She was sketching lines of ghostly hellhounds, trying to trace them back to their origin.

A grid. Blaze came running back, carrying a canvas bag. She held it out. “Grenades,” she said. “Have you figured it out yet?”

“A grid.” She ripped the page out of her sketchbook and handed it to Blaze. She took off at a run. A minute later she appeared on the security camera near Tyr, yelling at him and waving her hands.

He scooped her up in his huge forepaws, and then took a couple of running steps and jumped, wings partly unfolded.

He arrowed through the tunnel, skimming over the illusion of the dead hellhounds, and out into the air.

Tempest couldn’t see him anymore. All she saw was Zane fighting hellhounds in the mansion; and the rest of them marching through the tunnels toward her.

They would be here soon. If she was wrong, and they were real, she’d be dead.

Outside, she heard a muffled ‘boom,’ and the mountain shook. Blaze and Tyr must have found something.

She heard another ‘boom,’ and then another. Each one came from a nexus on her grid. Tyr was flying Blaze from point to point, destroying the generators.

There was a fourth ‘boom,’ and the hellhounds in front of Zane suddenly winked out. He looked around, startled.

The ones in the ballroom were next to vanish, and then those in the hallways heading for her. She scanned the monitors. Portal room. ‘Boom.’ Hellhounds gone.

She watched the ones in the tomb. ‘Boom.’ Six generators. That was it.

The hell hounds in the tomb looked up at the camera, eyes glowing red.

The power indicator for the tomb was still dropping.

Those ones were real.

Tyr! She called out. They’re in the tomb!

And then she started to run.