Chapter 25
Chapter 25
ERIK THE VANDAWOLF
T he dragon king’s blood spills around my hands.
Graviter’s fierce roar sounds in my ears. But it’s his fire that I fear.
Only moments ago, Asha stood in the path of his flames, her hammer gripped in her hand as if she would defy the inferno that was coming for her.
Now, she’s gone. Vanished in a burst of lightning so bright, my vision swims with golden spots.
I couldn’t look away from her. I can’t shake the fear I saw in her eyes before she disappeared. But I also can’t deny the certainty that she wasn’t afraid for herself. She was afraid for me .
The connection between us is unbreakable, but that makes it dangerous.
She will stop at nothing to keep me alive.
Just as I would give everything for her.
I wrench my claws from Graviter’s back and leap to the ground before he can throw me off, risking being trampled in the process.
Landing in a clear patch of ash, my boots finally hit the ground for the first time since Asha and I took to the air.
I sprint toward the city wall, away from Graviter Rex as fast as I can.
My father’s sword is safely sheathed at my back, but I no longer have a bow and arrows. I used up all of my arrows fighting the flying creatures in the sky, after which I snapped the bow in half and used the broken pieces of wood like daggers.
An upward glance tells me that the other dragons and their riders are making short work of the flying creatures that remain in the sky.
None of those dragons are breathing fire, but they don’t seem to need it. Within seconds, they plow through the swarm of beasts, sending monstrous bodies falling to the ground.
The dragon flying at their head has crimson-red scales, eerily similar to the color of the clouds, which camouflages it against the sky. It’s especially difficult to make it out since I still have bright spots in my vision from Thaden’s magic, but its rider?—
Damn!
My eyes widen as the female silhouette riding that dragon jumps up from her seat, leaps off her dragon and out into the air, and slices through the body of a nearby beast with a weapon that I can’t quite make out— Is it a sword? —before her crimson dragon safely catches her.
Seconds later, she does it again, executing a fearless display of life-threatening attacks that send monsters falling to the ground.
My eyes narrow.
She can’t be human.
But I don’t waste any more time studying her because Graviter’s roars continue behind me, along with his thudding footfalls.
He’s coming after me, as I expected he would.
Blackbird has soared ahead of me, nearly reaching the city wall, and is circling back, his frightened eyes seeking me across the distance. But then his focus flies past me to the dragon coming after me, and he veers away again.
Blackbird is right to keep his distance.
Graviter can’t see past his own rage right now. The fact that he came close to burning Asha to death is evidence of that.
My arms and legs pump as I race toward the stone wolf that rests on its haunches in front of the city. If I can reach it in the next few moments, I’ll have time to jump all the way to its head, where I can call Blackbird to me. He can circle behind the monolith, protected from the dragon’s attack for the few seconds it will take me to leap onto his back.
We can fly away from here, and I can find Asha.
Above me, the sky has remained dark. The flying creatures may be nearly completely annihilated, but soft flickers of lightning remain, and the scent of blood is strong in the air.
This land…
Something has changed.
I don’t have time to figure it out.
The stone wolf is still fifty paces away. The last time I took shelter in front of it, I was more badly injured than I am now.
Ever since Asha removed the device from my heart and made me whole, my ability to heal my physical wounds has increased exponentially.
I can feel my skin knitting together across my thighs and arms and chest, but even so, it seems it’s impossible to outrun a dragon of Graviter’s strength and speed.
His paw swipes across the air, and I’m forced to duck and roll to avoid it, coming up in a crouch to face him head-on, prepared to use my claws again if I have to.
He rages at me, his roar so loud that it hurts my ears. “You protected Thaden Kane Ironmeld!”
But at least he hasn’t taken another swipe at me, his front paws digging into the ash and his talons clawing the ground.
No matter how loudly I shout back at him, I can’t compete with the volume of his voice, but I take a deep breath and shout all the same. “Fuck Thaden Kane! And fuck you, dragon king! I protected the woman I love!”
“The woman you—” Graviter jolts back from me, his forehead suddenly creasing, his scales rippling with the change in his facial expression. “The woman?—”
A deep fury rises within me, an unearthly growl beyond that of a wolf. “Were you so intent on revenge that you didn’t see her, dragon?”
It’s as if my voice is a whip.
Graviter flinches.
I don’t stop, prowling closer to him, close enough that he could burn me to ash with a single puff of fire. Also close enough that I could leap up to his neck again and do a significant amount of damage to him.
“The woman whose hammer I made,” I roar. “The woman I died for!”
He shakes himself and takes a step back from me. “No, that’s not… Asha wasn’t there…”
He seems so confused that my eyes widen and my voice lowers. “You really didn’t see her?”
He stumbles back another step, teetering to the left before he drops to his haunches on the ground. His gaze has become unfocused. Maybe he’s replaying the last few moments within his mind. Maybe he’s realizing just how close he came to killing my hope and depriving this land of Asha’s power.
He is deathly pale, his scales blanching to an unsettling shade of ivory. I wait for them to revert to their previous golden color, but they don’t.
His whisper sounds horrified. “I nearly killed Asha Silverspun.”
My claws slowly retract, my arms now hanging loosely at my sides as I contemplate a dragon king brought low by his own rage.
When Graviter first came upon Asha and me up on the clifftop where we had found Milena Ironmeld, Graviter was mindless with rage.
Asha tried to reason with him. She told him she wasn’t his enemy. She didn’t want to hurt him.
He roared back at her that his son’s death had stolen the light from his heart. He told her he would not stop until all Blacksmiths were wiped from the face of the Earth.
He would have killed Asha then if I had not attacked him like I just did, using my claws to open up long gashes in his back.
Like now, it was only because of the physical pain I caused him that he seemed to regain clarity.
If nothing else, these experiences have taught me that a fire dragon’s rage is all-consuming.
He literally couldn’t see past it.
“What have I done?” he whispers.
The consequences must be dawning on him.
He threatened her. She wasn’t his enemy before, but now?
Graviter remains hunched on the ground while the other dragons land around us, all ten of them.
The crimson-scaled dragon drops to the ground first, its female rider immediately jumping from its back. The other human riders are only moments behind her, dismounting from their dragons right after she does.
The dragons and their humans take up a formation that arcs around me in a semi-circle. They block off any possible escape other than back into the city, and even then, I would need to run to one of the gaps in the wall since the gate is closed.
Of course, there’s always Blackbird.
I don’t have to take my eyes off the humans to locate him in the air behind me. Judging by the faint beat of his wings, he’s flying over the very northern end of the city, wisely keeping his distance from the dragons. He has nothing on their size.
The female rider of the crimson dragon reaches me.
She has dark-brown hair, chestnut-brown eyes, light-brown skin, and a pale-brown birthmark that extends down her left cheek and across her jaw. She’s wearing simple leather armor—protective plates across her chest and thighs—but is otherwise dressed in a black tunic and pants.
Her right hand and forearm are covered in what looks like a long, black metal glove.
“Kneel!” she roars at me.
I probably shouldn’t be surprised by her hostility, but I’m not inclined to obey.
“Get on your knees, or I will put you down!” She makes a swift movement with her gloved hand that looks like a mere twitch.
At the gesture, a blade appears in her hand, glinting, sharp, and the length of a hunting knife.
She continues coming at me, now only five paces away, and I anticipate the way she plans to immobilize me by the way her muscles tense.
She’s fast—I’m impressed—but I have a wolf’s reflexes.
I evade the sweep of her leg and the swing of her blade, a combination of moves that would have been intended to drop me to a knee and then get the blade to my neck. If she’d succeeded, I wouldn’t dare make a move for fear she’d cut my throat.
Instead, I step to the right to avoid her leg and lean back to evade the blade. “I don’t kneel!”
It isn’t because I’m too proud.
My chest suddenly hurts.
Out of the blue, a sharp pain strikes through my heart. The intensity of it squeezes my chest and steals my breath, and I find myself snarling through a moment of confusion.
My wounds should have healed by now.
I’m certain I don’t have any life-threatening injuries.
All I know for certain at this moment is that I shouldn’t kneel, or I might not get up again.
She snarls right back at me. “You attacked a dragon, Vandawolf. A crime punishable by death. You’re lucky I haven’t spilled your blood already.”
She gives another flick of her hand and the blade she was holding elongates, now the length of a sword.
Whatever that contraption is on her arm, it’s capable of changing itself, but I’m certain it’s mechanical, not magical. Every time she changes it, it makes a clicking noise.
I take a step back from her, gritting my teeth against the pain until, just as suddenly, it stops again.
My head clears, the sharp sensation fades, and I quickly reassess my chances against these riders and their dragons.
The other humans are also wearing long, black gloves on one of their hands, which makes them all as much of a threat as the woman who continues to prowl after me even as I take careful steps away from her.
It won’t be long before I run out of space.
“You know who I am, but I don’t know who you are,” I say to the woman.
“My name is Catalina Shield. I am the champion of the human Queen Isabella Exalted.”
I’m not overly familiar with the customs of the humans who live in the northwest, but it sounds like Catalina holds a similar position to Elowynn of the Dawn, who is the Fae Queen’s Champion.
These humans swooped in here, presumably following Graviter on his way back to Asha and swiftly taking care of the threat in the sky, only to quickly become my opponents. I need to know if they came here already intending to force Asha and me to kneel to their Queen.
I think I know what Asha would say to them in that case.
“Is it your Queen’s wish to make an enemy of me?” I ask, seeking clarity. “Or do you want to punish me solely because of my actions toward the dragon king?”
Catalina’s jaw clenches, and I’m not sure how to read her momentary silence before she retorts, “Your actions led to the death of Milena Ironmeld,” she says. “Milena was our ally. Even before you attacked the dragon king, you made yourself an enemy of our Queen.”
I narrow my eyes at her.
Our actions didn’t harm Milena. We rescued her and tried to keep her alive.
Graviter knows it was Thaden who was responsible for Milena’s death, but he remains frustratingly silent, hunched over at the far side of the group, his scales still an alarming ivory color.
“Will you surrender, Vandawolf?” Catalina asks, her expression increasingly dark. “Or will we find out if you can survive a fight with a thunder of dragons?”
By a thunder, I think she means the whole group.
Certainly, each dragon is shifting where they stand, baring their teeth at me, their scales gleaming.
Their riders all step forward, flicking their gloved hands in the air, at which blades of varying lengths form.
I consider my chances and rank them low.
As fast as I am, surviving a fight with dragons would never be easy. Blackbird can’t get in close. And the sky continues to flicker with lightning, threatening another downpour and, most likely, another swarm of monsters.
What’s more, the longer I’m separated from Asha, the angrier I become.
She brought peace to my heart. She made me whole. She gave me back my life and my mind and my future.
Now, she’s been taken from me.
Thaden Kane has her.
And these… fucking dragons… are responsible for that.
Graviter Rex may as well have delivered her to darkness.
For the last ten years, I made sure I was always two steps ahead of everyone else, assessing my moves and countermoves, always prevailing, always achieving my goal, even if I experienced losses along the way.
But I didn’t intend to survive beyond making Asha a hammer.
Nothing I do will be according to plan now.
It’s time to make it up as I go along.
I extend my claws and bare my teeth, satisfied when my canines grow sharp enough to rip out throats.
I stare down at the small army of humans and dragons I’m facing.
Fuck them.
If they want a fight, they’ve got it.