Chapter 34 Lusca
LUSCA
After so many years, I’d believed I had nothing left to learn about myself.
How wrong I’d been. I’d overestimated my strength, and didn’t know if I’d survive long enough to get to the sea and begin the long process of healing from my wounds.
Battling the ice god had taught me one vital lesson that I feared might be my last.
Humility.
If it were to be my last lesson here, caught in the middle of the dry that sapped me of strength, I would be glad to teach it to this fool as well. This god, who now lay gasping with my beloved’s blade in his throat.
I had thought when I stabbed him that it might do no good, though I could follow the pulse of his blood, and knew where to strike. The salt and liquid of it ran in channels exactly like a dragon’s blood, the arteries and veins the same. Though this creature was no real dragon, he was close enough.
And the obsidian-bladed dagger of fate was close enough to the artery that would kill him if he twitched the least bit.
He knew it, too, and stayed as frozen as an ice statue.
He looked like one, as well. My hand trembled on the dagger’s handle, and his pupils went wide. For the first time, I saw fear in him.
“What is that knife?”
“A kind of obsidian,” I hissed. “Ancient and powerful, and one of three made powerful enough to change destiny itself.” The stories of these blades were as rare as the weapons themselves.
One myth said they’d fallen from the stars themselves.
One said they were shards of the dragon’s claw that had struck down the first Alpha. I did not know what was true.
I’d found one of the three in the ocean long ago, the blade shattered beyond repair. No one knew where the second blade rested, or if it was whole.
But the blade of this dagger was far stronger than normal obsidian, and it warmed now as it tasted the ice god, like his blood was its favorite meal.
God or not, I would let it devour him.
But first I had to know one thing. “Why did you force her? Why did you use your… tail without her consent?” He was a god, not some man who desired to slake his lust on a woman’s body.
Fighting him had taught me that he was not a beast. He had the ability to think, strategize.
He had hurt my beloved and needed to die, but first I had to understand what had occurred.
It had occurred to me only seconds into our battle that perhaps I should have asked Rada that before I sent her a hundred miles out to sea. But her words had inflamed me in a way I hadn’t felt in thousands of years.
“My brother. Trapped him. He trapped her.” Even the tiny movements of his jaw moved the knife enough to endanger him. I pulled it out a bit, using the pitiful strength I had to stop the salt blood from flowing too copiously.
“Your brother?”
He spoke a name I’d heard long ago, in stories. “Edan.”
I hissed, “He trapped her. How?”
“I do not know. Fire. He uses fire.”
Oh, damn me to silt. “And you used ice. Why inside her?”
“He was preparing her womb for breeding.”
The strength left my hand, the dagger clattering as it fell to the stone. But the dragon did not attack me. Instead, he collapsed so close to me, my own skin grew slightly chilled. But only slightly.
I pushed up onto both elbows and examined him. “What’s wrong?” But I knew. I could see the streaks of black twisting from the place where I’d cut him.
“I am… I am…”
We both said the word at the same time. “Poisoned.”