Chapter 24 Wyverns #2
Black, foul strength flooded past me, crossing the room as swift as dark lightning. There was a scramble on a packed stairway. A body fell. A scream.
I cursed myself for being off guard. Then my urgency, my frustration, and the grating pain in my hand were all washed away by delighted fury.
Battle. At last.
The locations of draca aligned in my thoughts. Two behind me and one on the stairway were caught in this wyfe’s oily, black tentacles of command. One by one, I crushed the tentacles with my mind. Through our gripped hands, I felt Miss Rees quiver as each snapped.
“You have me,” I whispered. “And I have you.” My strength was swelling fantastically, unlike anything I had experienced. I swept up the black potency around her and crushed it back into her. She was making sounds now. Gasps and whimpers.
Alarm was spreading through the assembly, but not panic. People helped a grimacing young man to his feet on the stairway. No one understood what had happened. The draca who clawed him, a lindworm, had retreated to sit on his haunches. Waiting.
The eerie blue of draca flame flashed from another room. Even that indirect reflection threw heat on my cheek. I released Miss Rees’s hand—her grip had weakened to water—and she collapsed to her knees as I turned to the new threat.
Shouts erupted in the other room, and pounding, running feet. The orange flicker of mundane fire grew, and the entrances to the room jammed with panicked guests. Bodies collided, sending men and women reeling.
I reached my awareness through the wall and sensed another wyfe boiling with black strength.
Two opponents. I bared my teeth, ecstatic, excited by the chaos of running people and spreading smoke, then shredded her oily trails of command.
One trail I ignored. She had attempted to seize control of Jane’s wyvern, and my mind sensed a glowing silver orb surrounding the wyvern, sizzling the attempt into nothing.
Wyverns had their own defense, much like our Longbourn firedrake had used against Lydia, but even more potent.
“Elizabeth!” A broad hand took my arm. I looked up at Darcy, his jaw set, a smudge of soot on his temple. He looked very severe and grave.
“Do not fret,” I told him cheerfully. “I did not expect two, but I have them controlled.” Voices in the other room were calling for calm. “Where is Lord Wellington?” Had he caught anyone at the doors? The wyves dosed with venom were unimportant. We needed to catch their abductor.
Yuánchi’s voice filled my mind. Are you safe?
Stay away! In the delight of battle, I threw the thought as a command. It bounced off his distant strength like scrunched-up notepaper bouncing off a stone rampart, but I felt his astonished surprise.
“We restrained a crazed wyfe in the Egypt room,” Darcy said. “A draca burned some drapes. Is there another affected wyfe?” He squinted at me. “Are you enjoying this?”
“Two wyves were dosed with venom,” I said gleefully. “This one is strongest…” I turned, but the wyfe who hurt my hand was gone. “Miss Rees escaped! Oh, there.” I pointed to her, behind the downed ropes around the pedestal for Gramr.
“She has the dagger,” Darcy said.
Miss Rees had lifted the ten-inch curved blade vertically between her eyes. She turned it slowly as if admiring the dark gleam. She would have made a convincingly mad Lady Macbeth. People backed swiftly, leaving Darcy and me nearest.
She saw us and moved her left wrist near the blade. A threat.
“I thought you had her controlled,” Darcy hissed.
“I meant I isolated her from draca.”
But I could do more. I called the wyverns. My excitement had cooled enough that I made it a request, not a command, but of course they came. As the crowd pressed to the walls, the wyverns emerged, flanking Miss Rees and settling in taut crouches, each seven or eight yards away. Close enough.
The exhibit room stilled to frightened whispers. Traces of smoke drifted, laced with the stink of burned wool.
Lord Wellington stepped smartly to my other side.
“This is Miss Rees,” I said to him, loud enough to include her. “She was abducted. She has been mistreated.”
Lord Wellington bowed, his gaze never leaving her. “Miss Rees. No one has been seriously injured. We are here to help. Would you assist us by placing that dagger on the floor?”
She tilted the dagger. Reflections rippled along the serrations. Precisely, she touched the blade to the fleshy base of her left thumb. Her motion was so measured that the well of blood seemed unconnected—a gory coincidence.
Mutters and gasps rose from the onlookers. Darcy and Lord Wellington shifted their stances, trading glances as they prepared to rush forward.
“It does not hurt,” Miss Rees said with the simple relief of a child.
“See?” She held out her cut hand. Drops ran into her palm, trickles of dark red that pooled in her bone-white skin.
She closed her fingers, wetting the tips, then rubbed them along the flat of the blade, smearing a crimson streak.
From a dozen points, the flat of the blade began to smoke. Miss Rees waved it as if frustrated, trailing thin, parallel streaks in the air, then held the flat horizontally in front of her face, eyes narrowed to see through the smoke.
In a well-trained, musical voice, she sang words of strange syllables in a peculiar melody.
My gut smashed into a knot like an icy hand had grasped my insides. The room vanished. My vision turned black, but I was not unseeing—I was in another perspective, dark and ferociously cold.
“Darcy…” I said uncertainly. Blindly.
Swirling chill sucked the heat from my arms. My legs. Then Yuánchi’s presence erupted around me like a yellow sun. His voice bellowed No! like thunder.
Again, my vision changed, but this was a relief.
I had fallen into Yuánchi’s cradling presence.
I shared his inhumanly exact vision. He had launched from the ground and was climbing past the treetops, branches tossing with each beat of his wings.
An expanse of the Thames came into view.
The frozen surface shone like mercury in the moonlight but was spotted with hot torches and celebrating people.
The cold and dark perspective returned, dragging at me, but was forced away by Yuánchi’s commanding thought—Stay with me.
London rooftops began to pass. Uneven wood shingles. Rough slate. Heated plumes from chimneys. The view swerved to follow a street. Stunned faces turned up as we passed.
They see you, I thought.
It does not matter.
“Elizabeth!” Darcy’s voice shouted. My human ears had been hearing crashing stone, yelling, and thumps.
“I cannot see,” I answered, trying to hold my voice steady.
“Jane needs you!”
Do not go! Stay with—
Violently, I slammed my self closed and forced Yuánchi’s thoughts away. Human vision returned.
Miss Rees stood a dozen paces away, Gramr smoking in her hand. A blur of writhing bronze and gold tumbled between us. The wyverns were fighting. Chunks of stone sprayed as they strained for purchase, their claws gouging the floor.
I opened my mind, and the invisible conflict was revealed.
The venom-fueled potency I had pushed back into Miss Rees had broken free, vastly strengthened.
A writhing black leash had captured the mind of Lady Catherine’s wyvern and commanded her to attack.
If Jane’s wyvern had not blocked her, we would be dead.
Jane, big belly and all, was beside me, her hand stretched toward her wyvern, her face straining. “Help me!” she cried. “I am losing her.”
A second black leash was attacking the mind of Jane’s wyvern, held back—barely—by a shaking silver orb that surrounded the wyvern. Jane was supporting her wyvern’s defense, pouring strength through the silver thread of their binding, but the silver orb was failing.
This, at least, was a situation I had faced before when Lydia tried to take Mamma’s drake. I grabbed Jane’s hand, found the gleam of their binding, and added my strength to hers.
The golden wyvern’s defense flared blinding bright. Every trace of the vile black filling the room burned away like mist in a blazing noon.
The slashing frenzy of the wyverns ceased. They separated, feinting and wary, hissing through bared teeth. Ripped strips of wing hung. Gashes in their scales dripped golden blood.
Miss Rees collapsed to her knees, her white gown puddling around her. Her sobs filled the deathly still room. The dagger slipped from her fingers and rang on the floor.
“Thank you,” Jane said softly to me. “I did not know what I was doing.”
“You were doing very well,” I said.
Mary emerged from the crowd. She took a cautious step toward Miss Rees. “Joane?” Miss Rees turned her tear-streaked face to Mary, eyes wide with recognition.
The crystal chandeliers tinkled. The floor vibrated under my toes. Yuánchi had arrived.
I reached for his mind, expecting to see the museum courtyard, but his perspective was high in the sky. An astonishing panorama of moonlit London narrowed as he plunged toward the silver, frozen Thames.
Eyes closed, I felt the floor shake under my feet. Tipped objects clunked and smashed. I struggled for balance, hands outstretched, but I stayed in Yuánchi’s view while the stone floor jerked and shouts rose.
Yuánchi was diving, his wings tucked, air thrumming.
The scene on the ice became distinct, late-night celebrators fleeing, lamps and torches falling, people sprawling.
Then the ice buckled. A black crevasse split, unlit, cold, and deep.
Huge, wet wings splayed over the ice, then a lithe, black neck emerged.
Yuánchi’s thoughts filled with awe. She wakes. Then, with an urgency I had never heard, Elizabeth Darcy Bennet. Hold fast to me.
The black head rose. A colossal body clambered free. Each clawed step smashed thick ice. The faceted eyes turned toward Yuánchi—and looked through his eyes into mine.
Violence, ruthless as bitter winter, filled me. A dragon’s voice, feminine and ecstatic, caressed my soul. My wyfe of war.
A cyclone of black strength filled my veins. Fear melted away. I laughed and shifted back to my own vision.
Mary was kneeling beside Miss Rees and holding her hand. Miss Rees’s other arm was extended, propping up her swaying torso, her palm flat on the floor.
Her fingers were inches from the hilt of Gramr. The hilt she had dared to hold.
“Thief,” I whispered. “The dagger is mine.”
Issuing judgment was a long-lost delight. The sentence of punishment was effortless, a command I sent that crushed the defenses of Jane’s gold wyvern and seized her mind—a command that made the wyvern dig her claws into the stone floor and hurl herself forward.
A wyvern’s attack is not the floating leap of a wolf or a bear. It is the streak of a loosed crossbow bolt. The gold wyvern struck Miss Rees faster than a human eye could follow, but I felt the scythe claws cut and the blood and flesh spray.
Yuánchi’s mind fell on me like an ax, shearing away the mad, dark presence that had filled me. His embrace trapped me in featureless quiet. The chill of black strength drained.
Only my weak, human eyes remained to view the carnage.