Max
They came in on a hard wave of lethal leather and claws, more wyverns than I could count in a glance, and at the head of them flew a Kharvox.
For half a heartbeat my stomach dropped. Hadn’t Drakken’s dragon torn the throat and wings off an alpha Kharvox the day the heirs carried me out of the Scorched Wastes? The whole academy had chewed on that fight for two weeks. I’d seen the holo of the corpse a dozen times, crimson scales and fangs.
I squinted—my sight ran sharper than a human’s; the demon’s gift, whether I’d asked for it or not—and the relief died on the vine.
Not the same one. A new one. They’d built this one bigger than Drakken’s dragon, its hide a wall of crimson scales and spikes the size of my foot, each overlapping the next like forged armor.
Dark-orange fire guttered between its fangs—fire no true wyvern should have.
And its eyes were sharp, weighing, patient.
Bred, not born. The Pallid Court’s workshop had been busy.
Last time the wyverns had flown riderless. This time, nearly three dozen riders clung to their backs.
“Twenty newly made vampires.” Caspian’s voice cut over the wind behind me, low and hard, none of the usual laughter in it. “Ten witches leashing them.”
I followed his line of sight, and my skin crawled.
The vampires were wrong. Fresh out of the Pallid Court’s vats and not long on their feet, by the look of them: jerking between graceful and wrong, mouths already cracked open on too many teeth. Their eyes hadn’t settled into any color a living thing should wear.
The witches held the leashes. Ten of them in red coven robes, hands trailing threads of dark purple light that ran down into the vampires’ skulls. Where a thread snapped taut, a vampire lunged.
“Puppets,” I said.
“They threw mutant wolves at us out at Greyhold.” Caspian snarled. “Now they’re growing fucking vampires. They’re field-testing them.”
The chills slithered up my spine. The White Witch was using Covenant land for target practice.
There was no more time to chew on it.
“Die!” Caspian roared, and the front ranks closed in.
His death cards flew first, a fan of them spinning out ahead of us, runes flaring. Where they struck, wyvern hide split and the glyphs went off in bursts of fire and shrapnel. The dragon’s chest swelled under me, and he set loose his fire, a torrent of blue so hot the air bent around it.
I sent both chakrams out, one from each hand, at the nearest wyvern with a vampire rider.
Got him! Coldiron crowed.
The rings sheared clean through the beast’s neck and came whistling home to my palms, slick with green gore. My chakrams were forged from the DarkVeil’s own Coldiron, the volatile kind, and it giggled the whole time. It didn’t care whose blood it spilled. It only wanted more.
The wyvern dropped out of the sky. A vampire lunged through the gap, trying to land on the dragon’s back, but a death card from Caspian put him out of his misery, and he plummeted after it.
I threw again.
The dragon’s fire should have burnt the front rank to ash. It didn’t. The witches had positioned themselves at the rear, casting wide and broad, their threads of purple light flaring into shields. The dragon flame washed over the wyverns and left them screaming but whole.
The dragon stopped trying to burn them.
He went through the rank with brute mass instead, charging straight at a wyvern with a witch riding on its back.
The pair had broken from the rear to test us.
They’d underestimated how fast something that vast could move.
By the time they realized it, there was no escaping him.
The dragon’s jaws closed around the wyvern and bit it in two.
The witch turned her spells on him, chanting hard. My chakram didn’t care. It sailed straight through her magic, swallowed it like it was nothing, and went through her chest with a giggle. She died with the horror still frozen on her face, her scream taken by the wind.
Shit. DarkVeil Coldiron was something else entirely.
The metal sang.
Then the vampire swarm hit us.
They flung themselves off their mounts, springing across the gaps between wyverns and dragon, clawing for any hold on his back. The three of us moved like one unit—dragon, wolf, and me, the way we had at Greyhold—and we were good. We were lethal.
We were also three against far too many.
Caspian planted himself at my back, longsword carving black arcs, death cards filling the gaps no blade could reach. I worked the other side, chakrams flashing out and snapping back, my feet jammed under the dragon’s shoulder scales so the wind couldn’t peel me loose.
A vampire got inside my guard.
It came up over the dragon’s flank too fast to track, and its claws raked my shoulder before I could pull clear. Pain lit white down my arm. Hot blood welled through my sleeve.
The smell of it hit the lab-vampires like a lash. Every starving head snapped toward me at once, and the things went mad, fighting their own leashes to reach me.
Behind me, Caspian made a sound I’d never heard from him, a bellow that was all wolf, all rage, and his longsword came down and cut the vampire that had touched me in two.
“You’re bleeding, Max,” he snarled.
“It’s nothing.”
But the wound told me what the fight hadn’t, until now.
Every claw that had reached me had reached to grab. To drag. To haul me off the dragon’s back. Not to kill.
Caspian saw it the same instant I did.
“Return to base!” he roared over the wind, over the swarm. “They’re not here to wreck the fortress—they want Max! They tried to take her!”
The truth of it settled in my gut like a swallowed stone. I was the target. A whole sky of teeth and fire, and every bit of it bent on taking me alive.
At Greyhold, we’d put down every mutant in the field and left nothing breathing. Even then, something had nagged at me—a presence behind the eyes of the alpha beast that led them, watching me through it. Someone had seen me. Someone a long way off.
And now they’d thrown a sky full of monsters across hostile ground just to put their hands on me. I couldn’t be worth that. I couldn’t possibly be that important. They must’ve mistaken me for someone else.
You have no idea how important you are, girl. The demon’s amusement curled through me, smug as ever.
Sometimes I tossed a thought out like bait, hoping it would bite and let something slip. It never did. A crumb here, a crumb there, just enough to keep me circling and never enough to know. I was a toddler at a card table across from a thing probably older than the world, and we both knew it.
The dragon banked hard, wheeling us back toward the base—get the swarm over the walls, into range of the ground guns, and let our side even the odds.
The Kharvox cut him off.
It dropped into our path with five wyverns at its flanks, and the dragon pulled up short with a roar that rattled my teeth. While he traded snapping jaws with the alpha, a brown wyvern slid in low beneath his belly, talons spread to gut him.
I locked my legs around the dragon’s neck and threw myself upside down, head toward the ground far below. The world spun, the horizon tilting wildly.
A sweep of the Kharvox’s claws passed close enough to part my hair. I ducked it and flung a chakram down along his flank.
It took the sneaking wyvern’s head off before it could lay a talon on Drakken’s dragon.
Got it! Coldiron giggled.
I righted myself. The dizziness ebbed.
A witch on the lead wyvern threw out a hand, and the mage beside her—I’d felt him before I marked him, the darkest signature on the field—called orders to the Kharvox in the demonic tongue.
“Keep the dragon engaged. Stall it. The girl is what we want.”
“You’re certain it’s her?” the witch asked, in the same tongue.
The mage turned his head. His dark green eyes found me and held, weighing, the way you’d study a rare coin you weren’t sure was real.
“Grab her, whatever it costs. We test her after. If she isn’t the one, we kill her.”
Every word dropped into my skull. I understood the demonic tongue the way I understood my own. I’d told no one, and I wasn’t about to start now.
“Net coming!” Caspian bellowed.
A net of black mesh swung toward me.
The dragon turned his head and breathed.
Blue fire took the net in the air and ate it whole. Whatever they’d warded it against, it wasn’t dragon fire. Burning scraps rained past us.
Caspian fought the rear like a man possessed, death cards shredding the swarm, his longsword taking the heads off two mutant vampires that cleared the gap and scrabbled for a hold.
He was blindingly fast. A witch flung a spell at his back and he threw up his forearm—the Coldiron armguard—and the spell shattered against it.
“Shit.” Half a laugh in it. “It blocks nasties.”
Nasties. Nasties. Coldiron preened.
A wyvern had crept onto the dragon’s blind side, a vampire crouched low on its spine, both of them angling for me.
I jumped.
The dragon roared—not fury this time. Fear. Fear for me, the sound raw enough to crack me open.
I touched down on the wyvern’s back, and the vampire came up to meet me.
It didn’t go for my throat but lunged to grab, fingers hooking for my arms, my collar, anything it could use to drag me off and away.
My chakram took it across the throat before its hands found a hold.
The ring bit deep and came back to my palm slick and green.
Mutants all had green blood, and the made thing’s head tipped from its shoulders.
The rest of it slid off the wyvern’s flank.
The mount felt me where its rider should have been and twisted, its wyvern neck whipping around to take my leg off at the knee.
I drove my will into the second chakram, and the ring poured long and narrow into a spear between one breath and the next.
I buried it through the beast’s skull to the haft before the jaws could close.
The wyvern died under me and tipped toward the ground. I rode it down a beat, then shoved off into open air.
For one weightless second there was nothing under me but a very long fall.
Then the dragon’s talons closed around me, as gentle as a lover’s embrace, and flung me up toward his back. Caspian was already reaching. He caught me out of the air and hauled me down against the scales, one arm clamped around me until my feet found their hold.
“Thanks,” I breathed.
“Badass, lioness.”
Out ahead, the dragon opened the Kharvox down one flank, scales sheeting away in a spray of dark green blood, and the alpha mutant broke off with a furious shriek and fell back into the swarm.
We’d torn a hole in them. The dragon drove through it and climbed, hauling us up over the base, and the ground force answered.
Volleys ripped up from the walls into the enemy rank.
After that it all ran together. Coldiron shrieked in my skull, drunk on the slaughter and still fishing for my praise.
The demon kept up a running stream of battle-talk, telling me where to throw before I’d found the target.
The dragon roared and poured fire. Caspian howled, a wild victory note, every time his blade bit through hide and bone.
Hundreds of iron arrows whistled past my ears, some trailing flame, punching wyverns out of the air.
Mutants screamed. The mages spat curses in a language only I could understand.
A heavy round—one of the old dragon-killers, ballista-fed—burst against a wyvern close enough that the heat slapped my face.
Nikolai’s vampires were good. Their aim was clean. It didn’t kill my stress: one bad shot, one twitch off line, and they’d blow the dragon, Caspian, and me clean out of the sky.
It was fucking mayhem.