Chapter 4
Making a hard left, I was glad I’d taken the time and spent the money on new tires as I flew off the crumbling asphalt and over the packed dirt and weeds that served as the shoulder of what some called a road in our little slice of Hell.
Through the thick tufts of three-awn grass, and tall, and spiny creosote bushes, I forgot to swerve before the heavy, wispy seed pods of the clumps of buffelgrass smacked me in the face, but at least I wasn’t fighting to keep my Harley upright.
Eyes never wavering from the deep crimson mushroom cloud growing on the eastern horizon, the closer I got, the more off-kilter, upside-down, inside-out, just plain wrong everything felt.
Not dangerous or threatening– neither my instincts nor the Dragon with whom I shared my soul were itching to pull the Sword of the Culloden Bronze Dragon Clan from the Ether or get scaly and let Lou kick some ass.
Nope, it wasn’t like that. However, it was foreboding. It was growing. And it was creepy as hell– but it wasn’t aggressive. It was simply wrong.
“Everything okay, Old Man?” I mentally called to him.
Lou was bothered. I could feel it. He didn’t answer– not even a growl nor a grumble. Hell, he didn’t even say, ‘Shut the hell up, Lad,’ and if I knew anything, it was that he never missed an opportunity to tell me to shut my damn mouth.
No, all I was getting was a restless, uneasy stirring coming from my couple of millennia-old partner in crime, and that was as far from normal as I was from a frozen tundra.
Then I felt it– the scales running the length of his spine raised like the hackles of my dad’s German Shepherd, Dutchess, when a raccoon stalked the garbage cans.
That hadn’t happened in centuries– not since right after my first Shift when the Rebel King Modthmar’s troops were advancing across the Kyle Rhea Strait towards the Sound of Sleat in the south with designs on using Loch Alsh as a way to sneak onto the Isle of Skye and attack us in our sleep.
Something had shocked the Old Man as much, if not more than that, and well, that shit was hard to do.
After all, he’d been alive for more than two thousand years.
“King Anluan,” I’d hoped using his given name, an extremely formal form of respect that I hadn’t used in years, would shock him enough to at least snarl at me.
Unfortunately, it didn’t. Still just dead air.
What was happening? What was he doing? Why was he…?
Oh shit! There it was. Something I hadn’t noticed before. Something that was right under my nose– or in the depths of my psyche, as the case may be– that I just plain missed.
Lou was listening. He was gathering information. He was on guard but not yet sounding the alarm.
“Alright, Old Man, you just let me know when I need to duck and cover.”
Once again, I only received silence for my trouble, but at least I knew he wasn’t about to come forth, take control, and blast everything in his path with Dragon Fire.
“Gotta take the positives where I can find ‘em.”
Exhaling an exasperated breath, I gripped the throttle tighter and pushed forward.
The air thickened the farther I rode toward the horizon.
Through a small tunnel of red clay, sand, and muck created by years of erosion, everything was dark for a split second before a blast of heat smacked into me like a Mack truck as I came out the other side.
Pressing on my chest and wrapping around me, it squeezed with such force that my lungs literally burned.
Magic– wild and uncontained– rolled across the desert in waves. It set my teeth on edge and raised the fine hairs along my arms. This wasn’t a fire. Nor was it an explosion.
It was a summons. But for whom?
“All I gotta do is figure out whose team they’re batting for, and who the hell had the nerve to fuck with my Wards.”
Tired of talking to myself, but too keyed up to stop, I opened the throttle almost as wide as it would go, giving my Harley a fresh infusion of gas and waiting for the roar of the engine to calm my rapidly fraying nerves.
Because I couldn’t buy luck with a million dollars, it didn’t come.
That beautiful, reassuring, rumbling hum was swallowed by a deep, resonant vibration skimming the ground, then slithering up the frame of my Fat Boy.
The desert was alive in a whole new, imposing way. Arrhythmia was humming a bone-deep timbre that had Lou up on his feet, his head low and his eyes glowing.
“Someone is fucking with things they know nothing of.” It was a warning, not a statement.
That explained a lot.
I’d seen battlefields– Supernatural and not.
Magical detonations and those created with chemistry and human hands.
In the old days, when we fought for King and Country, my Brethren and I had unleashed Dragon Fire without restraint in defense of our Homeland.
Although it had been necessary, the carnage was devastating, the loss of life overwhelming…
No matter how bad it got, not once had the sky turned blood-red or had the horizon looked like a gaping wound.
The mushroom cloud pulsed. I felt a heartbeat… Not from the mist… Not my own… But somehow connected to me…
Soft, feminine, fiery, and fierce, the heartbeat and its owner were more determined than a hundred Guardsmen marching into battle as it beat in opposition to the mushroom cloud. It called to my heart… to my soul… to the Darkness that lies within all unmated Dragons.
My vision blurred. My heart skipped a beat.
My lungs collapsed as a dense, unmoving wall of desert air slammed into my chest. Sharp and sudden, it stole my breath.
Then, just as quickly as it returned what it had taken.
My Harley wobbled. The tires worked hard to grip the dirt– to find purchase– as I fought to keep control.
“Son of a bi…,” I spat, still gulping air into my lungs.
Whatever or whoever was playing silly buggers with the fabric of our world hadn’t finished. Then I felt it again– that lone heartbeat, battling the pulse of mushroom cloud– and I realized…
“It’s beating in time with mine.”
“Aye,” Lou snapped. “Now go. She needs us.”
At least he was talking to me again. Weirdly, his gruff words only accentuated the feeling that something deep within both of us was changing, transforming… dare I say– evolving?
“Wait? What? Did you say ‘she’? Are you talking about the other heartbeat? Who is it? What do you know that I don’t? Lou. Lou?”
He was gone again. Dammit!
“You know I hate the silent treatment,” I snarled. “Well, I’m not playin’ today.” Not taking my eyes off the cloud, I added, mostly because I just couldn’t stop, “Holler when you’re ready to talk, Old Man. I got shit to do.”
Darkening and intensifying, the edges of the mushroom cloud expanded and contracted. It was reshaping, but it wasn’t doing it willingly. Something was pushing back from the inside. Something…
“The ferocious, lone heartbeat.” I was in awe. Who was in there was tough as nails, she refused to give up, simply didn’t know the meaning of defeat.
One thing was for sure. Lou was right, she needed us.
“Damn,” I breathed. “She is… amazing.”
Heat flared in the depths of my soul. A deep, instinctive certainty filled me from the inside, looking for a place to call home.
“That abomination isn’t meant to be here,” Lou ground out through gritted teeth.
“What? What isn’t meant to be here? The cloud? No shit.” I waited for a confirmation that never came. “What the fuck, Lou? What…?”
“This was never supposed to be possible. It was simply not supposed to be… period.”
“What. Are. You. Talking. About?” I demanded and pleaded and pretty much begged, but got nothing. King Anluan was deep in thought.
He had shut me out. It had never happened before, not even one of the millions of times I’d pissed him off over the centuries.
Whoever said there’s always a first time for everything…
Well, that genius should’ve kept his damn mouth shut.
Putting that shit out into the universe just gets it coming back tenfold– and usually in my direction.
Okay, enough of that. What did I know? Lou had gone dark. No sharing of information. No sharing of thoughts. No sharing of anything.
Okay, I was left to my own devices. That wasn’t such a bad thing. I had my own Magic, a pretty good mind, and was a damned good Warrior, if I did say so myself.
“Time to put on the big boy boots.”
Doing just that, I opened my preternatural senses wide, set my sights on ground zero of the mushroom cloud, got as close as I could, and let the search begin.
Up one side and down the other, right and then left and back and forth, using the pure white Magic of my heritage and from the Ancients Dragons, I examined every square inch at least ten times, and came up with bupkis… nada… nothing.
There was an impenetrable wall of the darkest, nastiest, hellish Sorcery I’d ever seen all around the blast sight. I couldn’t get close enough to pinpoint anything for sure. I had thoughts, feelings, and even a few guesses– and they all had apocalyptic consequences that I chose not to ponder.
Not to mention, I needed to find the woman who belonged to that fierce heartbeat and lend her a hand. Not only because I was a Guardsman, and that was what I did, but because, for some reason, I just knew I had to.
So, I shut it down. I pulled back my Magic. I gripped the throttle on my Harley so tight that I knew the design of the rubber grip would be forever embedded in my palms, and I held on tight.
Head down, my preternatural senses on high alert, the only thing I knew with absolute clarity was that something had torn through the fabric of Time and Space, and that something was fucking with Arrhythmia big time.
Oh, and that woman, the Warrior in her own right, was way too close to danger for comfort.