Chapter 41
The Nest - Part Two
The blade punched through.
It wasn't clean. The shell was as thick as my forearm and hard. But the worms reinforced the strike, driving it deeper until something inside the shell gave way.
I pulled the blade free. Dark fluid leaked from the wound, thick and steaming where it hit the freezing air, the smell punched me in the face before I could turn away—sulfur, blood, and rot—my stomach heaved. I swallowed it down and held the blade steady.
And then whatever was inside the egg screamed.
The sound cut through the storm. It crawled under my skin, and the worms twisted inside me, recoiling, trying to pull away from the noise as if it were burning them. My hands clenched on the sword.
Zo was on her feet. Sadie had her spears half-formed already, pale light flickering between her fingers, her face filled with concentration.
The scream stopped.
I looked at Zo. She was already moving toward the rock wall, one hand on Sadie's arm, pulling her along. Smart. Cover first, questions after. I retracted the blade, felt the worms collapse back into my forearm, and followed.
"What did you do?" Zo hissed.
"I killed it."
"Brilliant, truly inspired work."
"You agreed with the plan."
Snow and loose ice blew outward in a wave, skidding toward the drop and vanishing over the edge. The impact shook the stone hard, cracking the ice shelf.
It moved toward the eggs. It had four legs and wings folded tight against its back.
A long tail dragging behind it, the tip carving grooves into the stone with each step.
Its scales were black in the storm-dark, edged with deep red along the ridges of its spine and the joints of its legs.
Smaller than Klaus. Maybe half his size.
"Don't move," Mabel said. "Don't breathe."
The dragon crossed the ledge slowly. Its head swung low, level with the eggs, and each pass of its snout sent a gust of hot air rolling across the stone that I could feel from where I hid. It stopped when it reached the one I'd killed.
It sniffed the broken shell. Its nostrils flared, drawing in the smell of the dark fluid, the cold air, and whatever else it could read from the scene.
Then it bit down and tore the egg apart.
The shell crumpled under its jaws. Fluid sprayed across the snow, black and steaming, and the dragon kept ripping chunks of shell and membrane and whatever soft thing had been growing inside, swallowing them whole without pausing.
Piece after piece after piece, and when there was nothing left of the first egg, it moved to the next one.
And the next.
And the next.
The dragon finished the fifth egg and paused.
Its head turned. Slow. Plates of scale sliding over each other with a dry scraping sound, and its eyes—red-gold, slit-pupiled, burning with their own heat—swept across the ledge.
The dragon's eyes passed over the alcove. Past us. Over us.
It held there for one second. Two. Three.
Then it turned back to the eggs and kept eating.
I counted. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. The dragon moved through the remaining eggs without pause—crack, tear, swallow, move—and by the time it finished the last one, there was nothing left on the ledge but shell fragments and dark stains spreading into the snow.
The dragon held still for a long time with its head low and its tail flat against the stone.
Then it jumped.
It launched itself off the ledge, its wings snapping open as it flew off.
"Did that just happen?" Zo asked.
"Yes."
"It ate its own eggs…"
Mabel poked out of my neck. "Survival… her nest was compromised. Something killed one of its young. Eating the rest prevents scavengers from getting the nutrients."
"That's fucked," Zo said.
"That's dragons," Mabel said.
The storm was still raging. The ledge was exposed, and our cover was gone. The eggs had been the only reason this shelf existed as a nesting site, and now it was just flat, open rock with a dead smell soaking into the snow.
"Can't stay here," I said. "The dragon knows something killed its young. It'll come back."
"The ridge keeps going up, there might be another shelf higher. Something with real cover."
I looked up. The rock face stretched into the storm above us, disappearing into grey and white and nothing. Impossible to tell how far it went or what was up there.
But staying put was the same as waiting to die.
"Up it is," I said.
Zo nodded. Sadie didn't argue.
The second climb had been harder than the first in every way.
Thicker ice. Stronger wind. Holds that crumbled under my fingers.
The worms had done most of the work, driving into the rock and pulling me up hand over hand while my actual muscles contributed less and less with each foot of elevation gained.
Zo pulled herself over the edge and dropped beside me. Then, Sadie and the troll. All of us on the stone, the wind cutting over our heads instead of through us.
An overhang. A shelf of rock jutted out above the ledge, blocking the worst of the storm.
"Better," Mabel said. "The overhang hides us from above. The dragon can't land here without folding its wings, and it can't climb up without making enough noise to wake the dead."
"It can fly up," I said.
"With what landing space? Look at this ledge. Fifteen feet wide, maybe. Cliff wall on one side, drop on the other. It would have to hover."
I sat up. The ledge was deep, carved back into the cliff face where centuries of weather had worn a dark patch into the stone.
"I'll check it out," I said.
"I'm coming," Zo said.
We moved toward the dark patch together, which turned out to be an empty cave.
"This'll work," I said.
"Better than freezing to death in the open." Zo was already turning back toward Sadie.
We helped Sadie into the cave. The troll positioned itself near the entrance, its bulk blocking most of the wind and throwing darkness across the cave. A wall of muscle and ice between us and whatever was out there.
"How are you holding up?" I asked Sadie.
"I'll live," she said.
Not exactly the answer I wanted, but it was the one she was going to give me, and pushing wouldn't get a different one.
"We need to discuss our situation," Mabel said, extending from my neck.
"What situation?" Zo asked. "Besides the obvious 'trapped on a cliff with a pissed-off dragon' situation?"
"That one, yes."
"We can't wait this out," I said. "The storm could last days. We've got no food. Water's fine—plenty of ice to melt—but starvation hits me harder than it hits you two." The worms needed fuel. I could already feel the pull starting; that meant the clock was ticking.
"We could keep climbing," Zo said.
"Into what?" Mabel cut in. "More mountain? More nests? The higher we go, the deeper we get into dragon territory. At least the one circling us is mid-sized. Go higher, and we might find one that makes Klaus look like a hatchling."
Sadie shifted against the wall, her jaw tight. "What about waiting for daylight? The dragon might move on."
"Or it might not," I said. "Dragons are patient. Cedric's memories are clear on that. If it thinks something killed its young, it'll search until it finds it. And 'gets bored' could be a week from now."
I looked at the three of them. Zo, bruised and exhausted, still sitting as if she were ready to stand up and hit something. Sadie, injured, conserving what little she had left. The troll at the entrance, silent, waiting for an order. And Mabel, coiled against my neck, pretending she wasn't scared.
Four options, none of them good.
Wait and hope the dragon loses interest. Sit in this cave, burn through what little strength we had left, and pray we didn't freeze or starve before the storm passed. Passive. Safe in the short term. Suicidal in the long term.
Leave now. Climb down in the dark with the storm still raging and the dragon circling below. That got us moving, but it also got us killed. One wrong step on the ice and we'd fall, or worse, the dragon would spot us on the cliff face with nowhere to run.
Keep climbing. Go higher, deeper into the mountains, hope we found better shelter before the cold finished what the fight with the first dragon had started. But every foot of elevation was more ice, more wind, and more territory that belonged to things that could eat us.
Or.
"We could kill it," I said.
Zo looked at me. Her expression was the one she made when someone said something so stupid it circled all the way back around to interesting.
"Kill the dragon," she said.
"Yes."
"Are you out of your damn mind?"
"I believe he is serious," Mabel said from my neck
"Dead serious," I said. "Look… we can't stay, we can't go down, and going up is a coin flip that probably kills us anyway. The dragon's the problem. It's the reason we're trapped here. So our only option is to remove the problem."
"We also have one injured fighter and a death wish," Zo said.
"We have more than that. We have Sadie's light. We have your kinetic absorption. We have the troll. And we have my worms."
"Klaus almost died to us," I said. "We hurt him. Badly."
"Klaus had already been fighting the Keeper," Sadie said. "He was wounded before we engaged. And most of the damage came from Kaz."
That was true. Kaz had done the heavy lifting against Klaus. Kaz, who was built to fight things like this, whose Origin turned him into a walking sun. We didn't have Kaz. We had a worm-infested dock worker, a kinetic brawler running on fumes, and an injured light-user.
"This one's smaller than Klaus," I said. "A lot smaller."
Zo stared at me. The humor had left her face. She was reading me, trying to figure out if I actually believed what I was saying or if this was desperation wearing a plan's clothes.
"You're serious," she said.
"We can't outrun it. We can't outwait it. We can't outclimb it." I held her eyes. "So we outfight it. Or we sit here and die slowly, which… and I want to be real clear about this, is not how I'm going out."
Sadie hadn't moved. She was watching me with those silver-grey eyes, and I couldn't tell if what I saw there was assessment or something closer to agreement.
"We're not strong enough," she said. "Not without a real plan."
"So we make a plan," I said.