An ice dagger had cut his other wrist, leaving him literally helpless to even hold a weapon. He bared his sharpened fangs, nevertheless, as the butcher king drew closer.
“Know this, Captain Whoever You Are, before you die.” He inhaled and exhaled a great puff of white air. “I will enjoy Vilhelmina’s sweet body and sweet blood day and night till she gives me an heir.” He tossed Mikhail a haughty smile, swinging his sword up to lay flat against his shoulder in a too-casual manner. “Then I’ll let my Legionnaires have a go at her. None of them have bedded a queen. That will be entertaining. And in all that time, you’ll be rotting in a cold, dark grave.”
Mikhail charged the animal and brought him to the ground, burying a knee on his throat. Dominik leveraged up and launched him off. Cries erupted on the parapet, not cries of pain and death, but of exclamation and surprise. The clanging of swords ceased. Both Mikhail and Dominik looked up to the upper parapet wall, where all eyes had swiveled.
Mina stood atop the banister, her arms outstretched, her unbound hair whipping in the glacial wind, and a haunting vibrant green aura rippling in flames around her body.
“Magic,” whispered Mikhail. “The legend.”
Her body rippled with power, then she roared, letting loose a sound that no human could produce. Her arms extended, stretching outward, long black claws like a bear’s growing from the ends. Then her legs lengthened and widened, as did her torso and her neck.
“Heaven save us,” whispered one of the Legionnaires standing nearby.
Her neck continued to stretch and stretch, her skin changing, shimmering like scales. No, not like scales. They were scales. Her face extended, jaws opening wide. Wider. Her long blond hair stiffening into a jagged spiky spine extending along the back of her lengthening neck until she wasn’t a woman any longer at all.
“My God,” he whispered as she grew taller, until the parapet wall crumbled beneath one of her mighty back claws, her body filling up the entire battlement. And the force of the promise, the vision given to her at her birth when Morgrid had cursed her launched upward in the behemoth form that towered on top of Izeling Tower and roared to the stars. A great white dragon.
She was fixed on something, someone beyond Mikhail’s vision from below. Her neck coiled back like a cobra, then snapped at the unseen object. A piercing woman’s scream echoed into the night as Mina, the dragon, lifted Queen Morgrid in her jaws, clamped around her torso.
“No! Guards! Help me!” screamed the queen who’d murdered and brutalized hundreds, thousands of her own people, just like her son now staring up in stupefied horror. “Nooooo!”
Mina’s eyes glittered bright emerald green with a shocking spark right before she snapped her jaws closed and severed the queen in half. The black storm of ice shards evaporated in a blink, the evil mass of clouds dissolving into the ether. Ice shards falling without force from the sky.
The white dragon queen reared up her head toward the night sky and released a deafening roar. Her head then snaked around and snapped down to the parapet where Mikhail stood, her serpentine green eyes focused on Dominik.
“Oh, no, she doesn’t.”
The wrist where the ice dagger had cut through him had knitted together and healed enough for him to bend over and pick up his double sword. While Dominik stared up in shocked horror at the dragon queen, Mikhail grabbed a fistful of his hair and jerked back.
“I am not a nobody. Know this, before you die. I am Mikhail Romanov, great-grandson to Rodin Varis, the first king of the land before your bloodthirsty mother slayed him on his throne. And I will restore his world of peace while you lie rotting in a cold, dark grave.”
Mikhail then tore through Dominik’s throat with his blade in one slice, jerking his head loose of his spine and slinging it up and over the parapet wall.
Mina’s dragon snorted a satisfactory huff of smoke. While Legionnaires scrambled to get away, she unfurled her white wings and flapped. The gusting wind was now caused by the storm of Vilhelmina Dragomir as she lifted off the battlement into the air, her body glittering like diamonds under the moonlight. She was horrifyingly beautiful. Mikhail smiled.
“My queen,” he whispered to himself as she circled down toward the battlefield.
With a hissing intake of breath, swooping down toward the retreating vampire army, she blew out a stream of electric-green flame, incinerating the screaming vampires in a flash. Dmitri and Katya, still mounted, led the charge against the retreating enemy.
“Yah!” bellowed Dmitri, letting fall from his hand a gold-tipped grappling hook on a chain, one of the many weapons forged in Cutters Cove for this day.
The Bloodguard and Arkadian equestrians still standing launched toward their enemy and let fly their grappling hooks, winding them above their heads as their cavalry pounded down the fleeing Legionnaires. A dozen hart wolves lay in pursuit with them, careening toward the woods.
The rabid vampires with sanguine furorem, and especially those pumped with Dominik’s elixir, didn’t retreat but fought like the maddened beasts they were. Marius, bleeding and roaring with rage, battled three at a time. Arabelle, not far away, engaged two more with Allora swooping in to take down a vampire coming at her back.
The pounding of boots reverberated on the battlement below as Legionnaires stormed upward to defend their queen and the king of Izeling. They circled Yuri, Gregory, and Dane. Dane tossed down his weapon and with a growling howl, ripped open his shirt the second before electricity snapped in the air and a flash of light blinded them all. In his place stood a towering, fierce hart wolf. A low growl rumbling from his throat, his tail whipping. The soldiers took a step back and raised their swords.
With a satisfied grunt, Mikhail heaved his weight off the wall, gripped his double-edged sword tight and leaped the parapet wall to land directly in the center with his men and Dane. The landing jolted his leg injuries. He winced but shook it off.
“Good of you to drop in, Captain,” said Gregory, grinning and wielding a battle ax with a head nearly the size of his own.
Mikhail smiled at the man’s humor at a time like this. He scanned the numbers. “Looks like ten to one.”
Yuri shrugged, blood dripping down his temple from a gash on his head. “We’ve had worse.”
“Indeed, my brothers. Let’s kill the bastards.”
With Dane’s agreeing growl, they lay into the enemy. The fight was far from over.
But above them, the roaring white dragon, the white queen of legend, burned away the enemy of the people, of the good and righteous. Creating a new world, ending the old in green flame. The night wasn’t won yet, but it assuredly would be.
He smiled, remembering the prophecy at her birth. “And she will be the savior of them all.”
Mikhail sliced through one attacker on his left then his right, taking a quick panting breath to glance up into the sky where she soared. The strength and power of beauty and beast in one body.
“Mina mine.”
Chapter Thirty-Two