Never laugh at live dragons. The quote bubbled to the surface of Echo’s brain. Probably Tolkien. How fitting.
The dragon snapped its jaws experimentally, as if testing its range of motion. It looked vaguely hungry. Echo didn’t like that one bit. “How do we kill this bad boy?”
Dorian shot her an appalled glare. “We are not going to kill it,” he hissed. “It is very likely the last of its kind. I will not be the Drakharin held responsible for rendering their species extinct.”
“Okay,” Echo said, keeping her eyes on the dragon. It dipped and twisted, flying around the island. It turned lazy circles, head swiveling to and fro as it rose, higher and higher, until its wings were brushing the roof of the cavern. A long forked tongue snaked out, rasping over lips peeled back from hideously sharp teeth. It was licking its chops.
It was licking its chops.
“Shit,” Echo said, ever the soul of brevity.
The sound of her expletive made the dragon tick its head to the side. Those unnerving eyes narrowed into even more unnerving slits. It huffed and it puffed, raising itself as high as the cavernous ceiling would allow.
A sound rumbled from the depths of its chest, rather like that of a bellows. Gills that Echo hadn’t noticed before opened at the sides of its neck.
But it wasn’t underwater. Why on earth would it need gills?
It didn’t take long for Echo to learn why.
The scales on its neck opened and closed, and through the narrow openings their movement revealed, Echo saw a glow, low and red. It was an angry glow, full of menace.
Echo had half a second to bask in the idea that dragons really did breathe fire before the very real dragon breathed very real fire. Directly at her.
Her own fire responded without conscious instruction from her terrified brain. Her magic coursed through her body, driven by sheer instinct. She felt it spill not just from her hands, but from every inch of her exposed skin.
A wall of fire formed around her, brilliant white chasing away the shadows in the cavern. The dragon’s blazing breath collided with Echo’s own flames, and was overpowered by them. The fire was startlingly mundane, considering it had originated in a dragon’s belly. Echo’s, on the other hand, was pure magic.
The dragon’s fire petered out and Echo felt hers fade in the absence of an immediate threat. Pain flared hot and bright at the base of her skull, so powerfully that in better circumstances, with fewer fire-breathing dragons, she might have vomited.
“Can we kill it if it tries to kill us first?” As it was so clearly trying to do. Echo kept her eyes on the dragon as she directed her question at Dorian. The creature seemed in no particular rush to lunge at her again, but one could never be sure. Most of the dragons she’d read about had been mercurial at best, acrimonious at worst. “Then can we kill it?”
“We are not going to kill it,” Dorian hissed.
Before Echo could argue with him, the dragon roared and dropped its massive body into a dive. And that was when Caius woke up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Death would have been a kindness.
Everything hurt. Every inch of skin, every fiber of muscle, every sliver of bone. Caius groaned, and that hurt too, his vocal cords stripped raw by his own screaming. Something hard abraded his cheek as he tried to turn his head. Something hard and solid, pockmarked and uneven. Like stone.
That was new.
He opened his eyes and the world shifted around him. The view was the same, but different. Same rounded cavern walls. Same lonely little door at the end of a narrow stone bridge. Same unrelieved monotony. But he looked at it all now from the vantage point of the floor. Days had passed since the iron shackles had locked around his wrists and he’d been strung up like a freshly butchered pig. He felt like a freshly butchered pig. The welts along his back that had started to heal widened with every movement, however minuscule, and his inflamed skin was feverishly hot compared to the cool stone beneath him.
Voices, familiar ones, drifted to him. With great difficulty, he turned his head toward them, noting the fractured lines of a broken circle in the stone. The glyph. It had been shattered. Thoroughly.
When he saw his friends, he would have wept had there been any tears left in him, had his sister not wrung him dry.
Hair the gleaming color of polished steel. A shock of vibrant feathers in a dozen different hues. Hair the rich brown of dark chocolate pulled back in a messy ponytail.
They had come. They had come for him.
Dorian. Jasper. Echo.
And a dragon.
Caius fought to find his voice, but it rattled around in his throat, scratching at its tender walls.
The dragon—oh, what a marvelous beast it was, with its alabaster scales and the soft golden tinge of its wings—dove toward Echo, who faced it with all the bravery of a knight out of a fairy tale. But unlike a knight, Echo was just a girl. Unarmed and unarmored. She didn’t stand a chance.
With an earth-splitting roar, the dragon gnashed its teeth at Echo. A warning perhaps, or a promise. Wind gusted over Caius with each flap of the thing’s powerful wings, abrading his broken skin. Fire blossomed in Echo’s open palms like the first blooms of spring, pure white and blackest black dancing against her skin.
Stupid, Caius chastised himself. Echo didn’t need a weapon. She was the weapon.
Dorian’s sword was drawn, but Caius saw the reluctance in his stance. He didn’t want to fight the dragon. To the Drakharin, dragons were sacred. They were gods, on this earth but not of it. To harm a dragon was the gravest sin among their people, the highest and most unpardonable form of blasphemy. One who raised a weapon to a dragon would never find peace in the realms beyond this mortal life. They would be damned.
“Stop,” he tried to say, his voice a shattered whisper.
They didn’t hear him. Fire arced from Echo’s hands, twirling through the air like ribbons of light and shadow. The dragon retreated from the flames, its milky eyes squinting against the onslaught of light.
Caius had heard the dragon shifting among the rocks as he’d hung there. There had been a soft quality to those movements, a mindless rustling, like a person in the throes of restless sleep. Caius had convinced himself he’d imagined the noise, that his desperate mind had concocted a creature out of shadows to keep him company so that he wouldn’t die alone, but the dragon was beyond his wildest imaginings.
It would be a travesty to kill it. It had not done Caius harm; it would be poor recompense for his companions to cause it grievous injury.
“Stop,” he said again, louder this time as his voice returned to him, shaken from its tortured slumber.