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But I follow Hyperion too quickly for her to keep talking, Gideon’s treachery the last thing on my mind. He’s always been working on the human side, but stuck among us as he’s been, I wrongly thought he couldn’t harm us. I suppose I thought his loyalty to Liz would. . .
Actually, the truth is that he’s so inconsequential, so powerless, that I never thought about him at all in a military context.
When the first blue spear arcs through the air, Hyperion dodges it easily. Ice-blue arrows rain down from the humans he’s approaching, several of them making contact with and harmlessly clattering off the hard scales of his red hide.
Hyperion roars at the audacity of the humans, and he blasts the gathered troops, accelerating as he melts an entire line of our attackers. As he does so, I swing around, lining up to take my turn.
Liz is slapping the side of my neck. “Wait, wait, please.”
I’m ready to fire, but she’s still begging so piteously.
“Azar! We can talk to them. Don’t just kill them all—it’ll make everything worse.”
They won’t listen to me, I say. I’ve tried. And they just murdered a dozen strike blessed and even more earth blessed. But I swing past without flaming them, just swooping over their ranks with a furious roar.
“Do you trust me?” she asks. “I knew you’d keep me safe by the volcano—” She cuts off then, and I’m not sure why.
As I swing back around, Hyperion begins his second pass, flaming a second line through the gathered troops. More blue arrows strike him and bounce off. Another spear zooms past him without making contact.
"Wait,” Liz shouts. “It’s Gideon! He’s down there!”
He’s chosen his path, I say. It’s time for us to take out our enemies. They chose to be our enemies.
“No,” Liz says. “This is the wrong decision. You have to at least try to talk to them.”
They’re armed with ice spears, I say. The arrows won’t work, but those spears might injure Hyperion or me. We have to take them out before they have a chance.
“They’ll come back with more,” Liz says. “And better ones. It’s what humans do. Roasting them isn’t the right way.”
I hear what you’re saying, but you can’t talk to someone who’s attacking you. When I reach the front of the line this time, I’m taking out the humans poised to kill us. I’m not making my brother do all the work and take all the risk on himself.
But as we draw near, Liz leaps from my back, spinning round and round, her tiny, puny body plummeting toward the ground below.
18
Liz
The first match I ever fought in a sanctioned competition was a disaster.
My opponent was much, much larger than I was, and she had far more powerful strikes. She hit me, over and over, and all I could do was pull myself together and force myself to stand up again and again. I only beat her because, after acting like a punching bag repeatedly, I swung around unexpectedly and managed to get an arm bar she didn’t see coming.
By the end, I was black and blue and generally looked like something headed to the morgue, but I won.
Ever since we stepped through the portal to Selfoss, my life has felt like that fight. I was almost compelled to that volcano, and I saw all those creatures, terrifying, pitiable, and trapped. Desperate.
I’m the only person who can save them, but doing so will be the end of me.
I’m not some legendary sister to Freya or wife of Odin. I don’t reincarnate or come back from the dead. I’m just a normal human, birthed by a hippy and an uptight lawyer, raised with lousy dance lessons and group gymnastics classes in the suburbs.
Sure, I was kidnapped as a kid by a sex-trafficking ring, apparently. I survived that by murdering some people, which is pretty horrifying. But people move on from that. They recover from the trauma and live normal lives. They don’t fling themselves into volcanoes to save demon-spawn and dark dragons who did who knows what to get trapped in the first place.
And normal girls certainly don’t risk their lives by jumping off the back of a flying fire dragon, hurtling toward the ground at the speed of, well, maybe sound.
I may not be as normal as I’d like to think.
Thankfully, that’s probably what allows me to spread my arms wide and stop, hovering about two feet from the riverbank below.
My head whips around immediately, checking to see whether Azar will still blast us all. The betrayal radiating through the bond, and the dark, blood-red color isn’t promising, but he doesn’t barbecue us.
