“This hot thing between us has to wait, Max,” Caspian said, as if I’d been the one throwing myself at him. “Into the battle we go!”
And just like that, the grin fell away, the predator coming out from under the playboy. The death cards stilled between his fingers. Below us, the field shrank, formations small and orderly, and ahead the sky darkened with wings. I tightened my grip onthe scales, chakrams ready, and let the roar of the coming fight rise up to meet me.
The dragon flew high and hard, set to drive straight into the horde of mutants and break their rank.
Chapter 29
Max
They came in on a hard wave of lethal leather and claws, more wyverns than I could count in a glance, and at the head of them flew a Kharvox.
For half a heartbeat my stomach dropped. Hadn’t Drakken’s dragon torn the throat and wings off an alpha Kharvox the day the heirs carried me out of the Scorched Wastes? The whole academy had chewed on that fight for two weeks. I’d seen the holo of the corpse a dozen times, crimson scales and fangs.
I squinted—my sight ran sharper than a human’s; the demon’s gift, whether I’d asked for it or not—and the relief died on the vine.
Not the same one. A new one. They’d built this one bigger than Drakken’s dragon, its hide a wall of crimson scales and spikes the size of my foot, each overlapping the next like forged armor. Dark-orange fire guttered between its fangs—fire no true wyvern should have. And its eyes were sharp, weighing, patient.
Bred, not born. The Pallid Court’s workshop had been busy.
Last time the wyverns had flown riderless. This time, nearly three dozen riders clung to their backs.
“Twenty newly made vampires.” Caspian’s voice cut over the wind behind me, low and hard, none of the usual laughter in it. “Ten witches leashing them.”
I followed his line of sight, and my skin crawled.
The vampires were wrong. Fresh out of the Pallid Court’s vats and not long on their feet, by the look of them: jerking between graceful and wrong, mouths already cracked open on too many teeth. Their eyes hadn’t settled into any color a living thing should wear.
The witches held the leashes. Ten of them in red coven robes, hands trailing threads of dark purple light that ran down into the vampires’ skulls. Where a thread snapped taut, a vampire lunged.
“Puppets,” I said.
“They threw mutant wolves at us out at Greyhold.” Caspian snarled. “Now they’re growing fucking vampires. They’re field-testing them.”
The chills slithered up my spine. The White Witch was using Covenant land for target practice.
There was no more time to chew on it.
“Die!” Caspian roared, and the front ranks closed in.
His death cards flew first, a fan of them spinning out ahead of us, runes flaring. Where they struck, wyvern hide split and the glyphs went off in bursts of fire and shrapnel. The dragon’s chest swelled under me, and he set loose his fire, a torrent of blue so hot the air bent around it.
I sent both chakrams out, one from each hand, at the nearest wyvern with a vampire rider.
Got him!Coldiron crowed.
The rings sheared clean through the beast’s neck and came whistling home to my palms, slick with green gore. My chakrams were forged from the DarkVeil’s own Coldiron, the volatile kind,and it giggled the whole time. It didn’t care whose blood it spilled. It only wanted more.
The wyvern dropped out of the sky. A vampire lunged through the gap, trying to land on the dragon’s back, but a death card from Caspian put him out of his misery, and he plummeted after it.
I threw again.
The dragon’s fire should have burnt the front rank to ash. It didn’t. The witches had positioned themselves at the rear, casting wide and broad, their threads of purple light flaring into shields. The dragon flame washed over the wyverns and left them screaming but whole.
The dragon stopped trying to burn them.
He went through the rank with brute mass instead, charging straight at a wyvern with a witch riding on its back. The pair had broken from the rear to test us. They’d underestimated how fast something that vast could move. By the time they realized it, there was no escaping him. The dragon’s jaws closed around the wyvern and bit it in two.
The witch turned her spells on him, chanting hard. My chakram didn’t care. It sailed straight through her magic, swallowed it like it was nothing, and went through her chest with a giggle. She died with the horror still frozen on her face, her scream taken by the wind.
