Shit.DarkVeil Coldiron was something else entirely.
The metal sang.
Then the vampire swarm hit us.
They flung themselves off their mounts, springing across the gaps between wyverns and dragon, clawing for any hold on his back. The three of us moved like one unit—dragon, wolf, and me, the way we had at Greyhold—and we were good. We were lethal.
We were also three against far too many.
Caspian planted himself at my back, longsword carving black arcs, death cards filling the gaps no blade could reach. I worked the other side, chakrams flashing out and snapping back, my feet jammed under the dragon’s shoulder scales so the wind couldn’t peel me loose.
A vampire got inside my guard.
It came up over the dragon’s flank too fast to track, and its claws raked my shoulder before I could pull clear. Pain lit white down my arm. Hot blood welled through my sleeve.
The smell of it hit the lab-vampires like a lash. Every starving head snapped toward me at once, and the things went mad, fighting their own leashes to reach me.
Behind me, Caspian made a sound I’d never heard from him, a bellow that was all wolf, all rage, and his longsword came down and cut the vampire that had touched me in two.
“You’re bleeding, Max,” he snarled.
“It’s nothing.”
But the wound told me what the fight hadn’t, until now.
Every claw that had reached me had reached to grab. To drag. To haul me off the dragon’s back. Not to kill.
Caspian saw it the same instant I did.
“Return to base!” he roared over the wind, over the swarm. “They’re not here to wreck the fortress—they want Max! They tried to take her!”
The truth of it settled in my gut like a swallowed stone. I was the target. A whole sky of teeth and fire, and every bit of it bent on taking me alive.
At Greyhold, we’d put down every mutant in the field and left nothing breathing. Even then, something had nagged at me—a presence behind the eyes of the alpha beast that led them, watching me through it. Someone had seen me. Someone a long way off.
And now they’d thrown a sky full of monsters across hostile ground just to put their hands on me. I couldn’t be worth that. I couldn’t possibly be that important. They must’ve mistaken me for someone else.
You have no idea how important you are, girl.The demon’s amusement curled through me, smug as ever.
Sometimes I tossed a thought out like bait, hoping it would bite and let something slip. It never did. A crumb here, a crumb there, just enough to keep me circling and never enough to know. I was a toddler at a card table across from a thing probably older than the world, and we both knew it.
The dragon banked hard, wheeling us back toward the base—get the swarm over the walls, into range of the ground guns, and let our side even the odds.
The Kharvox cut him off.
It dropped into our path with five wyverns at its flanks, and the dragon pulled up short with a roar that rattled my teeth. While he traded snapping jaws with the alpha, a brown wyvern slid in low beneath his belly, talons spread to gut him.
I locked my legs around the dragon’s neck and threw myself upside down, head toward the ground far below. The world spun, the horizon tilting wildly.
A sweep of the Kharvox’s claws passed close enough to part my hair. I ducked it and flung a chakram down along his flank.
It took the sneaking wyvern’s head off before it could lay a talon on Drakken’s dragon.
Got it!Coldiron giggled.
I righted myself. The dizziness ebbed.
A witch on the lead wyvern threw out a hand, and the mage beside her—I’d felt him before I marked him, the darkest signature on the field—called orders to the Kharvox in the demonic tongue.
