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Ellie stared at me for a few exhausted seconds, bottle raised halfway to her lips, then deliberately took another drink, replaced the cap, and climbed up with her sword in her hand.
I hurt her a few more times, pushing myself as much as her, and as she drove us back to my apartment, I saw tears cutting silently through the dust on her cheeks. She looked small, tired, and dispirited.
I got out, hefted the equipment bags, and trudged back to my apartment, feeling as sore as she must have been. When I looked back, Ellie was slumped over her car’s steering wheel, forehead resting against the leather-wrapped surface. Gathering the strength to drive away, I presumed. It was getting dark, and the clear sky was cooling from hot blue to the icy color of the deep ocean. Stars flickered like glitter thrown by God.
It was dark enough, and she was distracted. I dropped the bag into the grass, removed something from a side pocket, and slipped quietly back down the path, keeping to the blackest of the shadows. I circled the back of the idling car, moved up beside the driver’s side, and slowly lowered the gun in my hand to touch the side of Ellie’s head.
“You’re dead,” I told her. I wasn’t angry, only a little disappointed. She flinched and looke
d up. Her eyes were red and running with tears, her face burning with the force of her self-pity. “You think I’m dangerous? I’m an old woman. I’m nothing. Karathrax is your enemy, and he is cold and eternal and clever, and he will not have mercy on you. He will steal up on you in the dark, just like this, and end your life. You can be hurt. You can be killed. You understand?”
She did. I saw the fury and hurt slip over her expression, but then it melted away.
She nodded without saying anything.
I slipped the .38 back into the pocket of my running suit and shuffled back to where I’d left the training bag, opened the door of my apartment building, and greeted a couple of my elderly neighbors shuffling along on their walkers.
I needed a drink, a hot bath, and an evening of game shows.
I was in the tub, thinking how nice it was to have steaming, scented water without having to lug heavy buckets to a cauldron, when the bathroom door opened silently and Ellie stood there looking at me. She wasn’t crying anymore. She hadn’t showered, she hadn’t changed clothes, she hadn’t even washed the dirt from her skin. She looked a little savage, and in her hand was the gun, which she’d taken out of my training bag, I assumed.
“Bang,” she said. “You’re dead. See? I can sneak up on people, too.”
She closed the bathroom door, and I heard her leave, slamming the door behind her.
I relaxed and let out a long, satisfied breath.
She was ready for the next level.
“This,” I told Ellie the next morning, “is Dragonkiller.”
I opened up a long wooden box lined with velvet and took out a bow made of carved, yellowing bone. A thick string of sinew dangled from the bottom. I held it in both hands, ceremonially, and handed it to Ellie, who accepted it the same way. Instinct, I assumed. I hadn’t made a production out of it, although it was a ceremony of sorts.
A rite of passage.
“It’s a bow?” She sounded uncertain. I sighed.
“Of course it’s a bow,” I snapped. “String it.”
“Um . . .”
“Put your weight on it, bend it, and slip the loop over the top into the groove.”
She blinked, as if she’d never heard of such a thing—and perhaps she hadn’t!—and started to try to bend the thing. It wasn’t easy; Dragonkiller had been made for a man’s strength. She threw herself into it, though, pushing harder and harder until the form finally began to bend.
She strung the bow.
Panting, she looked at it and smiled. A pure, delighted smile of victory, one I remembered smiling myself, upon a time, as the bow bent beneath my hands for the first time. She looked up at me.
I smiled back. It was not voluntary; there was something so purely triumphant in her that it dragged approval out of me, all unwilling.
I transformed it to my usual scowl as swiftly as I could. “Give it here,” I said, and snatched it out of her hands. “Don’t think that bending the damn thing makes you a master of the bow.”
“I don’t,” she said meekly enough. “I want to learn. I always thought bows were cool.”
She wouldn’t think they were when her fingertips were shredded and bleeding, when her inner forearm was raw from the snap of the string. But I approved of her mind-set.
“This bow,” I said, “is made of dragonbone, and—”
