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Our eyes met. I put the knife to the fragile human throat, the girl’s throat, Ellie’s throat, and I remembered the child, the crying child that Heliothrax had become at the end.
“She was my mate,” he said. “You slaughtered the one you call Heliothrax for nothing. For nothing. Our females didn’t fight. Didn’t kill. Didn’t burn. None of them did. But you didn’t bother to tell one dragon from another, did you? We were all the same threat.”
“You killed our women. Our children.”
“You were prey,” he said. “We didn’t understand you could think, not for a long time. We didn’t understand you communicated. We do it differently, in ways you would never perceive, in color and light. These crude sounds you make, they were beyond our senses. Heliothrax tried, in the end. I watched you kill her.”
“And did nothing.”
His golden eyes blazed. “I was half a world away! I saw through her eyes.” Odd. It had never occurred to me that the Dragon’s Eye, the orb I looked through, was truly just that—the eye of a dragon. But perhaps it was true.
That reminded me of something. I cut a little deeper with the knife. “How did you deceive me? I saw through your eyes, in the desert. You never left.”
Ellie’s lips split into a cold grin. “You saw what you wanted to see,” Karathrax said. “Desert. It never occurred to you that what you were seeing might have been me in your desert. It was a long, cold flight, racing the sun, and I was daring fate, but I knew it was time. Time to end it.”
“It is,” I said. Yet something in me was howling. Something awful. When Karathrax was gone, something would be missing from the world that would never be in it again.
He killed Ellie.
And I had slaughtered his mate, punishing her on behalf of all dragons, with no more care for who she was or what she’d done than singling out one ant from a colony.
I’d killed so many of them, with poisons. Deception. Treachery. Heliothrax had been the first I’d faced, the first I’d bloodied a sword on, the first I’d destroyed with my own reddened hands.
Karathrax would be the last.
He should have changed by now, I realized. He could have taken on his dragon shape, ripped me apart, crawled away to a bitter healing in a lonely world.
He hadn’t.
We stayed that way for a long moment, my ancient enemy and I, and then I said, “Do you want to die as a human?”
“No.” Ellie’s even teeth flashed in a grim smile. “But I’m old, Lisel. Far older than you. Changing form is a young dragon’s game. Changing back is the work of hours for me these days. I don’t suppose you’ll be polite enough to wait.”
I readied the knife.
“But,” Karathrax said, “what happens to you, Lisel? When my blood is in the sand, what magic will you have left to sustain you? You’ve lived all these hundreds of years of stolen time because your life is linked to that of the dragons. Because seven hundred years ago, Godric forced you to drink the hot blood of my sire, Aedothrax, and bound you into the dragon line. Your life is linked to mine. Nothing else now.”
I knew he was right. Godric had said so, from the beginning—the dragon’s blood would sustain us as long as the dragons lived. Once the last dragon was gone . . .
I took a firmer grip on the knife. “I’ll risk it.”
“Not a risk. A certainty. You kill me, you die.” His eyes darkened back to Ellie’s clear blue. “But the same isn’t true for me. If I kill you, I go on.”
I had taught her too well. Too well.
The girlish right hand, during the distraction of his speech, had drawn a small, hidden dagger, and now Karathrax buried it to the hilt in my side, at the same time shoving me off with all the strength in that small female body. He couldn’t walk, but he could crawl, and crawl he did, not away from me, but toward me. Pain radiated from the wound in my side, flooding in pounding waves through my body, and my shaking hand tried and failed to remove the knife. It was stuck in bone.
Karathrax took the larger hunting knife away from me.
My blood thickened the sand. So did his.
We sat together in silence, and then he reached out and pulled the knife from my side. I screamed, unable to stop, and my vision flared white, then gray.
When it cleared, Karathrax was raised up on his arms, looking down at me from Ellie’s perfect, pretty face.
“I hated you,” he said. “For hundreds of years, you were the only thing in the world that existed to me. Your death. Your blood. Your suffering.”
And it had been the same for me, with him. Enemies to the end. Even long past the point where it had made any sense.
