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She stroked Alpha’s neck. “Sorry,” she murmured. “Go on, then. Get me close.” She leaned low over his neck, and Alpha made an approving sound, wings propelling them forward.
They were three lengths from the portal when its flawless black surface rippled.
She thought it was a trick of the light, at first, an illusion. But then it rippled again, like a pond with a stone thrown into it, and this time a pulse shuddered out through the air toward them. It struck her like a physical force, and Alpha cried out shrilly.
The portal rippled again, and something emerged from it. Something small, and purple, and pointed. Something that kept emerging. Coming and coming, growing larger.
It was a snout. A drake’s snout – the snout of a massive drake, far, far larger than Alpha.
All of Amelia’s insides went ice-cold and liquid. “Gods. Oh gods, oh gods – Alpha, no!”
Alpha threw back his head and angled their flight path upward.
Amelia leaned out of the saddle to look down, and watched the head of an impossibly massive, dark purple drake thrust through the rippling black puddle of the gateway.
Its jaws parted, as it kept emerging, revealing rows of knife-sharp teeth, emitting a low, thrumming croon. Its head was crowned with red-purple horns, and a frill much wider and pricklier than Alpha’s. Its eyes were edged were small spikes like rose thorns, giving it a stupid, heavy-browed look. Stupid or not, it could have killed Alpha with a single chomp.
The head came through, and its neck began to follow, sinuous and serpentine, peaked with more spikes.
If it kept coming – and the portal even now was widening to accommodate it; gods only knew if it bore a rider, but they were soon to find out for themselves – then nothing they’d seen so far today would look anything like carnage by comparison. It would slaughter them all, roast their flesh, and lick their bones.
Amelia was gripped with a kind of fear she’d never known, so powerful she felt faint from it.
But the portal needed blood to close. A magic user’s blood.
She pulled hard on the reins, and swung Alpha around so that he hovered in midair, directly above the portal. The purple drake’s neck slithered out another foot, and another.
Amelia dropped her reins, tugged off a glove with her teeth, and pulled the knife off her belt. She scored her palm, and she was so frightened she couldn’t feel the pain of it, but the blood poured freely.
She mopped at it with the glove, until its leather palm was stained crimson, then she took up her reins again. “Okay, let’s go,” she told Alpha. “You have to get me in close – close enough to throw it.”
He made a distressed sound, and pushed worry through the bond, but he started moving again, flying out, and around, coming back toward the portal in a slow arc.
The purple drake was out nearly to his shoulders now, and he saw them coming. Darted up with his head, jaws open, roaring. Amelia felt the heat and wind of his breath. Glimpsed a flicker of green flames between his teeth.
She gritted her own, leaned low over Alpha’s neck and threw.
The glove wheeled through the air, painfully slow. It caught the drake’s attention.
“No!”
He snapped at it – but missed, and it slipped neatly through the black surface of the portal, disappearing within.
Time stopped.
And then there was a terrible crack like thunder, and a blinding light. Wind roared – a sucking wind, one that Alpha screamed against and struggled to escape, wings beating furiously. A moment of tumult and anguish, her mind screaming, too – or maybe that was her mouth, who knew.
And then stillness.
Utter stillness. Alpha fumbled midair, and then righted himself, flapping strong, climbing up into the air once more.
Amelia twisted around in her saddle to look.
The portal was gone.
On the ground beneath where it had been lay the severed head of the purple drake, its red tongue lolling on the dirt, black blood leaking out across the road from the stump of its neck.
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