Abraham focused on the warlock. “Get us out of here now.”
But Allen was already working. He nodded distractedly, his mouth forming the words of a mass spell. When a bullet buzzed his left ear, forcing him to his knees, Abraham bent over him, shielding his body. Whatever wounds he sustained, he would have a chance to heal later.
Beneath him, Allen trembled, but Abraham could see the light from the man’s now-glowing pendant. Whatever spell he was casting was working. That’s it, he thought. Faster!
“You ignorant, ungrateful piece of shit excuse for a man,” came a deep, terrifying accusation from above him. Abe glanced up, taking in the tall, impressive form of a man with an eye patch and one glowing blue eye before the spell Allen had been casting at last encompassed him, and the world took on a faint green glow.
A flash later, and Abraham was surrounded by darkness and a quiet as pure and thick as his own last name. He rose slowly, freeing the man he’d been shielding. Oliver Allen rose to his knees and looked around.
“We’re it, aren’t we?” he asked softly.
“Looks like it,” Abraham replied grimly. Allen hadn’t had time to cast the spell beyond their small circle of inclusion. The rest of the Hunters in the candy shop had been left behind.
“What about the others?” Allen asked. But Abraham knew the man hadn’t really needed to ask. He knew Allen was already well aware of what was going to happen to the other Hunters.
“Lost cause,” Abe said as he stood and surveyed their surroundings. They were most likely dead now, having swallowed the poison that would take their lives and prevent any magic from reanimating or resurrecting them in any capacity. The poison was swift and painless, and no Hunter went on a mission without it. What Abraham didn’t add was that they were probably better off. If they’d lived and escaped, they would have had to deal with him – and he wasn’t happy with the fact that they’d disobeyed orders.
He wanted that thing alive.
“Where the hell are we?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet. Random location. I didn’t want us to be traced, so I told the magic to take us anywhere else. It was a shot in the dark. But what I don’t know, other warlocks can’t figure out. The spell I used was edited, too. That’ll make it even harder for us to be found.”
Abe looked down at the young magic user. An “edited” spell was one that had been taken apart and put back together by several people – rather like a set of Lego’s constructed by a group of twenty rather than one. The finished product would have the scent of twenty people on it, not just a single person. And sending them somewhere random had been quick thinking.
He hadn’t originally wanted a mage on his team. He didn’t trust magic anymore than he trusted shifters. But… Allen was surprising him at every turn.
“Smart,” Abe admitted softly. Then he ran a hand through his hair and said, “Now get us out of here and back to headquarters. I have a new team to assemble.” He thought of the beast whose vast wings he could scarcely erase from behind his eyes and remembered ancient maps he’d once viewed on the walls of his grandfather’s study. The edges of the world had as of yet been undiscovered. Written on the brown expanses were words in warning.
Then he thought of the man with one eye who had been towering over him just hair-breadth moments before Abe and the mage had managed their escape. The man who worried Abraham almost as much as the dragon did.
He whispered softly, repeating the prophetic phrase written on those maps from long ago. “Here there be dragons.”
*****
She was bleeding. She could feel the moisture cascading in rivulets moved by the wind over the expanse of her scaled wing. It was an alien but disconcerting sensation because she felt no pain. Just the wet.
She was too high on endorphins, too revved up by the adrenaline coursing through her, and probably too affected by the magic that had made her what she is.
What am I? she wondered disjointedly. Her thoughts were alien in this form. They were like images with question marks. Words were not as easy to create in this new mind, nor as easy to comprehend. Instead, she sensed things, smelled things, saw things. In fact, her vision honed in as she climbed higher in the storm-building night. She glanced down at the moving landscape below, where buildings became small cubes and roads became a grid, and lightning shot through the entire ordeal like electricity running through a mother board.
It was stunning. It was as if she had never before looked upon a skyline or watched a storm. These were new colors, this was a new spectrum. But the spectrum shifted into gray scale as she broke through the overhead blanket of clouds, piercing it like a needle through a cotton ball. Within seconds, she was rising above it, each beat of her enormous wings taking her closer to the stars.
I’m a dragon. That much knowledge was instinctive, and the scaled bat-like wings of deep, charcoal gray on either side of her were her affirmation. But there was something moving through the bones of those wings, lighting them up from the inside. And when she saw the wound she’d known she had, finally found it with those wonderful eyes of hers, she threw back her head in fury and thunder erupted in the heavens.
Her three massive hearts skipped their beats. Now she knew what she was.
I need to land. I need to tend to this wound.
Other shifters had the ability to heal quickly, as did werewolves. But in her altered state, the images she conjured as to healing were of bandages and medicine. The magishifter did not heal like other shifters. And that knowledge set those three hearts to a rapid beat once more, strengthening her resolve to find a place to land and shift.
She was grateful for the cloud cover, for the rain that would keep people from glancing skyward. Few, if any, would have witnessed her dramatic climb into the heavens before she’d disappeared above the clouds. But landing might be another story. She needed to find a place devoid of humans.
That thought, she saw as an empty flat plain with nothing but sand. Images, not words. But the meaning was just as clear to her. She needed solitude. Privacy.
Safety.
Chicago was lined by lake on one side, and consisted of city sprawl for mile upon mile in the other direction. There were no forests for her to land in, no open fields away from prying eyes. But her shoulder was beginning to hurt now, a gentle throb that warned of something building, something imminent and dangerous. She had no choice.
Sam turned on the wind, flexing her larger-than-life wings to angle downward toward the vast expanse of darkness that was Lake Michigan.
Chapter Eight
Dragons have three hearts. One to feed their mind, one to feed their spirit, and the last to feed their body. One heart pumped blood. Another pumped magic. And the third, the most important, pumped knowledge through veins ethereal and unseen, but there all the same.
The Thunder Dragon’s hearts pumped one more thing in addition to these: power.
Each dragon absolutely had a magic of its own. That was what the magic heart was for, after all. But whereas the red dragon’s power was contained in the conflagration of fire, and the blue dragon’s power was embedded in the notion of poison, the Thunder Dragon’s power was just exactly that – power. Electric power. The kind of power that fueled everything humans used and took for granted on a second-by-second basis day after day, month after month, year after year.
That power ran through the Thunder Dragon’s body, occasionally lighting up its bones like glow-in-the-dark piping. And when the mighty beast roared, the sound shook the heavens as if lightning had just struck.
That was the myth. The Thunder Dragon was the protagonist in children’s stories shared by shifter families for generations. It was like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Dragons, in general, were like Santa Claus. Most people believed they didn’t actually exist.
This was probably why the magishifter had taken dragon form. Why she’d chosen the Thunder Dragon specifically was a mystery. Maybe she’d recently read about it or perhaps she’d been subconsc
iously thinking about it. Whatever the reason, she hadn’t wanted any well-known animals to come to blame for the destruction in downtown Chicago, so she’d gone with something so inconceivable, authorities would be more likely to chalk the event up to leaking gas causing everything from hallucinations to violent explosions.
What Samantha O’Neill obviously didn’t know was that dragons were real. She’d clearly never been taught about them, as she’d been on the run since she was a child. And just as clearly, she’d never had a run-in with one. But the Arach, the Dragon King was sure to hear of this little event, and shit would probably hit the fan.
“Where is he?” Jack asked again. Under orders, his men had been busy tracking the warlock from the candy shop since he and his Hunter leader had vanished from their midst. Impatience was turning the edges of Jack’s words sharp as spikes. He could feel the tension in turn riding through his men, a mixture of fear and respect. But it couldn’t be prevented. The fact that his voice was being carried over receivers attached to everyone’s head didn’t help, but the devices were necessary for being heard over the chopping of the overhead blades.
One of his men spoke up, clearing his throat. “Still no word on the warlock,” he said carefully. “He covered his tracks like I’ve never seen.”
That had been Jack’s experience with tracking the mage as well. Most magic users left some kind of signature behind when they transported. It was like a scent, in that it could be traced and tracked, and with luck and a whole lot of magic, the mage could be found. But this guy had just vanished.
The helicopter had been circling the outskirts of the city for two hours now, and the storms that had ridden overhead were long gone. The shifters he’d chosen for this hunt all possessed the ability to see in the dark. That, combined with the thermal equipment onboard afforded everyone a clear view of the land below. They were looking for a landing site, any place where trees, plants, or debris had been shoved aside to make way for the touch-down of a massive beast – and any possible beast, massive or otherwise, still nearby.
“There!” he suddenly shouted, leaning slightly out the open side of the helicopter to indicate where he wanted the pilot to land. “Take us down!”
It would have been a lot less noisy for Jack to simply have shifted into an owl and skirted the city alone. But it would have taken longer, and he’d have had no communication with his men regarding the Hunters. He also wanted to be the first to know when the Dragon King, Arach, was brought in on the scene. He didn’t want Arach interfering with matters… this particular dragon was Jack’s to deal with, no one else’s.
The grass and bushes below were interspersed in the sandy topography that gave this area just across the border its name. They were south of Chicago by about an hour as the crow flies, now out of Illinois and into Indiana circling the southern perimeter of Lake Michigan. This was Indiana Dunes State Park, a stretch of lake shoreline thus far protected from industrialization, and hence still beautiful. At this hour of night, it was empty.
The sand began to fly underneath them, unfettered by the wind caused by the chopper’s blades. They landed smoothly, and Jack jumped out, his boots making a soft landing. He turned to give final instructions. “Head back, get word from D’Angelo and Arach, and keep searching for the warlock. I’ll be in touch.”
The men inside nodded without question and the chopper lifted off once more like a dragonfly taking to flight.
Jack waited until the lights of the aircraft had dimmed before he turned to face the water. She was out there somewhere in the lake. He could feel it.
Since their first encounter, he’d known whenever she was nearby. Maybe it was the trauma of that encounter that lingered like a perfume, sweet and sad and terrible. Or maybe she was in his blood now, a miniscule bit of her DNA intermingled with the blood of his loss. He’d given it a lot of thought over the years, and when he did, his face hurt. And he touched the patch where his eye would have been.
But whatever it was, his body tingled and his mind hummed when she was close. It was how he’d managed to track her again and again over the last two decades and it was what he’d sensed outside the candy shop in Chicago. Right now, she was out in the water. If the nearness of her hadn’t been enough to tell him she was there, the scent of her blood would have confirmed it. She was injured. One or more of the bullets had managed to reach her after all.
Jack moved to the edge of the water and prepared to shift when the air suddenly changed. The atmosphere darkened, as if someone had placed a sepia filter over his life. At once, everything felt wrong.
Slowly he turned around, knowing full well there would be someone there when he did.
“So she’s the magishifter. Quite a catch, I must admit,” the stranger said.
He was a handsome black-haired man with red glowing eyes, and there was a feeling about him that reminded Jack of nails on a chalkboard. The air between them seemed filled with something that blurred out the rest of the world, something intense and toxic. “Thank you for leading me to her. She’s inexplicably difficult for this body to track down.”
Jack knew good and well who he was. Walker had filled him in on the situation just as he filled him in on every situation involving the Thirteen Kings. This was Astaroth. He was Stephen Lazarus’s father – the former Demon King – now inhabited by none other than the Entity. Jack had actually been wondering when he was going to show up.
“Sorry Astaroth. Or Entity. Whatever,” Jack said nonchalantly, waving his hand dismissively to give the man as little respect as he felt he deserved. “But this one’s not yours,”
“Nor is she technically yours,” Astaroth replied with a knowing grin. “After all, you aren’t the king.” He chuckled. The sound was beautiful and terrible. “Perhaps you should have thought of that sooner.”
Oh, but he had. He’d thought of little else for the last twenty years. But he’d chosen to do things the way he had for a reason.
“Do you want to know why I’m going to claim her as my own?”
“Not particularly,” lied Jack. He did want to know what the hell the Entity’s plans were – every King at the Table wanted to know – and the longer Jack kept him talking, the longer Sam had to get further away.
“Yes you do,” the Entity said, his smile as broad as ever. Fangs flashed in the moonlight. The overhead clouds had parted, revealing a semi-full moon. The storm was long gone. “So I’ll satisfy your curiosity. You won’t be sharing the information anyway. You won’t have the chance.” The handsome devil shrugged. “Darius Walker will go on playing your part and he’ll tumble along with the others. Along with… everyone.”
“Oh?” Jack said. It was all he could think to say.
“Tucked deep inside a cave, kept perfect in a coffin like Snow White lies a woman with immense destructive power, Mr. Colton. That woman’s name is Amunet.” He smiled again, but this time there was something in it that was winsome. Something nearly human in its bizarre capacity for emotion. “She is a goddess.” He tilted his head to the side, considering Jack with careful measure. “In every sense of the word.”
“What does she have to do with the Queens?”
“Nothing. Not directly, anyway. It is their power I seek. Because that power alone can awaken the goddess.” He put his hands behind his back and looked down at the sandy ground as he began to pace. Each step he took sizzled in the earth, leaving behind scorched glass that sparked red and then settled down as it quickly cooled in his wake. “Do you know what hate is, Mr. Colton? The word is used quite freely, I’m afraid. So its meaning has become confused.” He stopped and pinned him again with that hellish gaze. “But hatred is not what the bully at school feels for the nerd he teases. It’s not what causes a crime of racism or prejudice. These are simple dislikes, preferences, and human failings. Hate on the other hand – real hate – is as strong as love. Hence, one must be willing to die for it. Hate is what a mother feels toward the man who rapes and murders her daughter. It is the emotion reserv
ed for that moment in time when all is lost and there is nothing left to live for, nothing but revenge. Nothing but this burning, driving need.” The fire in the demon’s eyes sparked to hellish life as he spoke, and Jack realized then and there in that moment – that he might not leave this encounter alive.
“That has to be the longest and most pedantic monologue a bad guy has ever gone into,” said Jack with far more dispassion than he was feeling. He wasn’t a pessimist. He liked to give himself the benefit of the doubt most of the time. But the distance between the Entity and himself had grown colder. Inexplicably, it had also grown warmer, like cold fire that made you sweat. The air seemed charged with electricity, but a kind incapable of producing light. Only darkness. Redness. And black.
He was pretty sure Astaroth was going to kill him.
This is it, he thought. This was going to be where he made his final stand. He had never felt power like this man’s. The Entity had chosen his host body well this time around. But if he had to go here and now, he hoped the time it took for him to die would at least save Sam. At least let it save Sam, his thoughts echoed desperately.
“Oh how adorable,” said the Entity derisively but also with a touch of pity. It was the worst combination. “You’re willing to die for her. See that right there is love. So very strong, is it not? Now imagine that in the opposite. A force so powerful you are willing to die for its fruition. That is hate.”
He can read my mind.
“Yes, I can.” The Entity admitted freely, shrugging again as if it were the smallest inconvenience in the world.
“Get to the point, demon. I’m starting to hate the sound of your voice enough to die right now.”
The Entity did nothing with that, neither rising to the bait nor even acknowledging that it had occurred. Instead, he simply explained. “Amunet possesses the ability to channel hatred into power. It is her uniquely beautiful gift. No one else in the world, not even the Wishers, can do what she does with the volatile emotion. And no one in the world, Mr. Colton, possesses as much hatred as I do. We make the perfect team.” He lowered his head and peered through the tops of his wicked red eyes. “Or we will.”