Demonhome (Champions of the Dawning Dragons Book 3)

  Matthew stood near her, and his face looked impossibly distant. Pointing the tip of his staff at the ground he began tracing a pattern of some sort.

  She croaked when she tried to talk. Help me, she cried mentaly. Her voice wasn’t working properly, and she was afraid she might be dying.

  The young man’s eyes caught hers for a split second, then looked away as he remained focused on whatever he was doing.

  He didn’t care. She was going to die.

  More machine gun fire erupted, and Matthew was forced to stop momentarily to deal with the new threat. A briliant flash of fire and smoke

  filed Karen’s vision on one side as something exploded near them. Strangely, nothing touched them though, and she didn’t even feel a shock or a pressure wave from the blast.

  He destroyed the newcomers with another pass of his staff, and then the young man returned to whatever he was drawing on the ground.

  This is insane. Karen tried again to rise, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. Her legs seemed fine, but anything that involved her torso sent shivers of agony through her. I’m going to die lying on the ground while he stands there making a target of himself. Life wasn’t fair.

  Minutes passed while Matthew continued working on his drawing and Karen bled. Twice more his work was interrupted by fresh soldiers, but

  each time he dispassionately destroyed them before returning to whatever he was doing.

  The lids of her eyes grew heavy, and Karen’s body felt heavy. Something moved close by, and she discovered that she had closed her eyes.

  Looking up she saw Matthew lifting his bundle again before stepping into some sort of circle he had drawn. She got the sense he was leaving again.

  Don’t mind me, I’ll be fine, she thought wryly. Then she felt something move beneath her, and her body was lifted into the air.

  He was watching her as she floated toward him. Matthew made a gesture with his hand and the stones that hovered around them flew back

  together, settling within the wooden box he held in his right hand. Settling his staff into the crook of the same arm that held his bundle he reached out and slid his right-hand underneath her, cradling her as though she were a smal child instead of a ful grown woman.

  And then the world changed, wrenching her senses and making her stomach flip. The firelight was gone and only the moon and stars iluminated the area around them. Gazing to either side, Karen could see that Matthew was now standing atop a large boulder of some sort.

  He dropped the cloth bundle and knelt to settle her gently on the stony ground. Her body moved as he put her down, and a fresh surge of pain tore at her. A smal cry escaped her lips and then the world went black.

  ***

  Matthew sank to his knees beside Karen’s unconscious form. His back screamed in protest. Whatever the enemy had used to attack him in the

  beginning had pounded his shoulders and middle back like three or four blacksmiths swinging at him with hammers. The armor had prevented

  penetration, but the padding of his gambeson hadn’t been nearly enough to save him from what felt like the worst bruises he had ever had.

  If I hadn’t put the armor on to decrease the size of my bundle, I’d be dead now. The thought brought a fresh rush of adrenaline. He had probably had one already, but things had happened so quickly that he hadn’t noticed, he had kept his focus purely on what had needed to be done to get them away from danger.

  The enemy had been bizarre, bearing the shape and form of men but made entirely of metal. He could only imagine they were some sort of

  artificial construct powered by whatever magic the wizards of this world used.

  Karen had been injured by one of their weapons before he had put up a temporary shield, but he hadn’t spared a moment to examine her

  wound yet. Focusing his magesight, he found the wound to be ugly and bleeding freely. The projectile had entered between her neck and shoulder, shattering the colarbone before passing completely through and exiting her back. Several smaler blood vessels were torn and leaking, and the entire area around the injury had begun to swel, as though she had been struck by a hammer.

  It was like a combination of a crossbow wound and a blow from a mace.

  What kind of weapons were they? He hadn’t even been able to sense their approach, which meant they must have flown through the air with incredible speed.

  He shook his head, Focus Matthew. She could die if you don’t do something. He began repairing the blood vessels first, stopping the blood loss, then he turned his attention to her clavicle. The bone had broken into three large pieces and at least a dozen smaler ones. Fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle he managed to get most of them back into place before fusing them together. There were a few tiny stragglers that just didn’t seem to work, so he extracted those and discarded them. That done he condensed a smal amount of water from the air and used it to rinse the wound before sealing the skin.

  Her weirdly patterned shirt was ruined, though, saturated with blood. The two holes in it were a smal problem compared to that. In the cold air it clung to her and chiled her skin. He hesitated, but he knew it needed to go.

  Using his aythar like a knife he sliced it apart on either side of her torso and removed it. Beneath that was the strange undergarment that wrapped around her chest and encased her breasts. It was also soaked, so he cut it away as wel. It looked uncomfortable. She’ll thank me later, he told himself, though somehow he doubted it. She had displayed a bewildering number of odd behaviors already, so she would probably blame him for the loss of her restrictive garment.

  Taking a brief moment to rest, his brain decided it was a good time to remind him that he was holding a half-naked woman across his lap. His eyes traveled the length of her torso, dalying as they moved over her breasts. The light from the moon wasn’t bright enough to see them wel, but his magesight aided considerably. For a moment, he wondered what they would look like under better light.

  She was stil unconscious.

  Matthew closed his eyes and shook his head, ashamed of himself for the unworthy thought. In his mind, he could almost hear his father’s laugh.

  The old goat would have probably made a light and convinced himself there was a good reason to examine her. He didn’t know that for a fact, but his father did have a lewd sense of humor.

  No, that probably wasn’t true. Either way, now wasn’t the time for idle speculation. What mattered was protecting her from the cold, and

  repairing her modesty before she woke up. Levitating her body, he enfolded her in an envelope of warm air before emptying the blanket of its bulky contents.

  Once it was free of clutter, he stretched it out beneath her. Then he used his magic to wrap it carefuly around her, enclosing her in several layers of thick wool. She wouldn’t be able to move, but until she woke he would be moving her with nothing but his power anyway.

  His second rush of adrenaline began to wear off, and his body began to shake. Less than an hour back in this strange world and he had already exhausted his aythar. Fumbling, he retrieved the smal leather pouch from the pile of his belongings and removed one of the iron spheres.

  Matthew created a smal shield around it, then activated it with the command word. He kept a tight rein on his intention as he spoke the word, using his wil to alter its meaning. The iron bombs weren’t designed to be used in this manner, but he managed to avoid an al-out explosion. The aythar stil rushed out far faster than he would have liked, but he held it as best he could and directed it inward, absorbing it through his hands.

  It felt like molten metal racing along the nerves in his arms. Hissing in pain, he retained his focus until he had gotten most of the energy. Some leaked away, but he hurt too much to care.

  Smoke rose from his hands and forearms, some of the hair on his skin had burned away. Drawing on an external source of power was something he had done before, but doing it so rapidly, from something like an iron bomb was obviously not ideal.

  I’m goin
g to wind up killing myself if I do that too many more times, he noted quietly.

  A quiet hum intruded on his senses, and he glanced upward. A dark shape hovered there, too high for his stunted magesight to detect. They

  had been spotted.

  Raising his staff, he tried to destroy the craft, but without his magesight his aim was inadequate. Matthew growled, this world was beginning to seriously irritate him. Not for the first time, he wished he dared to fly the way his father did.

  Flying was not a wise thing for wizards to attempt. It required a lot of practice to perfect, and the learning process was usualy fatal; a single mistake could be disastrous. His father had managed to survive the experience because he had been effectively immortal during the period he had first tried it.

  Matthew didn’t have that luxury, but he had something almost as good.

  He took a smal clay disk from the pile of items he had brought and with a word activated it. Fine lines appeared, and then the disk fractured into twenty-four separate pieces that flew outward to take up predetermined positions in relation to one another. Investing a smal amount of his power in it caused planes of force to spring up between the pieces, and with his magesight he could now see the broad, roughly disk shaped craft that rested on the rocky ground in front of him.

  It was an enchantment that created a nicely aerodynamic shape that would both protect them and make it much easier to fly. Matthew used

  another word to dispel the portion that served as an entry and began loading their supplies before using his aythar to levitate Karen into the craft’s interior.

  Flying would get them to their destination much faster than their original trek down the mountain had taken. It also required a lot of aythar, and he worried that, given his environment’s outright lack of aythar, he would tire far faster than normal, but it was a risk that had to be taken. If they were surrounded again, there was a very real chance that he would run out of resources to fight with before the enemy could be eliminated.

  Expanding his aythar, he took charge of the air around them and used it to lift the enchanted disk into the air. As he had feared the task was far more draining than it would have been in his own world. The air here was dead, and al the energy had to come from him.

  Matthew wasted no time as he sent them rushing upward to clear the tops of the trees. The aerial observer folowed them immediately,

  maintaining a precise amount of distance between them.

  He increased their speed and occasionaly altered their direction, but the thing folowing them never faltered. It matched his every move with uncanny precision, almost as though it were somehow attached to them. He made one attempt to disrupt its flight, veering toward it and sending an updraft of air to throw the thing off balance, but it adjusted to the change in air currents with only the slightest of wobbles to indicate he had done anything.

  Eventualy, he gave up. It wasn’t attacking them, so he decided to ignore it.

  Their ascent took considerably less time than coming down had taken them. In less than a quarter of an hour Matthew had found the area

  where he had caused the rockslide. He guided the flying craft through the rather large opening in the side of the mountain and watched carefuly to see what their tag-a-long observer would do.

  It hovered quietly outside the opening, but didn’t attempt entry.

  Moving quickly, he took his staff with him and used it to etch a long line across the ground at the cave opening, then he continued it up the wals and across the ceiling. That done he created a quick shield before beginning the more intricate work of inscribing runes along the inside of his initial line. He kept it as simple as possible, but it stil took him the better part of ten minutes to finish his work. He added a second line on the inside of the runes, and then empowered the enchantment with a significant portion of the aythar he had just taken from the iron bomb.

  Completed, the shield should be significantly stronger than a similar barrier made from solid iron. Exhaling a long sigh of pent up air, he returned to the larger chamber of the cave. Karen was stil unconscious, though she moved frequently, groaning in her sleep. He guessed from that that her injury must be causing significant pain, so he took a second to renew the nerve block that prevented her from feeling it.

  She grew stil, and the tension in her face eased. Matthew studied her features. Karen had a strong nose, a bit longer than average, but it suited her face. Her eyes were closed, but if they had been open the blue in them made a great match for the perfect teeth that were currently hidden by soft red lips. She had the whitest teeth he thought he had ever seen, which was made even more impactful by the fact that they were straight and wel aligned without any gaps.

  She was beautiful. Not in the delicate or fragile sense that he saw in so many of the highborn ladies he had often been forced to socialize with, but rather in the way she radiated health and wel-being. Her unusual height was the result of a strong framework that supported wel exercised muscles. She was stil quite feminine, and he almost blushed at the memory of what he had only recently seen.

  But she was definitely beautiful . “Like a fine horse, strong teeth and good withers,” he added to dispel the awkward turn his thoughts were taking. Briefly he wished his sister had been present to hear the remark, she would have been horrified. The thought made him smile.

  A wave of dizziness reminded him that he had already almost exhausted his aythar once again. He started to sit, but the pain in his back

  convinced him to remain standing. Instead he walked over to Desacus and put his hand on the great beast’s shoulder, Wake, my friend.

  One eye in the dragon’s massive skul slowly opened, revealing a large yelow iris. Desacus studied him silently for several seconds. That was a dirty trick. How long have I slept?

  “Too long,” answered Matthew, “Several harrowing days.”

  That’s what you get for issuing open ended commands, responded the dragon with a mental huff of disdain. Why are you wearing armor?

  “Carrying it was too much of a chore. Wearing it seemed a better option, which turned out to be a lucky choice on my part. I hadn’t had it on more than a few minutes before someone tried to put a lot of holes in me.” He kept his tone casual, but he found himself leaning on the dragon’s shoulder more out of necessity than by choice. “Lend me your strength, Desacus.”

  A gentle flow of aythar made its way up his arm and the young wizard sighed in relief. Slowly, painfuly, he eased his way to the ground and tried to recline against the dragon’s bely. His bruises wouldn’t alow that, so he eventualy wound up laying bely down on the cold stone. He continued drawing a steady trickle of aythar from the dragon and used some of it to warm himself.

  Tell me what’s going on. Who is the girl?

  Matthew wanted sleep more than anything, but he knew it was a bad idea to succumb to that desire without giving his reptilian comrade at least a basic idea of what sort of trouble they were in. He forced himself to stay awake and began recounting his recent misfortunes.

  Chapter 10

  It was dark. Not dark like sleeping outside on a moonless night, but pitch black with no glimmer of light beyond the occasional flickers created by a brain deprived of external stimulation. There were no stars.

  Karen felt weird. Her neck, shoulder, and arm were completely numb. She knew they were there only because she could feel their weight and

  resistance when she tried to move, but she seemed to be wrapped in some sort of heavy fabric. It was warm, for which she was grateful, but she had to fight down a rising sense of panic at being trapped and unable to see.

  Her bra was gone and as she shifted she got the sense that her shirt was similarly missing. Not a comforting thought, she noted. This was not how she had expected to wake up. Had the military captured them?

  Stay calm, Karen. Think it through. What’s the last thing you remember?

  A vision of Matthew standing in front of her wearing armor that might have been straight out of the
crusades passed through her mind. She had been shot, she knew that. It had appeared as though Matthew had also been shot, more than once, but for some reason it hadn’t kiled him.

  You’re assuming that he’s still alive. “Shut the fuck up, Karen. Try to be positive for a change,” she told herself.

  Something moved in the darkness; her ears detected a noise like metal scraping across stone. She froze. She wasn’t alone. Her heart began to pound in her ears as she listened for any further noises.

  “Helo.” The voice that found her was deep, several octaves lower than any human voice should be. It said something after that, and she

  thought the language might be the same as the one Matthew used, if it was being spoken by something that used a tractor engine for a voice box.

  She kept her silence, while trying to rol out of whatever was holding her. It took a moment to figure out the correct direction but once she got it, she was able to get out of the cloth with little trouble. Cold air touched her skin. Her shirt was definitely gone .

  A short burst of flame lit the cavern and for a brief instant she saw the massive head of a monster straight out of a nightmare. Thick scaled lips hovered over teeth that stretched out like daggers, and the eyes that stared at her had slitted pupils like those of a snake.

  Karen didn’t scream. The sound that issued from her startled mouth was something more like the ‘eep ’ of a frightened rabbit. She ran,

  heedless of her blindness.

  “Grethak !”

  The word seemed to penetrate her brain, freezing her muscles into immobility and she fel forward. Something caught her fal and a few seconds later she felt hands on her shoulders, straightening her and setting her back on her feet. Another strange phrase folowed, and her muscles began to respond again. She recognized the voice, it was Matthew.

  Thank god! She clung to him in the darkness, hardly noticing the rough metal that stil covered his torso.

  It’s alright, he told her, sending the words directly into her mind. We’re safe.