Dragon Fall

  The dragon behind me jerked back on my arm so painfully that I saw stars for a second or two, but that just seemed to make something inside of me snap. With a roar that I was astonished came from my mouth, I summoned a ball of Kostya’s fire and slammed it into the dragon with the sword. It splashed against his chest but didn’t stop the downswing of the sword.

  “NO!” I bellowed, and shoved my free hand forward in an instinctive attempt to block the attack. The dragon with the sword flew backward about twenty feet, slamming into a group of people that had come running at the noise. Istvan, who had been forced to his knees, struggled to his feet, taking advantage of the distraction to kick at the knees of the other sword-wielder, bringing her down before he snatched up the weapon and turned to the others.

  They were all staring at me. Or more precisely, at my still-outstretched hand.

  “Way to not let them know about the ring,” Jim said, giving me a wry look.

  “Oh, shite,” I swore, pulling my hand back against my body.

  “You said it, babe.”

  The dragons left Istvan and circled around Jim and me. “I have a very bad feeling about thi—aieee!”

  As I spoke, the woman nearest me made some sort of intricate gesture, almost as if she was drawing on the air. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a faint black image glowing in the middle of nothing and decided that drawing on air wasn’t such a bad metaphor at that. But it was what happened after the symbol dissolved into nothing that had me squawking. First of all, there was the matter of the woman reaching up and pulling back something—what, I have no idea, since there was nothing in front of her, but whatever it is she did left a big black gaping hole. And into that the two dragons holding me leaped, taking me with them.

  Thirteen

  I felt like someone had taken a two-by-four, wrapped it in velvet, and bashed me in the gut.

  “You going to ralph? You look like you’re going to ralph. Doesn’t it hurt being on your hands and knees like that? Oh, man, that looks bad.”

  I retched up nothing, gasping with both the taste of bile in my mouth and the pain from the walloping that my stomach had taken. Groggily, I turned my head to see Jim’s legs next to me. He was leaning down, his hands on his knees, sympathy mingling with wry amusement in his dark eyes.

  “Urgh.”

  Jim nodded his head. “I heard that it’s not easy being dragged to Abaddon if you’re not a demon.”

  “Abaddon?” Wincing at the pain in my hands and knees, I managed to get to my feet, looking around as I did so. “We’re in hell? It looks like a ballroom. Except for the lava rocks. Who carpets their ballroom floor with nasty little lava rocks?”

  “Someone who likes to cause people pain, I’m guessing.”

  That’s when I noticed that Jim was standing on a small piece of cloth. A familiar-looking small piece of cloth. “Hey! That’s my shirt!”

  “Just the back of it. You weren’t using the back, and you couldn’t expect me to stand on the sharp pointy rocks in my bare, vulnerable human feet, could you?”

  “Ack!” I said, slapping my hands on my legs. “Jim, we’re in hell!”

  “Abaddon.”

  “And the dragons know I have the ring! Is your discomfort really the only thing you can think of at this moment?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You have shoes.”

  “I give up,” I said, exasperated beyond words. “Fine, you want an apology? I’m sorry that I changed you into a human. I thought it would be easier for us both, but evidently I was wrong. Very, very wrong.”

  “You said it, sister.”

  “So you want to be a dog again? Go ahead and change yourself.”

  “I can’t do that once a demon lord has picked a form for me.” The look he gave me was as sour as a lemon.

  “This demon lord business is really just a pain in the butt, you know that? Fine, you have my permission to be a dog again, if only so I don’t have to keep seeing your naughty bits every time I turn around.”

  “My other package is much, much better,” Jim said, doing a little dance of anticipation, which had the unfortunate result of making the aforementioned naughty bits jiggle around.

  “Jim!” Hastily, I averted my gaze. “For the love of all that isn’t genitalia, stop dancing.”

  “You have to command me! And don’t forget my white spot, and the three white toes. Those are stylin’, let me tell you.”

  I rolled my eyes for a moment, praying to whatever deity was handy for a little patience, and said, “Jim, I command you as your demon lord to change back into a dog.”

  “What? No, you can’t—Aw, crapballs.”

  I eyed the Dalmatian that stood before me, complete with spots and little red collar. “Why are you a Dalmatian?”

  “Because you didn’t order me properly. Man, I sure hope that Aisling chick is a better demon lord than you, because this is terrible.” Jim bent double to look at his undercarriage. “Yup, terrible. Change me back!”

  “I told you to change into a dog!”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t give me parameters. Instead I had to go with your idea of a dog.”

  I blinked for a moment in thought, then suddenly remembered a Dalmatian stuffed toy that I had loved dearly as a child. “Oh. Sorry. Okay, let’s try this: Jim, I command you as your temporary demon lord to change into a dog that isn’t one I remember from my childhood, or that I particularly like.”

  A heavy, martyred sigh that could rival one of Kostya’s followed immediately.

  “Well, now, that’s just silly,” I told Jim the now-Chihuahua.

  “Parameters,” he said, his deep voice at odds with his tiny little body. “You didn’t do them right. Again. Great, now I fit in your pocket. I don’t even wanna see what this did to my package.”

  A door at the far end of the ballroom (as I continued to think of it, although who would give a ball in hell?) opened, and a man strolled into the room, accompanied by two women who were several inches taller than him and probably a good fifty pounds heavier. They looked like bouncers of a particularly hard-core New York City club.

  “My pocket sounds like a pretty good place for you right now,” I said, scooping up Jim and tucking him into the crook of my arm. He was probably five or six pounds, one of those Chihuahuas that rich girls and Hollywood starlets dress up and carry around in their bags, but my main concern at the moment was to keep Jim safe.

  “This is beyond humiliating,” Jim said, his voice muffled from where I had him pressed against my side. “Wait, is that your boobie? It is, isn’t it?”

  “Hush,” I told him as the man and his two bouncers approached. The man wasn’t much to look at—just a normal-looking middle-aged man with brown hair and eyes, of medium height and build, but with every step forward, a sense of dread grew until it weighed down heavily on top of me. It was like being smothered with a lead blanket, and I struggled to breathe by the time he came to a stop in front of me.

  He stood examining first me, then Jim, who scooted even deeper into the crook of my arm.

  “Your name?” the man said with no preamble.

  A squeak was all I could utter. I cleared my throat, remembered I was now a dragon’s mate, and tried again. “Hi, I’m Aoife. And you are?”

  The man ignored my question. “What is the name of the demon?”

  “Jim. Er… Effrijim is his full name, I think. At least that’s what Kostya says, and he would know.”

  “Effrijim.” The man frowned. One of the two bouncers moved forward to whisper in his ear. “Ah. The Guardian’s demon. Why is it bound to you?”

  “That’s kind of a long story. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.” I was trying to be polite, but at the same time, I really disliked the idea that I had been hauled forcibly to hell and was now at the mercy of who-knew-what.

  “Oh, man,” Jim moaned into my side. I glanced down to find him trying to bury his head in my shirt. “We’re gonna get squashed now for sure. That’s the premiere prince, Eefums
. The head honcho. Mr. Big himself.”

  “How do you know?” I asked in a whisper. “You lost your memory, and I doubt if Rene had time to show you pictures of demon lords.”

  “I don’t have to remember him to feel the power coming off him.”

  That was true enough. The power seemed to snap and spark around him, like it was a living thing embracing him.

  “Er… my apologies, Your… uh… Highness, is it?” I gave the man a little smile, even though that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.

  He just stared at me, a dead look in his eyes that increased the feeling of dread until I thought I was going to be pushed down into the ground by it. His dark gaze crawled over me again for a few seconds. “You are a wyvern’s mate.”

  I filed away that statement to trot out to Kostya at a later date. If even the head of hell knew I was his mate, Kostya could just get over his emotional baggage and embrace the fact. “Yes, I am.”

  “That is satisfactory.” He gestured toward me. “Take my ring from her.”

  “What?” I clutched my hand, ignoring the squawk from Jim as I smooshed him against my side, backing up as one of the bouncers came forward. “I don’t think you can do that, can you? It picked me, evidently, so it’s kind of mine now.”

  “If you do not give it willingly,” the bouncer said, her voice as harsh as the lava rocks underneath my feet, “I will simply take your hand to present to Lord Asmodeus.”

  I stared at her in horror, not just because of the appalling things she was saying, but because her teeth were pointed. All of them, and she seemed to have an extraordinary number of them.

  “Sweet suffering sycophants,” I whispered, getting ready to turn and run, although I had no idea where I was going to escape to. But at that moment, there was a rustle in my arms, and Jim leaped down to stand in front of me, his spindly little legs vibrating, his hackles up all the way down his back.

  “You’re going to have to go through me first,” he growled at the bouncer.

  She lifted one heavily booted foot as if to stomp him into nothing, but I shrieked and scooped him up, clutching him to my chest as I backpedaled madly, stumbling over the lava rocks. “Jim, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Protecting you. I’m a demon and you’re my demon lord; as you can see by Hans and Franz there, that’s what we do. It would have been more effective in proper form, but you won’t let me have that.”

  I turned and ran to the other end of the room, looking desperately for a door or some means of escape, but there was none, of course. That would have been far too convenient. I spun around and watched as the two bouncers stalked forward, neither of them in a hurry and both with expressions that I swear took off at least ten years from my life span.

  Hastily, I set Jim down. “I order you to go back to your old form.”

  He turned into a Dalmatian. “Criminy dutch, Eefsters! I thought we had this discussion.”

  The two women got closer, the one with the smile now holding a wicked-looking dagger.

  “Crap! The dog form, the dog form!”

  A Chihuahua faced me with an extremely bitter look on his tiny little face. “Fires of—”

  The second woman started smiling now, and hard to believe, it was even worse than the first bouncer. Panic filled me, along with a desperate need to be anywhere but that exact spot. “No, the other one! The big one that comes from that place in Canada. Crap, I can’t remember the name of it. Nova Scotia?”

  “Eefs, how hard is it to—”

  My mind shut down at that point, unwilling to deal with the fact that two horrible women were about to hack off my hand in order to give a ring to the prince of hell and unable to think of the name of Jim’s preferred form. “For the love of all that’s not canine, just change back to human form! Now, take down Shark Teeth there while I tackle her buddy.”

  Naked human Jim stared at me in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Attack!” I screeched, and threw myself onto the sharp-toothed woman.

  The scuffle that followed was anticlimactic at best, due in part to the fact that Jim didn’t even make it to his assigned bouncer before they both grabbed me.

  “Get her hand,” one of them said, which just made me try to punch her in the face. I didn’t connect, of course, because evidently I’m doomed to never land a blow.

  Jim leaped at the first one when she twirled her knife around her fingers, but the woman just slashed at him, leaving two long bloody marks across his bare chest. Jim looked down in stupefaction, touching one of the gashes and holding up the red-stained fingers to show me. “Um. Ow?”

  “Gods of the woodlands and fields,” I shouted, fighting the woman who held me in order to get to Jim.

  Asmodeus, who had strolled nonchalantly across the ballroom while his bouncers were stalking me, now arrived and said something that caused his bouncer to release me.

  “Are you okay, Jim? That looks terrible! I need to get you to a doctor.” I grabbed the hem of the front of my shirt and ripped it off, which more or less evened the garment, since Jim had poached part of the back. “Stand still. Try not to breathe hard. I’ll wrap this around you now, in order to put pressure on the owies. Stop looking like you’re going to faint. It’ll be okay, I promise.”

  “I feel woozy,” he said, weaving a little. “There’s a bright light. Is there supposed to be a light? Should I go into it? It looks warm and happy, and I want to go into it.”

  “If your comedy act has finished,” Asmodeus said, holding out his hand, “I would like my ring returned.”

  “Stop being so dramatic,” I hissed to Jim out of the side of my mouth. “You’re not cut up that badly. And as for you, Prince Asmodeus, or however you prefer to be addressed, I don’t think this ring is what you think it is. Kostya—he’s the dragon that I’m evidently a mate to—he tried to use the ring, but it was dead to him. The ring seems to like me, so I don’t think it’s going to work the way you expect it to.” I was bluffing, true, which might not have been the brightest idea since the man I was trying to fool was the head of hell itself, not to mention the fact that I had no idea of whether what I said was true, but really, I didn’t feel there was much other choice given that situation.

  After all, the bouncers were quite willing to lop off my hand to get the ring to Asmodeus. I suspected that even if I handed it over willingly, they wouldn’t throw me a “thank you for being so cooperative” party and send me on my way. It behooved me, therefore, to find a way to stalemate his attempt to acquire the ring.

  Asmodeus just looked at me, his hand still outstretched. “It is my ring. I created it, and it was taken from me. Return it to me, now.”

  Jim suddenly started humming under his breath. I shot him a curious look and was interested to see that he looked thoughtful, not terrified or worried, as I expected. And that got my own mind working—why was Asmodeus asking me to give him the ring? Why did he stop his bouncers from taking the ring (and my hand) for him? If I were the boss of hell, you can be sure that I’d be throwing my weight around wherever and whenever possible, including bypassing all the trouble it took in order to reason with someone who had an item I wanted.

  “Huh.” I smiled and held my hand close to my chest. “You know, I don’t think I will give it to you. As I said, it kind of likes me, and I have a feeling that it’s not going to like being forcibly taken from me.”

  Asmodeus didn’t react; at least there was no expression that clued me in to what he was thinking. His bouncers, however, looked at him with surprise, which verified my speculation.

  “I will take it from you if I must,” he finally said, in a manner that implied I was too boring for words. “If you insist on destroying yourself in the process, then it is no concern of mine.”

  Huge leap of faith time, I told myself, and held out my hand. “Okay. Go ahead and take it. If you can.”

  Asmodeus looked at my hand, his own fingers twitching a little, little black tendrils of
electricity snapping around him. Even as he looked, the ring grew warm on my finger and started to glow with a blue-white light. He narrowed his eyes at that; then suddenly he turned around and stomped off in the opposite direction.

  “Take them to a cell,” he ordered as he left.

  “Ha!” I gloated, relief swamping me as he left the ballroom. A tiny fraction of the doom that his presence had caused to squash me lifted, enough so I felt like I could take a deep breath. “I knew it! You can’t take it from me, can you?”

  The nearest bouncer growled at me, a low, ugly, feral sound that had me shivering despite my newfound confidence. The second grabbed me painfully by the arm and commenced to haul me out of the ballroom, Jim following behind with his own bouncer.

  He bitched the entire time it took for the two demons to take us down a couple of flights of stairs and lock us into a small windowless room. It wasn’t, as I assumed, a dungeon, but more like an unused room in the cellar.

  “Well,” I said, examining the situation. The room had a dirt floor, wood walls, and a lone naked lightbulb that swung from a cobwebby wire from the ceiling. There was also the faint smell of mice that left me jumping at every shadow. “Now what do we do?”

  “First of all, you change me back to my proper form. Then you use your magic ring to get us out of here,” Jim said, giving me the king of all disgruntled looks. “Unless, of course, you get your jollies out of seeing me starkers.”

  I averted my eyes from his nakedness. “In your dreams. I just couldn’t remember the name of the breed you like.”

  He glared at me. “Newfoundland. It’s not that hard.”