Several hours later, they were all quite thoroughly soaked, exhausted and entertained. And for Shamira, this time it had not involved sex. She strode out of the pond, water glistening on her tight skin and flowing down her carved body.
“Great,” Samantha muttered, turning the other way to see a smiling Clara. “Now she’s just showing off.”
“Mama likes,” the vampire crooned.
“You know she used to be ashamed of that body?”
“We kind of beat that out of her,” Clara finished. If the sister only knew she was not kidding.
Suddenly, the Thorn-Tail scurried to the top of the bank and started looking (not “looked”) around.
“What is it, Aodh?” Shamira said, almost afraid to approach considering the agitated manner in which the youngster was swinging his tail. “Clara –”
“Everyone out of the water,” Clara interrupted, heading towards the bank. “Katar, get Jormungandr out of the –”
At that moment, a wall of flame erupted around the pond with such heat and force that Shamira was forced to dive towards the ground. Aodh’s tail was singed and he cried out, hurrying away and preparing to take flight. Another wall of fire shot up, crossing the entire clearing and cutting them off from the house at large.
“Who the hell –” she started to say, wondering who could have the audacity to attack such a highly guarded compound, but she did not have time to dwell on it. Her sister, her lover, one of her young charges, and Katar and several of his dragons were trapped inside, while Shamira and Aodh were caught between a flame and a hot place.
“YOU RUINED EVERYTHING!” a voice boomed, containing a vile rage that Shamira had never heard before. It reeked of rot and waste, so much so that Shamira almost did not recognize it. Almost.
“Jonas,” she growled, mostly to herself.
Burning shapes began to appear around her, humanoid but far from human. She could not see Jonas yet, but she could feel him, his very presence a malice carried by a brisk autumn wind. “Everything I worked for, everything I set up, every moment I waited, for NOTHING!” A ball of crackling white flame shot over her head, making her duck, but it was obviously not meant to hurt her. Jonas wanted to play with her first.
“You’re a fucking idiot!” she shouted, preparing to transform. “You came here?! You know you won’t make it out alive!” The flaming forms were getting closer.
“I’ll turn you to ash before you can finish transforming,” came Jonas’s voice. “Yes, I know who you are now, and I remember you. You . . . we had you hanging like a side of beef and we let you go?!”
“Actually, I ripped your buddy apart before my friends came for me. Not that you’d know, since the only ones coming for you are the Wild Hunt.” All the flames were rendering her Shadow Sight useless, and she had to find him. She started the transformation, letting the smoke pour out of her pores. Then a blast of energy flew past her and nailed Aodh in the side. The young dragon screamed and looked like it was going to take to the sky. Another bolt of energy clipped its wing. Shamira jumped between the source of the bolt and her wounded charge.
“You son of a bitch! He’s just a baby!”
“He should be mine!” Jonas said, stepping seemingly out of the flames. His eyes let off little blazes of their own, and oh did they show how much he hated Shamira. “Lacroix was so short sighted. He would have been just sat around that little piss-poor excuse of a land for all eternity and whine about how Stapleton had stolen the big prize away from him. I hadn’t been studying sorcery my whole life to be security chief to a weakling like that.”
“So you hatch a plan to take over by getting him into so much trouble that we have to kill him?” Shamira was angry. She might be able to shift, but Jonas might seriously hurt Aodh. And she had no idea how her sister and Clara and the dragons were doing inside that ring of fire. “Samantha?!” she shouted. She heard some coughing and shouting, but she couldn’t make out anything specific. “Let them out or so help me –”
“You’ll what?” Jonas gave an evil grin. “The only way I stay alive in the long run is I make it so that people, even the Tribunal, are afraid of me.” He pulled a collar out from behind his back, and Shamira recognized it as similar to the one she had pulled of Aodh. “Having the ‘Great Moon Dragon’ at my beck and call should help with that.”
“There’s no fucking way –”
“Put on this collar and swear yourself to me or I’ll boil everyone in that pond alive, I promise you.”
A chilling sensation crept up Shamira’s spine. This son of a bitch had not only condoned but had seen her tortured, had betrayed his own lord, had been responsible for who knows how many magical creatures being bled out, and now he wanted Shamira to just hand herself over to him? The left side of her body started to warm up, and she dodged just as one of the flaming forms lunged for her. Whatever the hell these things were, they served Jonas.
She lashed out instinctively, feeling a solid core to the thing before the burning sensation became too much. She held her arm with its blackened skin close to her body, grimacing in pain as she moved away from the lumbering entity, but keeping herself between it and a terrified and angry Aodh.
“Put on the damn collar and I’ll let the others live,” Jonas reiterated. “I’d really rather not be here when the Wild Hunt realizes that I’m not where they think I am, and I know your friends in the barn –” He stopped when he heard thunder and saw a bolt of lightning in the sky. That same sky had been clear earlier that night.
‘Where did all the clouds come from?’ Shamira wondered. Someone, one of her friends, must be up to something. She had to give them more time.
“How do I know you’ll let them go?” she shouted. She grabbed a rock from the ground and hurled it with bullet-like speed towards the nearest of Jonas’s fiery servants, making it take a step back but only for a moment.
“You do what I say and pray that I’m a man of my word,” Jonas snarled. He glanced around, looking for something . . . Shamira could not tell what. His eyes finally rested on the flaming ring surrounding the pond, and his mouth formed an unflattering sneer. Someone in there was doing something Jonas did not like. Shamira almost smiled, knowing it had to be Clara. The shaman had power over nature and the ability to maintain the balance. Jonas had brought fire, so Shamira’s girlfriend was going to bring rain.
“Fucking red-skinned bitch!” Jonas growled.
“Big mistake,” Shamira said, lunging forward. Jonas turned in time to avoid part of her charge, but not enough so that she did not clip him a little. He staggered off to the side and lost his grip on the collar. He looked like he wanted to pick it up, but realized it would not be a good idea to take his eyes off of his opponent again.
“She hears that kind of racial slur, and you’ll be lucky if I kill you first.”
“You might want to listen to reason,” he said, his eyes glowing and the flames around the pond grew higher.
Shamira heard screaming from inside the fiery circle, and she heard Aodh cry out in pain as the flaming forms moved closer to him. She stared at him with more hatred than she had ever felt before. Then, the rain came. And boy, did it ever come with a vengeance. The flames around them were magical in nature, but so was the water that poured down from the sky, drenching only a few hundred acres of North Georgia forest and nothing else.
Gaps were appearing in the wall of fire that had separated the barn from the field of battle, and Shamira’s allies started popping through. Reaper opened up on one of the flaming enemies with a high pressure water hose. Shamira liked the ingenuity. Sebastian leaped through another gap and started firing his handgun, slowing another enemy down but not killing it. A pickup truck came hurtling through an opening and ran over a third fire creature, then Bunny got out of the cab and ran like hell before the whole thing exploded.
“You . . . lose,” Shamira said. Her eyes tried to move to Jonas’ right in response to something teasing her peripheral vision, but they shot back of their own accord. There was nothing out there. ‘But I could have sworn –‘
Jonas’ eyes were wild now. He grabbed the collar from the ground and lunged forward with uncanny speed, intending to put the collar on Shamira by force if necessary. He extended his hands with the device.
Shamira did not see the blow come. All she knew was that Jonas’ hands just fell off, the collar still clutched in their grip. Jonas screamed and sunk to his knees. Suddenly, Banshee was standing beside him, looking down on him with complete disgust. She held a sword in one hand, and the parts not coated in Jonas’s blood gleamed. Shamira had forgotten about the assassin’s Mind Fog aspect that made those around her simply not pay attention to her.
“You cannot have her,” Banshee said with ice in her voice.
The flames all began to die down, and the fiery enemies seemed confused. Shamira finally allowed herself to shift, her body stretching and smoking and growing until the last Moon Dragon stood in the clearing.
“He is yours,” Banshee said, looking at the vanquished foe kneeling on the ground.
Shamira’s dragon jaws lunged forward and caught Jonas around the midsection, then she swung his flailing legs around to face Aodh. The small dragon recognized the smell of the man and remembered what had been done to it. Aodh grabbed those legs with its mouth, and the two dragons ripped the would-be conqueror in half.
“That,” started a voice from the pond, “was intense!” Samantha stood naked in the water, watching her sister eat a vampire. She looked a little . . . shocked. Shamira looked at her sister who had just been put in mortal danger because of her proximity to the dragon-vamp, then at Aodh, which she had failed to protect. Even now, the young dragon was winding its way around Shamira’s feet, trying to take comfort from her.
* Samantha, are you okay? *
Samantha blanched. “My sister just . . . ate that . . . oh dear,” she said, then did what most sensible human women would do in her situation. She passed out. ‘I suck at being a dragon!’ Shamira thought again angrily. And then she saw Clara floating face up in the water, and her giant heart almost broke. She reached out with a giant claw to lift her lover from the water, but she started to move towards the show, propelled by an unseen force. Smaller dragons started poking their heads up above the water to look about, but it was Jormungandr who was pushing Clara. A quick scan of the beast’s mind showed that it did not understand exactly why Clara was important, only that she was important to the great beast.