That much of my father’s teachings had stayed with me.
Protect the innocent, save the children, you are the last line of defense.
The dragon with wings was closest and had his back to me. Funny enough, there was no hesitation for me this time. I went for him first. If I could distract them, maybe she could get away. I’d slip into the forest and that would be that. Over and done before anyone even knew I was there.
I raced across the snow, belly low and eyes locked on my target. At the last second, I jumped up and landed between his shoulder blades where I was fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to reach me. I dug in my claws, cutting through the thick armored hide with an ease that shocked me. I’d never actually tried to fight anything bigger than me in this form. What would be the point? But here I was actually doing damage!
There was a moment of silence and then he roared and tried to whip his head around, his tooth-filled mouth snapping. But I was too far up and he wasn’t flexible enough. Score one for the kitty cat.
“What the fuck is that on your back?” One of the Grasslander dragons laughed at him. “You’ve got a fuzzy black growth! A snarling tumor!”
They came toward us, laughing, while I clung to his back and he bucked and fought to dislodge me.
“You shouldn’t pick on those smaller than you,” I snarled. “Some of us have claws and teeth.”
“You . . . pussy cat, I’m going to peel your hide from your bones!” He flicked his wings out wide and the muscles under him bunched. There was no way I was going to fly with him.
I might have been stupid to think I could take him on, but I was not so stupid as to let him get me in the air.
Right before he launched skyward, I twisted and let go, leaping for one of his buddies. I caught him on the side of his neck and once more dug my claws in. I was lower this time, closer to his chest, and he flung himself backward as my claws cut deeply into his hide. This was insane. How was this even happening? A strange sense of glee filled me and I bit him, tearing away a tiny chunk of dragon meat with a wrench of my head. Heat flowed through me, and in a flash of understanding, it hit me.
This had something to do with the flail. Magic, Marsum’s magic. It made my claws and teeth stronger and sharper than they had ever been.
Giddy the fuck up!
In the tumble between me and the dragons, Lila shot into the sky. Her crystalline blue eyes met mine in a flash, and I thought she was going to leave, escape, as was my plan. In fact, I expected no less of her.
Apparently though, I wasn’t the only one with claws and teeth and an attitude to back them up once royally pissed.
She dropped like a stone, landing on top of the third dragon’s head. He screeched and then I couldn’t see them because I was tumbling with the dragon I was attached to.
“Get it off, get it off! Ahhh, the claws burn! Let me go!”
I grinned and decided to add to the pain, forgetting in the melee that I was supposed to be flying under the radar as it were. For the first time, I felt like a lion, tackling something I should never have tried as a tiny cat. And it was glorious.
I dropped my mouth and bit into his hide, shaking my head and growling as I tore at the armored scales, peeling them off like peeling an orange, hunks of hide ripping and falling to the snow.
If I thought the screeching was bad before, it was nothing to what erupted out of him now. You’d think I’d poured acid into the wounds.
“Let me go, let me go, let me go!” The words squealed into high octaves and I realized he was nothing more than a teenage dragon. Young and easy to scare once he realized he was outmatched. Part of my brain could not comprehend what was happening. The other part was practically crowing.
I was besting a dragon. All. By. Myself.
“Only if you promise to let her live, and let me go too!” I shouted back at him.
“Done, done! Lila lives!” He screeched the words, and from where I hung on, I could see his jeweled eyes rolled back in his head and his body slumped.
Did the pussy of a dragon just pass out? He fell to the snow and I leapt free of him before he could tumble and crush me. Damn it, he had!
The other two dragons were gone, leaving just me and Lila. She flew about five feet in the air.
“Why did you help me?” She shook her head. “You shouldn’t have helped me.”
“How about we get out of here first before we have a discussion about who should have helped who?” I countered. She bobbed her head and I raced away from the clearing and the dragon we left behind. “Will others come?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said.
Maybe was the chance we had to take. Without the blood lust driving me, my common sense showed back up. Lila was right. I should have walked away because now we’d caused a ruckus and were at least three days from the border of the Witch’s Reign. Three days of dodging dragons in subzero temperatures did not sound like a good idea at all.
There wasn’t enough breath for talking anyway. We raced through the trees, heading north. We had to get to Maks before the dragons did. They’d be looking for a cat and a tiny dragon. Not a woman with a big hood on. Already I knew Lila would fit in the hood; she was just small enough if she stayed still.
We burst out of the trees along the edge of the forest and there was a snort and a whinny behind me. I spun around to see Maks sighting a crossbow at me. Shit, I did not want him to see me like this. But what did it matter? He wasn’t going to make it out of this trip, of that much I was sure. I tried not to feel bad about that. But I couldn’t help the shame. It had been with me so long, it was a companion all in itself.
I opened the door inside my mind to my two-legged form and my bones and body shifted fast so I was upright in a matter of two blinks of the eyes. Maks’s eyes went wide and he lowered the crossbow. Behind us came a boom of trees being shattered and then a roar of a much, much bigger dragon. The teenage dragons had bigger friends, apparently.
“I have to hide!” Lila cried.
“In my hood, now. Don’t move. Don’t say a word.” I held the edge of the hood open and she hesitated a moment. “I won’t let you down, Lila. You can trust me.”
She shook her head once, indecision flickering across her face. But she had no choice. She had to trust me and we both knew it. She flew down to my shoulder. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven pounds. Almost identical in size to my house cat form. With a liquid ease, she slid into my hood, settling herself across my shoulders.
Maks handed me Balder’s reins and I mounted. “Trot. Not fast. Just moving away from here,” he said. “We need to make sure they don’t put two and two together.”
He was right, exactly what I was thinking. Dragons were smart, and if they saw the exit of my paw prints from the trees intersecting with the horses, we were screwed.
The horses happily broke into matched trots that put distance between us and my prints.
Lila shivered inside my hood. “They’ll kill us all. You should never have helped me. You don’t know what you’ve brought on yourself.”
“No, they won’t.” I reached back to my bedroll and fumbled with it until I found the black jewel. I held it in one gloved hand. Warmth rolled from it, and I clung to the stone, terrified I’d drop it in the snow. That would . . . not be good, to say the least.
“You sure about this?” Maks was beside me and I glanced at him.
“Of course, I am.”
“You’re a terrible liar, you know that, right?”
I grinned, a wild sensation rolling through me, covering the hesitation that crawled through my veins. That recklessness Bryce and so many others had accused me of, what my father had named me after, and it made me want to believe. With the attack on the dragons, something in me had shifted. “Of course, I am.”
He shook his head. “We need to survive this to get to Darcy, Zam. Not play dodge the dragon.”
That sobered me and I clung to the new strength I’d seen in myself. I didn’t want to hesitate anymore. I wanted to take life by the balls and run with it. “We will, but we have to be bold to see this to the end. There can be no other way.”
“This isn’t bold. It’s stupid,” Maks said.