Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(105)

“There’s no cheering,” he said.

“What?”

“There are crowds along the street, but they’re all silent. Do you hear anything else?”

Zara listened, then shook her head. “So? The common folk of Alexandria are going to rise up for us? You’re dreaming, Captain.”

“I might be,” he said, and turned the glasses back to the glimmering scales of the dragon. “First, we have to take that creature down. Ideas?”

“It’s a dragon. It breathes Greek fire.”

“You’re usually better than this.”

“And you’re usually better than to throw yourself into a useless fight,” she replied. “Unless something dramatic happens . . .”

Something drew Santi’s attention down to the open drive in front of the mansion. Four shapes, fanning out at equidistant points in the middle of the road. He recognized Wolfe’s robe blowing in the morning breeze an instant before he heard Thomas’s deep voice say, “Now,” and four beams of light—one red, two blue, one a shattering white—drew lines from the four humans straight to the dragon at the top of the Serapeum.

The shrieking, grating scream that came out of the dragon was loud enough to shatter windows, and down on the street below the Serapeum, the procession scattered as the dragon unfurled its wings and launched itself upward.

It wasn’t flying evenly. When Santi lifted the glasses and focused, he saw that along one side—the side that had been facing the embassy—half of its heavy, plated scales were gone, revealing cables, gears, wires, tubes, that were slashed open to expose ropes of green liquid cascading out.

He removed the glasses and threw himself down on the edge of the roof to shout, “Again! You hit it! Keep hitting it!”

Wolfe looked up, and so did the other three faces. Khalila, Thomas, and Glain. “Again!” Wolfe shouted, and the beams sliced out again. One missed completely as the dragon banked, but three found marks. Thomas’s—the white beam—sheared off one entire wing of the creature and sent it spinning heavily off to crash somewhere down into the city. A cloud of screams rose. “Keep firing!”

The dragon was making a clumsy attempt to keep aloft, but as the rays fired at it again, it marked its enemies and, in an awkward corkscrewing motion, turned its fall into a lunge.

God save us, it’s coming straight for us.

“Up! Get up!” Zara was dragging at his arm, but there wasn’t any point; they’d never get off the roof, and the four down below weren’t running. They were holding down their triggers, sending continuous blinding pulses of light at the automaton as its enormous, shredding jaws cranked open and it fell toward them.

It was Wolfe’s shot that cut the head from the beast. It hit at just the right angle, cutting clean through a gap in the melted, blackened scales and into the body of the creature; the weight of the head ripped it free and sent it tumbling down in a rough spiral to crash into the iron fence that ringed the compound, where it was impaled down to the ground on the spikes.

The body fell limply out of the sky. It hit just past the fence and skidded to a stop, hissing steam and leaking Greek fire that caught the entire metal skeleton on fire and slowly, steadily began to melt it down. The barbed tail of the thing continued to twitch, but that, Santi thought, was just the heat burning through the metal cables.

Wolfe turned to look up, and Santi found himself smiling. No, grinning. He saw the matching, vulpine expression on his lover’s face.

“Now,” he said, “we have a chance. Come on, Zara, let’s get—”

He rolled over and started to rise, and checked himself when he realized that she was holding a pistol on him. Her dark eyes were wide and very steady.

“No, Captain,” she said. “Not this time. I’m not letting you kill yourself. Not for him. I’ve watched you drag yourself through hell for him, and you can’t do this, Nic, you can’t. You swore oaths. This is wrong.”

He got up slowly, eyes on hers and not on the gun held between them. When he reached out, he was reaching out to her. “I would go to the lowest depths of hell for him,” he said, and put his hand on the gun. “Zara, if turning my back on him is the price of loyalty, you’d better shoot.” He could have taken the weapon, and they both knew it. She could have fired, and they both knew that, too.

Zara let the gun drop to the roof between them, reached up, and ripped the rank and insignia from her High Garda uniform. She opened her hand and let that fall between them, too. Her eyes were full of tears and rage, and she just shook her head and walked away.

He wanted to tell her something better . . . that he valued her, that he would miss her, that she was worth more than this. But in the end, he stood quietly and let her leave. It would be unkind of him to lie to her. He would never choose her over Wolfe. Best she understand that now, at the end of all of this.

He left her gun and insignia where they had fallen, and once he was sure she was gone, he went down to find Wolfe, throw his arms around him, and say, “They’ll be here soon. We need to go. Now.” He pulled back and looked at Glain. “Get Botha. Tell him he’s promoted to lieutenant. Find Troll; he’s my new second. You’re promoted to Sergeant, and head of the Blue Dogs.”

She saluted as smartly as he could ever have hoped. “Thank you, sir. It’s a start.”