Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2)(49)

She steps away from Simon, and he falls back to the ground. She watches him try to sit up. “Yessss. Am free,” she says in our heads. “Is better than this. Is best.”

She walks back to the fire.

“Do you believe us?” Bunce asks.

Margaret shrugs. “Believe you are malformed outcast tourist trash.”

She’s not wrong there. “So,” I say carefully, “we can go?”

“You will go to the Next Blood? Fight them?”

“Yes!” Simon yells.

“Go,” she says. “Tell the Next Blood they will never be top. Are the top! Am. Next Blood will burn, up when we wake. Up when we wake at the top.”

The woman—the dragon?—takes the Normal’s hand. “Take them away, Shepard. Don’t let them hurt you. Let them hurt bloodeaters.” She squeezes his hand, then walks away from us and the fire.

“Wait!” Bunce calls out. “My ring. I need my ring.”

The woman turns abruptly, as if Penny has attacked her, and holds up a clenched fist. She must be wearing thirty rings and a dozen gold bracelets. “Is mine now!” she thunders in our heads.

Penny sounds tearful. “Please. I can’t do magic without it. I can’t help my friend. Or hurt bloodeaters.”

The dragon—she must be—walks back to Penny and glares down at her. She brings her heavy hand to her mouth and closes her teeth around Penny’s ring. Then she spits something—the purple stone from its centre—into the dirt.

And then she leaves.

We’re still alive. And she’s gone.





36





SIMON


Shepard unties me first, then I free Baz. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve felt better, to be honest,” he says. Which makes me think he must be nearly dead.

I help him stand. “We’ll get you out of here and get you something to drink. More cats. A cow. Something.”

My wings are flapping around, half out of control. It hurt so badly to have them tied down—I think I might have sprained something. I hope it isn’t a break. It’s not like I can pop in to a veterinary clinic and have it set.

Penny doesn’t wait to be untied before she starts hammering Shepard with questions: “Where are these vampires? How do we find them? Where’s our car?”

“The truck you stole?” He’s working on the knots around her ankles. “Down the mountain, where you parked it.”

“We need to leave,” she says.

“You need to take a breath. You just barely lived through that.”

“Was that really a dragon?” I ask him. My wings are convulsing. Shepard hands me a water bottle.

“Yeah.” His eyes are shining. “Isn’t she magnificent?”

“That depends,” Baz says. “Is she listening?”

“Definitely,” Shepard says. “She hears everything on this mountain.”

“How?”

He grins. “Because she is the mountain.”

We all look down at the ground.

“Dragons,” he whispers. “A herd of them. Asleep since God knows when.”

“We need to leave,” Baz says. There’s a low spinning sound, like a boomerang, and a pair of trousers hits him in the face.

Shepard looks confused. “What the—”

“Thank Crowley,” Baz says, pulling the jeans free of his neck. “My kingdom for fresh pants as well.”

Penny’s still staring at Shepard. “The mountains are dragons?”

Shepard nods. “Isn’t it incredible? Most of them are native. Margaret settled here a few hundred years ago, I guess. That’s why she wakes up; she’s used to a colder climate. But she says the others are stirring now. She’s excited to meet them—and nervous, I think.” His voice drops. “Don’t tell her I said that.”

“But she looks like a woman.”

“That’s just her public persona,” he says. “Sort of a magickal envoy.”

Penny’s free of the ropes. She folds her arms. “Take us to our car.”

Shepard steps back. “So you can wipe my brain again?”

“Why didn’t it work the first time?”

He shrugs. “Maybe I’ve been given too much pixie dust over the years. Memory magic doesn’t seem to stick anymore.”

Penny holds out her fist—I reach out to stop her, but she’s already casting. “That doesn’t ring a bell!”

Shepard lurches backwards, like he’s been decked in the jaw. He shakes his head and lifts it, his eyes clear and unglazed. “I mean, it doesn’t feel good.”

Her hand drops.

“I don’t understand why you don’t trust me,” he says. “I’ve saved your skin twice now. I’m still your only safe way off this mountain—why can’t we be friends?”

“You don’t want to be friends,” Penny says. “It’s not like we all hit it off at a pub. You’re only helping us because you want information.”

“And that’s fine,” Baz says. We all look at him. He looks at Penny. “We can’t rescue Wellbelove on our own. We couldn’t even rescue ourselves. We need a guide.”