Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers #5)(14)
He sighed and pulled the oven mitts down more tightly. When he was satisfied she wouldn’t lose a finger, he turned back to the standoff going down just a few feet away.
“What are you?” Svena demanded, the frost at her feet rippling as she took a step toward Amelia. “You don’t even smell like a dragon anymore. You smell like him.” She pointed at Raven, who’d flown up to perch on the stairwell banister, where he’d have a better view. “What did you do to her, creature? Where is the Planeswalker?”
Amelia rolled her eyes. “For fire’s sake. It is me, ice queen. If you want proof, I can tell the story of that night back in the twelve hundreds when I got you so drunk off fortified wine casks that you ran off and saved the capital of Slovenia. Or if that story’s too well-known, I could tell everyone about the time you got a crush on a human fisherman and asked me to cover for you to your sisters while you two ran off behind his boat to—”
“Okay, shut up, I believe you,” Svena said frantically, her pale cheeks flushing a very slight pink. “But that still doesn’t explain how you’re here.”
“Come on,” Amelia said with a chuckle. “Surely you don’t think a minor inconvenience like death could stop someone as amazing as me?”
“A minor inconvenience?” Svena repeated, clutching her fists. “You were ash, Amelia! I saw it happen! The human we put your fire into was dead as well. Your flames were gone. Dragons don’t come back from that.”
“I know,” Amelia said proudly. “But that doesn’t apply to me, because I’m not a dragon anymore. I am a god.”
She spread her arms with a flourish, but Svena just huffed. “What does that matter? Any dragon worth the name has been worshiped as a god at one point or another. Even your tacky mother tricked the Aztecs into offering her blood sacrifices.”
“Don’t confuse me with Bethesda,” Amelia said, insulted. “And I’m not talking about human worship. I’m an actual superior being. Here, see for yourself.” She thrust her hands at the white dragon’s face. “Look at my magic. Does that look like normal dragon magic to you?”
Svena narrowed her eyes. “Of course not. We’ve already covered this.”
“And I’m trying to answer your question,” Amelia said, her face splitting into a grin. “I’ve transcended, Svena! I didn’t just cheat death. I drop-kicked it! I asked Bob to kill me so I could travel with Marci through mortal death into the Sea of Magic. Once there, I conquered and devoured the nascent Mortal Spirit of dragons and took its power for myself, forever tying all dragon magic to this plane.” Her grin turned manic. “Do you get it now? I solved the non-native reduction problem you’ve been working on for the past five centuries! Me! You always called my interest in humans a narcissistic obsession, but it was through human magic that I finally solved the biggest magical problem of our species! The one even you couldn’t crack! I did that, and now I’m the first dragon ever to become truly immortal by merging with an effectively infinite magical source, which means I have finally and officially won. Our rivalry is over. There is absolutely nothing you can do to beat me now. Even if you did manage to kill me, I’d just come back like any other spirit and laugh in your face.” Her expression grew unbearably smug. “Face it, frosty, you’ve lost.”
Amelia cackled after that. A loud, cringe-worthy guffaw of pure bad sportsmanship, and Svena began to shake. Julius stepped back at the sight, moving to shelter Marci with his body against the inevitable explosion that came from rubbing defeat in a proud dragon’s face. But as he opened his mouth to call his sister out for unnecessary levels of gloating, he realized Svena wasn’t shaking with rage.
She was crying.
“You idiot!” she roared. “I thought you were dead!”
“Well, yeah, I was,” Amelia said, looking confused. “It was the only way to make everything work. But I was always planning to come back.”
“I didn’t know that!” Svena cried. “You turned to ash in front of my eyes.” Then before anyone could move, Svena reeled back and launched a trash-can-sized ball of ice at Amelia’s face. “How dare you do this to me!?”
Amelia didn’t have time to do more than look surprised before the attack smashed into her, blasting her across the living room and into the couch, which exploded in a shower of wood splinters and synthetic cotton filling. The stuffing hadn’t even finished falling before Svena was on top of her, tossing the ice boulder away with a wave of her hand so she could grab Amelia by the shoulders and slam her into the floor so hard the boards cracked.
“You were the only one left I could talk to!” she shouted. “The only one who remembered what dragon magic actually meant! You were a brash idiot with no sense of subtlety, but you were mine. My idiot, my enemy, my friend! You belonged to me, and you let that smug bastard of a seer take you away!” She slammed Amelia into the floor again and then dropped down herself, her face vanishing behind the long sweep of her ice-blond hair as she buried her head into the crook of Amelia’s shoulder. “Did you even think of what it would be like for me, you stupid, selfish snake?”
She was sobbing by the time she finished, her whole body heaving as the giant hunk of ice she’d thrown at Amelia melted into a puddle. Pinned to the ground, Amelia shot a panicked look at Julius, but he just shrugged. It wasn’t that he didn’t have sympathy. It was just all for Svena. Amelia and Bob had done this to her as much as they’d done it to him, and as nice as Julius was, he didn’t move an inch to save his sister from the consequences of her recklessness.