Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers #5)(18)
He cut off with a pained grunt. Behind him, absolutely silent, the tentacle he’d kicked had suddenly whipped back around. Bob had calculated the chances of the monster noticing such a tiny blip as minuscule, but he clearly hadn’t given the Nameless End enough credit, because the black appendage curled up into the air like a coiled whip to smack him out of the sky.
If he’d been human, the blow would have killed him instantly. As a dragon, it merely sent him rocketing toward the ground, crashing through the broken Skyways and into the roof of what had been one of the last intact buildings left in the DFZ.
Chapter 3
Julius grabbed Marci and dove, rolling them both out of the way just in time to avoid the hunks of splintered wood. The dragon came in like a meteor, shooting straight through the attic and the second floor right above their heads before landing with a crash in the gravel driveway out front. It was still rolling over and over when Julius felt the familiar burn of Marci’s magic snap like a broken rubber band. The ward, he realized numbly. The ward protecting the house had been broken, which meant…
“Ghost!”
Marci screamed the name beneath him, and suddenly, the spirit was there, but not as Julius remembered. This was no fluffy transparent ghost cat. It wasn’t even the shadowy figure of the faceless Roman legionnaire that seemed to be the Empty Wind’s preferred combat form. This was a giant. A mountain of a man eight feet tall who blew in on a wind even colder than Svena’s ice. His dusky flesh was still dark, but it was no longer shadowy or see-through. Quite the opposite, the spirit now looked even more solid than Julius himself. With so much magic crammed inside him, Ghost had a weight to him that no living thing could match. Julius could actually feel his own magic bending toward the spirit like metal shavings toward a magnet as Ghost held up his hand to stop the flood of iridescent power rising up to swallow them.
He also stopped the collapse of the house, which, now that there was a dragon-sized hole blasted straight through the middle, was no longer structurally stable. The chimney fell over as Julius watched, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the living room. He was looking up to make sure the roof wasn’t about to follow suit when he saw Marci’s spirit looking down at them.
As always, the Empty Wind’s face matched his name—an empty helmet with two blue-white glowing eyes floating like fireflies inside—but here, too, something was different. It wasn’t just shadows in there anymore. This was a deeper darkness. Staring into it, Julius could almost feel himself being forgotten, as if his bones were already crumbling dust. It was horrifying, but he couldn’t force himself to look away. He was trapped in the sudden realization of his own mortality, the truth that even a dragon like him would eventually die and be forgotten. They would all be forgotten, and—
Marci reached up and slapped her hands over his eyes, breaking the spell. Julius collapsed into her the moment the darkness let him go. He was still gasping when he heard her yell at Ghost. “I thought that only worked on the other side!”
“So did I,” replied a thousand empty voices.
“Well, can you tone it down or something?”
There was a long pause, and then the freezing wind began to slack off. “Sorry,” Ghost said in a far more normal—but still incredibly creepy—voice. “It’s just… I’ve never had this much magic before. It’s incredible.”
“I’m sure it is,” Marci said, dropping her hands from Julius’s eyes. “But as a wise man once said, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ I don’t mind you stuffing yourself full of magic, but please don’t send Julius into an existential crisis. I just got him back.”
“Sorry,” the spirit said again, and then his voice brightened. “I stopped the magic.”
“I saw,” she said proudly. “And caught the house! A-plus job on both, by the way. Just keep up the good work until Myron and I can reestablish the ward.”
“I can hold it for as long as you need,” Ghost said, his empty voice a bit too joyful for Julius’s comfort. “It’s just like it was back in the Sea of Magic, but even greater. I can fly here, Marci. I can feel the dead all over the world. They call to me, and I can help them now. I can help them all.”
“And we will,” Marci promised as she helped Julius back to his feet. “But right now, we have to focus on the immediate concerns, like what hit our roof.”
She turned to look through the shattered front of the house, glaring at the giant dragon that was still lying in the long gouge he’d put in their gravel driveway. From the feathers, it was obvious the culprit was a Heartstriker, but Julius had never seen one so colorful, aside from Bethesda herself. Even covered in insulation and drywall dust from the house he’d just destroyed, the dragon looked like a giant bird of paradise. His feathers were a riot of tropical greens, reds, purples, golds, and rich blues. Heavy bone gauntlets encased the delicate scales above his clawed feet, the transformed evidence of a Fang of the Heartstriker. Despite all this, though, it wasn’t until the pigeon swooped down through the hole the dragon had left in the spiraling Skyways overhead that Julius finally realized exactly which Heartstriker he was looking at.
“Bob?”
The beautiful dragon shook the dust from his feathers and rolled over, pulling himself out of the crater to smile down at Julius. “In my defense,” he said, “that was not the entrance I’d planned.”