I looked up and saw the dragon’s white underbelly smashed against the upper viewport. Apparently the thing had wrapped itself around us.
Suddenly a huge mouth filled with deadly looking teeth filled the front viewport.
I shrieked in surprise and threw myself backward, momentarily forgetting that it was still outside the vehicle. The scary looking teeth closed down over the viewport and grabbed on, leaving me to stare in complete disgust at the thing’s curling black tongue and surprisingly pink tonsils.
I cringed and winced as the dragon drove its teeth through the shiny, red surface of the Viper, realizing finally that I was deep in a piss ocean surrounded by turd sharks. I wasn’t going to escape my predicament unless I donned my magic dance shoes and started doing a really good two-step.
Closing my eyes and taking a deep, calming breath, I pushed my mind through my options. It didn’t take long, I only had two. Pull out every ounce of magic I had and shoot it at the thing, praying it would take its nasty teeth back and hobble home in unhappy defeat…or let it eat me.
I didn’t much like option number two.
As the dragon tightened the grip its wings had on the Viper and started shaking its head in an effort to rip the nose off my beloved air vehicle, I forced myself to breathe deeply and pull my magic forward.
The magic bubbled up just as the Viper’s nose started to squeal in unhappy submission. A violent wrenching, ripping sound made me lose my focus and my grip on my magic slipped.
Forcing myself to focus, I managed to grab the thread again, just as the Viper’s nose wrenched loose and I felt the dragon’s hot, citrusy breath against my face. My eyes wanted to open but I forced them to stay closed, knowing that if I looked up into the hole the black dragon had made in my beautiful air vehicle I’d lose focus completely and I’d have no chance at all of surviving.
Instead I threw out my sensing power and watched the dragon’s fiery aura through that.
The thing lifted its snout into the air and gave a heart-stopping roar. I tightened my knees against the urge to wet myself and dragged my power out of its hiding place in my brain. In horrified fascination, my senses tracked the flow of fire from the dragon’s lungs, up its long throat and toward the open maw that waited above me. I was suddenly at a bonfire party, facing a pretty orange and blue jolt of skin-melting fire and I was the weenie on the stick.
Just before the fire emerged from the dragon’s throat I flung out my power in a protective bubble, praying I had enough in me to stop the wall of flame that was coming my way.
The flames hit my protective bubble with a whoosh and I nearly buckled under the dreadful heat. The Viper’s interior started to crack and melt around me and tears rolled down my cheeks. There was no way both of us would survive the attack.
In fact, I knew with a heavy heart that the Viper was already gone.
With this admission I realized I had two problems. First I had to vanquish the dragon and then I had to find a way out of the Viper before it hit the ground. The realization of this, bunched with the certain knowledge that the Viper was toast, nearly undid me.
The dragon reared back again, taking a deep heated breath that sucked all the air out of the Viper’s mangled cockpit and prepared to fling fire at me again. I opened my eyes and swallowed hard, realizing I had a beat in time to make my move. I quickly dropped power from my protective bubble and redirected it into a power arrow, which I shot through the ugly tear in the Viper’s nose and into the dragon’s convulsing throat.
The horrendous noise was cut off mid-roar and the dragon squawked painfully as my power ripped a three foot long hole in its throat. Instinctively it unwrapped its wings from the Viper and surged backward, flinging its beautiful black head from side to side in obvious pain.
I gasped as the Viper plunged downward, powerless and rudderless and torn beyond repair. My mind was quickly assessing my chances of shifting out of the cockpit into a place that was relatively safe and open when the Viper’s downward spiral halted with a bone-jarring jerk and my body slammed into the floor hard enough to knock all the wind out of me.
I lay gasping on the floor of the disabled vehicle as I felt it shuddering into the dragon’s embrace again.
I tried pushing myself off the floor and thought foul deprecations in my head as I fought to regain breath. My arms didn’t seem to be working right. Probably from oxygen deprivation.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I wheezed as an eight inch long, razor sharp claw pierced the Viper’s back and started ripping away the metal over my head.
I rolled to my back and fired another power arrow blindly through the new tear. The dragon screeched but didn’t let go of the Viper. I fired again and again until the dragon lost its temper and flung us away.
I grabbed a seat as we plunged downward, wondering that we hadn’t hit the ground yet. As expected, the Viper came to a grinding halt in midair and, this time my legs took a painful jolt but my hold on the seat stopped me from full impact.
I didn’t wait for the dragon to attack again. I flung myself into the seat and hit the eject button. The roof over my head surged open and the seat bucked powerfully, flinging me through the opening in the Viper’s roof and into the sky above.
I sailed past the dragon, watching one surprised, red eye track my upward progress as it realized what I’d done. It immediately dropped the Viper and spread its wings to fly. Before it could react, I tapped into my daemon hickey and pulled the full force of my power and Dialle’s through me, firing it into the surprised dragon as I reversed my momentum and started falling past it toward the ground below.
The thing had time to shriek once as my power hit its black head and then, with one last powerful surge of its mighty wings, its head exploded and its dead body plummeted toward the ground.
I grabbed the cross around my neck, closed my eyes and placed the cross against my forehead. I thought his name and Flick appeared, suddenly cradling me in his arms. “Hey, Astra.”
I smiled at him, taking a breath for the first time in moments. Leaning my head against his chest I sighed. “Hey, Flick. Take me to the office will you?”
His voice rumbled in his chest as he said, “Sure thing.”
And we entered the sphere where time and space stopped.
* * * * *
Flick sat across from me in one of my client chairs. Emo sat in the other. Emo’s handsome, golden face had creased more with each detail I’d fed them about my encounter with the black dragon.
He shook his head now, black curls swinging against finely honed cheeks and his beautiful black eyes narrowing. “It doesn’t make sense. Black dragons haven’t been seen around here for nearly thirty years.”
My gaze slid to his. “That’s not entirely accurate. I did see one fighting a red dragon when we faced off against Enoch and my mother. I have a feeling Enoch brought them back from the shadows to fight that battle.”
Emo shook his head and looked down at his hands. That memory was not a good one for either of us. Enoch had been a long-time friend and trusted ally of our two families. That he had chosen the dark purpose over the divine goal in the end still stung.
Flick seemed oblivious to our sudden melancholy. “So, we need to get you a new air vehicle.” He grinned at me, obviously relishing the idea.
I grimaced. Losing the Viper was like losing my best friend. We’d been through so much together and the Viper had never betrayed me or tried to kill me. Actually it was better than a best friend. “I guess.”
Emo slid his dark gaze to me. “I can start looking if you’ll tell me what you want.”
I shrugged, suddenly not interested at all in finding a new air vehicle. It felt somehow disloyal to replace my beloved Viper within hours of having lost it. “Surprise me.”
Emo’s eyes widened slightly, knowing that the choice was too important to be sloughed off so cavalierly. “How about we just do a cyber-lease for a few months until you figure out what you want?”
I nodded. Whatever.
Emo left my office to find me a temporary air vehicle and Flick, finally picking up on my mood, sat silently in the chair across from me. I stood up under the weight of his gaze and walked over to the large window behind my desk.
Outside the window, daylight was sliding into night under a heavy mist. As I peered into the dim distance, my eyes caught the occasional sparkle of light in the mist. My mind flitted from one thing to the next and didn’t really register anything outside the window.
I felt Flick’s presence beside me at the window but didn’t turn.
“Can you feel it?”
I rubbed absently at my wrist and kept my gaze in the distance, my eyes unfocused, deeply held by my thoughts. “Feel what?”
I heard the rustle of his robes as he shrugged. “The change in the air? Something’s brewing out there. Something big.”
I turned and focused a questioning gaze on him. “I hadn’t noticed.”
He shrugged. “I have.”
I watched him carefully for a few beats and then returned my gaze to the window, seeing the view beyond it with different eyes. The sky was a deep purple color that seemed slightly off. It was entirely cloudless but flashes of lightning pierced it with a regularity that spoke of storms in the distance. Each lightning bolt left behind a kaleidoscope of sparkles as the mist picked up the illumination and played it back in a thousand points of light.
It was pretty. But it was somehow wrong too.
Deciding that I was being overly sensitive in a backlash from the adrenaline cocktail I’d just imbibed in the skies above Angel City, I did a mental shrug and turned away from the window. “Well, I need to get back to work. I’ll catch you later.”
Flick accepted his dismissal behind the usual calm smile. “In His name, Astra.”
I sat down behind my desk and bent to the work piled on its untidy surface. I heard the small pop that told me he had left and then sat back in my chair, scrubbing a hand down my face wearily. The day’s events had rocked me in ways that I couldn’t begin to explain.
My brain roiled with thoughts and my heart with emotions that I didn’t have the energy to explore too closely. Something was definitely going on with my sister…something more than just falling in love. And Angel City seemed to be functioning under some kind of black cloud, metaphorically speaking. Magical attacks certainly seemed to be escalating. My thoughts swung to Flick’s melodramatic question from moments before.
Can you feel it?
I swung around in my chair and looked beyond the streaked glass to the churning sky above Angel City. Maybe he wasn’t being melodramatic. Maybe something was coming. And whatever it was, its precursors told me it wasn’t going to be good.
I shivered under a sudden premonition of danger that made me shake my head at my own capacity for melodrama.
“You’re just being stupid,” I told myself. Then I went back to my work, trying to ignore the low-level hum of intuition that was causing my skin to bubble into gooseflesh.
Almost without my noticing, my fingers returned to my wrist and resumed rubbing.
Chapter Three
Can You Feel It?
The Devil walked beside young miss and bade her to attend,
Our lady acquiesced in form but did his foul intent forefend.
I had thought my injuries from my altercation with the dragon were manageable but, by the next day, despite my attempts at healing them through my own magic, I was still battling a throbbing pain in my head that made me think I should probably see a doctor. And there was the achiness in my wrist that was starting to bother me more and more.
So I climbed into the small, non-aerodynamic air booger that Emo had leased for me and winced as my butt hit fake, cracked leather. The instrument panel was a nifty fake wood and the glass in my viewing screen wasn’t actually glass but…you guessed it…fake glass, which was scratched and dinged from years of abuse.
I discovered that the verbal directional capability was not working and that the speed gage stuck at one hundred and fifty miles per hour. Unfortunately I didn’t discover the last problem until I tried to slow for a traffic merge. I had to blow through without stopping, narrowly missing a couple of air vehicles. I cleared the merge to the accompaniment of a cacophony of horns and extended middle digits.
Finally I discovered that I could get the gage to release by pounding on it with my left fist. My right fist didn’t seem to have much effect and stomping on it with my foot just made it whir pitifully.
I eventually dropped into hover in the air space that was designated for air vehicle parking at the unplanned care unit and waited for the passageway to come my way. The thing was like a giant, hollow arm that travelled from vehicle to vehicle, providing an airlock and walkway into the building. When it arrived at my door and latched on, I climbed out and started walking toward the building, which was super-terra, meaning it hung above the ground on a complex foundation of devices that were powered by the sun.
The waiting area was full so I did what I usually did. Walking to the window behind which the triage meds sat, I asked for my sister. Darma always pulled me in ahead of the rest of the poor schmoes who didn’t know anyone.
The woman behind the counter just stared at me for a long moment, chewing edible tar that smelled like evergreens and then smirked. “She doesn’t work here anymore.”
I frowned. “There must be some mistake.”
The woman shook her frizzy, blonde head. “No mistake, honey. She was fired,” she said almost gleefully.
“Let me talk to your supervisor.”
The woman shrugged and said, “You’ll have to take a seat, she’s with a stage four med case right now.”
I sighed, nodded and reluctantly returned to the waiting area. A stage four was almost certainly fatal. I’d probably be waiting for a while. A couple of the people in the waiting area frowned at me as I walked past. Apparently they didn’t cotton to my use-your-sister-to-budge-ahead-in-line tactic.