Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers) (22 page)

His brother ducked just in time. “Oh, that is
it!”
he bellowed, brandishing his sword at the water. “I’m going to eat every last one of you slimy bastards!”

“Justin!”
Julius yelled, grabbing his brother by the shoulder. “Calm down! You can’t kill them all. There must be thousands in there.”
Or more,
he thought with a shudder.
“Let’s just go before—”

Pain exploded over his wrist, and he cut off with a gasp. When he looked down, his whole lower arm was covered in the same black slime that was on Justin’s neck. It burned like hot oil against his skin, but before he could wipe it off on his shirt, a full-scale volley of black goo shot out of the water, coating the wall above their heads.

At first, Julius thought that was because the lampreys had terrible aim, then he looked up and realized the truth. “They’re aiming for the ladder!” he cried, ducking to cover his head. “They’re trying to cut us off!”

Even as he said it, Julius knew it was already too late. He also knew how the ladder’s metal had gotten so pitted. This was clearly not the first time the lampreys had sprung this trap. They’d hit the ladder perfectly, coating the entire bottom half in thick, acidic spit that smoked and hissed against the old steel.

The fumes were even worse. As if the rotted fish smell wasn’t bad enough, the acidic goo also reeked of magic. Dark, fetid, oily magic that was getting thicker by the second. Julius covered his mouth and nose with his hands and looking around for Marci, but she was no longer behind him. This sparked several seconds of panic before he spotted her on her knees at the far corner where the platform met the wall, yanking something out of her bag.

It looked like a collapsible laundry basket, the kind with the plastic ribs that you could fold up into a tiny ball, but would still spring back to its original size the moment you let up the tension. That sight was absurd enough to make Julius forget the danger for a moment to wonder why she would have such a thing. He was still speculating when Marci dropped the basket on the ground.

The plastic ribs snapped open the second she let them go, flattening out in a ring, and Julius realized it wasn’t a basket at all. It was a circle. A collapsible casting circle made of yellow tent cloth with layer upon layer of spell notation written around the edges in Marci’s meticulous handwriting.

“Get in!” she shouted.

Julius didn’t wait to be asked twice. He sprinted across the cement and into the circle just as the lampreys launched another volley of burning goo straight at their prey. It struck the wall behind them in hissing splats, but when the sticky stuff crossed Marci’s circle, it burned up in a white flash, landing in a patter of harmless ash against Julius’s chest.

He let out a long, relieved breath. “Nice work.”

“Always pays to carry an emergency shelter,” she said, nodding at Justin, who had miraculously managed to dodge every shot since the first one. “Is he coming?”

Julius had no idea. He was spared having to say as much, though, because at that moment, Justin swung his sword with a roar that shook the ground. For a second, Julius couldn’t understand why. From what he could see, Justin was swinging at nothing, and then the air begin to change. All at once, the bite of dragon magic was all around them, surging up so fast and sharp, Julius thought he was going to be bitten in half. Just before the pressure became unbearable, Justin finished the strike, and the black lake parted in front of him like the Red Sea.

Thanks to the glare of Marci’s magic, Julius saw the whole thing clear as a lightning flash. Justin’s strike had cut the water and everything in it, slicing through the enormous, tangled mass of lampreys hiding below the surface like a laser. He saw his brother, larger than life, the bloody wounds from the earlier bites already closing. More than anything, though, he saw the sword in Justin’s hands. The sword that wasn’t a sword at all.

It still
looked
like a sword. It had a hilt and a wide, curved blade that was sharp on one side, like a long scimitar, but the blade itself was bone-white and slightly discolored at the tip, like an old tooth. An ancient fang of something very large and very, very deadly.

His strike finished, Justin stepped back, resting the Fang of the Heartstriker on his shoulder as the bite of the dragon magic faded and the water fell back into place, covering the bodies of the unknown number of lampreys he’d just chopped in two. “There,” he said, his voice thick with self-satisfaction as he turned around to give Julius a superior look. “
That’s
how it’s done.”

Julius sighed. It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy they weren’t going to be eaten by overgrown sea snakes, but he wasn’t exactly looking forward to the next several hours of inevitable bragging. Justin was already opening his mouth to begin when something long, black, and glistening shot out of the water and wrapped around his waist from behind, yanking him off his feet back into the water.

“Justin!” Julius shouted, almost running out of Marci’s circle before he caught himself. Even if he had risked it, he would have been too late. Justin had already vanished beneath the black water without a trace.

He was still watching the waves when Marci grabbed his hand. Julius glanced over his shoulder in confusion to see her staring at him with her heart in her eyes. She looked like she was about to cry, though with everything that had happened, it took Julius a stupidly long time to realize why.

“Don’t write Justin off yet,” he said with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “He’s very hard to kill. But we need to make a safe place for him to come up.” Or a safe place for them to take shelter in case Justin lost his temper down there. “Can you move the circle closer to the edge?”

Marci’s expression made it clear she thought he was being crazy optimistic, but she played along. “No. This circle’s a prototype. I haven’t figured out how to make it mobile yet.” She bit her lip. “I’m actually kind of surprised it worked just now. Maybe we can—”

Her voice cut off in a yelp as a wave of black, wiggling bodies shot out of the water straight toward them.

Julius moved instinctively, knocking the first lamprey away before it could smack Marci in the face. The next one made it past him, and though it began to smoke when it crossed Marci’s circle, the power that had incinerated the blobs of acidic spit must not have been strong enough to cook seven feet of wiggling, magically corrupted sea parasite. The lamprey crashed into Marci’s legs with a horrible, unearthly squeal before she kicked it away.

“What is going
on
?” she cried. “I thought lampreys lived
under
the water!”

Julius squinted through the glare of Marci’s circle at the black lake, now boiling harder than ever. Everywhere he looked, the lampreys were in a frenzy, flinging their long, black bodies out of the water. But it wasn’t until he saw the ones trying to slither up the slick, straight walls that bordered the lake like they were trying to get clear of the lake at any cost that he realized what he was actually looking at.

“They’re not trying to attack us,” he said, wiping the greasy water from his face. “They’re trying to get away from something.”
Justin
, he added to himself with a shiver that was equal parts pride and dread.

That was going to be a real problem. But when he leaned out over the edge of Marci’s circle to try and get an idea of what form of his brother they should be expecting, a strange glow began to fill the room.

Up until this point, the only light in the cavernous spillway had been the flashlight he’d dropped when Justin was first attacked and the glare of Marci’s magic. Now, something beneath the water was shining with a blue, ghostly light that didn’t look like anything his brother could do. It was getting brighter, too, and as it grew, the cold, oily pressure that had been making Julius uneasy since they first arrived grew exponentially worse.

Julius was very young for a dragon, and undeniably inexperienced, but even he understood there were some things you just didn’t want to look at. Some sights couldn’t be unseen, and immortality was a long time to carry those kinds of memories. Unfortunately, he was already looking at the water when the thing broke through, and the moment the hideous shape came into view, Julius knew that even if he lived to be as old as the Three Sisters added together, he was never going to be able to forget this.

Other than their remarkable size, spitting ability, and supernatural aggression, the lampreys they’d seen up to this point had looked more or less like overgrown versions of the normal predatory sea creatures of the same name. This thing, on the other hand, was a true monster. Its skin wasn’t just black; it was a void, drinking in Marci’s light without leaving so much as a glimmer. He had no idea how big it was beneath the water, but what he could see above was nearly twenty feet tall, an enormous column of thick, serpentine body ending at a small, flat head ringed with snaking black feelers, almost like a mane. No part of it, however, was glowing, and Julius was starting to wonder what it was he’d seen under the water when the thing opened its mouth.

Like the other lampreys, its mouth opened to form a flat, round circle. But where the other lampreys had three or four rows of jagged teeth, this thing had endless interlocking rings of arm-length points descending all the way down its throat. Julius could see them all, too, because the monster’s mouth was the source of that sickly blue light.

The glow emanated from deep in its throat, almost like dragon fire. But where dragons breathed flame in a continuous stream, this thing launched it like a shot. Their only warning was a slight hiss and the sight of the huge, slimy neck puffing up like a bullfrog before a car-sized lump of blue, luminous, deathly feeling magic exploded out of the thing’s throat straight at them.

As the blast left the monster’s mouth, Julius felt Marci pull in magic for a counter shot. But even though she was sucking down power so fast the air was crackling, it wasn’t enough. The magic in her circle felt like a raindrop compared to the tidal wave hurtling down at them, but there was no time to gather more. There was no time to dodge, no time to flee, no time for anything. Already, the blue glow filled his vision, and Julius knew this was it. He was going to die. But even as his mind accepted this fact, he realized it didn’t mean Marci had to die with him.

After that, the choice was simple. It was barely a decision at all to step in front of Marci and reach, not with hands, but with his power. The mental muscles he hadn’t exercised in nearly a decade screamed as he forced them into action, giving him an instant pounding headache. Julius ignored it, digging deep into his own magic—not the physical shape his mother had cut off, but his
actual
power, the spark of internal magic that made him a dragon trapped in a human body instead of just human.

He reached as hard and as far as he could. And then, when he felt the burning pain that meant he was at his absolute limit, Julius yanked up, pulling his magic over them like a shield as the creature’s magic crashed down.

***

Years ago, when he’d been a hatchling too young to even assume a human form, Julius had developed a knack for using his magic as a wall. His mother, not yet realizing what a failure of a son she’d hatched, had declared him “exceptionally gifted” for figuring out such a unique way of using their inborn power. For Julius, however, it was a simple matter of self-defense. As a small dragon already at the bottom of his clutch, learning how to make a shield to protect himself had been a vital survival skill.

Unlike humans, who drew their magic from the outside, a dragon’s magic was inborn. This difference was the reason his kind had been able to scrape by when magic had vanished for the last thousand years while human mages and spirits had completely shut down. Unfortunately, it also meant that when Julius used his magic as a shield, anything that struck the barrier also hit
him
, a
nd right now, he felt like he’d just hit the ground after jumping off the Grand Canyon.

The giant lamprey’s magic slammed into his own so hard, he felt it in places he hadn’t realized he’d had. Just when he thought for sure he was going to be pounded under completely, the lamprey’s blast struck something heavy, dense, and immovable deep inside him, and the surging magic stopped.

For a terrible moment, that was actually worse. The impact raced through Julius’s body, shaking him nearly to pieces. But then, like a tennis ball bouncing off a wall, the lamprey’s spell rebounded, shooting back across the water to strike the monstrous sea snake square in the throat.