The Highland Dragon's Lady (22 page)

Even with directions and her father’s memories to guide her, Reggie spent the first part of her far-too-long journey worrying that they were going the wrong way, that they’d missed a turn, or that they would at any moment do either. The forest was dark and dense, and there was far too much of it. Trees and undergrowth overshadowed paths, and the uneven ground meant that Reggie couldn’t have run, even if she’d had time to change out of skirts and corset.

When all of this was over, she was never going anywhere more rural than Greenwich again.

If she found Colin alive, she would go wherever he wanted. Or she would go to a leper colony and do good deeds there. Reggie wasn’t sure which she should promise. She wasn’t sure who she was bargaining with, or what they’d prefer. She should have asked Mr. Heselton, she thought, and felt a manic laugh bubble up in her throat.

Edmund didn’t look at her—he was attending too closely to the woods on either side of them, rifle firmly in his hands—but after the laugh, he said, “It’ll likely come out all right, Reggie. You…know about Colin, he said.”

“I know,” she said. It was the first time they’d really spoken since they’d left the house. Between looking for the right path and not letting Janet Morgan catch them by surprise, neither one of them had much presence of mind left over for conversation. She wanted to stop talking when she sounded reassured, just as she thought Edmund had wanted to sound more reassuring, but he was a bad liar and she couldn’t hold the words back. “But
she’s
a ghost. And a demon.”

“Might be a closer struggle than otherwise,” Edmund agreed heavily. “But he does have us.”

“Oh, good,” said Reggie.

And a little voice in the back of her head asked her why they were even bothering to come out. If Janet’s trap had worked, if Colin, the part-dragon, the magician with more than a century of life behind him, was actually in danger, what exactly did Reggie think two mortals and a few lead projectiles would accomplish?

She told the voice to remember fables about mice and lions and traps—or was that thorns?—that in setting her trap for large prey, Janet might have left smaller openings unguarded, that there had to be a reason mortals were running so much of the world. Then she told the voice to go to the devil. Then she wished she hadn’t thought of the devil.

If Colin was fine, she’d feel like an idiot. Reggie had never thought she’d be so eager for that.

If he was in trouble or fighting, perhaps they’d arrive in time to make a difference, even if only as a distraction.

If he was dead—

Her heart lurched sickeningly.

—if he was dead, he’d be
dead
, and there would be nothing anyone could do about that. She couldn’t think about any future beyond that possible point.

She wished she couldn’t think at all.

“There’s the fallen tree,” she said and pointed, grateful for the distraction and simultaneously feeling her nerves sharpen even more. Now she knew they were getting closer.

Running would be bad. Running was not subtle, and it greatly diminished one’s ability to notice anything, and she was likely to fall and break any number of bones, which would help exactly nobody. Reggie made herself walk and almost shook with the effort it took to hold back.

There on her left was the patch of flowers, fuchsia in the midst of the green and brown undergrowth. The air was colder here—the ghost, or night coming on? The sun had begun to sink in the west. Filtered through the leaves of the forest, the light looked almost bloody. She’d never been afraid of the dark, but the idea of walking through this place at night would have given her the shivers if she hadn’t already been terrified.

How useful to know that there were limits to how scared she could get. Surely this would be immensely helpful in her life to come.

Reggie heard the sound of running water just before she saw the stand of aspens, and her stomach clenched at the normally pleasant noise. They were in the right spot—they were as far as Pater’s memories could take them. Now, if Colin was in trouble, everything was up to her and Edmund.

“Should have brought a torch,” Edmund said, kneeling down and squinting at the ground. “But I think—this way.”

“Footprints?”

“One set,” said Edmund, grimly.

He rose and they went on, as quickly as they could. It wasn’t long before Edmund’s eyes weren’t their only guide. The air went frigid very quickly, and Reggie knew that it wasn’t just fear knotting her stomach. With every few steps forward, she felt as if she was edging her way along a tightrope, one stretched over not just a void but an unspeakable mass of corruption. By the look on Edmund’s face, his senses were telling him the same.

They were getting near Janet’s sanctum. That meant they were going the right way. Hurrah.

“Are you all right?” Edmund asked once, when they were following the stream back to its source. This time he did look back, though only for a second.

Reggie managed a smile. “Been better. I’ll hold up. You?”

“It’s hardly Christmas morning,” he said, “but I’ve a strong stomach. Years of food at Eton, you know—wait, have a look up there.”

He gestured ahead of them, where they could now see a smallish hill. Light rock and summer grass covered most of it, but in the center, near the ground, a dark shapeless pile rose up. They went forward to look closer. Edmund held his rifle ready, and Reggie pulled a pin out of her hat. Whether there was any real magic about silver or not, a hat pin was at least both long and sharp.

Nothing attacked them as they ventured closer—nothing but the sheer wrongness of the place, which almost pulsed out of the ground—and they could see the pile of rocks resting against the hill’s face. Edmund gestured to the muddy earth in front of them. “The prints stop here,” he whispered. “Must be a cave behind all those stones.”

Their next task was clear—but not easy. Neither Reggie nor Edmund had done much manual labor in their lives, and neither of them had
ever
tried to move large rocks while being quiet about it. After a hideous quarter of an hour, in which they expected to be heard and assaulted at any minute, they’d produced a small opening, through which neither of them could hear or see anything.

It wasn’t quite man-sized, but it was big enough for Reggie.

“Turn around,” she whispered. When Edmund gave her a blank look in response, she flapped a hand at him impatiently. “Around,” she hissed, and this time she didn’t wait. When she unfastened her skirt, he saw the light quickly enough and nearly spun. “You don’t have a knife, do you?” Reggie asked, shucking petticoats. They’d gone in too much of a hurry—but time was of the essence.

“No.”

“Damn.” Fingers shaking only a little, she undid the buttons on her blouse and started on her corset hooks.

“What the devil—”

“I’m not climbing over a lot of rocks in a walking suit,” Reggie said.

“You shouldn’t go in at all,” Edmund whispered back, not turning his head.

“One of us has to. I can go now, and I’ll make less noise.” Reggie dropped her corset to the ground and quickly refastened her blouse. She glanced at the dark opening of the cave, then took her hat pin from the ground again. Without a knife, that was likely the best she could do. “Move the rocks and follow when you can.”

The hole was a tight fit, even for Reggie in her underclothes. She wiggled through as swiftly and as quietly as she could, sacrificing what felt like three layers of skin on her shoulders and knees in the process and tearing a strip off one leg of her drawers. She dropped a short way into darkness and stood still, blinking while her eyes adjusted.

Getting her bearings, she first saw the bulk of Colin’s dragon form, crouched with the tip of his tail about a foot away from her. It lashed the air, but moved oddly in doing so, though Reggie at first couldn’t see exactly how. The dim light didn’t help, though there was more than she’d thought. The cave entrance let in a few rays of twilight behind her, while in front of her—

—she was abruptly very glad she’d stayed still.

Whatever it was that crawled across the stone floor in sickly lines of green-black light, it was as much outside Reggie’s experience as ghosts or dragons had been a month ago. That didn’t matter. She didn’t need experience to know that anything that looked the way that light did was bound to be
extremely
unhealthy. When she discovered that the line nearest her ran between two skulls—one that might have belonged to a fox and one that was almost certainly human and also very small—she was even more certain.

She also wanted to be sick, but that wasn’t an option.

Now she could hear a voice coming from the other side of Colin. It was female, sort of. It sounded more hollow than a human voice should, and while that might have just been the acoustics of the cave, Reggie doubted it.

“…as polluted as my brother left the bloodline, it was still
ours
,” said the voice, almost conversationally. “You’re of an old family yourself, and although it’s freakish and deformed, it’s evidently powerful enough to suit my purposes. And perhaps you can try to understand some of what I went through, seeing a jumped-up tradesman—”

Ah. Janet Morgan, playing with half a deck at most. Reggie didn’t really need to listen anymore. Colin, if dragons’ tails signified anything like cats’ did, didn’t want to be listening. So—why was he there?

Reggie looked up from the obscene light to Colin’s tail. It snapped out with anger—and then seemed to hit some unseen barrier, directly above the green-black line. The huge body in front of her shuddered, and Reggie sealed her lips around a rather dragonish hiss of rage.

Getting angry wouldn’t help.

Very well: he was trapped. The lines on the floor were the trap, like magic circles in stories. If Reggie remembered those stories correctly, and if
they
were right, then breaking the circle should free Colin. If she didn’t and they weren’t—well, it was still the only thing she could think of to do.

She tried to take a deep breath without making any noise.

Without chalk, how would one break a magic circle?

It couldn’t just be physical. Colin could have put a foot through the lines or moved the skulls, if that was the only disruption necessary—or a stray rat could have done the same. Janet would probably have thought of that. What wouldn’t she have thought of?

Something man-made.

Something metal.

Something silver.

Reggie swallowed and knelt down, the hairpin in one hand. She wished she could warn Colin. For the first time, she would have liked her power to work in two directions. She hoped that he’d be strong enough in this form to handle whatever happened next.

She braced herself, though she didn’t know exactly what for.

Then she thrust the hat pin into the line of corruption.

Power burst in the darkness like a string of grotesque firecrackers.

Colin, who’d felt Reggie’s presence nearby and had spent the last few minutes trying to distract Janet, now saw the dark flame rush toward and into her. The not-radiance crawled over her now mostly solid body like a swarm of insects, seeking its source, maybe. Colin didn’t have the time or the inclination to find out. He was simply thankful first that none of it had gone toward Reggie and then that it had stayed away from him as well.

He dared a glance behind him and saw that Reggie was standing. That was as much reassurance as he could allow his leaping heart. His head told him that she was a big girl and could take care of herself, and that he would help neither of them by ignoring their situation—and Colin attended to that judgment. Janet had been building herself a body, using his life force. When Reggie had severed that connection, Janet’s power had rebounded on her in a way she couldn’t have been expecting. Colin thought that she probably couldn’t leave the body she’d made.

Now he didn’t bother roaring—this was no time for either anger or braggadocio—but just spat fire toward Janet in a hissing red stream. The flame whipped out beyond where the barrier had once been and cracked across Janet’s body.

She froze. She might even have flinched. But she didn’t burn. Colin had turned his flame on men before. He knew how they smelled when on fire, and he knew the sounds they made. He knew that Janet should have fallen, shrieked, and died. Instead, the flame licked over her body, shone off the last remnants of the loathsome black light, and then died.

Behind him, he heard Reggie curse.

I’ll see that sentiment
, he thought in grim horror,
and
raise
it
.

Janet raised her head and looked at him.

Make
that
double
, Colin thought.

She hadn’t looked quite human before. Now she barely looked human at all. Whether she’d meant to construct her body this way, the energy returning to her had warped her still-developing form, or she’d shifted to a shape more suited to fighting a dragon, the blurring had become outright distortion.

A monster stood before him, not a woman: a thing with bleached-pale skin and no hair, with triangular eyes that were barely more than holes in its head, with a lipless maw where razor fangs clustered three deep. Outsized arms dangled, gorilla-like, from its sloping shoulders, with huge claws where hands once had been. The creature straightened or shifted further, and Colin saw with disorienting abruptness that it was almost his own size.

He’d never much enjoyed physical fights. He’d always left them to Judith and Stephen when he could. There were times, however, when the best way forward—or at least the only one with a chance of success—was the most straightforward.

Teeth bared, claws out, Colin went for the monster’s throat.

For a second, its flesh gave, cold and gummy under his talons—he didn’t get close enough to bite, and part of him was grateful for that, even as he snarled at the missed opportunity—and then it wriggled and threw him off, lashing at him with one giant, gnarled hand. The claws might have been bone or rock or pure magical force. Whatever the substance, it tore through the scales of Colin’s side with alarming ease. The pain wasn’t new or insurmountable, but the very fact of its existence was a very,
very
bad sign.

He might actually die here, he thought, though not for the first or hundredth time since he’d entered the cave. He’d had a quick moment of relief when the circle had broken, and now fear was right back, as persistent as Janet herself. She—it—was on him now, those damned claws digging into his sides, trying to get purchase and find a vital organ beneath the layers of scale and skin and flesh.

Colin snarled and shook, throwing off the thing’s grip and knocking it into the cave wall. Stunned, it shook itself, then—as Colin lunged for it—sprang upward and over his head, ripping almost all the way through one of his wings. Agony went shrieking down through every pathway in his body. His claws sank into the stone floor as blood flowed over his side, steaming in the chilly air. From his back, the monster laughed at him.

One of the skulls hit it with a gelatinous
shlup
. Whether the impact hurt the creature or not, it stopped laughing, and Colin heard Reggie shout. “How funny was
that
, you bastard?”

Before it could respond, before—God forbid—it could set its sights on a new and far more vulnerable target, Colin whipped his head back over his neck and snapped his jaws together on the monster. He only got its shoulder, and the taste was as awful as he’d thought it would be, all mildew and slime; still, the thing screamed in a very satisfying way. He lashed his head back around and down, slamming the monster against the floor and making it cry out again.

Again.

As Colin went for a third time, the monster got a claw up and raked bloody gashes into his muzzle, making him roar with pain and loosening his jaws before he could override his body’s automatic response. The creature dropped onto the floor. It wasn’t bleeding, but Colin could see the marks of his teeth and claws. They lasted, and they went deep. That was encouraging.

But he was still bleeding. Profusely. He wasn’t feeling weak or dizzy yet, but it might be only a matter of time. The veins in his wings were large, and there was the gash along his side too. And while he assessed the damage, the monster charged him again. Colin spun and slammed his tail into the cold white body, knocking the creature away, but it was a near thing. For a second, he could see his own blood on the thing’s claws.

He really hadn’t thought he’d die in a fight. Those few times he’d considered the issue, Colin had always thought he’d pass away like his father, fading quietly into another world when this one became too much of a burden. Then again, the world was full of surprises, even for his kind. He’d always said that, and the last fortnight would have convinced him even if he hadn’t.

Reggie.

Battle kept him from paying much attention to her, but he knew she stood at the cave entrance, and dimly at times, he heard her shouting instructions to someone outside or screaming at the monster. “Bloody well
die
already, won’t you?” had been one such exclamation. He knew she wouldn’t run, not while she thought she could still do anything.

He wouldn’t die in front of her. And he damned well wouldn’t leave the monster that had been Janet alive to go after her and her family next.

It wasn’t as though he’d been nonchalant about the fight before, but the thought of Reggie, the need to make sure she was safe, was like a cool drink of water to a man who’d been running for hours. Colin dug down and found the last strength left in his limbs, the last energy in his veins, and the will to push himself past agony, past the injury he knew he’d be doing himself.

The cave wasn’t very high.

Then again, he couldn’t get very high in his current condition.

He snapped his wings back behind him. The motion tore his wound deeper and he screamed, but even a scream of pain from a dragon was a forceful thing, and the monster hesitated, confused or intimidated, or both. That was all the time that Colin needed.

He gathered his muscles and leaped, arrowing himself straight up as far as the cave ceiling and his own strength would permit. Then, with another cascade of pain and the feeling of at least one wing bone snapping, he spread his wings as wide as they could go and dove like a hunting falcon onto the monster.

It raised its claws to defend itself, and they bit deeply into Colin’s chest, but it didn’t matter. He weighed more than a ton in this form. Dropping on the monster with all of his own strength and all the force of gravity behind him, he shook the whole cave when he hit. That his own claws went all the way through the thing, that his teeth snapped together on its neck, were almost minor developments.

Beneath him, he felt the monster fall apart, its body unraveling into air and force and whatever half-decayed matter Janet had used to make it. Her power began to disintegrate too—not that the cave or the forest nearby would be a wonderful picnic site for a generation or two, but the sense of corruption began to fade even as the creature dissolved in Colin’s claws—and the energy she’d stolen from Colin flowed back into him.

Good, he thought as he lay on the floor. He suspected that he’d need everything he could get.