Carlos reached for him, hands like claws and black wings of power spreading wide. Rui swept his hands upward. The stones seemed to buck and thrash, throwing Carlos back, but this time he wasn’t knocked to the ground. He turned and swept behind the blood-splashed rocks, Rui pursuing him as the Hell Dragon swirled in the sky and roared back at the ground.
The farmhouse on the hill above the dolmen burst into flames and distant screams erupted with the fire and smoke. The light of the conflagration cast the scene in hellish, flickering light.
The monstrous thing swept onward, raising a bank of flame that caught the second truck and flipped it, tumbling like a toy along the road in the sudden superheated wind. Men crawled from the twisted vehicle, burning like the morbid candles of Rui’s temple and threw themselves down to roll or simply to fall and lie burning on the ground. But their agony was a glancing blow to me now. Carlos had done something to me—or at least for me—and I was grateful.
Quinton started forward under the distraction of the newest assault, but his father twitched the gun a little to get his attention. “Let the mages kill each other. I have other plans for you and your girlfriend.”
“My wife.”
Purlis raised his eyebrows. “Oh, so you did it, did you? I hoped you wouldn’t.”
Brightness fell on the ground and we all looked up, seeing the brilliant flare of the Hell Dragon swooping downward again. It sped, blazing from the heights of the sky toward the highway. Its fiery breath would set the width of the road and a dozen yards on each side aflame. Already the river steamed from the heat of the fires on the hillside, spreading across the dry fields with a crackling roar and the stench of destruction.
I squeezed my eyes closed, rolling onto my shoulders to free my hands and slip them, still bound together, under my hips. The riot cuff cut into my wrists and made my injured hand feel like it was going to explode under the pressure. I screamed into the dirt and rolled into a ball to pass my hands below my feet. Flat on my back, sweating in the heat and pain from every part of my body I concentrated on the skeleton of the Hell Dragon, reaching for the one bone I knew—my own.
It resisted and rang like steel, refusing to come at first. Then it sprang free to fall hot on my hand, blazing and trying to fuse to the finger I’d cut it from. The song of the Hell Dragon altered only slightly and it rippled, the fire within it turning slightly golden, but otherwise the burning construct was unaffected by the removal of the bone.
It wasn’t a key—it wasn’t important enough to bring the beast down. If I kept it, it would burn through my flesh and set the rest of my bones on fire. I yelled and let go my mental hold. The bone leapt back to the Hell Dragon and the light of the dire beast flared white and red again. I could hear it roar and turn in the sky with a sound like wind tearing through the sails of a foundering ship.
I had no other choice: I’d have to swap bones if I could. It would probably kill me—a fiery death from which I wouldn’t stand a chance of waking. But it would be worth it to stop Rui and Purlis. I hoped Quinton would forgive me.
I kept my eyes closed as I tried to remember all the bones, tried to reach for one that I had an affinity for, mentally scrabbling. . . . It seemed far away, but I could hear Purlis talking to Quinton nearby. “She’s too much like your mother. She’ll never really give up her life to be with you. She’ll leave you in the end, like Liz did me.”
“Mom left you because you’re a monster. And you had her locked up in a mental institution because you can’t live with the truth, while your actions only confirmed it. You are a piece of work, Dad.”
I remembered and reached with my hands and my mind for the bone Rui had found such an amusing match—James Purlis’s left tibia. It was the bone of a man who was shorter than I, older, smaller in every way. The bone now inhabited the Hell Dragon Purlis had hoped to control to bring Europe to its knees, but he hadn’t even tried yet because he was too obsessed with his anger at his son to realize he couldn’t. I’d have to take it—it was the only shot I had left.
Heat and light rushed toward me and I felt a tearing, splintering pain in my left leg, my knee and ankle seeming to twist themselves apart as my own tibia started to pull toward the dragon’s skeleton to displace Purlis’s. I resisted the scream that rose from my gut, wrenching my will against it as if the sound would ruin my intent. I could feel blood running from my knee and along my leg like a line of fire, pooling around my ankle and heel. Then a steely cold wrapped around a burning shaft of light seemed to sear me, blinding me through my closed eyelids with hot illumination that rose from inside my own body. But it wasn’t like the burning of my finger bone against my severed knuckle. It felt as if the bone had ripped itself loose and left a hollow filled with some living light that tore through my flesh like a knife, burning with cold instead of heat.
I should have been dying, burning from the diseased and fiery magic that animated the Hell Dragon, but something wasn’t happening as Carlos had said it would. I had no strength to try again, even if I could figure out what to do. I wanted to shout, to scream, to weep, but I couldn’t. I was done and I was broken and it was for nothing. . . .
The strange singing sound in the night broke and soured, the ground beneath the standing stones seeming to shudder in revulsion at what it had vomited forth.
I opened my eyes, mere slits against the anguish gnawing on my body and the despair clouding my mind, and looked into the brightness of the Hell Dragon plunging down.
Then it twisted, coiling, tearing, screeching out of tune, and ripping into pieces as it fell toward the earth. . . .
Beside me, Purlis’s scream matched that of the drache, and I turned my head as he lit like a torch. A fiery shape burned against his leg, sending up a stink of melting plastic and steel as the bone he’d given up returned and sank into the body of his prosthesis, melding to him, knitting back in place now that there was no place else for it to reside. The fire of the Dragão do Inferno blossomed bright, consuming him from the inside out. Another horrifying scream came from the darkness beyond the stones as the scorched debris of the Hell Dragon rained to Earth in cinders and ash.
Against the fire I could see two black figures locked in struggle. The larger had taken hold of the smaller’s head and driven the other to his knees. A flickering ember flared nearby and illuminated them for a moment, and I could see blood coursing down Rui’s face from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth as Carlos leaned forward as if to whisper to him. As the ember died, I saw the gleam of Carlos’s sharp white teeth and then more blood as the vampire ripped his old student’s throat open.
I closed my eyes and turned my head against the ground, letting go of everything, not sure exactly why I wasn’t dead. What had gone wrong that seemed to have gone right instead?
The blazing light within me died out and the feel of cold steel and hot iron faded, leaving only the throbbing and stinging of torn flesh and shattered bone behind. It felt worse than amputating my fingertip had and I was glad I was too tired to look to see what had happened to my left leg. It didn’t feel right—it felt torn and hollow, the joints ripped apart and twisted, but not the way it had when I’d broken it as a kid or when I’d ripped up my knee a few years ago. I didn’t know if the bone I’d tried to give up was there or not. It had left—I was sure—but I wasn’t sure it had come back and it shouldn’t have. . . . I felt worn too thin to puzzle it out and I didn’t care.
I felt Quinton lift me into his arms and start running.
I raised my head off his shoulder. “Did we live?”
“For now, but you won’t last a lot longer if I don’t get you to a hospital quick.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling light-headed. Blood loss—it was almost familiar now.
Darkness loomed ahead, taking shape like a storm cloud becoming flesh. The light of the fires all around us cast moving light on Carlos’s face, streaked with blood and ash.