He was coming too fast and at an angle that would take him along the edge and shoot him back out over the water.
Zee managed to get his body in motion and flung himself forward to catch the spiraling Dreamshifter, both of them crashing down and rolling to a slow stop against the cliff face.
Zee was up again in a heartbeat. “Vivian!” he shouted, knew he shouted because of the strain on his throat, but his voice was sucked up into the roar of the waterfall and made no sound.
The dragon’s wings trembled once and then hung limp, doing nothing more than passively slowing her as she spiraled downward. He could see the hole in her breast, the black blood still falling, falling, to hiss into steam when it struck the water below. Her golden eyes were glazed and unseeing. She struck the water like an immense stone, without protest or struggle, creating a great drenching spray that rose all the way to the ledge. Zee’s face was wet with the droplets, tasting of grief, bitter and sharp.
Poe joined him at the edge of the cliff, perched precariously with his webbed toes over the edge. He stretched out his flipper-wings as if he were going to fly, and then dove, free-falling into the dark water below without so much as a splash.
Zee huddled there, watching, hoping against hope. Maybe Vivian would come back up, despite all the odds. Dragons were tough and hard to kill. They had magic. Surely Poe, at least, would bob back to the surface.
But the penguin was small, for all that he was at home in the water, and Vivian had been sorely wounded by the dragonstone. His doing, his fault. If she was dead, it was because he had killed her. This was knowledge he could not endure. He would rescue her, or die with her, one or the other. He took a step back, prepared for a running leap out over the chasm.
“No!” Arms around his waist restrained him, pulled him away from the edge.
Zee tried to fight, but he was off balance and Weston was using all of his weight to pull him down and back. He hit the stone with a jarring pain in the injured arm that shot red-hot spikes through his vision, but still he struggled and rolled until Weston’s shout stopped him. “Careful or you’ll take us both over!”
“Let me go.”
Stronger in spite of the injury, he twisted himself free of the Dreamshifter’s hands. Weston promptly doubled up his fists and delivered strategic blows to one laceration, and then the other. The pain made Zee gasp, froze him for long enough to hear Weston shout, “You can’t save her! Think! She’s a dragon. What are you going to do, drag her to the surface?”
“Let me go—”
“No! You haven’t earned a death! You have to save the Key. That’s why you’re here. That’s why she saved you. Both of us. Well, that and because she’s Vivian. We have to do this thing. It’s the only way to make right the wrong.”
A part of Zee stood here on this ledge, and the rest of him, the part that mattered, had plummeted into the water with the dragon. She had gone down never knowing how much he loved her, or how deeply he had betrayed her. And she had gone out of her way to save him, to save them all.
“Come on,” Weston said, turning away. “If we survive, there will be time to grieve later.”
Zee knew he was right. Still, he stood, head bowed, in a moment of silence for the sacrifice and all that was lost.
Thirty-six
The weight of the dragon body spun Vivian down through the black water, careening off stones, deeper and deeper until she knew that even a dragon could never hold its breath long enough to reach the surface. Especially a dragon weak from blood loss and poison.
This was it, the end.
Without any conscious agreement of her will, she shifted. Her bursting lungs were no longer dragon lungs; her frantic heartbeat was far too rapid. And she knew that what had been impossible for a dragon was beyond impossible for a human.
Sheer obstinacy kicked in. Impossible or not, she wasn’t just going to accept death without a fight. She began to thrash with her legs and arms to stop the downward trajectory and thrust herself upward, even though it was impossibly far and the rocks would kill her if she ever did make it to the surface. Her lungs burned. Another few heartbeats and she would open her mouth and let the water flood her lungs, weigh her down. Her heart would stop beating. And that would be the end.
Just as all conscious will was fading, a black-and-white form appeared at her side, and then passed her: Poe, flying through the water. Mindless, Vivian followed him through a stone archway, but that was the end of her endurance. She could hold her breath no longer. Her mouth opened. Instead of the expected inrush of water, she gulped in air.
Stale, mineral-smelling air. Her feet touched solid ground and she realized she was standing in a calm pool, only waist deep. Poe scrambled up onto a flat surface, paved with red stone. Weak and exhausted, she staggered after him. There was pain in her chest and she remembered, a little dazed, the unhealed knife wound. It throbbed but wasn’t bleeding.
Poe waddled away across the chamber and she dragged herself after him through yet another arch, which led out onto the edge of a flat plain. Mist swirled around her feet. A dim red light filtered down from an indifferent sky. She blinked. There should be no sky here, deep beneath the earth. Wonder gave way to an awareness of a throng of people, silent, waiting. She could feel the intensity of the eyes, all focused on her as though she were the single most important thing in the universe.
Naturally, she stood before them naked. Like everybody else, Vivian had experienced dreams of appearing naked at a crucial moment. This wasn’t one of them. She had no need for a pendant to realize that this moment was real. Banishing the impulse to cover her breasts with her hands, to turn her back and flee the way she had come, she forced herself to stand tall and face them down. Only her knees were all wobbly and in a minute she was going to collapse, in which case she’d be naked and unconscious.
It was not to be thought of and she pushed away the encroaching darkness.
A figure separated from the mass and approached. An old man with a long white beard and eyes keen and blue despite his obvious age.
“Vivian,” he said, his face alight with a fierce and savage joy. “I barely dared to hope, but you have found us.”
Swaying, barely able to support herself, she clung to his proffered hand. “Grandfather. I’m in so much trouble. Can you help me?”
All the joy ran out of his face at her words, and he shook his head. “I’m sorry, my child. Your burden is already heavy, I know, but it is we who need help from you.”
“I won’t be much help to anybody if I’m dead.”
“Then you mustn’t die.”
She snorted. It was precisely the sort of thing he could be expected to say. And also an appropriate, if acerbic, response to her overdramatic words. At this moment, at least, she was in no danger of dying. Exhausted and hungry, maybe. But thoroughly alive. Poe pressed up against her side and she felt energy flow from him, strengthening her a little.
“What is this place—hell for Dreamshifters?”
“Close. We are trapped here when we die. Between life and the beyond.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Why?”
But there was no humor now in his blue eyes, or in the hard-set lines of his face. The Ferryman had warned her—Death has no favors for one such as you. She looked from him to the others, women and men of all ages and nationalities. Her grandfather wore blue jeans and a button-up flannel shirt. Those farther back wore homespun. Beyond that was a mélange of clothing styles that should never have been seen together in one place: ball gowns and animal skins, togas, armor; there was even a man wearing a Viking helmet.