Dark and Stormy Knights (P.N. Elrod) (Kitty Norville 0.80)

I pulled in a deep breath. The child had actually done something intelligent. “The decision to put the blame on poor Master Farriner was made at the highest levels of the court, but actually, the blame rested on me. I’d wounded the dragon, and it had fled to nurse its wounds. I didn’t chase. I thought—I thought she had learned her lesson, and would stay well away from humans, at least for a few hundred years.” I felt myself drifting on memory, rich and bright. “She was beautiful, Heliothrax. So beautiful. Her scales were the color of twilight, and her eyes blazed like flame. They are beautiful, you know. It’s a shame they are so savage.”

“So you tracked her down and killed her.” Ellie’s voice had gone soft and quiet, and her face was turned away from me, wind whipping her hair across to hide her expression.

“Yes,” I said. It was the one thing I had ever done that still haunted me. She had been wounded and afraid, and alone of all the dragons I had ever killed, she had transformed herself at the last into a human. A human child, crippled and trembling and weeping. “So many innocent people died in London, even though they didn’t keep good counts. There was so much destruction. I had no choice. I had to put her down.”

The car arrived at the turnout and bumped off from tarmac to soft, hissing sand. The same track we’d taken dozens of times by now; there was a definite road being formed by the grooves of Ellie’s tires. She was silent until we arrived at the training spot and then shut off the engine and listened to the quiet tick of the metal cooling before she said, “How did you know it was her? Heliothrax, I mean?”

“She was the closest.”

“What if she didn’t do it?”

I sighed. “Does it really matter which of them did it? They were all deadly, all dangerous, all bent on killing us. A response had to be made. I made it.”

That shape-changed dragon, looking up at me with a child’s tear-filled, burning eyes. Trying to speak but not knowing how, because that was knowledge that Heliothrax had never bothered to acquire.

“I made it,” I repeated, and got out of the car to walk stiffly in circles, loosening up my ancient bones and muscles. Ellie opened the trunk, and I began pulling out our train

ing supplies—two folding chairs now, since I had decided she had advanced sufficiently that there was no need to keep her in discomfort when resting. Ample water. A small bag of food, enough to last two days, since I always plan for emergencies. I left the emergency shelter equipment in the car and removed the weapons and training bag.

We began the day as we had all other days—katas to loosen and center, sword practice (at which Ellie was becoming—much to my surprise—acceptable), knives. Then I opened the case that held Dragonkiller, unstrung, and handed the weapon to her to bend and string. I walked out with the target and placed it a child’s training distance away.

“We’ll start slowly,” I said, adjusting the target slightly to be sure it was just so. “Before you touch the arrows, I want you to—”

Something hissed past me, over my shoulder, and buried itself in the dead center of the concentric rings. I dodged aside, breathing hard, and stared at the quivering arrow, the vivid fletching.

I looked back to see Ellie standing, tall and straight and beautiful, bracer on her forearm, plastron strapped to her chest, leather glove on her hand, fitting another arrow to the bowstring.

“Thank you,” she said, “for teaching me so well. I admit, there’s a certain thrill to it, isn’t there?”

She no longer sounded like Ellie Cameron, shallow teen struggling to swim in shark-infested waters.

She sounded like the shark.

Ellie sighted, stretched the string, and released with perfect form, classical as Diana hunting a doe.

The arrow drove into the target within a breath of the first. Ellie methodically drew another from the quiver.

“You’re probably wondering right now what’s happening,” she said. She set the arrow on the string but didn’t draw. Her blue eyes were wide and calm and fixed on me. “That’s the feeling of every hunted beast, Lisel. The anger, the hurt, the anguish, the confusion. Even a rabbit will bite, at the end. Did you know that? Even the mildest of animals will fight to live.”

I had an awful feeling growing in my chest, like a malignancy, like the illness I had avoided all these long centuries. She was right: I was hurt, I was angry, I was afraid and confused. And all I could force from my lips was, “Who are you?”

“You know who I am, Lisel,” Ellie said, and smiled. Her eyes changed slowly, blue fading and somehow brightening into the lick of pale flame. “You know.”

Karathrax.

I didn’t hesitate. I threw myself sideways, behind the archery target, and in the same instant, Karathrax pulled and fired, a snap shot that should have gone wide but would have instead punched through my body if I hadn’t managed to get the target in the way. I rolled, pulling the target with me, and got into a crouch. The target was a heavy, awkward shield, but it was better than nothing, and I used it as I ran for the nearest genuine shelter, a heavy cactus that leaned near a dune.

Ellie—no, Karathrax (I had to stop thinking of him as a human now) was calmly setting another arrow to the bowstring. In no particular hurry, nor did he need to be. He had trapped me, dissembled perfectly.

“When?” I shouted to him. “When did you kill the child?”

“Before she ever reached you,” he said. “I kept her alive for quite some time, to learn from her so I could impersonate her appropriately. She’s buried quite near here, actually. I didn’t eat her.”

“Kind of you.”

“I’ve been waiting, Lisel. Waiting for the opportunity to face you and talk. Talk as Heliothrax would have, if you’d not slaughtered her without mercy.”

I needed to get to the weapons. There was little chance for me, but what there was lay in the weapons cache, the water, the emergency shelter. Karathrax was suited to the desert, and he could shed this human form and assume his dragon form at any time. Once he did, he would be . . . invincible.