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

I had killed my dragons with cleverness, from concealment, with poisons and treachery. I couldn’t take him in a fight, and we both knew it.

But even a rabbit bites.

I needed a distraction, something that would make Karathrax believe that he was on the verge of realizing all his hundreds-of-years-old dreams of destroying me.

Focus, I told myself. You have weapons you haven’t told him about. That was true; there were levels of training, of ability, that Karathrax had never seen, because he’d believed he’d seen all he needed.

He’d not seen this.

It was the most treacherous and difficult skill I had ever learned, and the most chancy; it required levels of commitment and fearlessness that most never mastered. I had scars from it, many scars, and some of them had been all but fatal.

I closed my eyes a moment, centered myself, and then stood up from concealment. I didn’t speak. I needed all my focus on Karathrax.

He didn’t wait. Ellen Cameron’s slender, tanned fingers tensed, the bow stretched, and I read the tremor in her arm as the muscle began to release.

Timing was everything to this. I’d gained barely enough distance to make it possible, but my concentration, my reaction time, had to be perfect.

No thought.

Nothing but the action.

I felt a sharp sting as my hand closed, just a bit early, on the arrow, and the barbed, sharpened head sliced furrows in my palm and fingers. That was all right. The important thing was to catch and stop the arrow, slow it so that if it did penetrate my skin, it would do so shallowly. The blood on my hand would only help sell the illusion, if I had gotten it right.

I had, barely. The arrow was lodged in my chest, sunk in to the depth of perhaps half an inch, but the illusion of it was solid. I screamed, dropped onto my side, curled around the arrow. Blood from my cut hand smeared a gory mess across the front of my tracksuit.

Karathrax waited a long, long moment, then took the bait, walking through the sand and nocking another arrow along the way. He wanted to kill me with the bones of his kin, not something human, like a sword. I understood that.

I played dead, and slowly, with just the tiniest play of muscles, worked the arrow free of my skin. Blood wicked through the cloth covering my chest, vivid evidence of my wound. Even better.

I felt cool relief from the hot sun as Karathrax stood over me, nearly as tall as the towering cactus with its defiant spikes. Ellie Cameron’s pink shoe rolled me over onto my back, and I made sure my eyes were half-open, fixed, unmoving.

One more thing I could do to sell the illusion.

I let my bladder loose, the way the dead do. The sharp smell of urine filled the clear desert air.

Overhead, a vulture riding the thermals shifted its course.

Karathrax’s eyes were eerie in Ellie’s face, merciless and cold. This was the moment of true danger; if he had a doubt, even an instant’s doubt, he would simply shoot me again. In fact, if he’d let me train him any further, I’d have trained him to do just that. Never assume something is dead, I would have told him. Never approach without administering a coup de grâce, preferably in the head.

As old as he was, he might have known that, but as a dragon, he likely had never had to fear much. Only humans. And even then, only a few. His instincts were wired differently. Dragons didn’t care whether their prey was alive or dead; the death was inevitable once they began to eat.

I heard the creak as the bowstring relaxed. Karathrax laughed softly.

“Dead in your own filth,” he said in Ellie’s soft, girlish voice. “What an ignoble end you all find, you humans. I think I’ll take your skin for a trophy. I’ll use it in my cave, as a rug.”

My eyes were burning from dryness, and the urge to blink was almost unbearable, but I abstained until he’d shipped the bow over his shoulder and glanced away to reach for the knife holstered in leather at Ellie’s belt. Ellie. A child, waylaid and destroyed, purely to provide Karathrax with the appropriate opportunity.

When he shifted to draw the knife, I focused my concentration again to a pinpoint. There could be no fumbling, no wasted motion, no hesitation—I visualized t

he motion, and then in the next shadow-second I copied it with muscles and will, turning the arrow, dragging it through cloth, and slicing its razor edge deep through the Achilles’ tendons on both legs, just above the heels, left vulnerable by cute pink athletic shoes with their appliquéd hearts.

Blood burst out in a flood, and Karathrax/Ellie let out a yelp of pure surprise and shock, wavered, and then I saw the pure horror on the face as the fine, precise engineering of the legs ceased to work. His body toppled, arms flailing, and he lost the knife as he hit the ground face just inches away. I flung myself across him, found the knife, and closed my bloody fingers around the gritty handle.

“No!” Karathrax roared, and I heard all the things he had described in that voice—anger, hurt, anguish, and confusion. Even a rabbit will bite.

I was no rabbit.

Karathrax twisted beneath me, and I knew I had seconds to finish this. He could shed this vulnerable human form, fortify himself inside a dragon shell, and though he would carry his crippling injury with him, he would be fiendishly difficult to hurt or kill again.