Page 25 of The Last Slayer
Andersen nodded. “He’s an expert. Just watch.”
“Are you ready, Mr. Patterson?” Apollyon said.
“Yes, sir.” Patterson cracked his knuckles. What did he think this was? A street fight? He looked like he worked out—his suit was tight across the shoulders and biceps—but controlling a dragon is different from picking up an unresponsive forty-five-pound iron plate. Or raising the dead.
Apollyon stepped back until he stood with the other dragonlords. The small patch of forest we were in began shaking, tree branches and leaves rustling alarmingly. Ancient power traveled underground, coming closer to where Patterson stood. Cracks formed in the packed dirt beneath his feet and snaked out.
He jumped away just as the earth exploded. A wyrm surged from the ground, thick as a thousand-year-old oak and long as a nine-car train. Wet black scales glistened as it moved, and an odor of death and old magic sent the birds and small animals around us into flight. A fine tremor ran through me. I’d known dragons were large. Textbooks had diagrams and dimensions. But it was one thing to read about such creatures, quite another to see one in real life. I had serious doubts about my effectiveness going against something this enormous and powerful.
The wyrm’s slitted yellow eyes opened, translucent nictitating membranes moving across them like theater curtains, and scanned the area.
Patterson had landed in an athletic crouch. “Come hither,” he said in the standard dialect taught to the dragon specialists. It was actually somewhat impressive. Not a skill I’d expected from a necromancer flunky.
The wyrm’s head turned to him. Hissing, it slithered slowly over the grass. Patterson stood up. He looked smug and glanced at his boss like a sea lion waiting for a fish for a job well done. He still wore the expression when the wyrm threw itself at him and plunged its garage-sized head over where he stood.
A female executive screamed.
There was a horrible crunching sound and the wyrm reared back, fresh blood gushing from its mouth. Patterson’s torsoless legs collapsed, knees hitting the ground first. Crimson pooled around them. The coppery smell of fresh death turned my stomach, but I managed to keep my face expressionless. Nobody was paying me to panic. A bodyguard caught the female executive as she fainted.
Apollyon didn’t look all that concerned. Nathanael and Semangelaf were discussing something and didn’t even glance up.
“This…this is an outrage.” Swain’s voice shook despite his best effort to look on top of the situation. It’s hard to be in command when one of your men has just had his upper body gobbled by a dragon.
Apollyon shrugged. “I did warn you.”
The wyrm didn’t retrea
t as I’d expected. It coiled itself around Patterson’s fallen legs possessively, neck scales rippling in peristalsis as it moved Patterson’s torso down its gullet. The TriMedica people scrambled backward. Only the hunters from the firm, Valerie, Andersen and I maintained our positions. The dragonlords did nothing to put the wyrm back underground. Its tongue flickered out, testing the air. I realized that Patterson had just been an appetizer.
A very small one.
The dragonlords had promised not to hurt anyone, but the wyrm hadn’t. Swain had been a fool to invite one in. Now it began to move slowly toward one of my team.
Enough was enough. I might not be able to kill the wyrm, but I could maybe buy enough time to evacuate everyone.
I shook Andersen’s hand off my arm and quietly recited the incantation for draco perditio. Magic filled my mouth, tingled my lips, prickled my skin like an electric current. A heady sensation of fogginess and power expanded within me as the magic began to sing inside my body. In an instant the intensity seemed ready to rip me in half, and still it built. I’d performed powerful spells before, but nothing like this.
Apollyon glanced at me, his teeth bared in a sneer. The wyrm turned its head toward me and in the same motion began accelerating in my direction. I had a split second before I’d end up like Patterson.
“Draco perditio,” I whispered.
The spell shot out like a cannonball, the earth crumbling in a line beneath the bolt as it traveled, and exploded into the wyrm. It screeched like a metal shutter being ripped in half, writhing even as it began to shrivel.
The spell tore every bit of magic from me, and I gasped, falling to my knees. My heart pumped hard, as if it would explode from the exertion, and I couldn’t get enough air. Dimly I saw that all the mortals were standing with their hands over their ears.
The wyrm was rapidly shrinking into a hard lump of rough blackened leather, but its momentum carried it forward until it stopped just short of where I knelt. I reached out weakly and touched the charred baseball-sized carcass…if it could be called that. It was freezing cold and prickly, like dry ice.
Oh god, I did it. The spell worked.
Something in my peripheral vision caught my attention, and I looked up. Nathanael stood before me, the tip of a nine-foot-long sword pointed at my throat.
The blade shone in the light. His hand was tight and rock steady around the jewel-encrusted hilt as he regarded me. Suddenly he didn’t look bored anymore.
“Where did you learn the forbidden spell?” he demanded, his voice like a silken whip.
An invisible vise clamped down on my chest, squeezing all the air out of my lungs. I gasped and collapsed on my side. My vision blurred and darkened.
Nathanael eased the pressure slightly. “Speak.”
