Demon Lord 5: Silver Crown King (27 page)

TWENTY-NINE

“Killing monsters is job security;

always another one coming along?”

                                                 —Caine Deathwalker

“Kinsey,” I glared, willing her obedience.  “I’ve got to jump out of my body for a few minutes and take care of something.  I need you to keep my dragon body alive until I get back.  Don’t let him run amok, and get blindsided.”

I can take care of myself
, my dragon objected.

I had concerns.  He was still relatively newborn, and shared my consciousness, but not experience.  And once my part of “us” was gone, I didn’t know if he’d stay stable, or revert to pure beast.  I needed to hedge my bets.

Kinsey said, “What happens to either of you is not my problem.”

I could tell her heart wasn’t in that, but her answer still pissed me off.  “Look, bitch, you let my body die, and the Old Man will hold your family responsible.  He destroyed Atlantis when just a young-punk demon.  Do you think he won’t rip hell out of the dragon home world getting payback?”

“The emperor will stop him.”

“The emperor will be too busy having his heart pulled out of his penis by the Red Lady.  Now, can I count on you?”

She actually rolled her eyes at me.  “Fine.  I give you my word of honor.”

I couldn’t wait any longer.  I warmed a seldom-used tat along my spine, a rose compass with an eye on it: the
Shard Mind
tattoo.  My scaly back stiffened, my wings trembled.  I fought for breath as a sharp pain made me think I’d been stabbed in the liver with a spear.  This was payment for the spell.  The phantom sensation faded, and I saw my dragon form from several feet away.  A wildness came into his eyes, a fervent bloodlust.  He leaped into the air, beat his wings, and took a shallow glide toward the trees that harbored the enemy fey. 

Kinsey burst after him, yelling, “Hey, wait up, you idiot!  You’re going to catch an arrow in the eye.”

Yell it louder
, I thought. 
Why not give somebody ideas?

My spirit form was a three-dimensional haze of shadow with two spheres of energy inside: one dark lightning, the other gold.  Cut off entirely from flesh, this was a step beyond the usual
Bi-locational
awareness I’d employed in the past.  My brain didn’t have two sets of perception; this was more like astral projection.  I merely had to think a direction and my liberated awareness drifted that way.  The edges of my sight were blurred, watery.  Only the center of my focus remained clear. 

Losing color, everything shifted into shades of graphite as I sank into the ground.  It should have been dark, but I saw pale ghost currents of ley energy in what appeared to be a sea of charcoal.  Like a diver, I nosed down, swimming through soil and rock, latching onto a ley line, letting it guide me toward the crystal heart it had come from.  I went deep, into a kind of timelessness, broken suddenly by concussive waves that rolled me end over end.  I felt like a submarine slammed by the detonations of depth charges. 

Recovering, I willed myself to my best speed, no matter how exhausting.  In my mind, I heard the scream of the land as its awareness thinned, but struggled to stay with me.  Fortunately, I’d relocated the heart near my keep for the coronation.  It came into view, a crystalline heart with cracks forming over its surface. 

Clutching the land’s heart, like a beast drawn from a demon’s nightmare, I saw a behemoth made of stone, veined with lava, its back a spiked shell.  I felt the fey-beast trying to tune to the crystal.  It had damaged my link, but not replaced it.  Having failed once, it pulled back a gargantuan fist and pounded the heart, as if it could be beaten into submission. 

Fearing that the heart might explode into fragments, ley lines already beating raggedly, I thrust out my shadow hand, the one that bore the shadow tat, the black circle crossed by lightning bolts. 

Plunging straight at my enemy, I concentrated on the black lightning at my core.  It flared, sending current through my phantom body.  Black lightning wreathed my hand.  Crackling jags of black flame arced from me to the creature, but moving through soil was different than air.  The dark lightning expanded, curls of it spooling off, so that by the time the charge hit the beast, a lot of explosive effect was lost.

The earth elemental arched its back.  Its face lifted as it screamed, a sound like grinding tectonic plates, felt more than seen.  Basketball-sized chunks were blasted out of its shell.  These became demonic ladybugs, slicing the soil with sword-like wings.  They swarmed in confusion, then turned hell-red eyes my way.

It was more important to save my crystal than to kill monsters.  I willed the crystal to come to me.  It bobbed around the big earth-monster and streaked through the swarm, slamming them off course.  The land’s heart was faster than the elementals, plunging into my phantom arms for protection. 

I needed a change of venue to be more effective, so I darted upward, pushing hard for the surface.  As I held the crystal, our bond strengthened.  Its light pulsed in time to my heart.  The cracks in it fused shut, vanishing.  I sensed that the surface was near. 

Just a little more.

The elemental swarm caught up to me, having crumbled into baseball-sized pieces with no limbs, just a helluva lot of sharp teeth.  Their bodies flattened vertically as fins developed.  They became stone piranha veined with magma, eyes like crimson stars.  Terribly hungry, they snapped at me, chewing into my nothingness.  Several swam into my body, and out again.  One hit the golden fire at my core and exploded into gravel. Another tried to swallow my black-star core and was also blasted into rubble.

That’ll teach ya.

Unable to hurt me, the demon-fish rammed the crystal tie, trying to jar it loose from my grasp. 

I broke the surface and rose into the air. 

The demon-fish followed. 

Fed by the shadow brand, the dark current around my hand intensified with less induction to drain the energy.  I lashed out with a back fist.  A rainbow of darkness flew from me, slicing across the elementals. Multiple detonations bloomed, giving me breathing space and a chance to look around.

The forest in this mirror valley was in flames on my side of the river.  I watched my dragon body thundered up through the smoke, spewing golden lightning freely. 

Her wings batting the smoke, Kinsey shadowed him.  I saw no sign of fey warriors attacking them.  The delaying troops were probably well-roasted by now.

I flew my shadow-shape toward the dragons.  As I arrived, my dragon body swung his head my way, his hungry gaze on the crystal heart.  I knew of only one way to keep the crystal safe, and to free us all up for combat. 

“Here!”  I heaved the stone at the dragon’s face.  Instinct took over.  He did what I expected, swallowing the crystal.  It vanished, a lump I could see sliding down his throat.  He gave me a what-the-fuck-did-you-make-me-do look.

And then we slid together. I looked out of dragon eyes, back where I belonged—just in time.  The ground surged up under us with a much larger version of the elemental monster.  No longer damaged, his earth shell had filled in and now bristled like a porcupine with burning trees for spines.  Its roar pounded through the sounds of the devouring flames.

The Nightmare Court magic-user that had raised this was damn good, but I didn’t think he could control the beast from too far away.  He was probably here, using the terrain to cover and hide him. 

I called to Kinsey.  “There’s a fey with earth magic around here somewhere controlling that.  Find him while I keep the monster busy.”

In human form, my
Dragon Vision
tattoo let me find hidden spells and magical artifacts, assessing their power and nature.  I didn’t need the tat to do this in dragon form.  Kinsey had the same ability.  She beat leathery wings, climbing higher for a better view, spiraling like a top to check all directions. 

I stared down at the animated dirt pile.  Its eyes burned, pits of bubbling magma like its mouth.  I realized that the roar I heard was coming from its whole body.  Only a hundred feet?  I wondered if that reflected a limit on how much earth the hidden fey could control.  The monster reached for me, its golem arm well short, until the creature’s girth compressed and the arm lengthened. 

I spewed gold lightning.

Stone and dirt fingers fell, severed from the hand, but the hand kept coming, growing new fingers as ribbons of lava bled across the palm.

Shitshitshitshitshit.

With the crystal in my stomach, I willed the falls of this valley to collapse, yanking down a rock slide so the climbing fey were crushed along with those that waited to climb.  I also reached back to the great lake I’d formed, causing a land slip that let all that water spill in here, while sealing off the other valley where the rest of the fighting was going on. 

I should be back there, commanding my forces, but no, I have to fight this dumb-ass monster here.

Diving for speed, I swung wide of the hand, spiraling around the monster’s overgrown arm.

It just opened its mouth wider, ready to swallow me whole if it could. 

The flood waters crashed past us both, uprooting trees, drenching the fires.  The monster stood against the force like it was nothing, but real damage was being done.  The monster’s legs were absorbing water, going muddy as hell, losing strength and cohesion.  The large boulders in its body were slipping loose, sliding out of the slush it crapped all over the place.

I spat lightning across the creature’s knees, exploding them.  Great chunks sprayed away.  The remaining craters bubbled, steamed, and filled in, but the elemental tilted to the side.  Its rough-hewn arms flailed, but balance was not recovered.  It continued to fall, a slow, drawn-out affair.  If this were a movie, there’d be dramatic music playing. 

I winged away, not wanting to be caught by its muddy splash, and climbed for altitude.  I flew a turn and saw that the earth elemental lying in the water, its magma veins hissing, cooling.  Steam clouded it.  The mass dissolved, leaving its last rocks sinking in muddy water.

Turning my attention to Kinsey, I saw her diving at a cliff face, at a ledge with a very ugly pile of boulders.  I gave the rock more of my attention, zooming my focus as I altered course toward it.  What looked like an oval stone on a bigger boulder became a naked man, his back to me.  He didn’t look too human since a gray coating of rock dust colored his skin.  His head was shaved bald to help his camouflage. 

He stood and turned, wearing a kind of thong that kept his private parts private. 

I was thankful;
I’m not into naked guys
. 

He gestured.  Needles of rock stabbed out of the cliff face.

Kinsey’s lightning turned them into rubble.  She flew through the dropping rock, showing dexterity that had been years in the building.

I felt my dragon-side well with appreciation and envy.  He said,
If you let me out more often I could do that, too.

I said, “If wishes were bitches, and bitches were worth anything at all, you’d own the world.”

I’m not sure what you mean by that, but I feel vaguely insulted.

“Only vaguely?  I’m losing my touch.”

I back-winged to lose speed.  Kinsey didn’t need any help at all.  Streaking by the fey magic-user, her head speared in.  She chumped on him, tossed him up in the air, caught him with another chomp, and ate him.

I felt off balance; I hadn’t thought she had this in her.  “Cannibalism?”

Of course not
, my dragon side said. 
She didn’t eat another dragon.  That would be wrong.

“But she has a human form.”

But she didn’t eat the fey while in that form, so it doesn’t count.

“Fine.  I don’t even know why the hell I’m arguing.” 

Kinsey flew a curved path around me.  “We’re done here.  Let’s get back to the party.”  Without waiting for an answer, she set a course toward the real valley.  I followed her up and over the stone ridge that separated the two. 

Hunger set in.  I fondly remembered the horse
tartare
I’d eaten. 

We should have grabbed a couple more
, my dragon-side said.

“There’s still time.”  I angled down into my real valley, scanning to assess the situation.  Fighting was everywhere.  My demons were scattered, moving in packs, spraying automatic fire into enemy fey.  The werewolves avoided heavy conflict, picking off stragglers and the wounded, since they had to be careful around the fey silver.  Other shifters mauled Autumn Court fey in diseased areas of forest that drooped, withering, shedding leaves.  Tree boles were pocked with fuzzy white rot. 

I felt the desecration of my land as an ache in the bones. I fed golden magic into my crystal, strengthening it.  New life flowed back into the forest.  The trees lifted their heads, proud, fresh green buds broke out.  The rotting bark fell away as fresh bark formed.