Green Flame Assassin (Demon Lord series, book 2) (56 page)

But I did know I was hungrier than ever.

I looked for the bear.  Once more, she was picking herself up off the ground, slower this time with the acrid stink of fear thick around her.  Terror darkened the green smolder of her eyes as she looked my way.

I tried to say:
I’m going to eat you
.

What came out instead was a metallic, squeaky hinge kind of sound that trailed off into a sibilant tea kettle hiss. 

The bear turned and bolted around a tree, intending to lose me in the forest. 

After a few steps, my new wings found their beat and I was hopping into the air, taking long glides between bounces.  I followed the smell of fear.  My eyes focused so that the seamless flow of images, became a rapid-fire barrage of stills across my mind’s eye, one image replacing the other as if I were not watching a film, but rolling frame by frame past my gaze as time nearly stood still.  After a moment, the heightened way of seeing became natural and I stopped being concerned.

Several images passed, bear’s foot print.  Dozens of stills showed unmarked ground, then more images of the next print.  I heard the beating of her great heart, the sound of snapping twigs, and breaking branches getting further and fainter.  Terror was lending her speed.

My stomach growled, then so did I.  My dinner was not going to escape.

I winged and hoped along, passing the boles of massive trees, wishing them taller, thicker, and more widely spaced so I could truly fly.

The land rippled and reconceived itself.  What I wanted became true.  And I was flying up into low branches well above my height.  My hind claws caught bough after bough.  I jounced them as I landed and sprang, pumping for greater heights.  The wind tore past my face, bringing the rich scents of the forests, its creatures, the presence of water—and the bear.

I soared, banking around tree trunks, gliding, dipping to study the bear’s tracks, and I noticed something; the tracks were growing smaller.  I thought at first I was growing still bigger, but realized that the tracks were getting smaller in scale to themselves.  The bear was unmaking herself, afraid to face me.

I growled in irritation. 
There will be a lot less meat now.

A flash of white skin caught my attention.  I soared around for another look.  On the backside of a tree, crouching between roots, she tried to hide.  Small, squat, she trembled, a black mane of hair covering her back. 

Well, a tiny bite is better than no bite at all.

Something in the clouds of my past memories surfaced.  This woman had hurt me, had taunted me:
Death won’t come fast enough … you’re going to be a crippled worm, begging for death…

I am a wyrm, a dragon,
so it is you who will beg.

I circled the tree, losing sight of her, bleeding speed and diving lower.  Coming around the great tree, I flew at her. 

She thrust her hands out, stabbing the air, and a pair of green-fire lances shot at me.  One went past.  Another spear of flame burnt a hole in a wing membrane.  I shrieked with rage, trailing smoke as I spiraled to earth. 

The ground welled up to cradle me in a soothing black, wet  loam that put out the flame.  I hissed at the woman as she ran, ducking behind another trunk.  I folded my wings, wincing at the motion of the damaged one, and ambled after her. 

Clear a path
, I demanded.

The land knifed up, a backbone of rock.  It divided the forest, then separated in two great arcs that formed a bowl of forest rimmed by mountain rock.  And in the middle of the new valley, there was a long strip of grassland, tawny, waving in the wind.  And dead center, with no cover in sight, ran the woman that was my dinner.  I saw her cast a hasty glance to all sides, her face a study of panic when she saw me smiling a dragon’s smile.

Yeah, bitch, time to beg.  Time to die.

Odd, that voice in my head didn’t seem to be quite mine.  I shook of the distraction, launching myself with a gait that carried me swiftly. 

She stood there, firing streams of green fire, igniting the grass.

Hurting the land.  Don’t let her hurt the land.

I don’t know why it mattered, but I listened to that voice.  I willed the grass to change.  The stalks became metal, bright, beautiful golden blades.  A glinting sea that did not burn in the green fire, but it melted, becoming a bubbling, seething mass flowing back toward the human as if to smother her.

No
, I thought,
she is
mine to take!

The golden slag pulled away from her.  She gave up trying to flame the ground, seeing the danger to herself, and threw bolts of green fire straight at me once more.

I fanned my wings, the good one and the stiff, painful one.  My heart called out for the blessing of wind, and it came; strong, unrelenting as my vengeance.  I was pulled over the green fire.  The lances tracked me, rising.  I banked, angling between the green-fire.  Her catch-me-in-the-air trick wasn’t going to work a second time.  I inverted and came upright once more, now under her fire streams.  She cut them off, waiting for me as if death was welcome at last, but I wasn’t deceived.  Her hands still pointed my way.  She was saving all her fire for one in-your-face, final effort.

Approaching rapidly, my jaws gaped wide, baring razor-sharp teeth. 

She exploded in a pyre of green fire, ready to embrace me.

I screamed, and golden lightening spilled past my jaws, a web of it that forked out and curled back in like clutching fingers, gathering her flame, absorbing it, scattering it, making it nothing.

And then I hit her, jaws closing, crunching her skull, lifting her off her bare feet.  Wet blood and slick brains wiggled down my throat along with shards of cranium.  I threw the rest of her up in the air and gobbled some more.  Bones snapped like twigs, crunching rather pleasantly in my jaws.  The entrails were delightfully slithery.  I landed to finish her off. 

Taking form, a green haze hung in the air.  It divided into two separate souls, bear and woman.  They ignored me, staring at each other, drifting further and further apart.  Fading, the bear lifted a paw in farewell, going wherever a dead Spirit Bear is supposed to go.  The woman repeated the gesture with hesitation, free, but still somehow bound to the other creature.  And then both souls were gone.

I craned my neck, poring over the glassy slag. 
Ah, there.  I knew I dropped something.
  I saw a foot and bit of ankle left, and…

…noticed I was no longer alone.  Men and women had formed a half-circle behind me.  I turned to see what they were doing and counted a dozen people, with faces shadowed by hooded cloaks of black silk.  The men wore
bright colors under their cloaks.  The woman wore multi-layered gowns, jeweled necklaces and rings.  The jewels held my attention.

A gray-haired man, with hard eyes, moved closer.

I snatched up the severed foot and chomped on it. 
That’s mine
.

The old one made sounds that had no meaning to me, turning his head toward those of his kind.  As one, they knelt to me, lowering heads, placing fists over their hearts.

I swallowed the last of my meal, lashing my tail so the bone blade scraped the slag.  That’s when I caught their smell.  They weren’t human.  They smelled like me. 
Dragon
.  And deep inside the clouds of my memory, where another me hid, a single word emerged to fill my mind. 

Family.

I awoke, and looked at my tattooed flesh, feeling like this wasn’t really me.  But it was.  I stood and looked over a golden slag.  Golden grass grew beyond that.  Forests lay left and right, and the whole valley was ringed in purple-black mountains.  The sky was at twilight, tangerine and mauve to the west.  The higher sky was midnight blue.  I had the heavy, refreshed feeling you get when you sleep a very long time.

I had the vague recollection of crazy dreams, but as I tried to pull them into view, they wisped away, lost.  Still, I had a sense of closure, as if important things had been done.

And that’s how they found me, buck naked and in need of a shave.  I turned, hearing hooves.  Izumi, and Vivian rode up to me on a road that faded in from nowhere.  A woman was with them, dressed like a queen, the dream stone in her hands.  I took a wild guess and assumed that Izumi had completed the mission without me. 
Josh was not with them.  Had he been forced to return home? 

How long have I been asleep anyway?

Well, as long as I still got paid, that didn’t matter too much.  After all, life is all about treasure, and he dies with the most can buy his way into hell.

FORTY-ONE