Serpent's Kiss: A Dragonfire Novel (27 page)

Meanwhile, the snake became a harridan again, then the scene began to dim before them. A violent swirl of snow hid it completely from view.

In the hotel room, Chandra snapped her fingers.

In the blink of an eye, they were on a dusty mountain road, one with little vegetation on either side. The sky seemed larger here, and the sweep of the land almost endless. A man lay in the road, like he’d fallen there, and a woman knelt beside him. Thorolf guessed that she wanted to help, but couldn’t do much for the man. Maybe he was sick, or maybe just old. The pair were cloaked and bent over, and they moved as if they were tired.

But then, the location was pretty brutal. A ribbon of road wound up the side of the mountain to this point, and it was the only path. Thorolf couldn’t see any shelter anywhere on its length before it disappeared. They must have walked up it, and he could feel that it was hot as well as dry. One tree with strange shimmering bark cast a thread of shade upon the ground. Thorolf felt thirsty, and he wasn’t even really there.

“The road outside the Garden of the Hesperides,” Chandra announced and Thorolf was awed again by her abilities. How could she do this vision thing?

He hoped she never stopped. It was awesome eye candy, and an amazing way to experience stories. He’d never been much of a reader.

This must be another glimpse into Myth. The Garden of the Hesperides sounded like it should be in Myth.

Best of all, they’d arrived in time for a dragon fight. A
Pyr
in his dragon form fought with one of those winged hags. The
Pyr
’s scales were so dark that Thorolf knew he was one of the Dragon’s Tooth Warriors. He looked closely at the dragon and decided it wasn’t the same warrior. The woman with the bleeding eyes was battling against him with surprising strength, clearly prepared to fight to the death.

She was one creepy chick.

Thorolf took a step forward to help his fellow
Pyr
before he remembered that he couldn’t make any difference. Then the dragonsmoke stung him all over again. The hag ripped at the
Pyr
and Thorolf willed the other dragon to win. The
Pyr
cast aside the harridan with sudden force, backhanding her so that she fell away, then his eyes glittered as he scanned the ground.

Seeking something.

“What does he smell?” Niall demanded of no one in particular.

Thorolf caught the scent of
Slayer
just before the
Pyr
in the vision did.

“
Slayer
,” muttered the dark
Pyr
, then snatched for a yellow salamander that abruptly appeared.

“Jorge!” Rafferty and Sloane cried in unison.

“Shh!” Chandra advised.

Thorolf hoped the
Pyr
smashed that old
Slayer
to oblivion. It wouldn’t be all bad to be rid of Jorge. The salamander shimmered blue, then shifted shape to become a yellow dragon. Oh yeah, it was Jorge all right.

Slayer
and
Pyr
locked talons as they began to fight. They spun end over end in a bid for supremacy, biting and slashing at each other, their tails entangled. They exhaled brilliant dragonfire at each other, then the
Pyr
sank his teeth deep into his opponent’s flesh. The
Slayer
cried out as his blood ran black from the wound. It dripped to the ground and hissed on impact, emitting a plume of steam.

Jorge tore himself free, slashing at the
Pyr
in retaliation. The
Pyr
’s blood ran brilliant red from his cut shoulder and wing. Jorge laughed, then began to breathe dragonsmoke. The plume of dragonsmoke glittered like a snake of frost as it wound toward the
Pyr
, then it stabbed into his open wound.

Thorolf winced in sympathy.

The
Pyr
fell toward the ground, fighting against the dragonsmoke but losing steadily. He was weakening by the time Jorge grabbed the hag and tossed her at the
Pyr
. She landed on his chest, and Jorge touched the tip of his talon to a spot on the fallen
Pyr
’s chest.

“He’s missing a scale,” Rafferty whispered. “He loves his mate.”

“No!” a woman screamed, appearing out of nothing beside the fallen dragon. Thorolf blinked. Where had she come from?

“Ah, the mate,” Jorge said with satisfaction.

But there were no sparks. The firestorm must be satisfied. It wasn’t right that the mate could be left to raise a young
Pyr
alone!

“Take me instead.” She offered her bared arm to the snakes that twined around the hag’s head. “It’s my fault he’s vulnerable.”

“Take them both,” Jorge suggested.

The hag took one snake in her hand and offered its hissing head to the mate. “Kiss this one,” she commanded, and her voice was somehow familiar. Thorolf felt sick at her suggestion. “Show me that you mean what you say.”

“And you’ll let him go,” the mate tried to negotiate.

“I’ll take him if you don’t. See if you can satisfy my hungry vipers.”

The mate leaned forward, her devotion to her dragon making Thorolf’s heart swell. He wanted that from Chandra. He wanted the partnership that Rafferty always said was possible.

Which meant he had to win her over.

“I forbid this!” a woman shouted, just before the snake made contact.

There was a flash of brilliant blue-green light, like a crack of lightning out of a clear sky.

“Darkfire,” Rafferty murmured. “Drake said the darkfire crystal plunged them into the past. This must be part of what it did.”

Everything happened very quickly and Thorolf didn’t know who to watch. Jorge pounced on the man fallen by the side of the road. He snatched at that man’s arm, tearing it away from his body with savage force. The man’s body was dragged across the ground as Jorge tore the arm free, and blood flowed copiously when it did. The man moaned in agony but Jorge suddenly disappeared.

“So, that’s where it came from,” Sloane breathed. “That’s the source of the virus in Seattle! I wonder what the man had.”

“Quiet!” Chandra snapped.

Meanwhile, the woman who had been huddled beside the fallen man had leapt to her feet. Her cloak had fallen away, revealing that she was young and beautiful. She pointed at the hag with the snakes for hair. “Your battle was your own until you dared to threaten a child of mine. I banish you from this age and this realm!”

“You can’t banish me!” the hag replied. In the strange blue-green light, she looked even more like a nightmare come to life.

The beautiful woman stalked toward her as she spoke.

“Across the centuries and the years,

You will wait and shed your tears…”

She kept talking but the vision sputtered.

Snow appeared around the perimeter of the scene, gradually encroaching on the middle. The sound became static, the beautiful woman’s words obscured even as her mouth kept moving.

The hag screamed in protest. She took the form of a snake again, a large green snake that made Thorolf take a step backward. This had to be who—or what—had attacked him.

In that moment, thunder boomed loud enough to make the earth shake. The light of the darkfire disappeared, along with the vision.

There was only the hotel room, and Chandra looking about herself with dismay.

She hadn’t ended the vision on purpose.

Something had gone wrong.

Thorolf had to think that if Chandra lost her powers, that would be a very bad thing. He had to reassure her, somehow.

They had to become a team. And the only way to do that was to work together to help her fulfill her pledge to her brother.

It was only if they joined forces that they could save the
Pyr
and satisfy the firestorm.

* * *

Chandra felt the fizzle. She knew the vision was slipping away, although she couldn’t make sense of why. She fed it new strength, buttressing it, but it faded all the same.

What was going on?

This had never happened to her before.

Despite that, the vision disappeared before it was done, and there was nothing she could have done to stop it. Chandra stared at the space, shocked by her own failure.

“Excellent,” Thorolf said. “I’m glad to see we have things in common.” He looked satisfied and almost happy, which was the least appropriate reaction in this moment, at least to Chandra.

“What are you talking about?”

“Screwing up,” he said, his satisfaction so clear that she wanted to smack him. “I always seem to be letting things slip in that last key minute, right when everyone’s counting on me.” He grinned at her. “It’s reassuring, actually, that you’re not completely perfect. Our firestorm has a chance.”

She sensed that Thorolf was making a joke, that maybe he was trying to make her feel better, but she’d never feel good about being a failure.

How could he talk about the firestorm at a moment like this?

“This has never happened to me,” she said, appalled by her own failure. “I’ve never failed…”

Then she fell silent, her gaze snared by the golden glimmer of the firestorm.

The
Pyr
thought the heat of the firestorm could burn away whatever was affecting Thorolf. If it could destroy magic, was it destroying her own powers?

Thorolf was right to talk about the firestorm. It was changing her as well as him.

She’d thought it was just lust, but there was more. She could still feel the heat the firestorm had awakened in her. In fact it was inescapable, a hum of energy that fed a simmering burn of desire whenever she was near Thorolf. That was a new sensation to her. She’d thought she could flirt with the spark of the firestorm, help Thorolf recover and it wouldn’t cost her anything.

Instead, he kept drawing her into a sensual experience that she couldn’t stop—and didn’t really want to—and now her abilities were affected.

Badly.

She thought of her new impulsiveness and the passion his touch had awakened in her. She thought of the temptation Thorolf offered, an invitation to physical pleasures that had never tempted her before.

“This is your fault,” she said, spinning to face him.

He didn’t look troubled. In fact, his eyes were gleaming with an intent that might have made a lesser woman’s knees turn to butter. Chandra was feeling a bit less steady on her feet than she should have been.

“I wish I could take all the credit,” he said and smiled.

That dimple was trouble.

“You chose me. You came to me,” he reminded her in a low and very sexy voice. Oh, he was confident, that was for sure. “You kissed me. A couple of times. Just a few minutes ago, in fact.”

“It was supposed to help you.”

“I feel much better, thanks.” He smiled a slow smile that did dangerous things to her knees. “How about another?” His gaze turned assessing. “Or maybe even more than a kiss? We’re in this together, Chandra.”

“No! It’s not like that.”

“You told me you work alone,” he continued with that infuriating confidence. “But the firestorm is changing that. We need to work together.”

No. She’d never had a partner and she wouldn’t have one now.

Chandra spun so that her back was toward Thorolf and furiously tried to change shapes. Nothing happened. She stretched out a hand, conjuring a flurry of snowflakes for a vision, but saw only the glimmer of the firestorm. The dark-haired
Pyr
they called the Apothecary watched her warily. She fired a look at him and he turned away.

Rafferty was drumming his fingers on his knee, as if the entire world wasn’t coming to an end. “That’s the beginning of the verse the Drake brought back to Erik.”

Chandra was busy trying to conjure a vision. No luck.

Rafferty looked at the ceiling and recited the verse from memory, the one that Hera would have said in Chandra’s vision if her powers hadn’t completely failed.

“Across the centuries and the years,

You will wait and shed your tears,

Until the darkfire is freed again;

Your vengeance can cause
Pyr
no pain.

I close the portal, for once and all,

To see those I love out of your thrall.

When darkfire will burn once again,

Your sister’s death can be avenged.

When daughters of all elements are mates

Then will the dragons face their fate.”

“That was what I wanted to show you,” Chandra muttered. She couldn’t summon so much as a snowflake.

This was bad.

This had to be why the mirror spell wasn’t holding.

“Brandon’s mate Liz is a Firedaughter,” Rafferty continued. “We just need three more.”

Niall shook his head. “No, Liz had to have been last. The terms of the prophecy must have been fulfilled.”

Chandra nodded impatient agreement. “This mate who appeared out of nothing was an Airdaughter, a nymph under Hera’s protection. The one in Hades was an Earthdaughter, and the mate of Alexander, who we didn’t see, was a Waterdaughter. This Liz must be the last.”