Dragon Soul (54 page)

Except that was probably sand too.

I cleared my throat and spat—trying to improve my situation a little—then realized I was totally fucking alone in the middle of the desert, no mount or anything, the storm swirling all around me and threatening to swallow me up. Wind magic was a mean, shifty little trick to play at this point, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d seen us coming after all. They’d sure as hell chosen the most effective way of evening out the odds, and confusing the shit out of everyone, to boot. Where the hell had Badger gone? It wasn’t like I needed him around or anything, but he’d disappeared trying to get to me. I didn’t want to owe a soldier any more than I had to. And where the fuck was the rest of the party?

Maybe they were dead. Hell, it was more than possible.

I couldn’t even grope around in front of myself. My hand was throbbing worse than ever, and I didn’t want to know how much worse it could get if sand got into my veins, but that pain was good. The pain meant I was near to that dragon piece, and if I was near to that, then I could follow the aching in my palm straight to the man I was looking
for. Then I could end him. It was my only shot at this point, since I couldn’t hope to see the hands on the compass.

Against my better instincts, I closed my eyes—I was going to need them later, and it wouldn’t do me any good to go sand-blind before the real shit went down. Besides, in this situation I was probably better off than the others since I didn’t need to see in order to reach my goal. All I had to do was follow the throbbing in my hand, and even though it was hurting bad enough to make me want to scream, I could tell myself
this
time it’d be worth it. With each ridiculous, shuffling step I took through the desert, I was drawing closer to the magician who’d done this to me. That knowledge was the only thing that made it bearable. I was every woman wronged by a man who thought he could be clever enough to cheat the fates. Every lonely ghost conscripted to wander the loneliest corners of the land until she closed in on the one who’d mistreated her. Every cautionary tale whispered in a young child’s ear at night to make ’em shut up and go to sleep.

Those stories’d scared the shit out of me as a little tot. Now they seemed about the same as all those heroic legends I’d gobbled up—everyone got what was coming to them, and justice was served.

Justice with a side of sand.

All of a sudden my hand pulsed something fierce and I straightened up quick as shit, eyes squeezed shut, shirt pulled up over my nose and mouth to keep all the sand out of my lungs. All I could hear was the wind howling, but the pain in my hand was telling me that wind wasn’t the only thing close by. The sand whipped sharply at my face, like I’d fallen into a nettle patch, but I held myself still, breathing shallow and close against the fabric of my collar.

As I stood there, the wind started to sound more like voices—loud angry voices and thin, shivery voices all rolled up together. On top of the fever, I was probably just losing my mind in the heat, the way people said happened once the sun came up over the desert. Not that I could see the sun behind all this sand, but I knew it was there.

Where are you going?
the wind sighed, hard against my face but soft on my ears.
Wouldn’t it be simpler just to lie down and rest? Let the sand cover your tired bones?

I didn’t know whether the voice was real or imaginary, but to my mind it sounded an awful lot like that rat-faced magician from the capital. I couldn’t tell what direction the words were coming from though,
so that didn’t help me. All I had to go by was the feeling in my hand, like someone’d stuck an arrow straight through it.

As a kid, my favorite stories had been the ones about the blind warrior—the one who won out against impossible odds every time, even when you thought his goose was cooked. I used to imagine what it was like to fight blind—to go into every battle knowing you were at a huge fucking disadvantage and not to let your guard down even after you’d thought you’d won. I’d go out back of the house, shut my eyes tight, and listen as hard as I could while one of my kid brothers tried to sneak up behind me. Sometimes I got him, and sometimes he got me. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, and eventually I decided I was sick of playing blind warrior.

What kind of idiot gave up an advantage she was lucky enough to have in the first place?

That magician bastard was somewhere close now. I knew it as sure as the throbbing in my hand, and I was stuck in the middle of the desert playing blind warrior again, only out here the stakes were a lot higher than bragging rights or who got first crack at our mama’s fried dumplings.

Breathing in slow, I forced myself to focus on the pain. It hurt enough to make me feel a little crazy for even trying it, but it was my only shot at getting the drop on this asshole. I took a step forward. Nothing happened. I shifted my weight to the right and got a blinding flash of pain all through my hand and up my arm for my troubles. That was the way, then, and he was a lot damned closer than I’d thought for me to be feeling this bad.

Screwing up my courage, not to mention my eyes, I took another step in what I already knew was the right direction. The voices started up again, louder than before, though they echoed strangely, sounding faint as they whisked past my ears.

What can you possibly be thinking? Even an animal knows to lie down when it’s been beaten. Surely you have more sense than something that goes about walking on four legs?

If that was the best they could do, I thought, gaining momentum against the shallow incline of the dune I’d come up against, then I was going to get through this, no problem. Every girl with a couple of brothers learns to build up a tough skin against being called animal names, and those desert voices had made a pretty big mistake in piping
up again since I was almost positive at this point where they originated. Cheap insults had nothing on the shit I was living right now.

My palm flashed white-hot pain as I crested the dune, and with the last of my strength I threw myself forward, hollering like any blind warrior worth his salt. Maybe I should’ve kept the element of surprise on my side, but there was only so much I had planned out before my future became crazy with revenge.

I connected hard with something good and solid, and for a minute my head swam like I was maybe going to pass out right there. But then me and whatever went over together and hit the ground with a thump that knocked all the wind out of my lungs—and there hadn’t been much in there to start with, what with me breathing hot, thick air in gulps through my shirt. I opened my eyes just long enough to see something bright and silver go flying in an arc through the air before it disappeared behind more sand, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut again or risk going blind.

The thing I’d hit shrieked like an animal caught under a cart wheel, and after that it started to struggle real good. I struck out at it blindly—at
him
, I hoped—hitting soft sand, then something hard and bony. My hand was hurting bad enough that I half expected
it
to start screaming, but I was caught up in some kind of madness, and nothing could tear me away from my purpose. He threw me off, but I was bigger than he was, and I definitely didn’t land as far away as he’d hoped. I sucked in a gasp when I landed, then realized that I hadn’t gotten any sand in with my air.

Tentatively, I opened my eyes, just in time to see a flash of blue clothing, and a pale, spindly arm heading straight for me.

“Idiot girl!” the owner of the arm shrieked, and if I hadn’t been sure before, that voice cinched it. I rolled away just in time to dodge the magician’s blow, and was on my feet—with my eyes
open
this time—before he could rally to get the better of
me
. “What if you’d broken it?”

“Well, considering it’s been doing its best to break
me
ever since you put the damned thing in my hand, I figured I’d give it some payback,” I told him, a little bit of my own madness in my voice now, from the heat and the anger and the fever pulsing in my blood. “I’m a pretty simple person. Don’t know anything about magic in the first place, so I couldn’t tell you one way or another what you’re doing either. Just that I don’t like it and I
want my hand back.”

He stamped his foot like a child, and I swallowed the urge to laugh in his face.
This
was the man who’d caused me so much pain and suffering? He was about as angry as a little boy who’d lost his favorite toy—and then I realized my hand wasn’t hurt as bad as it could’ve been, or should’ve been, if I was face-to-face with not my tormentor but the object causing all my torment.

“Shit,” I said.

“Exactly!” the magician cried. “That contraption in your hand is the final piece. Without it, everything else will fall to pieces. You can’t possibly understand its importance. The
planning
that went into this.”

“Guess you shouldn’t’ve let me wander off on my own, then,” I said. We were in a pocket of air maybe, but the wind was coming in strong, if not the sand. What’d just moments ago been a shelter from the storm felt like it was closing in on us—it was possible I was hallucinating, but just then, I wasn’t really sure. I had to assume everything and everyone was hostile to get the job done. Safer that way—if anything
could
be safe, at the moment.

“But you’re an incompetent,” the magician said.

Sure as shit, it baffled me too.

“So then why the hell’d you ask me to go after the piece in the first place?” I demanded. “Did you already know where it was?”

“Only the general area,” the magician said. “I had more important things to do than drag an ill-mannered pack mule down to the desert and use her as a divining rod. Easier to follow you once you’d homed in on the soul, so I could take care of other pressing matters. I hope it doesn’t offend your womanly pride to hear that you were not the
only
thing required for my plans.”

“So are you gonna take this gods-cursed thing out of my hand or not?” I asked. I figured I was going to kill him either way, but there was no harm in asking.

“In a sense,” said the magician, scratching his cheek as he stared at me with those ghostly eyes. “When we join you with the soul.” He sounded irritable. I was gonna have to wring his neck. I pressed my fingers against the inside of my elbow, trying to soothe the pulse.

“I’m supposed to pretend like I know what that means?” I asked, like it didn’t scare me one bit to have some creep deciding things about
my
body.

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” the magician sniffed. “You’re an uneducated
fool from a backwater outpost. Only someone who’d dedicated themselves to the study of dragons could possibly hope to comprehend my plans.”

“Great,” I said, fighting the urge to go for his throat then and there. If I could keep him talking, I might be able to figure out what the hell I was going to do with this hand of mine. Lucky for me, he was an arrogant prick, and there was nothing arrogant pricks liked more than explaining their plans to stupid women. “What’s that mean?”

“It
means
that the only flaw with the Volstovic dragons was their volatile nature. Only certain men could ride them, and it had to be men of
their
choosing. A very quaint arrangement, to be sure, but I cannot afford such a capricious nature. I require a vessel, in crude terms. If we activate the dragon’s soul within a
person
, however, then all I need to control is you.”

“Sounds like you’ve got that all worked out,” I said, talking now because if I thought about what he’d just said, I’d lose my mind. I hadn’t come this far and fought this hard just to sign up to be a slave.

I’d die first. And I was damn well going to take him with me.

“Come on, then,” he snapped, and tried to grab me by the arm, which wasn’t his first fucking mistake. His first mistake was getting me involved in the first place. All the rest was plum sauce on the shaved ice. I lunged at him—no weapon but my bare hands, or
one
bare hand, anyway, but that’d be enough once I got at him—and he was gonna be a split second too late to block me, when something rocked the foundations of sand beneath us. He went down to his knees. I didn’t.

“The hell was that?” I demanded.

“That
idiot,”
the magician howled. “He can’t have started without me!”

It seemed like he wasn’t in the mood for all his plans to be going to shit. Too bad, because that’s what I had in mind. I ducked away from him, but my reaction time wasn’t what it should’ve been. Maybe if I’d trained more as the blind warrior, I might’ve been better at this. As it was, my magician friend grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me up. He was using me, same as ever, trying to get that compass to tell him where the remains of the dragon were.

I brought my knee up, right into his balls.

That sure as hell stopped him and he shouted in pain, letting go of me like I was on fire. Funny I should think that—seeing as how I was—
but I didn’t let the humor of the situation stop me from taking control. I grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up, then punched him good and hard across the face with my bad hand.

Fucking mistake, I realized right after. The pain was so awful that suddenly it was me who was screaming, and the only pleasure I could get out of the situation was noticing that the face of the compass had left a mark on his cheek before he flipped the tables and was over me, one hand at my throat.

“Don’t try me, gutter pig,” he said.

He was an idiot because he’d left himself open, and I got him in the balls a second time.

There was no grace to it whatsoever: just me kicking and scratching and screaming, and him maybe realizing that he’d fucked with me one time too many. Adding insult on top of all the other insults—not to mention all the injuries—was just enough to make me act without regard to my own life, without thinking about what he could and would do to me.

That was when he pulled out his magic.

Wind blasted like a solid wall into my chest and threw me back against another solid wall of wind
and
sand. I was bleeding from one corner of my mouth and my eyes were full of tears—pain and the sand smarting underneath the lids—but I forced myself to keep my eyes open and my gaze on him, even when I fell. He was coming toward me, and grabbing my arm again, and when I tried to kick out at his ankles wind pinned me down and kept me there.