Dragon Bites Read online

  Mick remained human and continued to circle, slipping once in the blood on the sandy floor. The creature had a gash across his belly but it didn’t slow him.

  Turn dragon, I silently willed Mick. Take him down, and we’ll go upstairs and celebrate. We’ll check out that chocolate fountain.

  The creature struck. Its tentacle caught Mick on his side and flung him across the arena, Mick landing smack into the wall. He slid down but came to his feet, shaking himself, and went right back into the fight.

  The crowd roared. They were human and non-human, a mix of demons, Nightwalkers, men, and other things I couldn’t figure out in my panic. Most cheered on the demon, though some yelled for Mick as he faced the monster once more.

  “Why isn’t he going dragon?” Gabrielle demanded from beside me, Maya peering over both of our shoulders. “Why isn’t he flaming the son of a bitch?”

  I had no answer. I watched mutely as Mick ducked another blow from the tentacles, got under the creature’s reach, and thrust his hand to the cut in its belly, tearing open the gash to let blood rain down.

  The demon screamed in rage, kicking and flailing, a huge claw sending Mick tumbling again.

  Now was the time for Mick to blast him with fire and end this game.

  Game. I realized the fight was indeed a game, gladiatorial combat, with a dragon pitted against a demon, the spectators cheering on their favorite. This was Las Vegas, which meant they’d probably bet large amounts of money on the outcome. The demon was the favorite, I guessed from the amount of cheers it got.

  But why wasn’t Mick fighting as a dragon? Or using his magic to give him an edge?

  I scanned the room for any sign of a magic dampening spell but sensed none. If Mick remained human and fought with his bare hands, it was by his own choice. It also meant he didn’t have a chance.

  The demon struck again, this time slamming Mick to the floor and leaping on top of him.

  A scream left my mouth. It was drowned out by the cry of the spectators, thrilled that the favorite was about to win, the loser to—what? Die?

  Magic welled inside me, my Beneath magic building and swelling while I desperately tried to ground myself with Earth magic to keep it controlled.

  I felt the buildup in Gabrielle as well, power that could annihilate the entire arena and everyone in it, including Mick, and us too if she lashed out.

  Mick scrambled out from under the demon, his body covered with blood, and staggered to his feet. He looked up and straight at me, his eyes black and full of fire.

  “No!” he shouted.

  How I heard him over the noise, I don’t know, but the word bore into my brain. Mick’s eyes held desperation, even fear—not of the beast he fought, but of me and Gabrielle.

  I grabbed Gabrielle’s arm. “Wait! Stop!”

  She flung a glare at me, her eyes gray-white with power. “Why? What the fuck?”

  “Mick says no.” I had to yell into her ear. “He must have a reason.”

  Gabrielle kept glaring at me, but she lowered her hand, sparks swimming in her fingers.

  Below us, Mick danced out of the creature’s reach, the demon enraged. The beast struck again, and Mick ran behind it, kicking and punching until the writhing creature swung around.

  Mick grabbed the now furiously bleeding gash in the demon’s belly and yanked it open. A hideous stench filled the arena, cutting through the brimstone smell. Mick kept pulling, his strength amazing, until blood, filth, and entrails poured out of the creature’s stomach.

  It screamed and flailed, trying to grab Mick with its claw-ended tentacles. Mick held on, his body bathed in gore as he emptied the creature’s insides onto the arena floor. Maya swung away, hand to her mouth, but Gabrielle and I watched in fascinated horror.

  Mick jumped aside, and the demon crashed to the ground, thrashing, moaning, dying. The spectators yelled and cursed as their favorite writhed in agony.

  Mick lifted one of the stone blocks that lined the edge of the arena, returned to the creature, and rammed the rock through its cranium into its brain. The demon stopped flailing, went limp, and all light left its eyes. Mick was never one to let a creature suffer, not even a hell-bred demon.

  The few spectators on Mick’s side went crazy, punching the air, shouting and gleeful. If odds had been long on Mick, they’d just won a ton of cash.

  Two men in cowled robes walked out to the arena. They studied the demon, obviously dead, and then moved to Mick, who waited, panting and bloody. The two men—probably the refs—conferred, and then one raised Mick’s arm.

  The crowd booed, the winners melting away to collect their money, leaving the unhappy spectators yelling abuse.

  Mick raised his head and looked at me. He was covered from head to foot in red and black blood, and from behind the blood, his dragon-dark eyes blazed in rage.

  At me. Mick was furious at me for being there. He was telling me to get out and stay out, to leave this to him, whatever this was.

  Right. Like that ever stopped me.

  More robed men came in to drag away the dead demon, now a pathetic corpse. Mick gave me a final admonishing look and disappeared through an arched opening below.

  “We have to get down there,” I said.

  “How?” Maya, her face wan, her lips pale, scanned the arena. The rows where the watchers stood fed out into halls like the one we’d come through, giving no direct route to the arena floor.

  “Fly,” Gabrielle suggested.

  “Oh sure,” Maya said, but Gabrielle held up a hand, magic dancing on her palm.

  “Not fly like flap our wings, silly, but glide down. I can do that—”

  “No,” I said firmly. “Bad idea to attract attention in a place like this. Mick obviously got down there. There has to be a way.”

  I started back out the direction we’d come, lifting the bed sheet and entering the black painted hall again.

  Maya clicked after me. “There’ll be stairs connecting the arena to these floors, or a tunnel to outside or another hotel. Fire codes.” Her voice was shaky, breathless.

  I’d seen Mick in the blank hall and then he’d vanished, suggesting he’d gone through a door or stepped into an elevator.

  “How did he get down there so fast?” Gabrielle asked. “It took us a while to find the arena, but not that long. By the time we reached it, he was already fighting.”

  She had a point. Either we’d wandered around back here longer than we’d thought, or something in the air had made us lose track of time, or I hadn’t actually seen Mick. No—it had been Mick, but maybe I hadn’t seen him here.

  “I might have seen a reflection,” I said. “He has the magic mirror with him. He always does.”

  Gabrielle groaned, eyes rolling. “Gods, you’re not going to talk to that thing, are you? You promised you’d leave it upstairs.”

  “I did. It’s in my suitcase.”

  Mick and I each carried, at all times, a shard from a magic mirror that hung in the saloon of my hotel, plus Mick made sure a piece was ground into the side mirrors on our bikes. While annoying, the mirror was the most reliable means of communication we had, and several times, the mirror had meant our survival.

  I also used the mirror to keep in touch with Cassandra, my extremely competent hotel manager, whenever I left the Crossroads, or to talk to Mick when we were apart. The mirror had been disappointed that I’d left it in the hotel room tonight for our girls’ night out, but it was probably consoling itself by looking through whatever mirrors in the hotel it could. It might be an inanimate object, but it was a total perv.

  I didn’t want to go all the way back upstairs for it, but I realized I didn’t have to. I hurried out of the back halls and to the main part of the hotel, Maya and Gabrielle behind me.

  The decor of the casino contained mirrors on every wall, pieces of mirror glittering on the columns that rose to the dusky ceiling. Security sat above that dark ceiling, watching the gamblers on the floor from the nest of their observing offices, a
nd other guards patrolled the floor, watching, watching.

  I walked up to a column and chose a piece of mirror at random. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall…”

  “What are you doing?” Maya demanded, while Gabrielle let out a breath of resignation.

  “Come on,” I growled at the diamond-shaped mirror.

  No one else in the casino could possibly hear me over the electronic whir of the slot machines, bells announcing a winner, the clink, clink, clink … clink, clink, clink of coin payouts, shrieks of joy or curses of dismay.

  A security guard noticed my interest in the column and started to stroll over.

  “Answer,” I commanded the mirror.

  “You didn’t finish,” the mirror’s petulant voice came to me. Only a magical person could hear it, which, for the moment, meant me and Gabrielle. “You have to finish the incantation, or I’m not saying a word.”

  I ground my teeth, shifting on my stupidly high heels in impatience. “All right, all right,” I growled. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”

  “I am, of course, honey,” the mirror drawled in its drag-queen tones. “What do you want?”

  “Mick. Did he have you project his image where I’d see it?”

  “No, I did that all by myself. Mick didn’t want you anywhere near, but I knew he’d need you. He’s in trouble, honeybunch. Bad trouble.”

  The security guard was almost upon us. They didn’t like loiterers in Vegas hotels. Either spend money or get out.

  “I saw. How do I find him?”

  “I’ll show you,” the mirror said excitedly. “Follow me!”

  The tiny mirror flared with light, then the one next to it, then one on the next column. I followed the flashes, Maya and Gabrielle on my heels. The security guard halted and watched us go.

  “There.” Gabrielle pointed as a mirror flickered down the hall that led toward the shops.

  We scurried after it, three young women in tight party clothes running like crazy across the casino. We went by the hall where I’d first seen Mick, the mirror guiding us on past the chocolate fountain toward another hall and the entrance to the parking garage.

  I spun to follow a flash into another maintenance corridor, this one full of gray walls with pipes running everywhere.

  A narrow elevator door waited halfway down this hallway. Its bell dinged as we approached, and the door slid open. We peered inside, but saw nothing more sinister than a small, plain elevator that smelled a bit of diesel.

  Maya and I hesitated, but Gabrielle charged inside. “You coming?” she demanded.

  I darted in after her. Maya paused one more moment, then rolled her eyes and plunged inside.

  Gabrielle reached for the bottom button, 4B, but the button for the third subbasement lit before she could touch anything. The doors shut, and the elevator eased downward.

  None of us spoke as we descended. The elevator halted on 3B with a gentle bump, shuddered once, and the doors slid open.

  We peered out in trepidation, but found nothing more than a gray-painted, silent hall, similar to the one upstairs.

  Light flashed to my left, and I trotted from the elevator to follow it.

  I felt Gabrielle tense behind me as we went, the rise of her magic like static in the air. Maya brought up the rear in silence.

  The hell grew darker as we walked, and soon we heard the noise of the arena, the crowd surging to a roar as another match commenced. The sound was more muffled, however, farther away.

  The stench hit us a moment later—not from the arena, but from doors we came upon that lined the corridor. Each door was made of thick steel, some with small grates, some completely solid, but all locked from the outside, secured with chains and giant bolts.

  There was death down here, and fear and rage. The creatures inside the cells waited to fight until they died and they knew it. I felt their resignation, terror, anger, determination.

  Something large threw itself against one of the doors as we passed, but the door barely rattled. Magic kept these cells sealed, I sensed, not just the locks and chains.

  The tiniest flicker sparked on the dull gray steel of one of the doors, the magic mirror leading me where I needed to go. I knew Mick was behind the door—the bond that stretched between us pulled at me.

  Before I could do a thing, Gabrielle exploded the chains with a strike of Beneath magic. She never had debates with herself about whether or not she should use her magic—she just let fly. Maya and I danced back as pieces of metal flew past us and pinged into the cement walls.

  Gabrielle grabbed the door and flung it open, her magic negating whatever had held it shut. “Mick!” she yelled. “We’re here to rescue you.”

  Mick, naked and blood-streaked, his hair matted with filth, lifted his head from where he sat on a stone slab against the far wall of a dark and tiny cell. Manacles circled his wrists and ankles, chains leading from these to rings in the wall.

  Mick glared at us for a heavy moment before he sent a snake of fire magic to slam the door in our faces.

  Chapter Three

  I stared at the blank steel door, the panel over its grate tightly shut. Mick, captured and enslaved, was inside, but the glower in his eyes had told me that the three of us were the last people he wanted to see.

  “Gabrielle,” I said, holding down my worry as best I could, “open the grate. Gently,” I added hastily as she lifted her hand to blow it apart.

  Gabrielle sighed and gestured with her forefinger. The panel over the grate popped open, letting out the acrid scent of dragon and blood.

  I stood on tiptoes to peer through the grille. Maya, tall enough, especially in her high heels, looked in next to me.

  “Dios,” she said. “You stink, Mick. What are you doing in there?”

  I couldn’t have put it better myself. Mick rose and crossed the four feet of his cell to face us, his chains rattling.

  “I’m here by choice,” he said. “It won’t be forever, I’m paying off a debt, and you need to stay out of it, Janet.”

  He delivered this speech then scowled at me with dragon-dark eyes as though I should turn around and toddle home like a good Stormwalker.

  Believe it or not, the answer was a mountain of information for my usually cryptic boyfriend. A few years ago, he wouldn’t have even told me this much.

  “What kind of debt makes you have to fight demons without using magic?” I demanded. “You could have destroyed it and the refs in five minutes and blown this place. Come out of there—you can clean up, and we’ll go home. I’d love it if you were in one piece when I marry you.”

  “Valid points,” Gabrielle said from my other side, on her tiptoes. “Scrag whoever stuck you in here, Mick, and let’s party. Or I can scrag them for you, if you want.”

  Mick took on a look of ancient patience. “I’m not using magic, because I promised. Rules of the game. I will pay my price and finish it. If I’d known the games would be in Las Vegas, in this hotel, this weekend, I would have made sure you didn’t come here. I’m pretty sure this is someone’s idea of poetic justice.”

  Gabrielle spoke before I could. “You mean you’re being forced to fight to the death like a gladiator?”

  “Something like that.” Mick nodded as though this were the most reasonable thing in the world. “No magic allowed, at least in my case. A physical fight only.”

  My mouth went dry. “No magic means you can die. Who the hell would make you do that? And what is this debt? I don’t remember you involved in anything this big—this weird—”

  “It happened a long time ago,” Mick interrupted. “Before you were born, in fact. I arranged to pay off the debt now so I can marry you with a clean slate. I didn’t know exactly when the payment would be arranged, didn’t know until late yesterday, and as I said, I didn’t know until I arrived that it would be here. I went to a pickup point out in the desert, was blindfolded, and brought here. I didn’t have time to warn you.”

  “Yesterday.” I knew t
hat now was not the time to berate him for not telling me, but I couldn’t stop myself. Mick and I had agreed to make sure we both knew about any danger that befell us, so we could back each other up. Typical Mick to think fighting to the death was a trivial thing he could take care of when I wasn’t looking.

  “I planned to be done with it and home before your vacation was over,” Mick said. “You deserve some time off.”

  “So do I,” Maya put in hotly. “But for once, I agree with Gabrielle. We can’t leave you in there to be killed. The door’s unlocked—let’s go.”

  “I bet it won’t be that easy,” I said. “There will be some kind of contract, maybe a compulsion, that requires Mick to fulfill the debt. That’s how these things work. Right?”

  Mick gave me a nod. “I have to finish what I’ve started.” He softened into the smile that could make me melt at ten paces. “And then I’m free. We’ll celebrate when I get back to the Crossroads.”

  If he survived the games. The demon he’d faced had been huge and powerful, and Mick had barely bested it. I had the feeling each opponent would be harder to beat than the last, until Mick either died or won his final match.

  “What exactly did you do?” I asked. “And to whom?”

  “Lost a fight,” Mick said without embarrassment. “When I was younger, against a being vastly more powerful than I was. He was killing another and I decided to intervene, cocksure enough to believe I could best him. To save my life, and that of the one I was trying to help, I agreed to fight in his games, signed a contract in blood.”

  “Shit,” I said softly. I shivered, the chill clammy on my bare arms. “I can’t leave you here. I’m not going to lose you again.”

  Mick shook his head. “I can’t go, not yet. If you stay to wait for me, Janet, you can’t interfere. I have to finish this, one way or another.”

  “And if you don’t finish it? If you refuse to play the game?” I knew the forfeit would be dire, but I wanted to hear it.

  “Then not only will I forfeit my life, but everyone I know and love will be hunted down and killed. No exceptions.”

  I figured it would be something like that. Mick didn’t respond to threats to his own physical well being—if the cost had been only his life, he wouldn’t care. He was a dragon, and dragons didn’t have much use for fear. Very little on this Earth was more terrifying than themselves.