But where did one get a heart last minute?
Nesto’s scream drew his attention, and he saw the soldier running at the creature’s rear. Gilian and Rom attacked him from the front. Wisps of black smoke trailed from its body through a dozen fresh cuts. Nothing slowed it down.
A few feet from the fight, Belni’s body lay, torn open and unmoving.
“Draw him away from Belni,” Fox shouted, hoping his words didn’t draw the creature’s attention. But it seemed too distracted by the other three, toying with them like a wild cat.
It took another minute, but Gilian managed to stab the ciervado through the side, sending it stumbling a few steps to the left before it recovered. It yanked out the blade embedded in its torso, turning it on the now weaponless Gilian. Fox returned his focus to his own bloody task. He pulled out a small dagger as he kneeled over Belni’s body. He took a deep breath and plunged it into his chest, wedging it beneath his already-broken ribcage.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Nesto screamed as he shoved Fox from the side, sending him into the dirt. “Are you insane?” He pulled out Fox’s dagger, looking hopefully at Belni, as if he might take a breath at any moment.
“He’s dead!” Fox yelled, wrestling the dagger from Nesto and attempting to move back to the task at hand. “We need his heart.”
“You’re desecrating his body. The kings need his body whole to go to the underworld.”
“That’s what you’re concerned with right now?” Fox asked, waving a bloody hand at the massive faery fighting Gilian and Rom. “If we want to live, we need his heart. So unless you have a better?—”
He didn’t finish the sentence as he heard Gilian’s and Rom’s screams silenced with a wet thwack. He turned to see the faery dropping their unmoving bodies onto the ground.
Beside him, Nesto gave a dry heave and stumbled away, falling to the ground. Fox tried to keep cutting at Belni’s chest, but the blade was drenched in blood, slipping from his fingers as the ciervado bore down on them. He wouldn’t have time to get to the heart. His sword was lying on the ground behind Nesto and useless to him. And the faery was there, eyes boring into him, claws dripping with blood.
A roar rattled the surrounding trees, and Fox stared at the ciervado, trying to understand how it had made the sound.
A soft flapping of wings and a blue swirl followed through the trees.
Nesto let out a soft “Fuck,” behind him.
Fox had to agree. The last thing they needed was a dragon.
“I leave you for less than a blink, and you almost die, Pale Scales.”The voice was a cool mist in his mind as two bright dragon eyes emerged from the trees, looking down at him, sparkling with mischief. Only then did he see Sofia riding just behind Chalia’s head, looking exhausted, yet so beautiful—her deep brown curls a halo around her head, lit by the sun above.
“She’s right, Ocon,” Sofia said. “You’re a mess.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SOFIA
They’d almost ignored the screams. Sofia had almost told Chalia to keep flying. Thank the dragon gods she hadn’t.
Sofia’s eyes met Fox’s. He was crouched, covered in blood beneath a towering antlered creature with a face like white bone. Sofia’s heart thundered in her chest. Fox had stumbled into a damned ciervado. Everything stopped when his eyes met hers, and she saw the fear in his expression erased almost immediately, replaced with something she didn’t have time to examine. Hope? Joy? It didn’t matter. She was too aware that she didn’t have a single piece of iron on her.
“Chalia, thoughts?”she said, as the ciervado turned on them, swiping the air with a clawed hand, just missing the scales along Chalia’s stomach as she flew upward.
“It’s usually of a dragon’s nature to never go anywhere near the death-head.”
Sofia had to agree with the dragon’s way, but, “That’s not really an option right now.”
The ciervado turned back on Fox and his companion, drawn by the half-sobbed prayer the young man was chanting as he crawled on his hands and knees away from the scene. Chalia dove without Sofia’s asking, letting out a growl as the creature raised a claw to grab Fox.
It whipped around, faster than Sofia would have thought possible, given its lumbering size, two nails hooked into Chalia’s scales, ripping at them and eliciting a high-pitched cry from the dragon. Sofia lurched forward, grasping her feathers tightly as the dragon twisted. Her fingers lost purchase, and she felt herself falling, the hard ground there to catch her a moment later. She gasped out, her bones aching even as she shuddered under Chalia’s own pain.
Above her, Chalia twisted in the air, her panic flooding through Sofia, stretching out to her limbs.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,”Sofia said, taking a deep breath and filling her lungs.
A screech from behind had her on her feet again. The ciervado was almost on Fox. She snatched a bloody dagger fallen on the ground as she ran, feeling the weight of it in her palm—steel, gods be damned.
But it was all she had.