Dragon-Ridden (41 page)

Umi’s mouth dropped open and her
eyebrows drew together in confusion.

“I’ve been using you,” the Red Lady
explained. “And I know that you had no intention of letting me have either the
fulcrum or the key. None of it matters now.” She shrugged elegantly and waved
one hand, “I don’t need the key or the fulcrum for that matter.”

“What?” Umi said in a soft voice.

“I don’t need you,” the Red Lady
said. “I have something much more important than your fulcrum.” The Red Lady
came to her feet and crossed the floor. The skirts of her heavy ball gown
swished across the floor until she stopped next to Umi. She waved dismissively.
“You may go.”

“Wait!” Umi grabbed the Lady’s arm.
“What do you mean? You said you wanted the power. That once you had it you’d
share it with me. How can you give that up just because of something she said?”

The Red Lady looked imperiously at
the hand on her arm. She flung her arm up striking Umi across the face with the
back of the hand. Umi wobbled and fell to the ground.

Tate hung in her captor’s arms
secretly rejoicing. She hadn’t really expected the theory she’d spouted off the
top of her head to cause this much friction between her enemies.

“I have something much better now,”
the Lady said coldly. Tate’s pulse fluttered and she felt clammy all of a
sudden. The Red Lady turned to her and smiled softly into Tate’s eyes. “Did you
know that dragons are the most powerful creatures on this planet? They have
unequaled power, wealth, and they live for a very long time. Much longer than a
human. Normally they’re untouchable except for that slim window of time when
they first bond with the dragon,” the Lady pulled Tate’s sleeve up and caressed
the tattooed dragon’s wing, “and before their first change.”

For the first time since the last
encounter with the Red Lady, Tate’s dragon stirred, rousing itself from slumber
at the feeling of danger.

“What are you planning to do?” Tate
asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

The Red Lady stared into Tate’s
eyes and grinned in victory. “I’m going to rip this dragon from your body and
make it my own. You’ll die of course, quite painfully I’m told. Afterwards I’ll
change forms and eat your two friends.” Tate’s heart squeezed painfully as the
Red Lady leaned close and whispered into her ear, “Are you ready to beg yet?”

The Lady’s lips stretched into a
satisfied smirk at the glimpse of horror on Tate’s face.

“Kadien!” Umi cried in a shrill
voice. “Kill this insolent creature.”

Kadien sheathed his katana and came
to stand at the Red Lady’s side, looking at Umi with hard eyes.

“Kadien,” Umi said softly in
disbelief. She looked lost as if the fabric of her reality had been yanked out
from under her. Tate could relate.

“I told you I knew of your plans.”
The Red Lady turned her back on Umi and drew one gloved hand down his chest.
“So I made sure I had someone close to you who was willing to keep me apprised
of all of your movements.” The Red Lady faced Umi and Tate with a little moue of
surprise. “I confess I didn’t think it would be as easy to gain his cooperation
as it was. After all, the Kairi are known for their loyalty. This one, though,
was eager to betray you.”

Tate held still, grateful that Umi
had drawn the attention back to her. Every second they talked was one second
closer to their backup arriving. Twenty minutes had to have passed by now. She
hoped.

“Why?” Umi asked. “I thought you
loved me. What has this all been for if not so we could be together?”

Kadien’s face was filled with quiet
scorn as he answered her question. “Love? You don’t know how to love. How could
I love you after what you did? You’re a spoilt child playing at love, uncaring
of who you hurt along the way.”

“So you see my dear, your use wore
out the moment you brought the fulcrum to me,” the Red Lady added. She smiled
cattily at them. “Get the fulcrum out of there and put her in his place.”

“Wait,” Brown Eyes said, rising
from where he’d been watching the drama and coming to stand by the Lady’s side.
He slipped his arms around her, hugging her back to his front and said into her
ear, “Imagine what power you could wield if you had both the dragon and the
fulcrum. You could take over the empire.” He kissed one creamy shoulder. “None
would be able to stand in your way, not even the Dragon Emperor himself.”

Lust rose on the Lady’s face, not a
carnal desire, but the desire for power.

“You’d be an empress,” he
whispered.

She cupped his hands with hers and
nodded, her eyes going distant as she imagined it.

Tate eyed the two speculatively.
She was beginning to wonder who was really in charge here. The Lady or Brown
Eyes?

“Do it,” the Lady ordered, her eyes
diamond hard.

Tate’s captor obeyed,
force-marching her to deposit her in the center of the diagram next to the
little boy. He stepped out and an invisible barrier rose, encasing Tate and the
boy in the center. The power of it prickled along Tate’s skin like a thousand
biting ants.

“You should not have come,” the boy
told her. “They have all they need now.”

“This isn’t exactly how I saw
things going,” Tate snapped back. She immediately regretted how harsh she
sounded. He hadn’t deserved that, just because she was angry at the turn of
events.

“What are they planning?”

“They are planning to use the
Lourdes,” he indicated the diagram, “as an anchor and then with a spell,
they’ll be able to drain the raw power from us. They’ll have to weaken us
physically first, though.”

“How do they do that?”

His eerie eyes were stark as they
met hers. “Blood.”

Tate followed his gaze to Kadien,
who was pulling down the sleeves of his robed shirt, leaving his chest bare. He
tucked those sleeves into the belt of his pants and drew his katana. With a
deliberate slowness he stepped over the edge of the barrier into Tate and the
little boy’s space.

“By blood, do you mean our blood?”
Tate asked, nervously pointing toward him and then her. The boy didn’t respond,
watching Kadien warily. Guess that answered that, then. This would probably
suck worse then the caning.

She scrambled to her feet but
couldn’t go very far. The boy didn’t twitch from his seated position. The chain
around his neck made certain of that.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked
Kadien.

He held his sword by his side
before settling into a wide stance, the katana held loosely in his hands
pointing down. She edged further away but stopped before she hit the barrier,
which hummed with vicious intensity at her back.

“It does not matter to you why I do
this, only that I do,” Kadien informed her.

Tate gritted her teeth. In a way
what he said was true, but conceding the point meant she wasn’t wasting the
time away. Talking about his plans would delay the inevitable, and she was all
for that.

“It matters to me,” Tate pointed
out. “I’d like to know why I’m about to die.”

Kadien slashed up with the blade.
Tate jerked out of the way but didn’t quite make it as a streak of fire ignited
along her leg. Blood slid down her leg and with it pain rose. So much for
getting him to talk. Evidently that wasn’t something he did.

She stumbled and by some miracle
avoided the next slash. It didn’t matter where she went, though. The entire
space was within the reach of his blade. Two more slices landed, opening
shallow cuts, one on her arm and another on the unwounded leg.

She dodged the next slash but felt
pain streak across her back when he reversed his swing. Though she was fast and
agile, with such limited space she couldn’t avoid his blade for long. Blood
loss was already making her weak.

Tate lunged under another slash and
tackled him around the waist. That was a mistake. He brought his elbow down
onto one of her cuts and then with the other drove a dagger into her shoulder.
She screamed with the pain but hung on. With a last push, she managed to knock
him off his feet. She scrambled to pin one of his arms, but he rolled with her
until she was the one pinned by his weight.

Tate snaked one leg around his
ankle and then pushed up with her hips. With a fierce twist she ended up on
top. Fierce growls rumbled from her throat as the magic grew until it was so
thick she was choking on it. The more she bled, the more the magic seemed to
build.

With a mouthful of teeth that had
suddenly become very pointed, she leaned down and bit hard into Kadien’s
shoulder. He screamed under her. The dragon whipped its tail as it relished his
pain. So she bit him again.

Hands grasped Tate from behind and
threw her against the barrier. She landed in a crouch, her body a mass of blood
and her face animalistic as she snarled. Finally, the dragon had decided to
help her.

The dragon’s presence seemed to
grow in proportion to her pain. It was a struggle to hold onto her reason. To
not just give in and let her alter self wreak havoc where it willed.

There were two enemies now. The
other held a bloody whip.

“That should be enough,” a voice
said from outside the barrier.

The second enemy dragged Kadien
out. Blood poured from the wounds Tate had given him, and his normally golden
skin color had leached to a sallow white.

Tate managed to focus on the little
boy, beating her other self back. It paced restlessly, snapping at the power
that crackled around her. The dragon wasn’t talking to her as it had before,
but Tate could sense its uneasiness and fear.

She made a sound of distress as she
bent down to touch the boy gently. While she had been trying to bite her way
through Kadien’s shoulder, his ally had used a whip to create a bloody mess on
the boy’s back. He had collapsed unconscious to the floor and didn’t move even
when Tate shook him.

An invisible wind lifted Tate’s
hair, whipping it violently. The dragon on her arm had crawled its way up to
her shoulders and paced down her spine and then back up. Whatever the Red Lady
was doing was causing it to go wild.

The Red Lady stepped up to the head
of the diagram, wearing an ornate headdress. The head of a gold serpent with
mouth opened rose above her face. Red feathers framed the serpent’s head and
smaller ones marched down its back.

The magic began to swirl as the Red
Lady began to chant. Pressure built in Tate’s chest as the woman’s voice rose
in volume. The little boy panted, slumping down as if the very strength was
being sapped from his body.

Tate whimpered as streams of blue
light flowed from him to the Red Lady. He began screaming, one long wail of
sound.

Fear choked Tate, living like a
wild thing inside her. With her dragon’s increased agitation, thinking
coherently became difficult. All she wanted to do was collapse to the ground
and turn into a gibbering pile of fear.

Now would be a really good time for
help to arrive, Tate thought desperately.

The magic caressed her skin and
this time instead of ants biting it felt like the flesh was being stripped from
her bones. A scream tore itself from her lungs as she collapsed. The madness
infected her mind, and she ripped at the skin on her arms with her own
fingernails.

Give in,
the dragon
whispered in her mind.

“What?” Tate cried.

Give in to me,
the dragon
urged.
Together we are stronger than we are apart. She won’t be able to take
me once we’ve completed the change.

“Something is wrong,” the Red Lady
screamed. “The magic from the fulcrum seems to be detaching, but her power is
making it impossible for me to absorb it.”

Tate sobbed into the floor as the
pain momentarily abated.

“That’s impossible,” Brown Eye’s
said. “This spell has been perfectly calibrated to make you the new vessel. The
mistake has to have been yours. My master will not be pleased.”

“Wait. Wait,” the Red Lady cried.
“I’ll try again.”

Let me out before she starts
again,
the dragon urged.

“
How do I know you won’t
take me over?” Tate asked, voicing a fear that had been tumbling around inside
her for a while now.

The dragon fluttered its wings
uneasily.

Tate took that to mean her concern
was valid. “We both know it’s possible,” Tate said against the ground. “I felt
you try to take control last time.”

I will admit that normally when
my kind fuse with a host that there is some danger of the host fading and
eventually disappearing,
the dragon said hesitantly. Tate shut her eyes as
she felt hope fade.
It is usually dependent on how strong willed the host
is.

Movement started on the other side
of the barrier. It looked like Tate had lost time for the crowd had cleared
from the room and the only people who could be seen were the Red Lady, Kadien,
and the Lady’s henchman. Umi’s body lay on its back, her eyes staring
sightlessly up into nothing, a circle of red spreading under her. In death her
face was as perfect as in life with an expression of surprise at the sudden
turn of events. Dewdrop lay on his stomach not far away with his face turned
away from her. She couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive.

I don’t think that will be the
case with you, however,
the dragon continued.

“What do you mean?”

If you were going to fade, it
would have happened already,
the dragon snapped.

Tate lifted her head. The male
speaker wasn’t there, but Tate couldn’t be sure. Maybe he stood just out of
sight.

Tate’s eyes slid closed in a long
blink. The players now stood in different places. The Red Lady and Kadien were
now on hands and knees trying to etch more symbols into the ground.

“How do I know you aren’t lying?”
Tate asked rolling onto her back.