Licked by the Flame (13 page)

But as the storm flashed around him, he could see inside the vehicle. Lianne was not there. Thank the Creator, she was not burning to death, not trapped in there, breathing the poisonous vapors released from the flames. If not inside the vehicle, though, where was she?

He whirled around to begin searching. With another earsplitting crack, a bolt shot toward him and he surged up into the sky just in time to avoid being struck. He could not avoid the next one, though. It anticipated his movement and blasted directly for him, slamming him with enough force to plunge him back toward the earth. He could feel the powerful heat penetrate even his tough scales.

He struggled to regain control, even as another bolt pierced him like a knife, cutting him deep. He deflected it with his wing, but his body was shaken. The explosion of power battered him against the rough rocks of the mountainside, pain nearly blinding him. All he could think was how Lianne could never withstand such onslaught. He had to find her, to shelter her.

More lightning crackled toward him, but he was able to shift out of the way just in time. Pebbles sprayed around him where the bolt struck rock, shattering it into glowing, scalding-hot bits. Nic scanned his surroundings for any sign of Lianne.

A tiny pink glow caught his attention. He blinked through the particles pelting him in the wind. What was that? He could barely make out a tiny form moving toward him. Was it…yes, it was a fairy. A tiny, misplaced fairy fluttering in the fierce gusts here on this mountain.

Glaring, now he could see two of them. One glowed pink and one gave off a rich, summertime-gold aura. Were they causing this storm? He rumbled in the back of his throat, feeling the heat building up with fury and determination. With one halfhearted breath he could turn those damn fairies into char, let them blow away as nothing but ash in their malicious wind.

He’d never known these little creatures to be so violent, though. They continued moving toward him at a remarkable pace, considering how they were clearly struggling in this weather. He could do away with them in a heartbeat, yet he held off. Something was not right…he simply couldn’t credit these fairies for such a grand display as this storm. Nothing made sense.

Thunder roared and another bolt cracked out of the sky and shot toward him. He dodged, slamming his wing against a boulder as he struggled to get out of the way. Suddenly a mass of multicolored glitter surrounded him, billowing like a cloud but clinging to him even as the wind threatened to tear it away. He could feel the magic in this wispy mass.
Fairy Dust
. It had been years since he’d been touched by it, but he recognized it well. Instead of intending to harm him, the dust added an extra layer of protection as another flashing bolt slammed into him.

The fairies were not targeting him. No, they were
aiding
him. He could make no more sense out of that than he could the rest of this bizarre event, but at least this was a welcome development.

“The human female,” he shouted toward the fluttering creatures. “Where is she?”

He could see the fairies better now. The pink one—a female—seemed especially terrified, but she pointed upward. The golden one with her nodded and called back to Nic over the crash of the storm.

“Higher on the mountain. She went that way.” He gestured, pointing the same direction as the female.

Nic glanced upward toward…
oh, hell
. When he craned his neck around a splintered outcropping, he could barely make out Lianne’s form. She was on the mountain, sure enough, clinging to whatever she could, pressed tightly against the cold rocks, looking small and helpless.

It was obvious where she had been headed, too. What had she been thinking? Clearly she’d been inching her way toward the one and only place on this mountain that was completely forbidden to her. She was mere feet away from the dark void that Nic had specifically constructed to keep humans out. If she reached that spot…well, he’d created security features that would make certain no human who ever went there lived to tell about it.

It really wasn’t surprising that Lianne wasn’t literally screaming for her life. Oh sure, she was terrified enough, clinging to the brittle rocks of this barren volcanic mountainside. But screaming was entirely out of the question. The wind sucked up all of her breath and she barely had enough to remain conscious, nothing at all left for screaming.

Not that her screams would have done any good. There was no one around to hear her if she had been able to make more than a rasping gasp every now and then. The storm was so loud, anyone who might have been nearby would have been made deaf by it. All in all, she decided the best thing to do was to use the little energy she had left to hang on to her spot here, to keep from tumbling to her death.

As miserable and frightened as she felt, and with her head pounding with stabbing pains, a small part of her wondered if maybe tumbling wasn’t actually the better option. At least then all this would be over. Although, she figured it would be her luck not to die from the fall, just end up horribly mangled and maimed. That thought kept her clutching the crumbling rocks and praying for a miracle.

What she got instead were damn hallucinations. She cursed the tumor inside her head and blinked into the wind, amazed that no amount of blinking could chase away what her eyes thought they saw. Among all the wind and the lightning and the bits of dust blowing around her, two distinct glowing lights fluttered like butterflies along the base of the mountain, darting in and out of the shadows.

One light was pink, the other a reddish-gold color. What on earth were they? Clearly they were not actually on the mountain, but hovering in midair. They were flying, or floating, but not in tempo with the course of the wind. UFOs? No, way too small for that. All the pseudo-documentaries on television portrayed them as much larger than these. What Lianne was watching appeared more like…intelligent insects.

Of course they weren’t, though. Hell, no intelligent insect would turn up in the Icelandic wastelands in the middle of a freak storm, so obviously that couldn’t be it. But there they were, flitting below her and seeming very intentional about it. Clearly they had some sort of intelligence, whatever they were.

She battled the wind and the loose rocks at her feet to push hair from her face. Lightning slashed through the air, more than once exploding into the rocks. Lianne’s footing slipped as a rock beneath her toe shifted, but she held on somehow and readjusted her hold. It wasn’t easy, staying up here while everything around her seemed to wage war.

Another crash of lightning and she realized her vehicle had been struck. Damn it! She gazed down the mountain face and watched as glittering sparks flew out in all directions, the vehicle erupting in smoke and the glow of fire in its undercarriage. It only took a few moments for the acrid smell of burning plastic to waft up to her on the violent gusts that pounded and pelted her body. Hell. Now how was she getting back to the jobsite if she ever did find Nic’s lifeless body out here?

She figured he had to be dead. There was no other excuse for the fact that even in the midst of this storm he still hadn’t appeared. She’d been moving toward the darkest, most unseeable area on this rock face to look for him, and the closer she’d come the more foreboding it felt. Just glancing over at it now, only a few yards away, sent chills up and down her back. As close as she was, even with the frequent lightning strikes, her eyes still couldn’t penetrate the thick shadows there. It was almost as if the mountain just simply quit being at that point, that some great void of nothingness was fastened onto the side of the cliff, and the shadow opened into oblivion.

Maybe that was where the UFOs came from. Oh God, she was messed up. She shook herself and started plotting her descent. She hadn’t thought much about that as she inched her way up here, which was probably a mistake. With all this lightning, she’d be fried here any minute if she didn’t find some way down.

But how about that dark void? She’d been heading there; maybe she ought to continue. If that little crag in the rocks was so shadowy, maybe that meant it cut deep into the mountain. A cave, maybe. She could tuck herself in there and get out of this wind, not be such a target for every lightning bolt that flashed out of the clouds. At the very least, she’d get there long before she could make it to the ground. And even if she did get there, it wasn’t as if their smoldering vehicle would offer her any protection.

She reached her numb, bleeding fingers outward toward what seemed the next promising chunk of rock that would move her slightly closer to that void. Bits of the ledge she stood on shifted again, but she quickly found a new foothold. The designer boots she’d worn for this trip didn’t provide nearly enough warmth. She laughed at herself. Yeah, she had been heading to Iceland to work with a bunch of engineers and nerds, so of course she put style ahead of functionality. Well, at least when they finally found her frozen body out here someday, she’d look good.

Another adjustment and she had moved a good ten inches closer to the darkness. It was no small feat, considering that she shuddered and twitched at every crash of thunder, every jolt from the nearby lightning. The wind was not getting any easier to ignore, either. What kind of crazy storm was this? If she didn’t know for a fact the very notion of it was ludicrous, she’d think it was targeting her specifically.

Suddenly her whole body was enveloped in darkness. That was weird, considering her peripheral vision could still see flashes of lightning all around. Right where she was, though, it felt as if some huge form suddenly blocked her from view, shielding her from the storm and even canceling out the wind. She blinked through her tangled hair and could see that, as crazy as it seemed, this was indeed the case.

Something huge was swooping directly toward her! Giant wings flapped against the storm and a body came into view. What grabbed her attention—aside from the giant wings and overall hugeness of it—were the eyes. Hot, fiery eyes glowed behind an impossible face. A dragon!

Hallucinations, of course. That had to be the explanation. Still, she huddled tight up against the mountain, and an involuntary whimper escaped her. Her head knew this couldn’t be real, but the whole rest of her believed it sincerely. She was being preyed upon by an enormous red-glowing dragon.

She couldn’t take her eyes off it. Its wings blocked the sky, its eyes nearly burned through her, and its sharp claws gleamed as it reached its powerful arms toward her. She screamed and fought it off as best she could, but the action was stupid and futile.

Her footing gave out and she fell from her perch. The dragon—or whatever it was—scooped her up and clutched her tightly against its hard, heated body. She could see that it was covered in scales. Layer upon layer of them, shiny and nearly as hard as metal but somehow warm and flexible, too. She struggled against this incomprehensible monster but it held her fast. Escape was out of the question.

She forced herself to look at it, to make whatever sense she could out of this. This couldn’t be a dragon, but what the hell was it? She was pressed so tightly against its body she could see very little of it now. The wings flapped, she could hear them, and she felt the muscles of the creature’s broad chest flex and labor with the action. It felt…alive. Real. It couldn’t be, of course. There was no such thing as dragons, after all.

It sure as hell looked like a dragon, though. Above the chest was a long neck that reached up above her, putting the creature’s angular face out of clear view. She shifted her focus to its arms. Ripped, powerful, and oddly humanlike, except for the knife-sharp claws and the rows of spade-shaped scales.

As the creature shifted these muscular arms, she could see between the scales. Instead of flesh, it appeared the monster was made of molten steel, bursting with occasional flares. The bright glow of heat and fire matched what she’d seen in his eyes.

His
eyes? No,
its
eyes. This was not a human; it was a
thing
. A horrible, terrible, impossible thing, and she’d rather fall to her death now than let it carry her off to feed its young or do whatever it was it might be planning on doing with her at this point. She pried at its claws and kicked against it. Apparently her new boots weren’t very good for this, either.

She could have sworn the creature merely chuckled at her feeble attempts. The steady whoosh of his wings against the air, though, did seem to be slowing down. They were losing altitude, too. At first the creature had swooped her high into the air, but now they were descending again. Maybe she could get away after all!

“Put me down!” she railed at him, kicking and clawing for all she was worth.

“Not until I’ve got you someplace safe,” the horrific beast replied.

What was that?
The creature
spoke
to her? And his voice had been…oddly gentle and soothing. In fact, he had sounded a lot like Nic. Well, clearly that could only mean one thing.

This really
was
just another hallucination and she had nothing to worry about. In fact, this whole mountain fiasco with freak storms and fluttering UFOs was probably nothing more than a bad dream. Yeah, she was probably back in her bed safe and sound and warm. Well, maybe not warm. Maybe she’d kicked her blankets off and that was what sent her into this frigid nightmare to begin with.

Okay, then, she guessed she could just relax until something finally woke her up. She gave up the kicking and fighting and let her body slump against the warm form of the dragon. It did feel oddly secure here, as a matter of fact.

“That’s better,” he rumbled into her ear. “You should rest now.”

And then, with one more flap of his wings, he whooshed her toward that terrifying, dark void in the side of the mountain. The tiny colorful glows she had seen earlier suddenly showed up next to them, accompanying them on their flight. The void appeared darker and larger than ever. No wonder that spot had seemed so foreboding when she’d first seen it. Clearly it was an alien dragon’s lair and she was about to be held captive there.