Soul of Fire (5 page)

With all his willpower, he was holding fast to the dragon, preventing it from turning and flaming, forcing it to yield control to Peter and give up its form for Peter’s. It was not easy. The dragon disliked turning into Peter as much as Peter disliked turning into the dragon. There had been times in his life where if he could have separated himself from the beast, Peter would have willingly—nay, gladly—killed the creature.

But now he felt no hatred, only urgency, as he gentled the brute into giving him control of their joint mind and into allowing him to change their body into human form again. The dragon contorted and danced in a mad rictus of pain as bone slid over bone and flesh altered its shape. Wings and tail melted away and back into the body, and legs became long and human, and the teeth shrank to Peter’s accustomed, well-shaped human set.

The transformation, though fueled by magic, wasn’t easy. Peter felt the pain wrenching the creature’s body, the grinding of bones, the seeming tearing of flesh. Lost in the mortal pains of change, he thought the girl must have run away by now. She must be running madly through the streets of Calcutta to alert her compatriots that there was a were-dragon on the loose, to call the wrath of the Gold Coats upon him.

Trembling, he found himself human, his hand holding on to the foot of one of the heroic statues that surmounted the black marble. Sweat covered his body, cooling it even as the warm night breezes blew upon him. Panting, he blinked to clear his remaining eye of the sweat that had run into it, making it sting.

He must get his clothes. He must leave this place as soon as possible. By the time the girl found someone to listen to her wild story, he must be well away, back at the home of his kind hosts, who had lodged him in Calcutta for six months, without ever suspecting that Peter might be a were-dragon. They’d vouch for him and he’d . . .

Something—he’d never be sure quite what: a sound of indrawn breath or perhaps a shuffle of shoes upon the marble—called his gaze. The girl had not run away screaming. Granted, her pink, well-shaped lips were opened in what could be construed as shock, and her hands were clutching her carpetbag a little harder than strictly necessary. But still, there was in her dark blue eyes something that was very akin to curiosity. And that seemed to be enough to keep her silent, whatever else she felt.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, his voice coming out shaky, like the voice of someone very tired, which he was after his transformation. “I beg your pardon, miss.” The words were automatic, as he fumbled under the monument for his clothes and quickly pulled on his underwear. “I should not be in a state of undress.”

She didn’t answer for a long moment, and neither did she move. He wondered if he’d so wounded her sensibilities that she’d lost her senses. He should probably be very grateful she wasn’t swooning, or else crying, but he didn’t know what to do if she presently suffered an apoplexy of some sort. He knew nothing of first aid. For too long, he’d known more about killing humans than helping them.

The girl cleared her throat. Her voice shook, too, as she answered, though her words strived, at least, to be sensible. “I imagine it must be very inconvenient,” she said. “To change shape like that. You must ruin a fair number of suits.”

Peter let his gaze sweep over her. He didn’t notice any horror of his missing eye—lost in circumstances he was loathe to explain—nor any squeamishness because of this deformity. Instead, she stared at his face, her own grave and attentive, like a schoolgirl’s. Except always for that twinkle that seemed to hide at the back of her eyes and which might be, in fact, nothing but his own imagination. He wondered if she was making fun of him. But it was too much to imagine that a young girl of respectable birth, probably delicately nurtured, would find anything funny in a man who became a dragon or a dragon who became a man.

Still, his suspicion of her amusement made his voice dry as he answered. “You can’t imagine. Fortunately, I’ve learned to undress very quickly.” As he spoke, he fastened his pants and proceeded to put on his shirt with fleet hands. There had been a time, in his early youth, where he’d have shrunk from the thought of performing this task without a valet. But years and circumstances, not to mention exile in foreign lands and extreme poverty—as well as the secret he must keep—had changed him. He now found it very odd to have a valet assigned to him at his hosts’ house.

Something flickered in her gaze in response to his words, and she frowned a little, bringing very straight, dark eyebrows down over her eyes. “It must hurt . . .”

she said. “The transformation. It looked as if it hurt.”

She looked uncertainly up at him as he fastened his sleeves by touch.

Like being drawn and quartered,
he thought. Aloud, he said, “Yes,” and looked away, quickly pulling on his waistcoat and his coat and checking the pockets of the coat for the letters, which he felt—one crisper than the other—rustling under his fingertips.

They recalled him to the memory of his obligations. Nigel was moving from place to place around the world, trying to keep the other ruby, Heart of Light, safe—moving, always moving to avoid those who would snatch the jewel from him—waiting for Peter to meet him and give him Soul of Fire, the ruby that Peter was starting to believe no longer existed, or perhaps never had existed and was a cosmic prank on him. And there was Summercourt, in far distant England, with its somnolent home farm, its flocks of white sheep upon the green hillsides. Peter must write and renounce it, no matter how much it hurt.

He put on the patch that hid the closed lid over his missing eye and turned smoothly to the girl. “You’ll pardon me,” he said. “Why . . . why didn’t you wish to be taken back to your house? What happened to make you leave? I suppose you think I kidnapped you—or . . . or the dragon did. And I’m sure your good parents think the same, judging from the powerstick that greeted my attempt at returning you.”

She bit the corner of her lip. She started to shake her head. Whatever arrangement her hair had been in, it had become wholly disarrayed through their flight, and it now hung in enchanting tendrils around her face, making her look less like a proper miss and more like a fairy or an elf of legend—an escaped woodland creature not quite at home in the human world.

She turned her eyes to him, and he was shocked to see they were not just dark blue, as he’d thought. They were a blue almost black, deep and textured like the sky over his father’s estate at twilight in summer. If he stared long enough, he swore he would see stars shining back at him from their depths.

She sighed in turn, and her eyelids, fringed with long, dark eyelashes, fluttered half-closed. “I ran away,” she said, “to avoid marriage. Even being kidnapped by a dragon would be better than that union.”

SAHIB STILL WOULDN’T LISTEN

Captain William Blacklock woke up to screams. They
were the shrill, toneless screams of an aged native.

In the heat of the Indian summer, the captain had gone to sleep in nothing but his underwear, and now he arose from the camp bed, not quite awake, and grabbed for his sword with a hand made slippery by sweat. He stumbled on bare feet across the Chittai rug made of woven rush.

When his feet hit the cold, damp stone of the
ghuslkhanah
—what passed for a bathroom in these parts, though it rarely contained more than a thunder box and a hip bath—his eyes half opened and his mind became alert enough for him to understand that the man screaming was his
bhisti:
his assigned water carrier. And what the man was screaming was “Snake, snake,” or as close to the English pronunciation of the word as he could get with a near-toothless mouth.

Bringing his eyes fully open with an effort, and forcefully pushing back the remnants of his dream, William saw the offending creature: a shiny, wet-looking green-and-red serpent coiled on the stone floor and raising its head to attack. It was not a very scary sight, as it was quite common for snakes of all sorts, poisonous as well as inoffensive, to crawl into the
ghuslkhanah
through the hole in the wall that served to empty the bathwater. They were doubtless attracted by the damp and the coolness, more hospitable than the heat everywhere else in the merciless sun of summer.

William did not know if this snake was poisonous or inoffensive. And it did not matter. He swept his sword in an arc. The snake turned its attention to him at the movement, but it was too late to strike. The head went flying to a corner of the room, while the body contorted on the stone.

The water carrier—an elderly man, his dark face wrinkled like a dried plum—stepped back, looking with something that might be disgust at the remains of the reptile, and William sighed. The rules of caste in India. He knew, vaguely, that there were four castes and that many of the sepoys came from either the warrior class or the Muslim population, which, like the Christians, stood quite outside the caste system. As for domestic service, he very much doubted that anything but out-castes would work for the Englishmen. And yet, it was clear that there were distinctions among them and that one of the distinctions made it impossible for anyone but the so-called sweeper caste to have anything to do with dead animal flesh.

On the other hand, it was quite possible that his water carrier was hoaxing him and simply didn’t want to deal with the dead snake. William neither knew nor cared. A few months in India and he was feeling as if it were a punishment that would never end. He used the tip of his sword to flick first the body and then the head out of the hole in the wall, and ignoring the obsequious bowing of the
bhisti,
stomped into his bedroom.

He couldn’t even say why he was so resentful of the man, so uncomfortable with everything here.

Except . . . except that having refused to marry Sofie Warington, whom his superiors had tried to press him to offer for on the principle that the feel of the jewel they sought was thick all about her—a cause he considered insufficient to tie himself to the lovely and resourceful girl with whom he was, unfortunately, not in love—he’d been sent to India to find the jewel himself. Some rumor had been concocted, something to explain his presence here—about resentment among the natives for the presence of the Were-Hunters. Gold Coats had been dispatched first, to major cities, to create an opportunity for the rumor.

Blacklock didn’t for a moment doubt that the natives must indeed resent the Were-Hunters with all their hearts. They lived a life closer to the beasts of the field—as William’s clergyman father was all too fond of saying—and as such tolerated those who changed from beast to human more easily than Englishmen did. In fact, with their gods who took animal forms, and their idea of reincarnation up and down the scale of creation, their attitude was no surprise. So though weres were forbidden under Her Majesty’s rule, the law had never been enforced, or not seriously.

No, the Gold Coats had been sent to India—that William knew—for one reason only: to find the were—the British were, at that—who had been reported to be in possession of the jewel Heart of Light, taken from the primal temple of mankind. And so far the Gold Coats had failed at that mission.

But their presence on the subcontinent, and the largely imaginary native resistence to it, had been used as a pretext to send William and another twenty-five officers to India, to reinforce far-flung garrisons.

As a reinforcement they were inadequate. As a cover, they were good enough. They had allowed William to spend a month in Calcutta, gossiping and looking about. But the document that reported the existence of this mythical were said nothing else about its human form—whether he was a sailor or a soldier, a merchant or a nobleman. From what William understood, the rumor had reached Lord Wiltington—the new head of Her Majesty’s Secret Service since poor Lord Widefield’s death—through curiously broken channels of native tribesmen, railroad employees and finally operatives in the north of Africa.