Not my hand.
Not my rage.
But somehow, my body dove out of the line of fire, just as a wall of flame sliced through the ice that had been directly under my feet.
The sensation lasted a second, maybe two, and then I was in control of my body again. I climbed unsteadily to my feet and tightened my grip on the ice skates in my hand, angling the blades outward.
Here goes nothing. I took aim and fired.
I knew it wouldn’t make a dent in the dragon’s armor, knew that I didn’t have the aim or the power or the fearlessness I needed to take down an opponent twenty times my size, but as the skate flew through the air, the dragon tore its gleaming onyx eyes from mine and followed the blade’s trajectory.
Dragons liked shiny things.
While it was distracted, I wracked my brain for a way out. Unless I could get close enough to reach the soft spot under its breastplate, I didn’t stand a chance of inflicting any kind of lasting damage, and Bethany was still there, her back pressed against the side of the rink, her eyes following the dragon’s every move.
I jerked my head to the side, motioning for her to go. She jerked her head, motioning for me to do the same.
If we got out of this alive, I was going to kill her.
Think, Kali, I told myself. There had to be a way out. There had to be. I didn’t want to die like this, scared and weak and unable to even remember what it felt like to be anything else.
Fifteen hours and twenty-four minutes.
Like that did me a hell of a lot of good.
I told you to run. Don’t make me tell you again.
The voice was implacable and fierce, and the fact that my enemy—who shouldn’t have even been able to talk—was ordering me around swung the pendulum of my emotions from scared to angry and from angry to pissed. Before I could make use of that, however, Bethany snapped. One second she was cowering behind the dragon, and the next, she was on her feet, poised on top of the remaining exterior wall of the rink. She didn’t say anything. She barely even moved. She just swayed—first her hips, then her arms.
I tried to process. The two of us were on the verge of death, and she was belly dancing?
Go. Now. Must—lights.
I watched as the dragon turned its head to the side, absorbing Bethany’s movement whole. I could have streaked across the ice, yodeling the national anthem, and it wouldn’t have mattered.
The beast had marked its prey. For the moment, it seemed content just watching her, but I knew that wouldn’t last. I had a minute at most, maybe less, and I did the only thing I could think of—
I ran.
Not away.
Not for safety.
To the control booth, where I found a pair of employees huddled on the floor.
“Dim the lights,” I told them, out of breath and running out of time, my mind echoing with the broken instructions Zev had tried to impart.
Must—lights.
Neither of the employees moved. I glanced out at the rink. The dragon, its eyes still locked on Bethany’s, began to cross the ice. Soon, it would be close enough that she would be able to smell the blood and smoke on its breath, close enough that I didn’t have even a second to spare.
“Turn the lights off. Now! And if you have any kind of special effects—a light show, disco ball, whatever—turn those on, too.”
One of the employees pointed a single, shaky finger to the control panel, and I scanned it, looking for the switch. Out on the ice, Bethany continued her impromptu belly dance. She swayed. The dragon swayed. She blinked. It blinked. Any moment, any second, it could snap out of it, go in for the kill—
I flipped the switch. The rink went dark. And then, a second later, a smattering of lights appeared on the ceiling, swirling steadily.
That’s right, I told the dragon silently. Swirly, shiny lights.
Slowly, the beast stopped swaying. It tore its eyes from Bethany’s, and it lay down on its front paws in the middle of the ravaged rink. Its scales—the exact color of the ice— glistened in the uneven lighting. Even from a distance, I could make out the crystalline texture of its skin.
Slowly, painfully, the dragon’s breathing became even, its mammoth chest rising and falling, its eyes fixed on the ceiling above. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the creature was gone, its body melding into the ice underneath.
Unnatural, the voice in my head whispered, disturbingly clear. Even though I agreed with the sentiment, I tried to shut out the voice and did everything in my power not to think about the fact that if it hadn’t been for his suggestion, I might not have thought to go for the lights.
Bethany would have been dragon bait.
And I would probably have been dead.
9
If I had a nickel for every time I almost died, I would have been driving to school in a Ferrari and flying off to Bora-Bora on the weekends. One of these days, I’d cut it too close to dawn or run into a monster that was too strong. With the way I lived, the things I hunted, death was only a matter of time.
One more brush with oblivion shouldn’t have bothered me.
I shouldn’t have been dwelling on the fact that the parasite that had saved my life was killing me now.
But I was.
Our standoff with Puff the Man-Eating, Fire-Breathing Creature of Doom had lasted minutes, but the police—not to mention a Preternatural Control team—had shown up before we could make ourselves scarce, and the resulting inquisition had been dragging on for over an hour. If Bethany and I had been adults, if the kids working at Skate Haven had been adults, then maybe we wouldn’t have had to answer the same questions sixteen times apiece.
But we weren’t adults.
We were teenagers who claimed to have had a run-in with some subspecies of dragon that could disappear into ice like a kelpie into water. And, oh yeah, it breathed fire and ate people, and its scales were the color of ice.
“So let me get this straight,” the policewoman interviewing me said for maybe the fiftieth time. “It was some kind of … ice dragon.”
I may as well have been telling her it belched gumdrops and had a weakness for Saturday morning cartoons. Forget the fact that there was obvious damage to the rink—not to mention the remains of the boy who’d actually placed the 911 call in the first place. It didn’t matter that our stories were consistent both with the damage and with one another’s accounts of what had gone down. Dragons stayed away from cities. They didn’t just hang out at local hot spots. And they didn’t have any kind of affinity for ice.
So obviously, the teenagers were lying. Or on drugs. Or both.
This is why you don’t call the police. Or Preternatural Control. No matter what. Ever.
If I’d doubted the rule—and I was fairly sure I never had—I certainly never would again. My skin itched just talking to the authorities, and it was all I could do to meet my interrogator’s eyes, when what I really wanted to do was to get out of there, stat.
The police department had more than a few open cases with my name on them—figuratively, and I had no desire to make that literal. The chances that anyone would think to connect a witness in a horrific dragon mauling with the vigilante responsible for dozens of area beastie slayings was slim. It wasn’t like my usual MO involved laser light shows, but still—the sooner I got out of there, the better.
“Ice dragon,” I said, repeating the police officer’s incredulous words.
For some reason, my voice sounded very far away: slow and gummy and like I wasn’t quite speaking English. As I turned this thought over in my head, I noticed that my interrogator’s face was looking less like a face and more like a sea of unrelated features, each blurring into the next.
Weird.
I blinked, and when that did me no good, I reached out for the railing to steady myself.
“Miss, are you feeling all right?” the officer asked.
Her voice sounded even farther away than mine.
“I’m fine,” I said—or at least, that’s what I think I said. The details are, to this day, a little unclear. “Just give me a minute.”
“Ohmigosh!”
It took me a few seconds to realize that the exclamation in question had come from Skylar, who, up until that point, had wisely stayed out of the fray. I’d entertained the notion that she’d had the common sense to go home and leave Bethany and me to sort this out on our own.