Dark Heart (33 page)

“You’re just like Chuck. What is it with me…every man I ever love is always just like him….” Sandrabumped back against a fluted column, trapped between two pews that ended there.

“Quickly!” he roared. “We need a mirror.” He grabbed her wrist and dragged her toward the altar, where he could see a gleaming silver urn.

Sandra screamed as a bone in her wrist snapped. “Please…let me go…I can’t do this,” she begged.

“No! Quickly!” He grabbed the urn and shoved its reflective surface at her face. “Give yourself to him!”

She turned her face away from it, looked at the wreck of the man she loved with sorrow in her eyes, pain in her heart.

“I will be…myself.” She reached into her coat and drew out her gun.

Justin’s claw lashed out, ripping her open from armpit to wrist. Sandra screamed. The gun clattered to the floor. Blood sprayed across the altar, across the steps, soaked the dark red carpet.

Sandra slumped against him, staring at her ruined arm, staring at the blood that pumped out of her in steady spurts. “Please, Sandra,” Justin pleaded, holding her gently in arms desperate to crush her, “all the pain will go away. You’ll live forever. We’ll be together forever! You will
live!
Choose to live!” His muscles sang to him. He had to restrain them from crushing her into a pulp, from bashing her head into the flagstone steps. “For the love of God, look into the mirror!”

“The love…of God…” Sandra’s body shook. “Yes…that
is
the answer…” She looked up at him. “Justin…you will…have to live with yourself again. You cannot have me. You go…with your God. I will go with mine. May he have mercy upon you…upon your soul.”

Her words blasted into his brain like shrapnel. He staggered back from her as if she’d hit him. Her words were Gwendolyne’s words. Gwendolyne had spoken those exact words to him before her death. She had prayed for his soul, damned him for his decision to join the Dragon.

Justin lost control.

With a powerful surge, he leapt forward and snatched Sandra by the neck. Her scream was cut off in a gurgle and a wet snap. His taloned fist drew back and he plunged it into her heart…

…into his heart.

S
andra’s body slid down the length of his arm, her red blood staining his skin. She fell on the altar, then tumbled to the stone floor in a crumpled heap.

Sandra’s eyes, always so full of passion and pain, were glassy now. They stared past his left shoulder at nothing. Her last breath gurgled through the blood pouring from her nose and mouth. Her arms were broken, as was her neck, and her body lay on the blood red carpet of the church aisle, all unnatural angles and bruised and torn flesh.

Justin stared at what he’d done, horrified. Sandra’s last agonized look was engraved on his memory, merging there with Gwendolyne’s dying agony. Both…he had killed them both…both of the women he had truly loved…

“Well done, my servant.”

Justin looked at the silver urn. The Dragon was there, all smoldering eyes and long teeth.

“You have served me well this day, Lord Sterling.”

Justin roared. Grabbing the urn, he threw it the length of the cathedral. The urn flew across the building to the front of the church, where it clanged against the double doors and fell to the floor.

Justin launched himself into the air. His powerful wings carried him toward the stained glass rose window over the altar.

Glass exploded into the air. Sparkling shards fell. Pedestrians in the street screamed. Brakes squealed and cars slammed into each other.

His wings pumped furiously, carrying Justin instantly away from the scene. People had seen him, watched him fly away. He didn’t care. Let them scream. He could harness the light rays, bend them around his body to make himself invisible, but what did he care if they saw him? What did he care if they screamed? They
should
scream.

Justin roared. The concrete canyons of the city echoed with his rage.

His wing clipped a building. Its brick facing ripped into his shoulder and sent him spinning downward. Chunks of brick came with him. He smashed into an awning.

Again he roared. He launched himself back into the sky. His muscles roared with pleasure, wanting more, wanting to fly into the crowds of the city and unleash carnage. But he curbed the desire. He flew straight to Gwendolyne’s Flight.

It was nine in the morning. Chairs were neatly upended on the tops of the tables, waiting for the new day.

He smashed through the plate glass window, landed on the wide dance floor, cracking its paneled wood surface. As soon as he looked up, he saw the Dragon’s reflection gazing at him from the huge mirror behind the bar.

“Listen to me, Lord Sterling…”

“No!” Justin snarled, grabbing a bar stool and pitching it at the glass. The Dragon’s image shattered and fell to the floor in a rain of silvered glass fragments. Two pillars at either side of the bar were also mirrors, and the Dragon’s face began to appear there. Before the master could speak, Justin smashed them. Methodically he found every mirror in the room and smashed them all before the Dragon could speak another word.

At the end of his rounds, Justin collapsed to the floor, exhausted.

“Sandra…,” he wept. His fists crushed the floor into dust. “Gwendolyne…both of you…how could I have killed you both?”

Clenching his long, spiked teeth, he willed himself back to human form. Slowly the dragonling body collapsed. His wings rumpled in upon themselves and his muscles slithered back, away, underneath the scaled skin that pulled away from him.

Ripping his way out of the skin, he stood, naked and wet in his deserted club.

A chair scuffing the floor caught his attention and he turned. He had not heard the door open, but Kalzar sat calmly at the end of the bar, swirling bourbon in a cut crystal glass.

“Terrible service in this place,” he said. “Must be bad management.”

Justin said nothing. His hands curled around a tall, thin statue at his end of the bar. It was an Art Deco piece—two elongated lovers intertwined in a kiss.

“You know, I’ve often tried to imagine the quickest way to put you in the master’s disfavor, but you outdid anything I could imagine today.” Kalzar chuckled, “You really lost it this time, Justin. I suspect I’ll be dreaming about you tonight.”

“You won’t be dreaming about anything tonight,” Justin vowed.

Grabbing the statue in two hands, he lifted it and smashed it on the bar, revealing the thing he had hidden there. Hidden from everybody, from the Dragon, even in a way from himself. The other artifact he’d taken from the museum.

Justin brushed the chalky debris off the steel edge and lifted the broadsword from the statue’s wreckage. It gleamed with rivulets of fire in the light from the shattered window.

Kalzar’s grin faded. His thin lips tightened.

“What is that?” he asked, taking a step back.

“Why don’t you tell me?” Justin said, moving toward him. Kalzar backed up another pace. “You can feel the power just the same as I can. Beowulf used this sword to kill Gyzalanitha. Saint George killed countless others of our kind with it. Using this blade, he chased our master into a lake in Libya. That was where the priests trapped the Dragon. The king drained the water away and thus ended the Dragon’s ability to return to this world.” Justin smiled a terrible smile. “What’s the matter, Kalzar? Haven’t you read up on this? I am surprised at you. Such a powerful artifact, and you didn’t think to look for it? Well, I did. Until I found it by accident. Or perhaps it wasn’t an accident.”

“The master will have your head if you—”

“Fuck the master,” Justin yelled, stepping forward and swinging. The blade caught Kalzar in the ribs, ripping into his expensive suit, his muscular chest, trailing blood in its path.

Justin pulled the blade back for a second blow. “Can you feel it? It howls for our blood. Even as I hold it, I can feel it wanting to turn on me, as well. It was made to kill our kind. Much as it wants me, it wants you more, Kalzar. I am honored to aid it in its quest.”

Bleeding from his terrible wound, Kalzar bolted for the men’s room. Justin cut him off with a swipe of the sword.

“So that was how you came in? The mirrors in the bathroom. I thought I’d gotten all the mirrors in the place,” Justin said. “Now they’re your only escape. The doors are all locked. You’d never get through one before I cleaved you in half. All of the other mirrors are shattered. Now, which way will you run, Kalzar?” Justin stalked his old enemy, sword point first, making sure to stay between him and the bathroom door.

Kalzar’s eyes flicked from Justin to the blade, then back to Justin. “Calm yourself, Justin. This is not what you want. The master will forgive you if you repent. You know he will. His Elders are valuable to him.”

“Begging now, Kalzar? How very unlike you.”

They crossed the floor slowly, Justin waiting for Kalzar to make a move, Kalzar biding his time. Then he heard it. The telltale bone-cracking sound that preceded the transformation.

Justin leapt forward, but Kalzar was a split-second faster. He launched himself into the air. The sword caught his foot, slicing through two of his clawed toes. Kalzar howled, but while he was in the air, his transformation completed itself. Wings broke through his back and unfurled, spraying blood. His snout grew long and fanged. His suit ripped along the seams and tan scales bubbled all over his body. His howl of pain became a roar of fury. His wings flapped. His burning eyes turned to look back at Justin.

“I will rip the flesh from your bones,” he growled.

Justin’s urge to metamorphose into his own dragonling form was almost overwhelming. A mortal’s chances against a dragonling were low. Even a lesser disciple could not fight an Elder, as he had shown Omar. But Justin refused to transform. To do so would be to enter the Dragon’s realm again. That body was a gift from the Dragon, susceptible to the Dragon’s manipulations.

Kalzar dove. Justin swung the sword. The blade slashed Kalzar’s chest. He howled again and backed off. That wound would not heal, the toes would not grow back, and his side still bled from where Justin had slashed him while he was still in human form.

For most of his immortal life, Justin had felt nothing but contempt for Saint George, the man who had driven his master from the world. But Justin had only faced the Dragon’s reflection in the mirror. Saint George had fought the Dragon flesh-to-flesh. He had sent Justin’s master fleeing, using only this slender span of metal.

For the first time in many years Justin felt fear. The Dragon’s powers had kept him safe from harm. But he had spurned the Dragon, and now he fought one of the Elder disciples with nothing but a sliver of sharp metal and the power of a faith he’d forsaken for centuries. If Justin failed, Kalzar would carve him up with Justin’s own weapon, and that would be the end of it.

“Give it up, Justin!” Kalzar cried. He scooped up handfuls of shattered mirror and began throwing the glass at Justin.

The tiny shards ripped into Justin and he gasped. Glass rained down on him with hurricane force, and he fell back, bleeding from a dozen wounds.

Justin jumped inside the DJ’s booth and slammed the door. Kalzar attacked the booth, shattering the glass.

Holding Kalzar at bay with the sword, Justin flicked on every switch in the booth. Thundering music blared out of the speakers, smoke poured out of the machines. Strobe lights cut through the white, billowing clouds. Colored lights danced.

While Kalzar tried to make sense of the chaos, Justin ran up a staircase that led to the metal balcony encircling the dance floor. He didn’t go far, but positioned himself directly above the DJ’s booth, hidden in a gout of smoke that chugged out of a spout just below.

It took Kalzar only a moment to realize that Justin had escaped him. By the time he looked back, Justin had disappeared into the smoke that already hung thick over the booth. Justin knew the limited visibility would turn Kalzar’s advantage of flight into a disadvantage. Kalzar would be forced to fight blind against an opponent he could not kill, while a wild slice from out of the smoke could mean death for him.

Kalzar flew toward the DJ’s booth, intent on turning off the machine before the entire club filled with a white cloud of smoke.

And Justin was waiting for him.

Fearing a trap, Kalzar hovered cautiously near the balcony. Justin leaped outward—Kalzar flapped his wings in a sudden lunge for safety, but it was too late. Justin’s sword bit deep into the dragonling’s side, severing the left wing and deeply cutting into the right one.

Dragonling and man crashed to the ground. Justin landed on the bottom, his sword clattering onto the floor, sliding out of his reach.

Justin gasped for a breath and lurched to his feet. Kalzar was stronger, quicker. Despite the vicious wound in his side, despite the fact that his wing was torn from his body and was not mending, he lunged for the sword. Justin lunged for him.

Dragonling claws grasped the hilt of the sword just as human fingers gripped the edge of the wounded wing. Justin pulled. The wing tore free. Kalzar dropped the sword, screaming and falling to his knees.

Justin kicked the sword away just as Kalzar reached for it. The dragonling lashed out at Justin. Kalzar bunched his legs to jump, but his injured foot betrayed him, and he slipped in his own blood. He took a step forward and leapt again.

Justin dove for the sword, snatched it up, and flipped over on his back just in time to meet the hurtling form of Kalzar. Justin swung. Kalzar slashed at him with his claws. Both slammed into the floor under the force of the dragonling’s charge.

The blow knocked the breath from Justin’s body. His left arm snapped under Kalzar’s weight. But Justin managed to drive the sword deep into Kalzar’s thigh. Kalzar roared again and rolled away from Justin.

Justin dragged himself to his feet and, breathing heavily, looked at his opponent.

Kalzar was writhing on the floor. His two clawed hands grappled at his leg, which was nearly severed at the thigh, gushing blood.

Justin mercilessly chopped the remaining stubs of wing from Kalzar’s body. No screams this time. Only a pitiful grunt. The giant dragonling shrank, its magic snipped away. Kalzar’s human form lay in a sack of scaled flesh. With a flick of the sword, Justin slit the sack so that he could see Kalzar’s face.

“You’ve…killed me!” Kalzar croaked in a barely audible voice.

“I told you that I would,” Justin said.

Justin stood over Kalzar, the sword gripped in his good hand. His left arm crackled and snapped under his skin as his broken bones knit together.

“You…hesitate…” Kalzar gasped. “Why don’t you finish it?”

Justin said nothing.

“I see…now. He chose you…so well…” Kalzar whispered. “Everything…you do is what he…wants you to do. He wanted he…dead. And she…is dead. He wants you to let me live now…and you…cannot kill me.” Kalzar’s choke became a coughing laughter. “You cannot…defy him…not really. None of us…can. He chose us…too well.”

Justin’s expression was flat and emotionless. Stepping forward, he brought the blade of the holy sword down on Kalzar’s neck. Steel chopped cleanly through flesh, bone. Kalzar’s head fell to the bloody floor. The face—even in death—wore a shocked expression.

“You’re wrong,” Justin told the dead man.