The Nothing: A Book of the Between (26 page)

The horned head snaked down at the end of the long, sinuous neck and came eye to eye with Kalina. Zee held his breath, knowing full well what a dragon could do and feeling it would be no great loss if the sorceress met her end between the sharp teeth. At the same time, Vivian would be sick with regret when she came to herself.

If.

A small puff of smoke set Kalina to coughing, and the glorious dragon spread her wings and lofted herself upward toward the stars.

A wet sound caught Zee’s attention. Godzilla stood at the center of a growing puddle of steaming black blood. He had planted all four legs wide, as though to brace himself. His broken wing hung askew, his head hung low, misery and fear clearly apparent in both golden eyes.

Blood continued to flow from the wound Zee had made. Guilt stabbed him.

“How do we stop the blood?” he demanded, crossing to Godzilla, just outside the spreading black pool.

“It can’t be stopped,” Kalina said. There was something softer in her voice than he’d anticipated and he swung to look at her.

“Don’t you see?” she asked him. “We made the exchange, first of blood and then the words were said...”

“You lied! You said—”

“I said we would restore the dragon to your lady and that she would be well. It was necessary.”

Zee stared at Godzilla with sick horror. The little dragon’s eyes were dazed. His sides wheezed in and out, retracting a little between the ribs.

“So, he’s just to be left to die?”

“Given the opportunity, are you saying you would have chosen differently?”

Hatred for these people and their slippery ways warred with the sick pity and guilt. He was afraid of the answer to that question. “How long will it take him to die?”

She shrugged. “Dragons are strong. It could be days.”

“Can you ease him?”

“There is no magic that will work on a dragon.”

“Then what was that mumbo jumbo you just did?”

“The exchange? He participated freely. I’d thought we would have to bind him again, but she bled so rapidly, I was afraid there would not be time. He consented.”

“And he wouldn’t consent to an easing of the pain? Or some sort of healing?”

“There is no healing. Only another exchange. Do you have another dragon who would consent to the trade? It is sad, I admit. He was very brave. Now I must go help prepare for the council. Are you coming?”

Zee shook his head. He didn’t want to spend another moment in her company. And since it was his hand that had brought this death to Godzilla, the least he could do would be to bear witness. “I’ll stay here.”

He waited until the other two were gone and it was just him and the little dragon.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what they were going to do.”

There was fear in the golden eyes; he could read it clearly now. The certainty of death, with no hope, no help, no comfort.

Godzilla shifted a little to one side, presenting the wound.

“I can’t help you,” Zee said, watching the blood continue to flow.

The dragon turned his head, a dull eye looking up into Zee’s face, and then he understood.

“I owe you a favor.” And the head turned away.

Zee drew his sword and placed the tip between the dragon’s leg and his breast. His hands were slippery with sweat and he tightened them on the hilt. Godzilla stood steady, pressing toward him rather than away. Focusing his mind to guide his hands with the greatest skill he knew, Zee slid the blade into the resisting flesh, angling up to reach for the heart.

Godzilla sighed.

The braced legs loosened, collapsing outward.

Zee had just enough time to jerk his sword free and leap back before the dragon sank downward into the black pool of blood with a dull splash. His eyes were already dark. He looked smaller with the life gone out of him, pitiful and alone.

Zee dropped the sword, his eyes blurred by hot tears. Memory came to him then of Vivian on her knees in cold sand, tears cold on her cheeks, eyes bleak. “It’s only a dragon,” he had said to her. And she had answered, “But he was so young, Zee.”

There followed on the screen of his memory all of the dragons he had killed in his lifetime, in his dreams and out of them, each of them rising up from a bloody death to take flight across a sky bright with stars. The curse of his birth struck him fully for the first time, that he should have been born to this fate. Each one of those deaths had seemed right and almost holy at the time.

Now he felt drenched in guilt and blood beyond the hope of cleansing. Moving away from the dragon but still inside the ring of torches, he sank down onto the grass to hold vigil for the first dragon to whom he had given a name.

How long he sat there he didn’t know, looking up from his introspection only when he sensed movement. Vivian stood there, herself, more or less. Her hair glowed with an intense red that was not her normal color, her eyes a gold too bright for human. She looked from Godzilla to Zee, her eyes traveling with his to the sword that lay at his feet, still black with the dragon’s blood.

A small strangled noise escaped her and one of her hands covered her mouth, even as her eyes met his. Too much for words between them yet again, and he looked away. How was he to explain?

But then, inexplicably, she was kneeling beside him, her arms around him, her face buried in his chest.

“I didn’t...” he began, and then broke off, not knowing what to say.

“Shhh, shhh, I know.” She pressed her lips against his to silence him. “He asked you for the death. What else were you to do?”

Holding her always against his heart, he shifted her so that she sat on his outstretched legs. A long time they sat this way, arms wrapped around each other, silent, his face pressed against her shining hair.

“What now?” he asked, at last.

“We have a dinner to attend.”

“I don’t want to go.” He tightened his arms around her. If he let her go now, if they left this place, she was going to slip away again.

“Neither do I.” She leaned back and traced the scars on his cheek with her finger. “I’m so sorry, Zee, about, well, everything.”

“Fate.” He kissed her. “I’ve been sitting here mulling on our fate. It’s a cruel path we’ve been given, the two of us.”

“Would you change it, if you could?”

He glanced up at the dead dragon, and then back to Vivian. Her golden eyes still held that predatory gleam, the pupil not yet quite round. He traced a finger over the smooth skin of her jaw, still faintly marked with a pattern of scales. None of it mattered, not anymore. Her soul was still her own, and her heart. At the core, she was always Vivian.

“Not if it meant missing out on you.” He kissed her then, lingering, aware that every kiss could be the last. Important to remember, then, the sound of her breath, the scent of her, woman laced with the lingering smell of hot stone, the soft fall of her hair over his hands.

Someday, he would paint her again, drawing on all of these things. He hadn’t had a chance to paint her from anything but dream, he realized suddenly. Since the day she’d walked into A to Zee as a flesh-and-blood woman, too much had happened too fast to allow for art. A loss, but again, one he would suffer willingly for the chance to stand beside her.

When she pulled away, her eyes, though still golden, had reverted to fully human, and the scales had faded. It would be easy to pretend, but he was done with all of that.

“If I were given the opportunity to choose,” he said, “knowing all that I know now, I would still be here. Can you believe that?”

Her face went still and remote and he thought he’d said too much. But she laced her fingers into his hair and pulled his head down so she could kiss him. Then, not looking at him, her breath tremulous and warm against his cheek, she whispered, “Me too, God help me, if it wasn’t for all those who died through my failures. What right have I...”

Her voice broke, and he gathered her in against his chest, feeling the rise and fall of her breast as she drew three deep, shuddering breaths. Not sobs, though. When she looked at him again, he saw what had been forged from all that she had passed through.

“My life is not my own,” she said. “There may have been a time for me to walk away, but that is past. When the time comes—well, there may be no coming back to Vivian for me. Do you understand this?”

Looking into her face, he knew that it was true. Tracing the soft line of her lip with his thumb, he smiled a little, only to ease her, for his heart was full of nothing but shadows and heartache.

“You will always be Vivian, whether you come back to me or not. And I will guard you to my last breath, whether you be woman, dragon, sorcerer, or Dreamshifter, or all the things in one.”

A soft cough drew his attention. Leander, standing in the shadows. “The council is about to begin. Will you come?”

Zee wanted to say no. To grab Vivian by the hand and take her away from all of this, but there was no place in all the worlds where they could escape from what they had become.

L
EANDER
LED
them back into the castle and through a maze of corridors. Vivian let him lead but could have found the meeting place on her own. Her dragon self, burning in her belly, supplied a whole new energy to her newly awakened awareness of magic. It was as though she had a living map in her head. She could visualize all of the rooms of the castle and how they fit together. She knew the books in the library and how to tell one person’s spell-working from another’s. Before she entered the council room, she could sense the magical ability of each person within, distinct as a signature. One soul burned especially bright, overpowering the others. A densely woven white light, so closely contained it seemed about to explode. The Master, she thought, as the door opened. Only the Master could have so much power.

But then she saw the truth. The room itself was unaltered by magic. Cracks spidered the stone walls and pitted the floor. All was cold, rough-edged stone, unsoftened by carpets or tapestries. Even the long table, running the length of the room, was bare stone, empty of all but goblets filled with water.

The Master sat at the head of the table, with Kalina standing just behind his left shoulder. On the table before him rested a seeing stone. Leander slipped into an empty chair to his right. The Giants and Jared filled seats down each side of the table. Two were yet empty, but Vivian chose to remain standing, Zee beside her.

As she entered the room the Master stopped speaking in mid-sentence. Every other head swung around, all eyes fixed on her. Even Jared’s sightless gaze was trained in her direction. The awareness inside her registered a flare from each being capable of magic in the room. The Giants, their magic hard-edged and workmanlike. The Master, weaker than she would have thought. Nothing from Leander. But Kalina held an incandescent fire of power, closely compressed and hidden by a screening spell that mimicked the binding. Compared to her, the magic of all the others was nothing more than candle flame.

“As you see,” Vivian said into the silence, “the dragon has been fully restored. Perhaps now we may speak of the way into the Forever.”

The Master rose from his seat and came toward her, his fingers running across Leander’s shoulders in a caress as he passed. So weary. The heavy use of magic in the last days had taken its toll. He shuffled. His shoulders were bent and fragile. Vivian’s power was more than enough to match his.

The old man’s eyes ran over the line of her jaw and down to the pattern of scales on her shoulders. She stood unflinching beneath the examination. When his eyes met hers, it was a direct assault, all the force of his will directing her to yield, to bow before him and acknowledge him as Master. If he had been kinder, she might have felt a hesitation, an inclination to humor him, but he was a harsh, selfish, unfeeling old man who had brought his demesne to the brink of extinction. To him she would never yield. So, she held his gaze, unblinking, matching him will for will, power for power.

In the end, his whole body jerked, as if in seizure. His skin had grayed to the color of ashes and was wet with perspiration. “Anathema,” he whispered. “A woman’s power should be bound.”

Vivian kept her voice matter-of-fact, showing neither respect nor contempt. “I believe you have some information to share with us.”

She had broken him. He staggered and almost fell as he turned to shuffle back to his seat. Kalina, ever attentive, was there to catch him. As she took his arm to offer support, a tinge of color flowed back into his skin; his back straightened. Vivian felt the subtle shift in magic and marveled that the old man should be so blind as to miss completely what his daughter was capable of.

By the time Kalina pulled out the heavy oak chair for him, the Master had regained sufficient presence to speak with a quiet authority.

“You have asked me how to enter the Forever without the Key. Here is the tale as it was told to me by my father, and by his father before him. I call it a tale, because it may be no more than that. In living memory, there has been not one instance where this incantation has been attempted.” He closed his eyes and intoned: