Dark and Stormy Knights

EVEN A RABBIT WILL BITE by RACHEL CAINE

I got a letter from the Pope in the morning mail. Handwritten. I was inclined to shred it, along with the credit card offers and the pleas from charities, but I felt a little guilty. Not because of the sender, but because of the quality of the envelope. They sure don’t buy the Holy Father the cheap stuff at Wal-Mart; this was crisp, beautiful linen paper, probably made by hand by some revered, tottering artisan, and there was an embossed crossed-keys seal on the flap. Too nice to shred.

He probably knew that. Which was why he’d sent it and not some officious underling with a cheaper stationery budget.

I shut the door to my small apartment against the fierce Phoenix heat and shuffled over to the kitchen table, next to the window. I moved aside the Dragon’s Eye and sorted through things until I found my reading glasses, perched them on the end of my nose, and then ripped open the envelope with a dagger that had once belonged to some king or other. The fat, homicidal one? Well, that described most of them.

Inside, the folded sheet of paper matched the envelope. Another embossed seal on the page and somewhat messy writing that I worked out bit by bit. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, and I don’t get to use my Italian much.

Most honored Lisel, it read. Forgive me for not paying you the courtesy of a visit, but it isn’t as easy to slip away and pass anonymously these days as it used to be, in the days before television and the Internet.

Actually, I was just glad he hadn’t tried it. The last thing I needed was an ineptly disguised pontiff trailing a mile-wide caravan of paparazzi to the doorstep of my little retirement community.

I have been informed that you are shortly to step down from your post as Dragonslayer, after so many centuries of service. I, and the entire world, remain in your debt. You have been a good and faithful servant of the Church and God, and I offer you my personal blessing and thanks as you lay down your glorious burden and pass this mighty responsibility to a new generation.

There were several things wrong with this. First, I wasn’t retiring, I was being made redundant—and thanks, God, or whoever was running the machinery out there, for making me feel even more useless than I already did. Second, it was hardly a “mighty responsibility.” Maybe it had been when I’d taken the job seven hundred and forty-two years ago; in those days, there had been many dragons alive, all of them deadly and cunning and determined to exterminate as many humans as they could, with whatever means they could find.

Today, there was one dragon left. One. And he lurked out in the sands of the Egyptian desert, comforted by the heat in his bones for the same reason I’d retired to Phoenix. He was old and tired, and he had outstayed his welcome in the world.

Glorious, it was not. It never had been.

I sneered at the Holy Paper and crumpled it into a ball, then threw it at the kitchen trash can. It bounced off the side and skipped across the faded linoleum floor, where it startled my old gray cat, Fidget, into opening both eyes. Fidget batted the papal bullshit around for a few seconds, then yawned and went back to sleep.

I felt exactly the same.

I drained the rest of my first pot of coffee and pulled the Dragon’s Eye back to the center of the table. It was a red-tinted crystal ball on a plain wooden stand. It looked like something you could buy in any new age shop, but take my word for it, there’s not another like it in the world. I didn’t know the origin of it, and I didn’t want to know; there was something that deep in my still-superstitious soul I mistrusted.

It knew too much, this orb. It saw too much. I sometimes wondered if there was something on the other end, looking back—if it exposed me as much as the thing I observed.

With a quick, practiced gesture, I put my hand on top of the smooth, warm crystal and felt a hum rise up inside. The crystal clouded, then showed me a flickering confusion of images—vivid ocher sand, hot blue sky, the glitter of crystals in shadow, a burst of flame. Always the sand, blowing, whispering in dunes. Nothing to be seen except the sand, as if he stared at it for hours, mesmerized in much the same way that modern feeble humans stared at their television sets.

So, that duty was completed. Karathrax was still in the desert, as he had been for the past hundred and twelve years and handful of months. I checked every day, but it was pro forma, the work of thirty seconds, and then I went on with my life, such as it was. There’d be no last great epic battle between the two of us. We were old, cranky, and tired, and it was a fucking long trip to Egypt. Or to Phoenix, for that matter. I couldn’t see either one of us summoning the will to make it happen.

I started the morning rituals—made more coffee, drank more coffee, sat on the toilet for a while (what? like you don’t?), read the morning paper in all its stunning sameness. I don’t know why they call it “news.” There’s nothing new about what happens in this world on a daily basis—I’m not talking about scientific discoveries; those are moderately interesting and a constant source of amazement. No, I’m talking about human nature. As a species, we seem to be unable to learn the lesson of history. When a dog bites us, it’s still a shock that dogs bite. Or that man will murder his brother. Or that greed and self-interest and blind hatred are built into our very souls.

I despair.

I was clucking my tongue over the lurid, breathless accounts of crime when the doorbell rang. Son of a bitch. The kid was early. I should have gotten my ass in gear instead of moping around the house like a bitter old woman.

Even though, of course, that was accurate enough.

I looked down at myself—sloppy, fuzzy zip-front robe, flannel pajamas underneath even in the heat of summer, bony feet in grubby fleece house shoes. I’d been planning to dress up a bit, maybe put on something formal for the occasion. The impressive red silk robes given to me by one of the long-dead emperors of China, perhaps. Or something from the papal treasure chest.

Oh, screw it. Who was I trying to impress, anyway?

I shuffled to the front door, checked the peephole, and saw a fish-eye view of a medium-tall young girl. Ridiculously young, it seemed to me, and fashionable. She was smiling nervously, shifting around as if she were thinking of leaving at any second. Sadly, she did not.

I fumbled back the six or seven locks, one after another, forgot the chain, banged the door hard at the full stretch of it, closed it and slipped it off, and finally opened the door fully to gaze upon the new Dragonslayer.

She looked like a goddamn cheerleader. Maybe twenty, if that—fresh out of the petty rigors of high school, glowing with youth and vitality and health and smart-ass attitude. She was wearing a hipster t-shirt with some ironic logo, tight blue jeans, and some kind of cheap-looking sneakers that had probably cost more than my monthly rent. “Mrs. Martin?” she said. She sounded bright and chipper and nervous.

“Get your ass inside,” I said. I was still wishing I’d put on the formal robes or something, but the whipcrack of command in my voice was effective without them. The girl scurried over the doorstep, and I slammed and locked it behind her. “What’s your name?”

“Ellen,” she said. “Ellen Cameron.”

“I’m going to call you Ellie. Coffee?”

She looked relieved to have something so normal to agree to, so I tottered off to the kitchen to put on a fresh pot. While it brewed, Ellen stood politely where I’d left her, looking around but not touching. Good. I couldn’t stand people who fondled my things uninvited. Not that I’d had any of that sort of behavior in the last hundred years.

God, I hated being old. Looking at Ellie, with her fresh, summery youth, made that burn inside me like a blowtorch. When I was her age, I’d had dragon’s blood forced down my throat, fresh from a dying beast. It had been a foul custom, but it had rendered me almost as immortal as the dragons. Impossible to get more now, though. The girl would just have to do without.

I brought back the cups and sat the girl at the table. She was a neat, strong child. If not a cheerleader, she’d be a gymnast or a soccer enthusiast. Soccer, I decided. She had an outdoor glow, and gymnasts tended to spend their time inside.

“Right,” I said. “My name is Lisel von Haffenburg-Martin, and I have killed four dragons in my time, which is more than any Dragonslayer before or since. Most would-be Dragonslayers die before they feel the breath on their neck from the dragon who’s been stalking them. Lucky me, I have survived to retire. Now, I get to train you to take my place.”

Ellie folded her hands in her lap and did her best to look like a good student. It was a poor attempt, but then the child was hardly out of school. At least she had better manners than most of her contemporaries, I’d give her that. “Do you mind if I ask—” She swallowed hard. “Ask if you ever—if the dragons . . .” She burst out into laughter all of a sudden, and the painfully polite girl disappeared. “Oh, man, this is crazy. You’re an old lady, and we’re talking about fighting dragons.”

“No,” I said. “We’re talking about killing dragons. Not fighting them. This is something else altogether. We’re not knights, Ellie. We’re not heroes. We’re exterminators. Think of dragons as enormous, eternal roaches, and you get a better idea of what it is we do.”

“Ugh.” Her pert little nose—quite different from my prominent beak—wrinkled in disgust. “But I get to use a sword, right?”

“You must read a great many stupid books,” I snapped back. “Of course you don’t. Why in the world would you go up against something as fierce as a dragon with a sword? Honestly, it takes a man to think of something that idiotic. You kill a dragon with only one weapon.”

Ellie started to ask the obvious question, but then I saw her shift sideways. I liked that. She’d be clever and not easy to predict. “You’re not talking about real dragons, right? Like with wings and scales and grrrrrr?” She made a kittenish attempt at a predator’s face and hooked her fingers like claws. It was moderately amusing.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Huge, vicious, fast beasts. They breathe fire. Their scales are as hard as diamonds. If you catch their gaze, they can freeze you in place for the kill. They’re smart, cold, and utterly without mercy.”

Ellie thought I was lying. It was written all over her milk-fed, self-confident face. I’d grown up in a grim world, rocks and hard edges, steel and muscle and violence. We’d thought it civilized at the time, but now that I look back on it, it was a savage time, and I’d taken to it like a duck to water.

I couldn’t imagine this child surviving half a day in that time, even without a dragon’s threat hanging over her. She’d have been slaughtered by the first cutpurse fortunate enough to stumble over her.

“Dragons,” I said with cool precision, “can also take other forms. And when in other forms, they are vulnerable, without their natural defenses.”

“Other forms,” Ellie repeated. I could see that regardless of what she’d been told, whatever papal letter she’d received, whatever counseling from her local bishop, she was sure that I was a batty old lady. “Right. Like—what?”

“A particular favorite of Vixariathrax was to assume the form of a cow grazing in a field. He dispatched four separate Dragonslayers that way. Of course, cows were as common as dirt then.” I shrugged, although my shoulder was beginning its daily rhythmic dull ache.

“A cow.” Her face was a study in doubt. “Then how did you figure it out?”

“It was the only cow in the field.” I smiled slowly. “Cows come in herds, girl. Vixariathrax was a hungry old bugger. One placid cow, left standing in a field trampled by dozens? Something was definitely wrong.”

“How did you kill him?”

“Same way I killed them all,” I said. “With cleverness. For him, I shot him from cover. He never saw me coming until it was too late. Poisoned arrows. When he changed back to his dragon form, the poison was trapped inside. He thrashed himself to death out in that field. Took a while, but it was effective enough.”

Ellie had gone quiet, frowning. I saw revulsion in her now. “Doesn’t sound very . . .”

“Honorable?” I put all the scorn I could into the word. “There’s nothing honorable about killing dragons. Nothing brave about it. You put them down, or they kill you. That’s all there is to it.”

“But—” She licked her lips. “How many are there out there to fight?”

“One.”

Ellie opened her mouth, closed it, looked even more reluctant.

“Oh, don’t be so squeamish. One’s enough,” I said. “One dragon has the power to destroy a million people, more if he’s grown angry. He’s a flying, unstoppable, calculating nuclear bomb. He could destroy a city a day, every day, and there would be almost nothing that could stop him once he was going about it.”

“They could put him in a zoo or something.”

“Zoo,” I repeated. “Do you imagine that is a better end for something so magnificent than a decent death? To be gawked at by thousands, millions, trapped for eternity in a small, inadequate cell? And no zoo could hold him, girl. No prison could hold him, for that matter. You could bury him under a mountain and he would dig his way out.”

She swallowed. “Modern weapons—”

“They have weapons,” I said flatly. “Us. Dragonslayers. We’re the weapons, and we’re so effective that in two thousand years, we have hunted dragons from thousands down to one. One last, old, lonely, angry dragon. If that distresses you, get your ass out of my chair and leave. I don’t have time to train some weak-livered baby sentimental about a killing machine who’d gladly rip you apart and pick his teeth with your ribs, if given half a chance.” I was not exaggerating. I’d seen it happen to my predecessor, Godric. Harenthrax had taken his time about the dismemberment, starting with pulling away tiny bits like fingers and toes and eating them like appetizers before starting to disarticulate the man’s limbs. Godric had stopped screaming only when his lungs failed. I was not sure how long it had taken him to really die after that. I’d grown numb. In the end, I’d fallen asleep, shameful as that was, and woke only when the screaming had stopped.

She got up, the girl, and stood there staring down at me. Her lips pressed into a thin line. “You’re a mean old bitch,” she said. The sheen of politeness was completely gone. Good. I had no real use for manners.

“Oh, yes, I am all that. ‘Old’ being the operative word. I survived the worst four dragons could throw at me. I survived politics, wars, husbands, and the death of everything I ever loved. Because I am smart. Because I am ruthless. If you think that is a character fault, you have no business being a Dragonslayer. You’ll be dead before you smell your first whiff of sulfur.”

She headed for the door.

“Go on,” I called after her. “Be sure to tell God you’re an idiot when you get to heaven. Probably tomorrow.”

That stopped her in her tracks. “What?”

“The Holy Father handpicked you,” I said. “I didn’t. I don’t get any say in who comes after me, and I’m stuck with whoever they send me. So if you walk away today and don’t learn anything, fine, no skin off my ancient nose, is it? I’m retired. I’ll be training your replacement tomorrow, and telling him about your suitably gruesome, gory death. Because if I know who you are, most assuredly old Karathrax already knows as well.” I picked up the Dragon’s Eye—it was surprisingly heavy, about the weight of a good bowling ball—and shuffled over to thrust it at her. She took it, wide-eyed. “There. Consider yourself trained. Now get the hell out.”

“But—” She stared at the crystal. “What is it?”

“Your problem,” I said. “You don’t want to listen to the mean old bitch, fine. Figure it out yourself. Now shoo!”

I shoved her right out the door, slammed it, and started the tedious process of locking it all. Around lock number two, she started knocking tentatively on the door.

By lock number four, she was pounding on it. “All right, all right, stop making such a racket!” I yelled through the door, and unlocked it again. I let the girl in. This time, I left the locks unturned because I might want to eject her, quickly. With force. “Now, are you willing to pay attention?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ellen said, but I read a simmering resentment in her expression, in the tense set of her shoulders. “Sorry. Um, here, could I set this down . . . ?” She lifted the heavy weight of the Dragon’s Eye.

“No,” I said. “You can stand there and hold that out in front of you, for the next hour. Consider it punishment duty.”

And training, for what would come next.

Ellen bit her lip, then stretched out her arms, and almost immediately the shaking began.

I sat down, refilled my coffee cup, and picked up the paper.

She wasn’t completely hopeless. For one thing, she wasn’t a complainer; I can’t abide complainers. She did everything she could to fulfill whatever task I set her, even the impossible ones, and she didn’t whine even when she was sore, bruised, cut, exhausted, and ready to drop. I think it became a personal mission for her, to wear me down.

Good luck, little girl. Even as old and feeble as I was now, I was Lisel Dragonslayer. She’d woken something in me, a fierce pride, a desire to stretch myself. I abandoned the old-woman robes and house scuffs; I began dressing in loose running suits, suitable for fighting, and sturdy athletic-type shoes. Velcro closures. Greatest thing in the world.

I started her out training with a staff, because she could do herself the least damage with that, and I could do the most to her without maiming. Fun all around. Ellie was surprisingly strong and fast, but then, I supposed the Pope hadn’t just picked her name out of a hat; they had an entire council of researchers working on things like that, identifying potential Dragonslayers, filtering them, vetting them, prying into every corner of their lives. Much easier in my day, when your lord and master pointed a bony finger your direction and said, “Take that one.” In my case, my lord and master had been my husband. I’d gotten along better with the dragons, frankly.

Ellie was out of school, and the Church was fronting her family a lot of money—hush money—combined with a dizzying cocktail of faith and flattery. I didn’t know if the Pope actually took any of this seriously; they all professed to it, but none of the pontiffs I could remember had ever actually seen a dragon. Then again, their trade was to believe in things unseen. And they’d never tried to cut me out of the papal budget, so far as I knew, which must have meant something significant. Even the Pope has downsized.

I knew, because I asked, that Ellie’s family had been promised a million dollars a year for the next ten years, all squirreled away in some Swiss account, with allowances funneling to her parents through some byzantine arrangement of shell companies. It was a pension, supposedly. Both her mother and father had retired from their jobs. Ellie got a stipend that would keep her in anything her heart desired, barring haute couture fighting gear.

I certainly hadn’t been paid that excessively, but then, I supposed the standard of living was much lower in my day. I’d never hungered or lacked for shelter or comfort. Same basic thing, I supposed. There was no point in being bitter that the budget for the newer generation was more luxurious than in my heyday.

The training proceeded apace. Ellie took two weeks to reach a mastery of the staff sufficient to convince me to let her graduate to edged weapons. Blade proficiency took a bit longer, but she came every day, training her pretty little heart out . . . first with a dull practice blade against a post, then against me. That was humiliating.

For her, of course.

The fourth time I disarmed her without breaking a sweat, she got a mulish, angry look as she swiped up the fallen sword. “I thought you said you don’t kill a dragon with swords!” she spat. “Why do I have to—”

“Because I said so,” I interrupted. Sometimes I love being old. “Now shut up and fight.” It was the closest she’d come yet to real complaints, and I wasn’t surprised; by this time, I’d been a screaming banshee, shouting abuse at Godric like a fishwife at a wandering husband. It was hard bloody work, especially since we conducted our business out in the desert, far from prying eyes and passing motorists curious about what a pair of women might be doing with medieval weapons in the hot sun.

She settled into a fighting stance, with a firm two-handed grip on her sword, and advanced. This time she was a little better; it took me three parries to find an opening, but this time I didn’t settle for stripping away her sword; I slammed the point of my weapon hard into her chest, knocking her back to the ground. She lay there on the dusty soil, blinking up at the desert sun, and tears trickled out of her eyes to cut clean lines through the dirt on her face. She was weary, sweaty, and so very young.

I hesitated for a second, then slammed my sword blunted point down into the sand hard enough to make it stand upright and reached down to offer her a hand. She stared at it for a second, gasping for breath, and then gripped it and let me haul her to her feet. Sand showered out of her clothes in an ocher flow and clung to her sweaty skin in clumps.

“You need all your skills,” I said. “Strength. Agility. Quickness of body and mind. Discipline. Patience. Ruthless dedication. That is why I’m teaching you. Not how to chop wood with a sharp edge. Any fool can do that.”

She thought about what I said. I could see the wheels turning. Over the past few weeks, she’d impressed me as much for her thoughtfulness as for her athleticism, which was considerable. I wondered how bright the girl really was. Brighter than most modern simpletons, I would guess; she questioned everything, accepted nothing without turning it this way and that. One would almost think rhetoric was still a skill possessed by the common man.

I reached in my pack, tossed her a bottle of water, and opened one for myself. We sat in the shade of a spiky bush—one of the few around—and swigged. She didn’t speak at first. Neither did I.

Eventually, she said, “The dragon. The one who’s left. You haven’t told me anything about him.”

“You’re not ready,” I said. “Learning about dragons is the last thing you do.”

“Why?”

I almost smiled. She asked why more than any child I’d ever known. “Because I say so.”

“Mrs. Martin—”

“Lisel,” I said.

Her cheeks colored slightly. “Lisel.” It sounded stilted and forced. “Why is knowing about him dangerous?”

“I didn’t say it was dangerous. It’s distracting.”

“Why?” Her huge eyes were fixed on me in challenge.

I surrendered, for the first time. “All right. I’ll tell you about Karathrax, but it doesn’t mean you can cut your training short to go after him.”

“Yeah, I know. Luke had to go back to Yoda, too. No jumping the gun.” I had no idea what she was talking about. Her flush deepened. “Sorry. Go on.”

“It’s not known how old Karathrax is,” I said. “He was in the earliest records handed down among the Dragonslayers. What is certain is that he was the cleverest of all of them, and the most patient. He waited once for fifty years, pretending to be mortally injured, simply to destroy the Dragonslayer who wounded him.”

Ellie’s eyes got even wider. “How many people has he killed?”

“In general? Thousands, certainly. The destruction of several medieval cities was ascribed to Karathrax, as the dragons began to wage a coordinated war against the Dragonslayers. He’s been responsible for the death of almost a dozen of us, over the centuries.”

“But before you.”

“I’m just the last one left alive,” I said. “I wasn’t the only one when I was chosen. I was one of almost a hundred. By the time Karathrax was the last, so was I.”

She said nothing to that. We drank our water in silence, and then she finally ventured, “But he must have done something terrible, right? I mean, not just being a dragon. Something to make us hunt him down like this.”

“Are you deaf? I said he killed thousands. Destroyed almost a dozen Dragonslayers!”

“I know,” she said softly. “But that’s war, kind of. They were fighting for their survival. Why were we killing them in the first place?”

She understood nothing. Nothing at all. The water in my mouth suddenly turned from sweet to bitter, and it was all I could do to choke it down. “Never you mind,” I said sharply, and got to my feet. My aches and pains, accumulated slowly over all the centuries, reminded me yet again of the years. “Get up and fight.”

Ellie stared at me for a few exhausted seconds, bottle raised halfway to her lips, then deliberately took another drink, replaced the cap, and climbed up with her sword in her hand.

I hurt her a few more times, pushing myself as much as her, and as she drove us back to my apartment, I saw tears cutting silently through the dust on her cheeks. She looked small, tired, and dispirited.

I got out, hefted the equipment bags, and trudged back to my apartment, feeling as sore as she must have been. When I looked back, Ellie was slumped over her car’s steering wheel, forehead resting against the leather-wrapped surface. Gathering the strength to drive away, I presumed. It was getting dark, and the clear sky was cooling from hot blue to the icy color of the deep ocean. Stars flickered like glitter thrown by God.

It was dark enough, and she was distracted. I dropped the bag into the grass, removed something from a side pocket, and slipped quietly back down the path, keeping to the blackest of the shadows. I circled the back of the idling car, moved up beside the driver’s side, and slowly lowered the gun in my hand to touch the side of Ellie’s head.

“You’re dead,” I told her. I wasn’t angry, only a little disappointed. She flinched and looked up. Her eyes were red and running with tears, her face burning with the force of her self-pity. “You think I’m dangerous? I’m an old woman. I’m nothing. Karathrax is your enemy, and he is cold and eternal and clever, and he will not have mercy on you. He will steal up on you in the dark, just like this, and end your life. You can be hurt. You can be killed. You understand?”

She did. I saw the fury and hurt slip over her expression, but then it melted away.

She nodded without saying anything.

I slipped the .38 back into the pocket of my running suit and shuffled back to where I’d left the training bag, opened the door of my apartment building, and greeted a couple of my elderly neighbors shuffling along on their walkers.

I needed a drink, a hot bath, and an evening of game shows.

I was in the tub, thinking how nice it was to have steaming, scented water without having to lug heavy buckets to a cauldron, when the bathroom door opened silently and Ellie stood there looking at me. She wasn’t crying anymore. She hadn’t showered, she hadn’t changed clothes, she hadn’t even washed the dirt from her skin. She looked a little savage, and in her hand was the gun, which she’d taken out of my training bag, I assumed.

“Bang,” she said. “You’re dead. See? I can sneak up on people, too.”

She closed the bathroom door, and I heard her leave, slamming the door behind her.

I relaxed and let out a long, satisfied breath.

She was ready for the next level.

“This,” I told Ellie the next morning, “is Dragonkiller.”

I opened up a long wooden box lined with velvet and took out a bow made of carved, yellowing bone. A thick string of sinew dangled from the bottom. I held it in both hands, ceremonially, and handed it to Ellie, who accepted it the same way. Instinct, I assumed. I hadn’t made a production out of it, although it was a ceremony of sorts.

A rite of passage.

“It’s a bow?” She sounded uncertain. I sighed.

“Of course it’s a bow,” I snapped. “String it.”

“Um . . .”

“Put your weight on it, bend it, and slip the loop over the top into the groove.”

She blinked, as if she’d never heard of such a thing—and perhaps she hadn’t!—and started to try to bend the thing. It wasn’t easy; Dragonkiller had been made for a man’s strength. She threw herself into it, though, pushing harder and harder until the form finally began to bend.

She strung the bow.

Panting, she looked at it and smiled. A pure, delighted smile of victory, one I remembered smiling myself, upon a time, as the bow bent beneath my hands for the first time. She looked up at me.

I smiled back. It was not voluntary; there was something so purely triumphant in her that it dragged approval out of me, all unwilling.

I transformed it to my usual scowl as swiftly as I could. “Give it here,” I said, and snatched it out of her hands. “Don’t think that bending the damn thing makes you a master of the bow.”

“I don’t,” she said meekly enough. “I want to learn. I always thought bows were cool.”

She wouldn’t think they were when her fingertips were shredded and bleeding, when her inner forearm was raw from the snap of the string. But I approved of her mind-set.

“This bow,” I said, “is made of dragonbone, and—”

“Whose bone?” she interrupted me.

“What?”

“Which dragon’s?”

I thought for a moment. “Aedothrax,” I said. Godric had killed him seventy years before I had been chosen as his apprentice; the bow had seen good service by a dozen Dragonslayers before and since and had come back to me. “Dragonbone is excellent for these kinds of weapons. Very springy, but resistant. It never breaks.”

“Dragons never break bones?”

“Not under normal circumstances. I told you, they are tough bastards.”

Ellie nodded, taking in the information with her usual concentration. I pulled the bow back to its full extension, a use of strength I hadn’t attempted in years. I only just managed, but I refused to allow the strain to show. I loosened it just as slowly, then handed it back to Ellie and took out a quiver from the other half of the wooden case. In it were a dozen handmade arrows, all of the same dragonbone, tipped in sharp iron with viciously pointed heads. The fletching was a vivid red, as hot as it had been the day I’d stripped and dyed the feathers. It hadn’t faded at all.

Unlike me. But then, I hadn’t been shut up in a box for a hundred years. It only felt that way.

Ellie reached for it. I pulled it back out of reach. “Not yet. First, you learn to string and unstring the bow. Then we go on to target practice.”

“But I want to learn to shoot!”

“Of course you do,” I said, and rolled my eyes. “And I’m certain you know nothing at all about it. Your generation is taught nothing that’s of any practical use at all, are you?”

“Hey, I’m really good with computers!”

“I rest my case.” I nodded at a heavy padded target in the corner. “Fine. I’ll let you shoot—carefully. Carry that, too. We’re going to practice.”

Ellie’s face screwed up in frustration, but she managed to balance target and bow without much difficulty. I carried the quiver, a folding chair, and the water bottle. Comfort and survival. Let the apprentice do the heavy lifting.

In the car, as we drove out to our usual desert practice area, I found myself saying, “How do your parents feel about your new calling?” Small talk? Whatever demonic spirit had just possessed me to make small talk? I stared straight forward through the dusty windshield, frowning, appalled at myself.

Ellie, though, responded instantly like a puppy to a pat. “Mom’s very devout, so, you know. Just the fact that the Pope actually called the house . . . I mean, even Dad was impressed by that. And the money, of course. Everybody’s impressed by money.” She sounded a little bitter and ironic about that. I approved. “Mom’s worried about me, though.”

“You’ve not told her!”

“Oh, no—I mean . . . no. I said I was doing some training. Like Special Forces stuff. Army of God, all that stuff. She won’t tell anybody.” Ellie fell silent, nervously tapping fingers on the steering wheel. “Hey, Lisel?” When I didn’t answer, she swallowed and continued. “Do I get to have, you know, friends? Boyfriends? A life?”

“Can I stop you?” I turned my face away, staring out at the passing desert. The flickering landscape connected to something else, and I changed the subject. “Are you using the Dragon’s Eye as I told you?”

“I check it every day,” Ellie said. “For about an hour. He doesn’t do much, does he?”

“He’s old,” I said. “And tired.”

“But I thought he was clever and dangerous!”

“Oh, he’s those things as well. Dragons can lie dormant, consumed by their own affairs, for a hundred years or more, and then suddenly take a notion to destroy half of Chicago. Never assume that lazy equals weak.”

“Did you ever make that mistake?” she asked. Which was a very good question, and one I did not want to answer.

“Once,” I finally said.

“What happened?”

“London,” I said shortly. “In 1666.” She gazed back at me with perfect, milk-fed blankness, a placid cow of the new age rich with information and remarkably poor in actual knowledge. “The Great Fire of London.”

Then she surprised me with a very small smile. “I thought it started from that guy’s bakery. On Pudding Lane.”

“And I thought children your age knew only what appeared on your Twitter page about history.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t on Twitter.” She lifted one shoulder in a charming, self-deprecating shrug. “I started reading up on disasters. I figured some of them must have been caused by dragons, right? I wanted to know what I was up against.”

I pulled in a deep breath. The child had actually done something intelligent. “The decision to put the blame on poor Master Farriner was made at the highest levels of the court, but actually, the blame rested on me. I’d wounded the dragon, and it had fled to nurse its wounds. I didn’t chase. I thought—I thought she had learned her lesson, and would stay well away from humans, at least for a few hundred years.” I felt myself drifting on memory, rich and bright. “She was beautiful, Heliothrax. So beautiful. Her scales were the color of twilight, and her eyes blazed like flame. They are beautiful, you know. It’s a shame they are so savage.”

“So you tracked her down and killed her.” Ellie’s voice had gone soft and quiet, and her face was turned away from me, wind whipping her hair across to hide her expression.

“Yes,” I said. It was the one thing I had ever done that still haunted me. She had been wounded and afraid, and alone of all the dragons I had ever killed, she had transformed herself at the last into a human. A human child, crippled and trembling and weeping. “So many innocent people died in London, even though they didn’t keep good counts. There was so much destruction. I had no choice. I had to put her down.”

The car arrived at the turnout and bumped off from tarmac to soft, hissing sand. The same track we’d taken dozens of times by now; there was a definite road being formed by the grooves of Ellie’s tires. She was silent until we arrived at the training spot and then shut off the engine and listened to the quiet tick of the metal cooling before she said, “How did you know it was her? Heliothrax, I mean?”

“She was the closest.”

“What if she didn’t do it?”

I sighed. “Does it really matter which of them did it? They were all deadly, all dangerous, all bent on killing us. A response had to be made. I made it.”

That shape-changed dragon, looking up at me with a child’s tear-filled, burning eyes. Trying to speak but not knowing how, because that was knowledge that Heliothrax had never bothered to acquire.

“I made it,” I repeated, and got out of the car to walk stiffly in circles, loosening up my ancient bones and muscles. Ellie opened the trunk, and I began pulling out our training supplies—two folding chairs now, since I had decided she had advanced sufficiently that there was no need to keep her in discomfort when resting. Ample water. A small bag of food, enough to last two days, since I always plan for emergencies. I left the emergency shelter equipment in the car and removed the weapons and training bag.

We began the day as we had all other days—katas to loosen and center, sword practice (at which Ellie was becoming—much to my surprise—acceptable), knives. Then I opened the case that held Dragonkiller, unstrung, and handed the weapon to her to bend and string. I walked out with the target and placed it a child’s training distance away.

“We’ll start slowly,” I said, adjusting the target slightly to be sure it was just so. “Before you touch the arrows, I want you to—”

Something hissed past me, over my shoulder, and buried itself in the dead center of the concentric rings. I dodged aside, breathing hard, and stared at the quivering arrow, the vivid fletching.

I looked back to see Ellie standing, tall and straight and beautiful, bracer on her forearm, plastron strapped to her chest, leather glove on her hand, fitting another arrow to the bowstring.

“Thank you,” she said, “for teaching me so well. I admit, there’s a certain thrill to it, isn’t there?”

She no longer sounded like Ellie Cameron, shallow teen struggling to swim in shark-infested waters.

She sounded like the shark.

Ellie sighted, stretched the string, and released with perfect form, classical as Diana hunting a doe.

The arrow drove into the target within a breath of the first. Ellie methodically drew another from the quiver.

“You’re probably wondering right now what’s happening,” she said. She set the arrow on the string but didn’t draw. Her blue eyes were wide and calm and fixed on me. “That’s the feeling of every hunted beast, Lisel. The anger, the hurt, the anguish, the confusion. Even a rabbit will bite, at the end. Did you know that? Even the mildest of animals will fight to live.”

I had an awful feeling growing in my chest, like a malignancy, like the illness I had avoided all these long centuries. She was right: I was hurt, I was angry, I was afraid and confused. And all I could force from my lips was, “Who are you?”

“You know who I am, Lisel,” Ellie said, and smiled. Her eyes changed slowly, blue fading and somehow brightening into the lick of pale flame. “You know.”

Karathrax.

I didn’t hesitate. I threw myself sideways, behind the archery target, and in the same instant, Karathrax pulled and fired, a snap shot that should have gone wide but would have instead punched through my body if I hadn’t managed to get the target in the way. I rolled, pulling the target with me, and got into a crouch. The target was a heavy, awkward shield, but it was better than nothing, and I used it as I ran for the nearest genuine shelter, a heavy cactus that leaned near a dune.

Ellie—no, Karathrax (I had to stop thinking of him as a human now) was calmly setting another arrow to the bowstring. In no particular hurry, nor did he need to be. He had trapped me, dissembled perfectly.

“When?” I shouted to him. “When did you kill the child?”

“Before she ever reached you,” he said. “I kept her alive for quite some time, to learn from her so I could impersonate her appropriately. She’s buried quite near here, actually. I didn’t eat her.”

“Kind of you.”

“I’ve been waiting, Lisel. Waiting for the opportunity to face you and talk. Talk as Heliothrax would have, if you’d not slaughtered her without mercy.”

I needed to get to the weapons. There was little chance for me, but what there was lay in the weapons cache, the water, the emergency shelter. Karathrax was suited to the desert, and he could shed this human form and assume his dragon form at any time. Once he did, he would be . . . invincible.

I had killed my dragons with cleverness, from concealment, with poisons and treachery. I couldn’t take him in a fight, and we both knew it.

But even a rabbit bites.

I needed a distraction, something that would make Karathrax believe that he was on the verge of realizing all his hundreds-of-years-old dreams of destroying me.

Focus, I told myself. You have weapons you haven’t told him about. That was true; there were levels of training, of ability, that Karathrax had never seen, because he’d believed he’d seen all he needed.

He’d not seen this.

It was the most treacherous and difficult skill I had ever learned, and the most chancy; it required levels of commitment and fearlessness that most never mastered. I had scars from it, many scars, and some of them had been all but fatal.

I closed my eyes a moment, centered myself, and then stood up from concealment. I didn’t speak. I needed all my focus on Karathrax.

He didn’t wait. Ellen Cameron’s slender, tanned fingers tensed, the bow stretched, and I read the tremor in her arm as the muscle began to release.

Timing was everything to this. I’d gained barely enough distance to make it possible, but my concentration, my reaction time, had to be perfect.

No thought.

Nothing but the action.

I felt a sharp sting as my hand closed, just a bit early, on the arrow, and the barbed, sharpened head sliced furrows in my palm and fingers. That was all right. The important thing was to catch and stop the arrow, slow it so that if it did penetrate my skin, it would do so shallowly. The blood on my hand would only help sell the illusion, if I had gotten it right.

I had, barely. The arrow was lodged in my chest, sunk in to the depth of perhaps half an inch, but the illusion of it was solid. I screamed, dropped onto my side, curled around the arrow. Blood from my cut hand smeared a gory mess across the front of my tracksuit.

Karathrax waited a long, long moment, then took the bait, walking through the sand and nocking another arrow along the way. He wanted to kill me with the bones of his kin, not something human, like a sword. I understood that.

I played dead, and slowly, with just the tiniest play of muscles, worked the arrow free of my skin. Blood wicked through the cloth covering my chest, vivid evidence of my wound. Even better.

I felt cool relief from the hot sun as Karathrax stood over me, nearly as tall as the towering cactus with its defiant spikes. Ellie Cameron’s pink shoe rolled me over onto my back, and I made sure my eyes were half-open, fixed, unmoving.

One more thing I could do to sell the illusion.

I let my bladder loose, the way the dead do. The sharp smell of urine filled the clear desert air.

Overhead, a vulture riding the thermals shifted its course.

Karathrax’s eyes were eerie in Ellie’s face, merciless and cold. This was the moment of true danger; if he had a doubt, even an instant’s doubt, he would simply shoot me again. In fact, if he’d let me train him any further, I’d have trained him to do just that. Never assume something is dead, I would have told him. Never approach without administering a coup de grâce, preferably in the head.

As old as he was, he might have known that, but as a dragon, he likely had never had to fear much. Only humans. And even then, only a few. His instincts were wired differently. Dragons didn’t care whether their prey was alive or dead; the death was inevitable once they began to eat.

I heard the creak as the bowstring relaxed. Karathrax laughed softly.

“Dead in your own filth,” he said in Ellie’s soft, girlish voice. “What an ignoble end you all find, you humans. I think I’ll take your skin for a trophy. I’ll use it in my cave, as a rug.”

My eyes were burning from dryness, and the urge to blink was almost unbearable, but I abstained until he’d shipped the bow over his shoulder and glanced away to reach for the knife holstered in leather at Ellie’s belt. Ellie. A child, waylaid and destroyed, purely to provide Karathrax with the appropriate opportunity.

When he shifted to draw the knife, I focused my concentration again to a pinpoint. There could be no fumbling, no wasted motion, no hesitation—I visualized the motion, and then in the next shadow-second I copied it with muscles and will, turning the arrow, dragging it through cloth, and slicing its razor edge deep through the Achilles’ tendons on both legs, just above the heels, left vulnerable by cute pink athletic shoes with their appliquéd hearts.

Blood burst out in a flood, and Karathrax/Ellie let out a yelp of pure surprise and shock, wavered, and then I saw the pure horror on the face as the fine, precise engineering of the legs ceased to work. His body toppled, arms flailing, and he lost the knife as he hit the ground face just inches away. I flung myself across him, found the knife, and closed my bloody fingers around the gritty handle.

“No!” Karathrax roared, and I heard all the things he had described in that voice—anger, hurt, anguish, and confusion. Even a rabbit will bite.

I was no rabbit.

Karathrax twisted beneath me, and I knew I had seconds to finish this. He could shed this vulnerable human form, fortify himself inside a dragon shell, and though he would carry his crippling injury with him, he would be fiendishly difficult to hurt or kill again.

Our eyes met. I put the knife to the fragile human throat, the girl’s throat, Ellie’s throat, and I remembered the child, the crying child that Heliothrax had become at the end.

“She was my mate,” he said. “You slaughtered the one you call Heliothrax for nothing. For nothing. Our females didn’t fight. Didn’t kill. Didn’t burn. None of them did. But you didn’t bother to tell one dragon from another, did you? We were all the same threat.”

“You killed our women. Our children.”

“You were prey,” he said. “We didn’t understand you could think, not for a long time. We didn’t understand you communicated. We do it differently, in ways you would never perceive, in color and light. These crude sounds you make, they were beyond our senses. Heliothrax tried, in the end. I watched you kill her.”

“And did nothing.”

His golden eyes blazed. “I was half a world away! I saw through her eyes.” Odd. It had never occurred to me that the Dragon’s Eye, the orb I looked through, was truly just that—the eye of a dragon. But perhaps it was true.

That reminded me of something. I cut a little deeper with the knife. “How did you deceive me? I saw through your eyes, in the desert. You never left.”

Ellie’s lips split into a cold grin. “You saw what you wanted to see,” Karathrax said. “Desert. It never occurred to you that what you were seeing might have been me in your desert. It was a long, cold flight, racing the sun, and I was daring fate, but I knew it was time. Time to end it.”

“It is,” I said. Yet something in me was howling. Something awful. When Karathrax was gone, something would be missing from the world that would never be in it again.

He killed Ellie.

And I had slaughtered his mate, punishing her on behalf of all dragons, with no more care for who she was or what she’d done than singling out one ant from a colony.

I’d killed so many of them, with poisons. Deception. Treachery. Heliothrax had been the first I’d faced, the first I’d bloodied a sword on, the first I’d destroyed with my own reddened hands.

Karathrax would be the last.

He should have changed by now, I realized. He could have taken on his dragon shape, ripped me apart, crawled away to a bitter healing in a lonely world.

He hadn’t.

We stayed that way for a long moment, my ancient enemy and I, and then I said, “Do you want to die as a human?”

“No.” Ellie’s even teeth flashed in a grim smile. “But I’m old, Lisel. Far older than you. Changing form is a young dragon’s game. Changing back is the work of hours for me these days. I don’t suppose you’ll be polite enough to wait.”

I readied the knife.

“But,” Karathrax said, “what happens to you, Lisel? When my blood is in the sand, what magic will you have left to sustain you? You’ve lived all these hundreds of years of stolen time because your life is linked to that of the dragons. Because seven hundred years ago, Godric forced you to drink the hot blood of my sire, Aedothrax, and bound you into the dragon line. Your life is linked to mine. Nothing else now.”

I knew he was right. Godric had said so, from the beginning—the dragon’s blood would sustain us as long as the dragons lived. Once the last dragon was gone . . .

I took a firmer grip on the knife. “I’ll risk it.”

“Not a risk. A certainty. You kill me, you die.” His eyes darkened back to Ellie’s clear blue. “But the same isn’t true for me. If I kill you, I go on.”

I had taught her too well. Too well.

The girlish right hand, during the distraction of his speech, had drawn a small, hidden dagger, and now Karathrax buried it to the hilt in my side, at the same time shoving me off with all the strength in that small female body. He couldn’t walk, but he could crawl, and crawl he did, not away from me, but toward me. Pain radiated from the wound in my side, flooding in pounding waves through my body, and my shaking hand tried and failed to remove the knife. It was stuck in bone.

Karathrax took the larger hunting knife away from me.

My blood thickened the sand. So did his.

We sat together in silence, and then he reached out and pulled the knife from my side. I screamed, unable to stop, and my vision flared white, then gray.

When it cleared, Karathrax was raised up on his arms, looking down at me from Ellie’s perfect, pretty face.

“I hated you,” he said. “For hundreds of years, you were the only thing in the world that existed to me. Your death. Your blood. Your suffering.”

And it had been the same for me, with him. Enemies to the end. Even long past the point where it had made any sense.

“But now I see you’re just an old, tired woman,” he said. “Old, tired, and lost.”

He slowly lowered himself down, a controlled collapse, and I saw the pupils of his golden eyes growing wider.

“You kill with poison,” he said. “Don’t you?”

That was what I had been about to tell Ellie, before Karathrax had revealed himself. Before you touch the arrows, I want you to learn precautions against the poison. Because every wicked edge had been tainted with it, a poison that felled dragons and humans alike.

It had sliced my hands, as I’d caught it.

It had sliced open the tendons at the backs of his legs. A death sentence for us both.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and it came from some secret, true, dark place inside me. “She was magnificent. You were all magnificent. And we were wrong to destroy you. I know that. I knew it then.”

And in the end, Karathrax reached for my hand, and we lay in the hot, comforting afternoon, growing cold in the sun together.

“Murderer,” he murmured before his eyes fluttered closed.

My heartbeat slowed, slowed, and in the instant before it stopped, I thought, Guilty.

No doubt the Pope would have disagreed.

He would have been wrong.

Rachel Caine is the New York Times bestselling author of the popular Weather Warden series and the young adult Morganville Vampires series. She has another series, Outcast Season, which began in 2009 with the novel Undone . In addition, Rachel has written paranormal romantic suspense for Silhouette, including Devil’s Bargain, Devil’s Due, and Athena Force: Line of Sight (which won a 2007 RT Reviewers’ Choice Award). Visit her Web site: www.rachelcaine.com . MySpace: www.myspace.com/rachelcaine .