The Seer (82 page)

Bellicose
shook him off with a furious growl, ‘You forget your place!  It is not you
who leads this tribe but I!  And I shall hunt the prey of my own choosing,
not yours!’

‘We need the
Seer!’ 

‘I say what
we
need!’  Bellicose thrust his face into Malachi’s, his lipless mouth drawn
back in a vicious snarl.  

Seizing her
chance Mistral, rammed her knife back into her boot and threw herself from the
ledge.  She twisted round as she fell, her fingers clawing at rocky edge,
boots scraping down over rock.

‘Come
on! 
Come on!’ 

Desperation
gave her strength.  She curled her fingers in tight, gripping at the rock
while her scrabbling boots found a hold.  Clinging tenuously to the rock,
Mistral’s head jerked left and right, frantically seeking more holds. 
Away from the exposed ledge the wind suddenly dropped, allowing the noise of
the fight to carry clearly.  Recognising a wild shout of panic as being
Cain’s, she instinctively twisted to look for her brother.  She could
instantly see that the fight was going badly.  The outnumbered warriors
were fighting with two or more vampires at once.  Her eyes raked the
chaotic scene, desperately seeking the figure of her Mage.  She saw the
blonde heads of the twins, fighting back to back against three vampires, and
Grendel ripping apart the vampire unwisely trying to bite into his tough skin;
but she couldn’t see Fabian.  Her eyes swept over the motionless bodies laid
on the ground, disregarding the pallid vampire corpses to stare fearfully at
the three dark-clothed figures.  Giving a low cry she let go of the ledge,
dragging her hands against the rock as she fell, trusting them to find a hold
before she plummeted down to the gorge floor. 

Clawed hands
grabbed at her, jerking her to a halt.  For one brief moment she dangled
in the air, then she was hauled up and held aloft to stare into the face of
Bellicose La Monte.  

‘No
Seer.  You remain with us.’

Grimacing at
the blast of rancid breath Mistral tilted back her head and spat into his face,
‘Never!’  

With a snarl
of rage Bellicose flung her down on the ledge.  Mistral cried out as her
head slammed into the hard rock.  Stars burst before her eyes and her ears
rung like a struck gong.  She forced her screwed up eyes to open, staring
dazedly into the snarling face of Bellicose La Monte.

‘Malachi may
have persuaded me to forgo the delights of your blood, but not your
child!  It will be mine!’

Mistral’s head
snapped up.  Pain exploded behind her eyes, piercing her brain like a
lightning bolt.  She pushed herself up with her hands, forcing her hissed
words into his face.  ‘You will
never
touch my son!  I will
die before I let that happen!’  She suddenly felt something warm trickle
down her face and saw Bellicose’s crimson pupils dilate.  With a stab of
fear Mistral realised that she was bleeding.

‘Die,
Seer?  Ah, but so you shall.’  Bellicose closed his eyes and breathed
in the scent of her fresh blood, his bone-white face stretching into a grisly
leer. 

Mistral
scrabbled backwards in panic.  The sharp fragments of rock sliding beneath
her palms drew more blood, fuelling the desperate craving burning in
Bellicose’s eyes.  He gave a low growl and dropped into a hunting crouch,
his hungry eyes amused by her futile efforts to escape.  Time seemed to
slow.  Mistral could suddenly hear and see everything with total
clarity.  The fight on the gorge floor, the blue sky overhead, the feral
face staring at her with undisguised greed … but inside her mind wheeled
frantically.  She could run … launch herself from the ledge and hope that
the fall might not kill her ... or she could fight.  She still had a knife
in her boot – if she could reach it she might stand a chance of killing him
before he ripped her throat out. 

Bellicose
laughed when Mistral finally pushed up against the sheer wall of the
gorge.  She was trapped.    

‘Goodbye …
Seer.’

Mistral
snatched at the knife in her boot then froze, her eyes widening in
disbelief.  For the briefest of moments she thought her death had already
happened and she was seeing some outlandish vision of the afterlife, but the
air buffeting her face with every wing stroke was sweet with a fiery scent that
told her this was real.

‘Oh, goodbye
Bellicose,’ she murmured, smiling at something over his shoulder. 

He spun with a
growl to follow her look and leapt back in shock at the sight of the dragon
queen suspended in the air above the ledge.  Mistral gazed at the
terrifyingly beautiful creature and knew with unwavering certainty that
everything was going to be alright.  Her smile widened when Bellicose
began to back away from the queen with cautious steps; the hunter had become
the hunted.  The queen beat the air with huge scarlet wings, her merciless
bronze eyes tracking every move.  Bellicose slowly backed up until he was
pressed against the rock beside Mistral.  Now he was the trapped
rat. 

Mistral turned
to grin at him, ‘Any last words leech?’ 

Giving a
furious snarl he whipped around and leapt up, reaching out with his long arms
to grasp the gorge edge high above.  Mistral swore in frustration; he was
going to escape!  She lunged for his legs as the dragon queen gave a
thunderous roar and dived, her jaws closing around his body in a bone-crunching
snap.  She swooped away with Bellicose screaming in her jaws, her head
twisting sharply from side to side, shaking the life from him like a dog with a
rat.  Mistral winced at the cracking sounds of Bellicose’s bones snapping
but couldn’t drag her gaze away.  She grimaced when the queen tossed his
broken body up into the air and let it fall helplessly into her open mouth,
swallowing it whole before soaring up into the sky and vanishing over the top
of the gorge.

‘I hope for
your sake he tasted better than he smelled.’  Mistral muttered and braced
her back against the rock to push herself upright.  The adrenaline that
had given her strength was gone, leaving her drained.  Wiping the blood
away from her face with a shaking hand, Mistral staggered a few paces and dropped
to her knees, her head spinning nauseatingly.  She closed her eyes,
gulping in air to try and steady her reeling head.  She needed to focus,
get down to the ground and fight, but her legs seemed to be made of rubber,
refusing to support her weight.  Opening her eyes again, Mistral was taken
aback to see the queen hovering alongside the ledge, looking directly at
her.  Mistral gazed into bronze eyes burning with the heat of a thousand
smouldering fires and froze, unsure of what to do.  With a gusting sweep
of her wings the queen circled and returned to the same position, making her
intention plain. 

She was
inviting Mistral onto her back.

Mistral
hesitated ...
Fabian
.  His name pulsed in her mind like a
heartbeat.  Where was he?  For the merest part of a second her mind
flew to his to See a robed figure fleeing before him … he wasn’t in the gorge …
with a rush of relief she opened her eyes again and stared in disbelief at the
queen, still waiting patiently for her to mount.  Her doubts, her fears for
her brothers, her aching exhaustion, it all vanished as Mistral sprinted for
the edge and leapt into the air, carried on a wave of pure jubilation onto the
queen’s back.  She landed on golden scales smoother than glass, but warm
and strangely pliable beneath her splayed palms.  Trying not to look down,
Mistral crawled up her long back and positioned herself over jutting
wing-joints on the queen’s shoulders, pressing her legs against her smoothly
scaled sides as she would Cirrus.  The queen turned her head to look at
Mistral, her bronze eyes flashing with sudden fire.  She lifted her head
in an ear-splitting roar and with a single powerful downward thrust of her
wings she launched them up into the sky.  A shout of pure joy escaped
Mistral’s lips as the world dropped away to be replaced by an unending expanse
of blue.  They defied the strength of the wind with the speed of their
flight, but the air rushing past her could have been a summer breeze for all
Mistral felt.  She was protected by the vast scarlet wings on either side
and warmed by the fiery heat coming from the body beneath her ... and it was
heaven.  The majestic queen beneath her was everything she had ever
dreamed of, and for one glorious moment she was permitting Mistral into her
world.  Adrenalin ripped like wildfire through Mistral’s veins, expelling
itself in a wild shout of exhilaration.  In its aftermath came a brief
pang of regret; riding Cirrus was never going to be the same after this. 

They circled
high above the gorge while Mistral loaded her crossbow.  The sun had risen
higher in the sky and appeared in frequent bursts from behind scudding grey
clouds to transform the queen’s scales to dazzling gold.  Mistral was
blinded by each sudden blaze and forced to pause until the sun vanished behind a
cloud again.  The queen circled patiently, the instinctive bond between
them needing no instruction; not that Mistral would even have begun to know how
to control a creature the size of a small house.  She finished loading her
crossbow and snapped back the lock.  It was time to hunt.

The queen
immediately dropped into a steep dive and Mistral’s eyes widened, her euphoric
grin frozen in place by the sheer force of the air roaring past her.  The
tangle of white and dark figures on the gorge floor came hurtling up to meet
her with startling speed until the queen suddenly levelled out and swooped
around in a wide circle above the battle.  Mistral hastily wiped her
streaming eyes and fired at the nearest vampire, laughing wildly at the shocked
look on Cain’s face when she soared past on the back of the dragon queen. 
The queen arced up into the air and circled again while Mistral reloaded,
accelerating into a headlong dive the moment she heard the lock snap back, then
pulling up sharply and cruising over the fight to allow Mistral to pick off
another vampire.  

Not to be
denied her tithe, the queen’s fiercesome jaws put pay to any vampires foolish
enough not to cower in fear when she flew past.  Their terrified shrieks
and the repeated snap of the queen’s jaws were almost as satisfying to Mistral
as the sound of her own crossbow firing.  She gave a shout of laughter
when the vampires suddenly abandoned the fight and fled, running before the
avenging queen to be shot down by crossbow bolts or snatched up and devoured
whole.  Turning sideways to sweep along the narrow gorge, the queen
overtook them and lashed out with her tail, knocking them to the ground. 
The warriors were upon them in moments, making short work with their
swords.  Circling in the air above them Mistral watched the twins converge
on the last vampire, its dying scream split the air in a piercing shriek, then
it was over. 

Laying a hand
against the golden scales of the queen’s neck, Mistral sighed.  It was
time for her wild ride to end too.  Flying gracefully down to the western
end of the gorge away from the warriors, the queen landed and sunk close to the
ground to allow Mistral to climb down.  Mistral slid down from the queen’s
back and turned to look into her bronze eyes and smiled.  Phantasm was
right, love did take many forms.  The queen held her gaze for a moment
then gave a single quavering note of dragon song and thrust herself upwards in
the air.  With a strange sense of loss, Mistral watched the glorious
creature climb up into the sky and disappear from her sight. 

Fabian ...

His named
tugged at her mind, dragging her back to reality.  Turning around, Mistral
began to run towards the warriors and let her mind divide; experiencing the
same painless ripping sensation to See through his eyes and her own
simultaneously. 

His breath
came in ragged gasps; he had been running hard.  She felt his anger and
disappointment.  He had not caught his quarry. 

Mistral pulled
her mind back into her own, looking up to meet the blood-spattered faces of the
twins.  Phantom was staring at her in awestruck silence but Phantasm’s
expression was urgent.  ‘Are you alright?’

‘Never
better.’

He closed his
eyes briefly, then grabbed her arm and pulled her into a run back towards the
eastern end.  ‘I’ve got Cain’s spare kit.  He needs your help.’

Mistral looked
over at the fallen bodies they were running towards, ‘Who?’  She demanded
breathlessly.

‘Brutus.’

Mistral swore
and forced her legs to run faster, letting Phantasm lead her to where Brutus
was sprawled out.  Xerxes was knelt by his head, a stricken expression on
his face.

‘Move Xerxes,
you’re in my way!’ 

Mistral
roughly elbowed him aside and looked down at the deathly still face of her
brother.  A flap of skin the size of her hand hung down over his face, chalk-white
beneath a crimson slick of blood.  She knelt down and slipped a hand
inside his shirt and felt the beat of his heart.  It was weak, but
regular.  Wordlessly taking the kit pressed into her hands by Phantasm,
she unrolled it and pulled out a needle and thread.

‘What’re you
doing?’  Xerxes asked in a choked voice.

‘Stitching him
up Xerxes.’  Mistral responded shortly.  ‘Unless you prefer his new
look –’

‘He … he’s not
dead then?’ 

‘No Xerxes.’
 Mistral snapped.  ‘For some strange reason, possibly due to the fact
that half his scalp has been ripped away, he’s passed out.  Now please
shut up, and do stop crying.  It’s shattering your manly
reputation.’  Mistral held a needle up to the light to thread it while
Phantasm cleaned the wound and pressed the skin back into place. 

Xerxes
continued to stare his brother, tears running down his face, ‘I – I thought I
was going to have to tell our mother that her good son had died.’

Holding the
threaded needle carefully, Mistral turned to look at him, ‘Diannah has two good
sons Xerxes.  Now, if you’re going to insist on hanging around, hold this,
and pass me the iodine when I’ve finished.’