The dragon knows blood even if it hasn’t satiated itself on it.
Yet. It makes its second promise even as it – he – scents the air for more blood. Because the predator is intimately, instinctually drawn to it. Because it hangs heavy on the light air, a crimson beacon leading to its disastrous conclusion. Because she is at the end of the trail. And no matter the twigs that catch his hair and poke through the thin membrane of his new wings. No matter that he hears the growing sound of shuffling movement towards the blood-source (predators, he thinks, moving in to finish the job). He winds through the gloom under the trees, stumbles but never sprawls over fallen branches in his haste. Because she is the disaster at the end of the trail – and he needs to find her before anyone else does.
But as he runs, the beast soars. It rattles his ribs like a caged prisoner desperate to fully escape. It squeezes his meaty heart in its claws, tries to control him. The taste of its freedom is not enough. It wants more and more. Sabrael gasps at the dragon’s power, gasps because his breath becomes shallower with each hoofbeat. He tries to concentrate on the path ahead, but the world seems to close in on itself around him. He – the dragon – hisses its pleasure, knowing the prey’s fall is only a matter of time.
Mine.
Sabrael staggers, shakes his head. Somewhere in the near distance, the sound of voices replaces the shuffling of leaves. His frustration burns him from the inside out. Because he will not be the first to find Wallace and god only knows who it will be instead. And who is to blame? The part of him that always lurked in the hollow spaces, the creature made of fire without a face (but oh, he can see it like his own reflection now), is not cooperative – it is his competition. And his body is the prize.
He fights against the dragon – against himself – before he has his answer. A truce if not a victory. Blood, he thinks, don’t you care for a taste? And of course the monster obliges, greedy for it.
They move together as one and reach her just after Reilly and Thiago. One of them is near but the other is Too Near. “Move,” Sabrael says like cold steel. His punctured wings lift from their forgotten place on the ground, flaring out defensively. The hollow is scent-painted with destruction and it takes all of his concentration to hold the beast at bay. Kill them, it urges. But they are not the purple-hued man he should have killed, the artist whose careful manipulation had sculpted the scene before him. Down to the finest details: the lace curling along her hips, the glimmer of tears, the red, red of spilled blood.
The half-horse takes single, reptilian-slow step towards the nearest stallion. His eyes flick between both of them, but it is the mare he addresses next. “Have they hurt you, Wallace?” Do I need to hurt them?
Sabrael