Page 42 of Dragon Cursed
The shadow lifted what might have been a hand.
"I came only to see her.And to take what is mine.Come here, little daughter.Come to me.Your blood is owed.It has been owed for ten generations.Come and pay it."
Poppy didn’t move.
Alsander shifted.
There was no time aesthetics.He let the dragon up out of him in a single brutal sundering.The chamber was suddenly too small for what he was.His wings struck the high stone.His tail swept a shelf of his own books to the floor.He didn’t care.He did not care.He opened his great black throat and gave Laoch every bit of fire he had ever held back.
The fire went clean through the shadow.
It didn’t consume the creature hiding in its depths.
The half-formed figure came apart and reformed two feet farther from Poppy, hissing, and the eyes in it were furious now, no longer playful.
Alsander took the half-second of distance and put himself bodily between them.His vast scaled bulk filled the chamber.His head lowered.His teeth bared.The air in the lair was hot and bright with his fire.
It wasn’t enough.
He knew it wasn’t enough.
Laoch was reforming.Laoch was always reforming.Alsander had thrown everything he had at this thing, and it had only retreated.
He knew back then it hadn’t died.
He didn’t know if itcoulddie.
Behind him, Poppy made a sound.A small, startled sound — as if she had walked into something invisible in the dark.
The dragon turned its great head.
She was on her feet against the stone wall.
Her eyes were wide.
The fur slid off her shoulders.
Her hand had risen, trembling, to the pendant at her throat — throwing a clean white light across the firelit chamber.It didn’t behave like firelight.Didn’t flicker.
Poppy was looking down at her hand, shock written clearly across her face.
Laoch saw the light, too, andhissed.
"No."The shadow recoiled.Smaller.Sharper.The voice was no longer slow and amused.It was a wire pulled tight."No, no, no, what are you, what are you doing —"
Poppy lifted her hand.
Not toward Laoch.Toward Alsander.As if she meant to put her hand on his scaled flank to steady herself —
Her palm opened.
The same clean white light that lived in the pendant rolled down her arm, out across her open hand, and into the air between her and the shadow at the back of the chamber.
The light moved like water, rolling across the floor of his lair in slow, undulating waves.Where it touched the shadow, the shadow thinned.Where it touched the stone, the stone was cleaned of the dark that had begun to sink into it.
Laoch screamed; a small, high pitched sound.Almost human.
It was the sound of a thing in pain.
