Of course, if he was burned to death he wouldn’t need it.
The newcomer lacked the wits to run away. Instead, he strode forward, scrabbling up the spheres toward the monster. The dragon didn’t strike, didn’t flame. It just stood, mouth hanging open, neck extended. Its gigantic sides went concave with each breath and its black tongue stuck out. A strident wheezing sound filled the cave.
The stranger reached up, grabbed the knife with both hands, and tugged it free. “Dragonstone,” he said, and his voice was sharp with fear. He put a hand on the dragon’s neck, looked directly into a golden eye, and commanded, “Change back, at once! Before it kills you!”
The monstrous dragon crumpled and twisted and shrank into the naked white body of a woman, lying limp and still with a bleeding wound in her breast. In the continuously flickering light the red blood gleamed the same color as the blade still gripped in the stranger’s fist.
Zee staggered back as he saw Vivian’s face, her hair, her body. Tears flowed silent from beneath closed lids, but she didn’t move, other than a slow rise and fall of her chest.
“Talk to me,” the man said, kneeling by the body and pressing his hand over the wound. Blood welled up between his fingers and over his hand. “Wake up and tell me what to do. Can you hear me?”
Zee edged closer. He’d seen a glint of steel near where the man was kneeling. His sword. Exultation grew within him. This was not Vivian, but the sorceress, at his mercy. Fate had given her to him after all, led him to use the stone knife when he thought he was fighting an entirely different foe. And now here was her accomplice, distracted and an easy target.
Another foot. Six inches. Slow and easy. There. His left hand curved around the hilt, tightened.
He raised the sword, ready for the death blow, even though his sense of honor clamored against it. Stab a man in the back, Zee? Unarmed, unwarned?
The man is in league with her.
“Vivian, you can’t die now,” the man said, dropping the knife and pressing both hands to the wound. “Wake up. I know you can hear me.”
Zee checked himself in midswing, overbalanced, and almost fell. His stomach twisted, his heart hammered in his ears. He’d almost murdered an innocent man, somebody who had fallen under the spell. All too easy to do, as he well knew.
Put things right, kill the enchantress, and the man would come back to his senses. He circled around and stood over the unconscious woman on the other side, putting the tip of the sword to her breast.
“What are you doing?” The man’s eyes were keen; his bearded face bore lines of strength and grief and a quick intelligence. He didn’t look like a man under enchantment.
“You think it’s Vivian,” Zee said. “But it’s not. It’s a thing that needs killing.”
Strong words, but still he hesitated. So much blood. Her face was dead white and so very still, except for the slow tears that continued to well from beneath closed lids and flow silently down her cheeks. Zee longed to gather her into his arms and soothe her, to bandage the wounds and heal her, but it wasn’t Vivian, couldn’t be.
He pressed the tip of the sword against her chest and demanded, his voice harsh, “Where is the Key? Tell me, and I’ll ease your death.”
The other man’s hands withdrew and Zee heard the familiar sound of a shell pumped into a shotgun, but he never looked up to see the weapon. Unwilling, disbelieving, his eyes caught the glimmer of scales on a white shoulder, noticed the absence of a carved stone pendant lying over this woman’s heart. And then her eyes opened, wide and golden, bright with tears. Her lips parted to speak, her voice little more than a whisper. “Would you really kill me, Zee?”
His heart contracted in grief and dismay. In the next instant, a heavy weight caught him on the back of the head and he plunged forward into a darkness that was beyond despair.
Thirty-one
Weston’s eyes felt like someone had scrubbed them with sand, leaving a liberal supply behind. His muscles ached from clenching against the chill. The rock he sat on had seemed smooth enough hours ago but had long since begun to dig into his backside. Soon enough the sun would be blazing down and he’d be wishing for the predawn coolness.
Discomfort kept him awake, and watchfulness was in order. Anything that had ever been dreamed in any nightmare since the dawn of time could show up in the Between. And what emerged from the mouth of the cave could be even worse. His shotgun lay across his knees, loaded and ready, for all the good it would do.
His prisoner was still unconscious, propped up against the exterior wall of the cave with his hands bound tightly in front of him, but Weston didn’t trust him for a second. He would have killed the bastard, given him a face full of lead at point-blank range, if Vivian hadn’t spoken his name at that last moment. Zee. Obviously not the man she’d believed him to be, but Weston wasn’t going to kill him without her permission. Unless he had a damned good reason.
He was praying for a reason.
The raven stood on the stone only a foot or two away, head cocked to one side, eyeing him. It croaked once, gravely, and flew off to a farther distance. How the bird had managed to follow him he’d never know. It certainly hadn’t been with him under water, able to swim through the door. But there it was in the Dreamworld, waiting, when he came out the other side.
As for the penguin, it stood at Vivian’s feet, black eyes never leaving her face for an instant. Weston watched her just as closely; it was all he could do other than apply pressure to stop the bleeding and make her as comfortable as possible. He’d wrapped her in a blanket, elevated her feet to counteract the effects of shock, made a pillow out of his own warm flannel shirt. He’d have given her the T-shirt too, if he’d have thought it would make any difference to her comfort.
Her skin looked bloodless, her forehead furrowed with pain, her breathing too rapid, too shallow. When he put his ear to her heart, it fluttered like bird wings, quick and light. At least she wasn’t bleeding anymore, but that didn’t ease his worry much. He’d heard of dragonstone—that was one tale he had listened to when his father told it, mostly because it also involved the legend of the dragon slayers, and an adventurous hero had appealed to him. But what effect the stone would have on Vivian in human form he couldn’t begin to guess.
The prisoner stirred, a low groan escaping him before he was awake enough to contain himself. Weston watched him shift his position, sitting up straighter with his back against the stone, shivering a little, trying to rotate and ease the muscles in shoulders pulled tight by the bonds. Weston had stripped him out of his T-shirt after he knocked him out just to see if there were any fatal hidden wounds. There hadn’t been. But his torso was a mass of bruises, his right arm bloody from a laceration running from shoulder to elbow. Another wound marked a line down his ribs.
Injured, bound, and weaponless, he still had a dangerous look about him. Weston didn’t trust him for a minute. He cradled the shotgun, hoping for an opportunity to use it.
“No need for that,” the man said, his voice rough with thirst and pain. “Not going anywhere.”
“Can’t see as I put much stock in your word. Zee, is it?”
A nod of assent, that was all. Not much of a talker, this one. “Vivian worried about you. All-fired set on your rescue. And when you find her, you try to kill her. What sort of man does that?”
“I thought . . .” Zee stopped, his face closing like a shutter, unreadable and self-contained. In a moment he said only, “How bad is it?”
“Bad enough.” Weston didn’t know the answer, not yet.