Chapter 692: Round Two, You Ugly Bastard

The second wave came early.

Thirty miles south had been Dexmon’s estimate. The estimate was wrong. The second wave had been closer than anyone sensed because the second wave had been hiding behind the storm that the first wave’s storm dragons were generating, using the weather as a curtain and the curtain had been thicker than Drakenfell’s scouts could penetrate.

They emerged from the cloud cover like teeth from a jaw.

Fresh riders. Fresh spotters. Fresh dragons whose corruption was darker and more entrenched than the first wave, the kind of darkness that belonged to creatures whose corruption had been applied deliberately rather than hastily, the difference between a lock picked in a hurry and a lock installed by a locksmith.

And they were carrying Dark Fae that the first wave had left behind.

The assumption had been clean. First wave: spotters and riders eliminated, dragons cleansed, situation controlled. The assumption had been wrong because the assumption had been built on the idea that every hostile body had been accounted for, and accounting required visibility, and visibility in a storm generated by corrupted storm dragons was a fucking joke.

Gavriel was standing on Solara when the second wave hit.

He had just cleansed his ninth dragon. His green magic was running hot, pouring from his hands with a fluency that was improving by the minute. His body had found the rhythm. Jump. Land. Hands down. Green surges. Corruption flees. Move. The repetition was converting panic into procedure, and procedure was the closest thing to control his magic had ever experienced.

He scanned the next target. A storm dragon, riderless, drifting forty feet below his position. Easy jump. Clean angle. He’d been making harder landings for the last ten minutes and his confidence had graduated from "this might work" to "this is going to work" to "I am actually good at this," which was the exact moment the universe decided to correct his attitude.

He jumped. Landed clean. Both boots on scales. Hands reaching for the spine.

A blade swung at his head.

Gavriel ducked. Reflex. The blade whistled through the space his skull had occupied a quarter second ago, close enough that the wind from it moved his hair.

There was still a rider on this dragon.

The rider was standing at the base of the dragon’s neck, balanced on the scales with the easy, practiced stance of a combatant who had been fighting on dragon backs long before Gavriel had started treating them as trampolines. Tall. Dark armor that absorbed light rather than reflecting it. Hands wrapped in dark magic so concentrated it looked liquid, the energy pooling in his palms and crawling up his forearms in veins that pulsed with their own heartbeat.

High-ranking. The armor said it. The stance said it. The magic said it louder than both.

Gavriel drew his blade. Green magic wrapped the steel before his fingers finished closing around the hilt.

The Dark Fae tilted his head. Studied Gavriel’s face the way a collector studies a piece he thought he’d lost.

"You." The voice carried recognition. Warm recognition. The warmth was obscene because it belonged to a predator recognizing prey that had escaped, and the recognition was producing pleasure rather than anger. "The last time I did this, I killed you."

Gavriel’s blood cooled by three degrees.

"You survived, though. I see you have evolved since then." The Dark Fae’s head tilted further, his dark eyes tracking Gavriel’s face with an attention that was intimate in the worst possible way. "I’ve been curious about that. Do you remember me?"

Gavriel’s mind sprinted through every memory it owned. The siege months ago. The clearing. Solara curled around his body. Bleeding out. Serena’s hand in his mouth. Gold blood on his tongue.

He remembered being revived. He remembered Serena’s tears. He remembered Elara’s silver magic hitting his wounds and stopping cold because the dark magic was eating everything she pushed in. He remembered the taste of gold blood and the sparks and the warmth that started in his mouth and spread through his veins and rebuilt his body from the inside.

He did not remember the hit. The actual moment the dark magic connected, the blast that should have killed him, the face behind the blast. That memory was a hole. The kind of hole that trauma carves when the brain decides the recording is too expensive to keep.

But the body remembers what the mind discards. His chest tightened. His ribs ached in a phantom pattern that followed the exact trajectory of wounds he no longer carried. His body was screaming yes, you know this man, while his brain was screaming I lost the file.

"Can’t say I do," Gavriel replied, his voice carrying a calm he was manufacturing in real time. "You’re going to have to refresh my memory."

The Dark Fae smiled. The smile belonged on a headstone.

"Gladly."

Dark magic detonated from both palms.

The blast was nothing like the arrows. Nothing like the low-level Dark Fae whose deaths Gavriel’s green had been containing all night. This was concentrated, targeted, carrying the density of a weapon designed to hit one person and ensure that person stopped existing.

Gavriel’s green magic erupted from his body in a wall.

The two forces collided with a concussive CRACK that shook the dragon beneath them and sent shockwaves rippling through the storm clouds in every direction. Green met black and the meeting was violent, the energies grinding against each other with a sound that lived between a scream and a forge.

The green held.

But the impact launched Gavriel backward. His boots left the scales. His body crossed ten feet of dragon spine before he caught himself on a ridge, one hand locked around the scale, his body hanging off the side with his legs in open air.

Blood ran from his nose. Thick. Steady. Dripping off his chin and falling into the dark below.

He hauled himself back up. His vision was doubled at the edges. The green magic was still wrapped around him but it was dimmer now, the containment field he’d been maintaining across the entire battlefield flickering at the margins.

The Dark Fae watched him climb back onto the dragon with the patient amusement of a hunter watching wounded prey stand up.

"Interesting. My blast should have killed you the first time we met. This explains it." His dark eyes tracked the green magic pulsing around Gavriel’s body. "You’re Fae. And powerful. Far more powerful than anything I’ve encountered in a wolf." He paused. "The gold blood saved you last time. Your Fae magic is saving you now. I wonder which one runs out first."

Gavriel spat blood off the side of the dragon. "Let’s find out."