Hellbender - Dana Cameron Page 0,75

it. And I worried what kind of spillover would affect the situation at home.

I had to pick a side and neither choice seemed tenable. But despite his bad—no, dragon-like—behavior in starting this fracas, Quarrel was my friend. He’d come to my aid on several occasions, after all.

“Quarrel, I demand you cease this!” I shouted, more in the hope of giving myself some courage for what I was about to do. I opened myself up to the artifacts that had attracted the dragons, hoping that I could find some that would enhance my vampiric abilities to persuade.

Immediately, a number of things happened. Naserian, the oldest, began losing artifacts to me and turned in rage to attack.

“Naserian! You pledged yourself to me! Stop!” But she was caught up in the frenzy.

I reached into my bag of tricks and found what I was looking for: the katana from the temple outside Kanazawa. Having gotten her attention, I threw it at Naserian, and it turned, instantly, into a collar. She was now under my control. It was possibly the extra power I’d gained from battling Naserian that kept me able to act and plan, because my perspective changed dramatically.

I could now see through her eyes.

“We must stop the others!”

No time for subtlety. I saw Quarrel clobber Yuan, trying to steal the jewels the younger dragon had taken, so I replicated the collar and clapped it on Yuan’s neck with a snap of my fingers and a flicker of thought while he was distracted. The more I had power over them, the more the artifacts from their hides, only newly enmeshed, slammed into me. I was knocked to the ground. No matter—I was becoming very skilled at thinking and getting the stuffing knocked out of me at the same time.

I gained another pair of eyes and another will subject to my own. I was starting to get dizzy, trying to keep the dragons under control, and I could feel blood streaming from my nose, my eyes, my ears. I diverted a small fraction of my power to maintaining me, and turned to Quarrel.

The hydra was trying to pull him from the Castle, which by this time, had grown into a cavern full of treasure to my dragon-lent eyes. I realized that the Castle was whatever the perceiver believed it to be. Quarrel was stubbornly refusing to leave the pile of treasure he was sitting on, assimilating so many jewels that he was a blur of gold and rich color over his midnight blue-black. He turned, hissed, and slashed at the überdragon. At the same time, he dug himself into the pile of jewels, wallowing, as if increasing the contact with them would speed his assimilation of them. With the combined forces of Naserian and Yuan, I felt myself growing taller and becoming heavily armored. I summoned up a weapon and found myself with a giant iron-pronged mace. I bashed at the überdragon, more to fend it off than to damage it, I hoped. A bop on the nose to get its attention, no more. We were the interlopers, and my friends were the thieves.

The hydra turned on me. Roaring, it clapped its clawed hands together. The resulting concussion knocked me over again. I skidded across the floor and rolled to my feet. I struck my mace on the floor in return. The hall reverberated and shook. A faint crack ran across the floor.

“Quarrel, in the name of all that is holy, I bid you: ‘Knock it the fuck off!’ ” I turned and slammed my fist into Quarrel, just managing to get his attention. When he looked up, his amazement at what he saw slowed him down long enough and I collared him the same as I had the others. A faint line of spiderweb thinness and starlight brightness now ran between me and each of the dragons. Three sets of eyes and three sets of desires to tamp down. With Quarrel temporarily reined in, I now had three thin leashes in one hand, a miracle of shimmering fineness in comparison with the dull iron brutality of the mace in my other hand.

The überdragon pulled up cobblestones and chunks of pavement to hurl at me. More dings in my new armored form. More bruises down to the bone and marrow, and the strain on me was staggering. For the first time, I could really see what my armor and jewels looked like. Sebastian Porter had described a kind of golden nimbus around me; I saw the