tree. Still, the ground got hotter and hotter, so hot the adult dragons started to catch fire.”
“I thought dragons breathed fire. Shouldn’t they be fireproof?” Honestly, Martin expected better from Will’s stories.
“This was eldritch flame. The dry grass caught fire, and the dragons caught fire, and all the hills, from peak to peak and along the valley of bones—it all went up in flame.”
Martin stared, waiting for the next part, the happy ending that Will always finished up with. “Then what?” he asked, his voice a whisper.
“They all died. Even the little dragon, because he couldn’t fly very far yet. That’s why there aren’t any dragons anymore.”
“But—Will, that is not a good story, I’m sorry to say. What was the voice? What was it saying? Was it the devil, come from hell? It had better not be, because that’s—that’s—cheating.”
“No, it wasn’t any of those things. It was just the way the story ended.”
Chapter One
It was hot—by God, it was hot—and the ground beneath him was rough and dry. In his head sounded a steady, rhythmic pounding. Martin felt that while it was unlikely that a sinister menace was about to spring up from the earth and consume the last of his race, he couldn’t quite rule it out.
When he opened his eyes, there were neither unnatural flames nor shrieking dragons, but there was not much of anything else either. It was dim, but even that faint light was enough to make him squeeze his eyes shut. His head was—really very bad, no use mincing words. All of him was bad, but his chest and his head were unspeakable.
“Damnation,” he rasped, those three syllables taking all the air from his lungs. “Will,” he managed a moment later, because hadn’t Will just been telling him that terrible story?
There was the sound of chair legs scraping across a stone floor, and then a cool hand on his forehead. “Sweetheart,” said Will, because he was an idiot with no sense of self-preservation.
“Don’t,” Martin said, and batted Will’s hand away. Or at least he tried to. He must not have been successful, because the end result was that now Will was holding his hand. Their fingers were intertwined and Martin lacked the strength, physical or mental, to disentangle himself. Besides, Will’s hand was cool and familiar, and he was aware he was holding on to it like a lifeline.
“Do you know where you are?” Will asked.
No he bloody well did not know where he was. “Thousand thousand years ago,” he mumbled.
Beyond the pounding in his head, he heard a vial being unstopped, then felt a cool hand on his cheek, followed by the unmistakable foulness of willow bark tincture in his mouth. He tried to spit it out—dignity was quite beyond him—but Will stroked his hand down Martin’s throat and made a truly regrettable soothing sound, and Martin did not know whether to try to recoil or to purr like a cat. Before he could decide, he was asleep.
When he woke, the room was brighter, and that was unfortunate in every way, because it turned out that light was almost as ghastly as whatever was happening on the left side of his chest. For lack of anything better to do, he opened his eyes slowly, trying to make them adjust. Maybe the pain in his head would distract him from everything else. After he got one eye a third of the way open, he could make out the rough wood frame of the bed he lay upon. Beyond that were a pair of bare windows, clouded and cracked. Above his head was a ceiling crossed with dark wood beams. He was vaguely aware of a fire crackling somewhere behind him. When he breathed tentatively through his nose, careful not to strain his lungs, he could tell that it was a wood fire, not coal. On the one hand, he was more than a little alarmed to find himself in a totally unfamiliar place; on the other, this was certainly not his aunt’s London townhouse, nor was it Lindley Priory. Relieved to have established that, he let his eyes drift shut again.
The next time he woke, it was once again dark. Somehow he had managed to roll onto his side. From this position, he could see a fire burning high and bright in a stone hearth. Before the fire was a plain, straight-backed wooden chair, and in that chair was Will Sedgwick, fast asleep, his mouth slightly open, his hair a disgrace, his jaw covered in