War Of The Alphas: Alpha - War of the Alphas: Alpha Part 32
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War of the Alphas: Alpha Part 32

Melchior launched at Stark with a dragon's shriek.

He was suddenly holding the triple-barreled golden revolver, even though he certainly hadn't been wearing enough clothes to hide it. The gun didn't look as ridiculously oversized in his hands as it had for Deirdre; it fit him comfortably, like an extension of his massive, muscular hands.

Arms lifting smoothly, he aimed the gun at Stark as the half-man, half-beast launched into the air.

Melchior's finger squeezed the trigger.

"No!" Deirdre shouted.

A fireball blasted from all three cannons at once.

For a heart-stopping moment, she thought that the fireball was going to strike Stark in the face. Powerful or not, Stark wasn't powerful enough to survive that strong a blast, that much fire, that deadly an attack.

But he jerked aside at the last moment.

He presented his flank instead of his skull. The concussive blast struck the center mass of his body. It consumed him in flames, devouring his fur, melting his flesh.

And he acted like he didn't even feel it.

Stark sank his forepaws into Melchior's chest. Claws sank into scaly pectorals. Hot blood spurted from the wounds, blazing hot, glowing in the darkness of the unseelie silver forest.

The force of Stark's momentum carried both shifters into the trees.

Away from Deirdre.

If he had waited just five more seconds to growl, she would have killed Melchior already.

"Damn it," she swore.

She didn't chase them. She wasn't going to get between a fighting dragon and bear wolf, not when she was finally alone with the monolith and its nauseatingly powerful magic.

Let them kill each other.

Deirdre stepped up to the edge of the circle to study the runes more closely. Some of them could have corresponded with the runes that she'd seen in the sound booth, but she wouldn't know unless she went back to look. She didn't know the runes well enough to remember them.

To break the spell, she just needed to stab the right part with the Ethereal Blade. Right?

"Right," she said out loud.

Roars shook the silver forest. She couldn't tell what noises belonged to dragon and which belonged to bear wolf, but judging by the fire among the silver trees, the fight wasn't going in Stark's favor. Once Melchior finished him off, he would come back for her.

She didn't have time to figure out the spell-she had no idea what she was looking at anyway.

Deirdre thrust it into the ring of runes.

The Ethereal Blade ripped out of her hand. It whipped around, flipping a one-eighty, and shot past her.

Deirdre jerked an inch to the left. The blade cartwheeled past her.

The Ethereal Blade vanished among the silver trees, rejected by the powerful magic protecting the obelisk.

No wonder Kristian hadn't been able to cut his way through it.

Melchior's serpentine form rose from among the trees, climbing into the sky. Deirdre had no idea what he was really doing-he couldn't be flying within Original Sin, not unless it had suddenly become a thousand times more spacious on the inside, but it looked like he was flying.

He roared, shooting a pillar of flame from his mouth into the air.

Stark must have been down.

And Deirdre was out of time.

The monolith was covered in ice. Deirdre was a creature of fire. She should have been able to burn it away-if she could just summon her flame powers.

She stepped over the circle of power. The magic didn't recognize her as a threat, so it didn't fling her into the trees the way that it had with the sword. It even allowed her to press her frigid hands against the ice encasing it.

The stone was so cold that her skin adhered to it. The phoenix inside recoiled.

Melchior landed to the ground behind her, shaking all of Original Sin. His heat radiated at her back.

"Come on," she whispered. "Do something right for once. Please."

Why couldn't she turn into a phoenix? Why couldn't she shift without Melchior's help? Why couldn't she control her anger?

If she changed, she could save the queen, save the election, save the gaeans.

Melchior roared again. Deirdre braced herself to be consumed by dragonfire, digging her fingers into the ice, squeezing her eyes shut.

It didn't happen.

She peered over her shoulder.

Melchior's back was to her. He was attacking something coming from the opposite direction that she couldn't see-the club over there was too dark, and the vibration of magic seemed to distort the trees.

No, it wasn't darkness.

There was too much movement within that darkness. Even at that distance, Deirdre could make out the thrashing of skeletal hands as shadow consumed the silver forest. Melchior's roar drowned out everything else, but she knew there would be screaming within the shadow.

For a moment, she was eight years old again, hiding underneath the blackberry bushes in her hometown. The Genesis void was closing in on her. Darkness and death consumed the world.

But this wasn't the end of the world. This was a soul-consuming sentient monster that wanted to destroy Deirdre.

"Tombs!"

She turned to see Everton Stark holding the triple-barreled dragon revolver in both hands.

There was no time to be relieved by the realization he had survived.

He was aiming that gun right at her.

Deirdre didn't think Stark would shoot her. If he wanted her dead so quickly, there were a thousand other times he could have tried to kill her, even commanding her heart to simply stop.

But this was the man who had ordered a dragon to kidnap his own children. What did Deirdre truly know about Stark?

Only that her reflexes weren't quite as good as his.

She leaped away the instant that she realized that he was aiming the dragon revolver at her, and that was a full instant after he had already squeezed the trigger.

A fireball erupted from the gun. It seemed to move slowly through the winter-bitten air, but Deirdre was slower. Her boots couldn't seem to propel her across the ice. Her heart seemed to be frozen between beats.

The fireball blazed over her left shoulder. She smelled burning hair.

It impacted the monolith.

The rock cracked from ground to its tip with the sound of a femur snapped in half. And then it fractured completely.

The force of the explosion sent Deirdre flying.

Her body hurtled past Melchior. She smashed into a silver tree behind his thrashing tail, hard enough to shake ice out of its branches. She hit the ground in a ball, throwing her arms over her head for protection as shattered rock pelted her and ice pinged to the ground.

A tentacle thrashed over her head. The sluagh seized upon the tree she had struck, ripping it from the ice.

Fluid spattered around her. Deirdre rolled away.

Melchior stomped toward her, melting ice under his massive heels, concrete cracking under his weight.

The stench of sulfur bore down upon her. His tongue thrashed between his fangs.

Deirdre was trapped between a sluagh and dragon.

She couldn't think, couldn't escape, couldn't even shout to Stark one last time.

"Stop."

The voice was calm and echoing, even more powerful than Stark's voice. Deirdre heard it through her whole body. It bored right through her skull and pounded into her brain.

Stop.

All of Original Sin grew still.

Deirdre peered from under her arm. Through Melchior's legs, she glimpsed a woman standing among the rubble of the monolith, which had been destroyed by the dragon revolver. She was brown-skinned, a little lighter in tone than Deirdre, with her dark hair woven into thick braids that fell around her shoulders. She was naked. Her skin was like jewels. Caramel diamonds.

Stark hadn't been aiming for Deirdre. He had identified the weak point in the spell containing the unseelie queen and taken action to destroy it. Deirdre had merely been standing in the way.

And he'd freed Ofelia Hawke.

Her head fell back, arms spread wide, and it seemed like she embraced the club. Like she folded the entire building and all of its millions of layers of magic into her arms, despite the fact it was impossibly huge and she was no bigger than the average woman.

The silver trees, sky, and ice vanished.

Deirdre was inside of a darkened club. Everything was concrete. There was a bar against the wall, along with a few couches and tables. Ordinary furnishings. An incredibly ordinary building.

A building too small for the bulk of a dragon's body and a sluagh engorged with vampire souls.

Something hard pressed against Deirdre's shin. She was suddenly lying beside Geoff, who was blue with cold even though Original Sin was suddenly a very pleasant seventy degrees.

Vidya and Ember were on the upper catwalk, frozen in mid-fight, fists lifted and wings flared.

Stark stood against the wall.

And the Ethereal Blade was only inches from Deirdre's fingers.

The unseelie queen drew all of the magic into herself piece by piece until she radiated with the power of it. She looked so impossibly huge. She never should have fit within the country, much less a single club.

Melchior growled. Deirdre could make out actual consonant sounds in the rumbling of his dragon voice. He was saying, "Ofelia."

"Come to me," she said.

The sluagh drew into itself, dwindling down to the size of a human being. It squealed as it shrank. It twisted with agony.

The queen repeated herself. "Come to me."

Deirdre jerked her knees to her chest, getting her legs out of the way. The sluagh shot past her. It stained the concrete floor with its acidic blood as it raced to Ofelia's open arms.

"No!" Deirdre cried.

Melchior had said that the sluagh could kill its masters. That was why Rhiannon didn't let it into the Winter Court anymore.

It would murder Ofelia.

But there was nothing that Deirdre could do to stop it. Ofelia had summoned the unseelie creature to her, and now it collided with its queen.

Deirdre didn't see what happened after that. Melchior was rounding on her, and if she thought that he'd been frightening before, it was nothing compared to how he looked now. Flames glowed on his scales. His heat built, filling Original Sin until it felt like an oven.

He rounded on her, serpentine neck lowering his head, mouth opening wide.

His jaw snapped.

Deirdre rolled out of the way just in time. A fang grazed the toe of her boot, leaving a deep furrow.

She scrambled across the floor. Grabbed the Ethereal Blade.

Melchior dropped on her, and Deirdre drove the Ethereal Blade upward, aiming it between two of the hand-sized scales on Melchior's breast.

It plunged deep into his leathery skin. The sword heated instantly.

He flung his head back, mouth opening in what should have been a roar. But instead of a scream escaping him, there only came flowers. Whole fistfuls of blossoms dribbled over his jaws.

But he didn't die.