bedeviled & beyond 07 - beset & bewildered by Sam Cheever Page B

the pits below.
    I wanted to scream...to cry...to smack him about the head and shoulders for risking himself uselessly for me. I was already done for. There’d been no reason for him to kill himself too.
    But I was beyond any of those things. I felt as if the impossible heat had drained my entire body of moisture, turning me to a husk of bone and seared skin that the smoke would preserve for all time.
    The roar of the fiery pits below slammed into me with the force of a laser storm. If my skin hadn’t already been blackened by fire, the pits would have burned me beyond recognition within seconds.
    Slayer screamed something I couldn’t hear, pointing at a spot over my shoulder. I tried to turn my head. It wouldn’t turn. My muscles had locked into rigidity from the excruciating pain.
    He formed himself into an arrow and plunged toward me. I wished I could tell him he’d be too late.
    My downward plummet ended abruptly and painfully. I slammed against something hard but strangely giving. Agony pierced one hand, driving up my arm and into my shoulder as I landed. A blessed cool swept over me, driving off the choking smog. When he was about twenty yards above me, Slayer did a roll in midair and covered himself in charcoal colored energy. His downward spiral slowed enough so that he slammed down beside me without pinging back off.
    “Dammit, Darma!” His handsome face folded into a mask of worry. I opened my mouth to tell him he was crazy for leaping to his death but nothing worked. My mouth was impossibly dry and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.
    He looked up, barked something over my head, and the ground beneath me undulated, coiling as if to explode. Slayer covered me in energy and gave me a smile. “Hold on, Princess. We’ve got some fancy flying to do.”
    That was when I realized I hadn’t hit the ground. The scaly red surface I lay upon shot straight upward and rolled toward the left, heading for the broken roofline of several charred castles. Beyond the scorched buildings another ragged horizon waited, thin clouds clinging to the uneven peaks.
    The Hades mountain range.
    I closed my eyes as the red dragon flew fast and hard toward that horizon, occasionally dropping several feet downward as flame seared the sky above us. Some of the attacks hit close enough to make Slayer suck in a breath and I realized he was taking the brunt of the damage for both of us.
    After a time, the evasive maneuvers stopped and the air turned cool. Slayer straightened with a grimace. “We’re over the mountains, Darma. Almost home.”
    Home.
    Then a thought occurred to me. My eyes shot open. I reached a charred hand to clasp Slayer’s shirt. “Caninra and her people! We can’t just leave them here.”
    Slayer wrapped his big hand around mine and smiled. “They’re fine. They’re working their way toward the mountains.”
    “But they’ll be killed. There are only three of them.” Tears filled my eyes as I remembered the small female I’d seen lying dead in the scow.
    “They’re not alone. Here...” He carefully pulled me into a seated position, tucking me back against his chest. The contact was painful against my ravaged skin but I pushed it aside, my eyes widening in wonder at what I saw.
    The sky was full of red dragons with Astra and Dialle’s guards astride them. “She sent help?” A deep sense of failure swamped me. Astra and Dialle had worked hard over the last months to craft a new kind of leadership. One that didn’t always fall to battle when things went wrong. Because of me...and my inept running of The Angel Network, all their hard work was out the window. “This is all my fault...”
    Slayer shook his head, pointing toward a pair of larger dragons at the lead, one black and one white. I recognized Astra’s dragon foster child Glynus and her mate Spencer. Slayer’s lips were a gentle touch against my cheek. “This is Torre’s fault. Nobody else’s. No one can be allowed to kidnap and threaten