The wyrm took advantage of his distraction and crashed into his shield with its tail, overpowering it with sheer force. Mal clung to the head under his claws desperately; he couldn’t portal in this kind of wind, and he didn’t dare let go, even as the spell pulling the wyrm back to be caged unraveled in the air and the wyrm slithered back up into the clouds.
Then the second head bit into him and ripped him loose, tossing him end over end into the storm.
For a moment, Mal only tumbled, helpless and s
tunned. Then he cast a swift healing spell to stem the worst of the bleeding and he tried to make sense of where he was and where the wyrm was.
Out of the cloud and rain, a grinning head came sweeping with jaws wide to snap at his ravaged wings. Mal dived for a portal, missed it in the driving wind, and slammed into the body of the wyrm beyond.
Landing in feathers was somehow less comfortable than it sounded when the feathers were tipped in knives.
Mal kicked off and fell backwards through the clouds until he could spread his wings and fly again with his damaged wings.
Think! he berated himself. Act! Fight! His magic stores were draining too quickly, and he couldn’t risk harming the shifters who had so selflessly given it to him.
The wyrm spiraled down towards him, lazily, and batted at him with a playful tail.
It was a game, Mal realized as he dodged the tail with effort and feathers skidded off a hasty shield when he wasn’t quite fast enough. The wyrm was toying with him, confident in its victory now.
Their battle, swiftly becoming one-sided, was taking them out over the storm-raged jungle and Mal had a sudden cold moment of terror. Was the wyrm deliberately taking them to Scarlet’s grove?
The tree... one of the heads hissed dismissively, as if it felt his thought. We stopped the tree.
She is powerless, the other smirked.
To Mal’s horror, the storm was effortlessly flattening the giant trees of the rain forest below them, ripping them up by their roots and tossing them aside as if they were tiny saplings. He had a glimpse of the clearing, just beyond.
Scarlet...
Mal closed his eyes and dug as deep into the magic as he dared, waiting until the two baleful heads were close together and then casting a shield not over himself, but over the wyrm’s two heads, like throwing a bag over two squirming snakes.
He had only a heartbeat of optimism before the two heads, growling, moved in opposite directions and ripped the shield into a spray of sparks.
Before we take the world back, we will make you suffer, the wyrm snarled in harmony. We will make you pay the sins of your forefathers in the blood we draw from your sides and the pain we will make you scream.
But when Mal expected the feathered creature to rip his heart out by upending Scarlet’s tree, it only growled into the storm and the wind sent him tumbling as the wyrm chased him like a cat chasing a crippled mouse.
Mal spread badly damaged wings, breathing what he knew was his last healing spell into them as he fled back towards the ocean, hoping only to draw the monster and the storm it was making from Scarlet’s unprotected grove.
Chapter 28
Scarlet had never felt so helpless. Not as a new dryad, not wandering the streets in England with her dying tree. Not when she was most sure she would lose her resort. Not even feeling her tree’s life slip away after she had been salted.
Her forest was tapped, the life energy that they had shared with her so selflessly drained to nothing. Even if they survived the storm and captured the wyrm, she didn’t know if the jungle would ever thrive again.
And there was nothing she could do for her mate.
She stood at the edge of the bar deck, as if she could do anything to protect the staff hiding there. They were crouched behind whatever shelter they could find—toppled tables, chunks of rubble from the restaurant deck above.
And above them was the terrible aerial battle, half obscured by charcoal clouds and blowing debris.
The wyrm tore chunks from Mal’s hide, ripped at the webbing of his wings, batting him out of the sky like he was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. Every time, Mal returned to try to drag it back, every time more slowly. Bright shields flared more briefly with each hit.
He was being idly savaged, Scarlet realized. The only reason that the wyrm hadn’t left the island for its freedom yet was to exact painful revenge from Mal himself, playing with him like a cat with its helpless prey. Mal’s magic was finite, his ability to heal was slowing and his protections were failing.
Bastian was suddenly standing beside her. “He’s released us,” he said, sounding weary.
Scarlet felt her chest seize with pain. Mal had only his own magical reserves remaining, and she knew they would not last long.