Chapter Nineteen
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With love, water is enough; without love, food doesn’t satisfy.
No.
Wolfe couldn’t believe his eyes.
But there it was: a monstrous white dragon with black horns and thorns as thick as his legs all along its scaly back.
Five of the same sharp thorns spouted from the tip of its tail like a spiked mace. Its scales were a metallic white with light bluish undertones, the same color of Guinevere’s dress.
Had it really been a dress? Was it perhaps part of the monster’s body all along?
No time to speculate; he could only take in what he saw.
Massive, muscular legs with scale-covered claws, more reptilian than the red dragon’s, which, in contrast, looked like they were from a giant raptor.
While Merlin looked more like a griffin with his build, this dragon looked like a nightmare from the deep. At once elegant and sleek, but also startlingly ugly with its piranha-like teeth and flat black eyes.
Long, whip-like extensions protruded from its face, on the chin, around its muzzle and along the sides where gills opened and closed as it breathed. They looked like the whiskers of a catfish. Also unlike the red dragon, this one had no wings.
Taken in all, Wolfe assessed it to be a water dragon who lived beneath lakes and seas. This cavern, then, was most likely Guinevere’s, not Merlin’s. The treasure beneath the water was hers as well, just like the “pitiful pet” she kept chained to the rock.
He exchanged a look with Sorin, whose borrowed dagger glinted in the pale glow radiating from the white dragon’s body.
Wolfe shifted his grip on his own sword and dagger, edging around the creature to find its weak point, taking its measure.
The thing was so massive, it blocked his view of Rui, Ere, Morgan and Tristan. It blocked most of the red dragon too.
Its scales looked thick and impenetrable against any man-made weapon. The disks were as round and big as shields, overlapping each other like fish scales. They seemed welded together, without any gap to insert a blade.
How were he and Sorin to wound it?
Even the lid-less eyes looked at them from behind a protective clear casing, like a true reptile. Wolfe knew that it would be thicker and harder than the sturdiest glass.
He needed more time to find the dragon’s weakness. There had to be one.
He prayed fervently there was one.
“Before you smite us with your heart-palpitating mightiness,” Ere’s nonchalant voice carried over the barricade of the creature’s form, “can you please explain where we all went wrong to displease you so?”
Incredibly, the white dragon cocked its head to listen.
“Why do you need to kill the red dragon anyway? And why lure the dragon-slayer here to do it? You seem to have done a bang-up job tearing him to pieces already. Well done. Brava. ’Tis a masterpiece of sadism.”
Guinevere turned her arrow-shaped, reptilian head toward the speaker, while one eye rolled sideways to keep Sorin and Wolfe in her sight.
“I owe you no explanation, human,” she growled. “Your death is imminent.”
“But what do you have to lose by indulging my curiosity for a few more moments?” he persisted in that same bored tone.
“For those of us who might live to serve your evil genius, please enlighten us poor fools so that we could cower in your brilliance and magnificence and repent.”
Wolfe and Sorin edged slowly around her body, moving by incremental degrees so as to not make a single splash of water or sound.
While she kept one eye on them, and presumably the other eye on Rui and Ere, she answered without opening her mouth. This entire time, she’d been speaking to them through a voice that seemed to resonate from outside of her body.