Ilona Andrews - Dark and Stormy Knights

Dozens of serrated teeth dug into his leg. Hot, sharp pain streaked up his spine. He felt something crack more than he heard it, and another wave of agony washed over him. An involuntary scream exploded inside him, but he couldn’t pull in enough breath to let it out. The silent scream coursed through his chest, sapping him of what little strength remained.

Dizziness slid over him, threatening to steal his consciousness. His muscles grew weak and began to tremble from lack of oxygen. He wasn’t going to last much longer. He had to do this now.

As the Terraphage swallowed him, his arms slid down its throat first. He tried to pull the trigger, but it was coated with saliva and who knew what else. His finger slipped off. He tried again.

Numbness vibrated through him. Blackness closed down around him until even the twinkling stars in his vision disappeared. His strength faded, making even the small movement of one finger difficult.

Ryder gritted his teeth and focused all his concentration on that one little digit. His finger twitched. The rifle bucked in his grip.

He didn’t hear the explosion, but he felt it. Pressure slammed into him like a giant fist. The heat seared his hands and face. He became weightless for a brief instant before he hit something hard. Pain engulfed him, and he could no longer fight its pull. He let go and let the numbing blackness swallow him whole.

Ryder woke up to the feel of a little hand squeezing his. He cracked one eye open and hissed at the brightness of the light surrounding him.

“He’s awake, Mama.”

Anne. That was Anne talking. He’d know that sweet voice anywhere.

“Careful, honey. Don’t hurt him,” said Jordan.

As if that were possible. He already hurt about as much as a body could. Every joint ached, and the pain in his leg was enough to tell him that it was either broken or missing completely. He wasn’t yet ready to see which.

He forced his eyes open and saw Anne’s pretty face beaming down at him. Her blue eyes were glowing with happiness. “You killed the monster,” she told him, smiling.

“I did?”

“Yeah. Big-time. You’re a hero.”

Ryder nearly snorted. Only the thought of how it would make his ribs ache held him back. “You think so, huh?”

“Yep. You even killed the monster in my dreams. They’re all gone now.”

“That’s enough, Anne,” said Jordan. “Let him rest.”

Ryder squeezed her precious hand before letting her go.

He’d saved her. He’d killed the Terraphage. Not only that, but that low pulse of sound that had once beat in time with her heart was gone. Anne was no longer a Beacon. She was safe—a normal little girl with her whole life ahead of her.

Knowing he had played a part in that felt pretty damn good.

Jordan sat on the side of the bed, taking up the spot left open by Anne’s departure. Her fingers were soft but strong as they moved over his palm. “You’re going to be okay. Your leg is broken in two places and you have a ton of stitches and a few burns, but the doctors say you’ll survive.”

“That’s good to hear.” It would be even better once he got some pain medication, but that could wait for a few more minutes. He didn’t want to look weak in front of her, not when she was staring at him as though he’d handed her the world.

“You’re a hero,” she whispered. Tears shimmered in her blue eyes. “You saved my baby.”

The gratitude made him uncomfortable, so he tried to shrug it off. The pain in his joints stopped him from pulling off the whole nonchalant act. “No big deal.”

“It is to me. Thank you.”

Ryder swallowed down an awkward lump of emotion. “Sure. Whatever.”

“So, what now?”

Three months later, Ryder followed the call of the Beacon to a small, sandy Nevada town no one would really miss.

The low, nearly inaudible pulse of the Beacon’s heart thrummed nearby, coming from the town’s only grocery store. He wasn’t sure who the Beacon would be this time—man, woman, old, young—but it hardly mattered to him. Not anymore.

His grandfather’s dented plate mail rattled as he walked into the store. He knew he looked ridiculous, but that was okay by him. Lying in a hospital bed again wasn’t. This time, he’d come prepared to do battle. Another one of the Terraphages was going to die tonight. The rifle strapped to his back would help. The explosives would help even more.

There were ten grenades dangling from his waist, and he was going to need every one of them. And then some.

Shannon K. Butcher once spent a summer chasing tornadoes with the National Severe Storms Lab in Oklahoma on an undergraduate research project. A former engineer, she now writes full-time. She lives with her husband and their son. Vist her at www.ShannonKButcher.com .

I got a letter from the Pope in the morning mail. Handwritten. I was inclined to shred it, along with the credit card offers and the pleas from charities, but I felt a little guilty. Not because of the sender, but because of the quality of the envelope. They sure don’t buy the Holy Father the cheap stuff at Wal-Mart; this was crisp, beautiful linen paper, probably made by hand by some revered, tottering artisan, and there was an embossed crossed-keys seal on the flap. Too nice to shred.

He probably knew that. Which was why he’d sent it and not some officious underling with a cheaper stationery budget.

I shut the door to my small apartment against the fierce Phoenix heat and shuffled over to the kitchen table, next to the window. I moved aside the Dragon’s Eye and sorted through things until I found my reading glasses, perched them on the end of my nose, and then ripped open the envelope with a dagger that had once belonged to some king or other. The fat, homicidal one? Well, that described most of them.

Inside, the folded sheet of paper matched the envelope. Another embossed seal on the page and somewhat messy writing that I worked out bit by bit. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, and I don’t get to use my Italian much.

Most honored Lisel, it read. Forgive me for not paying you the courtesy of a visit, but it isn’t as easy to slip away and pass anonymously these days as it used to be, in the days before television and the Internet.

Actually, I was just glad he hadn’t tried it. The last thing I needed was an ineptly disguised pontiff trailing a mile-wide caravan of paparazzi to the doorstep of my little retirement community.

I have been informed that you are shortly to step down from your post as Dragonslayer, after so many centuries of service. I, and the entire world, remain in your debt. You have been a good and faithful servant of the Church and God, and I offer you my personal blessing and thanks as you lay down your glorious burden and pass this mighty responsibility to a new generation.

There were several things wrong with this. First, I wasn’t retiring, I was being made redundant—and thanks, God, or whoever was running the machinery out there, for making me feel even more useless than I already did. Second, it was hardly a “mighty responsibility.” Maybe it had been when I’d taken the job seven hundred and forty-two years ago; in those days, there had been many dragons alive, all of them deadly and cunning and determined to exterminate as many humans as they could, with whatever means they could find.

Today, there was one dragon left. One. And he lurked out in the sands of the Egyptian desert, comforted by the heat in his bones for the same reason I’d retired to Phoenix. He was old and tired, and he had outstayed his welcome in the world.

Glorious, it was not. It never had been.