“Joe get out of there!” I yelled.
I couldn’t use an offensive spell while Joe was standing between us. I dropped my levitation spell long enough for us to drop back to dry earth. Then I reactivated it and focused it on Joe. For a moment, I thought it wasn’t going to work on him, but then his body began to rise.
The black tendrils followed him up. They spread around his torso as I tried to get him high enough to escape the blackness.
Then, as if reaching some elastic limit, Joe was snapped back to the mud and the blackness finished flowing over him.
“No!” Tess screamed.
“Damn you, Rowle!” I yelled.
I held up my left hand again and activated the spell burned into the three copper rings. Lightning leapt from my palm. It cut a jagged path between my hand and Rowle’s shield.
Rowle disappeared behind a brightness that was impossible to look at. I squinted my eyelids down and held the lightning on him. Drawing from three separate locations on the distant mountains gave me access to far more charge than I’d ever controlled before. The thunder from the initial stroke faded, but the bolt held with a loud crackling of electrical discharge. The mud between our positions smoked, and then it began to glow and bubble. Still I held the bolt.
I brought back my last meteor and crash it into Rowle’s shield with an explosion that drowned out all other sounds.
“Tess, get ready,” I said. “When the lightning stops, shoot the bastard.”
“With pleasure.”
I felt Tess moving to my right to get a clear line of sight.
Finally, after more than a minute, I felt the charge weakening. It was now or never.
I dropped the spell.
“Now,” I said.
For a moment, I still couldn’t see Rowle; the afterimage of the lightning had hidden him better than any glamour. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw him kneeling behind his shield. His head came up, and I could see the age lines across his face. I’d weakened him.
I activated my own night magic tattoo and sent the swirling black energy flowing across the intervening space. Rowle saw what was coming and he raised a hand to activate a tattoo to block my spell.
The twang of Tess’s bolt release was sharp in my ears.
The bolt flew true, passing through Rowle’s shield as if it were mist. The broadhead penetrated his upraised hand and then embedded itself in the center of his chest.
The shock on Rowle’s face was soon replaced by pain.
“Great shot,” I said. I had no idea how my apprentice had become so skilled with the crossbow, but I was definitely liking it.
The mass of blackness reached Rowle. His shield was down, and my spell engulfed his torso in blackness.
There came a shout of warning from Beast. I looked up, searching the sky for another threat. Rowle’s familiar, the black dragon, was diving toward Tess. There was no time to deflect its path; it was too massive, too fast, and too close. I shoved Tess away from me and triggered my levitation spell while pushing at her with an energy blast. The dual spells shot her fifty feet away in a second.
I moved my own shield into an umbrella of energy above me and braced for the impact.
The dragon’s mouth opened wide as it swerved toward me, and I realized it meant to devour me. I remembered how this creature had killed Walt, my mentor, my friend, and rage filled me.
Its jaws struck, snapping shut around my shield.
In hindsight, I should have had my shield in a sphere around me.
The dragon’s teeth, each nearly as long as my forearm, snapped shut just above my knees.
The pain was beyond incredible. I screamed in agony and concentration escaped me as I fought to remain conscious. My senses tat no longer functioned, and the inside of the dragon’s mouth was nearly pitch black. I could see a red glow at its gum line, but that was it.
My healing tattoo activated. It would slow, if not stop the blood loss, but I had to get moving.
I felt myself being lifted to the horizontal and then beyond. Its rough tongue moved against me, and I understood that I’d even let my shield drop. I put my hands out and clutched at teeth on either side of me. Its tongue shoved me right and then left as its jaws parted slightly. It either was trying to slide me under its teeth for another bite or was trying to swallow me whole.
Either way, I was having none of it.
I managed to trigger my fire tat, with no focus flame erupted all around me.
Without my shield, only my spelled leathers kept me from becoming a fireball. Wanderer’s magic doesn’t affect Wanderers as much as it does others, but my face and hair still crackled from the heat and my healing tat was unable to keep up with the additional damage.
I canceled the fire and tried lightning. I heard thunder, but the dragon didn’t act as though it had been hurt. When the thunder faded, I heard shouting. Tess was shouting something, but I couldn’t understand her through the layers of flesh and bone.
I tried an energy pulse and knocked off a chunk of tooth the size of my fist.
The dragon didn’t like that and shook its head, slamming me from side to side into its teeth.
Its head reared back, and I was head down. I started sliding down its tongue. Flesh slapped against the top of my burned scalp–an enormous uvula?–I activated my shield and pressed it outwards with as much energy as I had left.
My slide stopped.
I triggered my night magic tat. The darker blackness of its energy poured from my hand and onto the beast’s tongue. Where it struck, flesh glowed, but it did no damage.
Frak! Black dragons were immune to night magic! Why
