The power transfer was a lot easier to manage when I didn’t have a body to worry about. There was no resistance, no pain, no mental game of imagining fire running into wires. I was past all that now. All I had to do was grab hold of the magic long enough to redirect it, riding the lightning up one arm and down the other straight into my dad.
Just like before, he ate it up. This was only the second time we’d tried this, but no one could match a dragon for greed. His flames sucked the power out of me as fast as I pulled it in. Within seconds, the huge fist of magic the Gameskeeper had thrown at us wasn’t just deflected, it was gone entirely. We’d sucked it dry, and from the way the smug smile was sliding off his face, our enemy knew what that meant.
“You!” he cried, his bloody eyes locking onto my tiny smoke figure. “I’ll skin you alive!”
My father answered his rudeness with a gout of flame. Unlike my dad’s other blasts, the Gameskeeper actually rolled out of the way of this one. Watching the flames, I understood why. When it got hot enough, dragon fire was capable of burning anything, even magic. But such attacks were costly. Forming them required breathing out the hottest, purest, deepest part of the flame that created a dragon’s life and magic. It wasn’t something to be used lightly, or ever. As always, though, my father and I were different. Between the magical buffet the Gameskeeper had put on and my ability to feed him fire, I could fill my dad up faster than he could burn himself down, and he used that new advantage as ruthlessly as I could have hoped.
“Again, daughter!” Yong roared, following the Gameskeeper with a stream of fire so bright, I couldn’t even look at it. “Do it again!”
He didn’t have to tell me. I was already reaching down for the magic the Gameskeeper was lashing at us from the ground in a desperate effort to sweep my father off his feet. With no body to slow me down and the silver thread holding me tight, I caught it before it could even touch his claws, sucking the power into my dad like a magical vacuum hose. As soon as I gave it to him, Yong blasted it back out, forcing the Gameskeeper to retreat or be turned to a crisp under a torrent of all-burning fire.
And just like that, the tide began to turn. Every time the Gameskeeper attacked, we tossed it right back, forcing the god to retreat. The few times the blazing fire dimmed enough for me to catch a glimpse of his plain face, the Gameskeeper looked shocked, as if he couldn’t believe this was happening, which was fair. My father was spending his fire at a rate that would have killed any other dragon in minutes, but he wasn’t any other dragon. He was my dragon. We’d always been a unique situation. Mostly a nonfunctional one, but when we did manage to find our common ground, nothing could stop us.
I was sure there was a lesson about the strength of family in there somewhere, but I was too busy helping my dad burn a dark god to think about it. Even after the Gameskeeper wised up and stopped throwing his magic at us, there was no putting this dragon back in the bag. Now that I knew how easy it was to channel in this form, I started stealing the Gameskeeper’s power straight out of the air, gathering it up in bigger and bigger handfuls until, all at once, there was nothing left to grab.
Yong’s fire stopped a second later, leaving me blinking in the sudden dark. When my eyes—or, more accurately, the mental concept that served as my eyes since I was currently disembodied—adjusted, the Gameskeeper was back to his previous size, panting on his knees at my father’s feet. I wasn’t sure which had been the final straw, my rampant theft or Dad’s fire, but the god clearly had nothing left. He didn’t even flinch when my father pressed his foot down on top of him, his long claws forming a cage that pinned the defeated spirit onto the smoking, melted sand.
“You are defeated, Arena Master,” Yong said, his voice booming through the empty stadium. “And we all know what happens to a defeated champion in your ring.”
“It makes no difference,” the Gameskeeper replied, his plain face pulling into a defiant sneer. “I am a spirit, a true immortal! You can’t kill me. So long as humans lust for blood, I’ll always rise again!”
“Then we’ll just have to make sure this city is a better place before then,” I said, crossing my smoke arms. “You might be part of humanity, but that doesn’t mean we have to welcome you. We decide which gods we worship, and now that we know what you really are, I’m going to do my damnedest to make sure you never get a foothold in the DFZ—or any other city—again.”
“With what power?” The god scoffed. “You’re not a priestess anymore, and now that you’ve shown your true colors, you never will be.”
I shrugged. “I don’t have to be a priestess to do what’s right. As I’ve been informed many,
