Immortal

again.

They shortly achieved a sort of détente, as she clearly had him outclassed in terms of quickness, but he was stronger and much better protected. So, while none of his fierce attacks connected, none of her furious counterattacks had any effect either.

“Are you going to fight?” she shouted at me, ducking a vicious swing and wondering where the hell her backup was.

“You’re doing fine,” I said.

Were I to insert myself into the battle, the best I could do was offer him something else to swing and miss at—or not miss, which would be infinitely worse—and my sword would fare little better than her nails, teeth and fists. I stood my ground.

I had a game plan. I really did. But there was no point to explaining it to Eloise since she was a critical element in that plan.

As they continued their furious skirmish, I took note that the dragon’s fighting style was almost all offense. It worked out well for him. Eloise was getting more and more frustrated as her every blow, cut, and slash glanced harmlessly off his hide.

“I thought you faced one of these before!” she yelled.

“Me? No. I’ve seen them. Never fought one.”

“This would be a good time to start!”

I was completely in awe of what I was witnessing. In my lifetime I had seen some extraordinary life-or- death struggles between countless manner of beasts, some quite fearsome. This battle between vampire and dragon topped them all.

In a telling sequence, I watched Eloise bring her palm up into the dragon’s long chin, a powerful blow that unbalanced him temporarily and sent him tumbling backward. Seizing the opportunity she dove hard at him.

Then I saw what I was looking for.

The dragon brought his right forearm up in front of his chin to ward off her attack and swung hard with his left arm. It was his first defensive maneuver.

Everyone has a weakness. The trick is figuring out what it is in enough time to take advantage of it.

But before I could do anything about my newfound knowledge, Eloise made a mistake. Ducking under his left arm, she sprang forward, leaving herself open for a shot with his right arm. He swatted at her head, connecting with a devastating impact that sent her tumbling backward and exposing her belly. He followed it up quickly with a coup de grâce, a deep slash across her stomach, that would have been mortal had she been human.

Bleeding badly, she fell to her knees. The dragon stood over her, looking eager to finally eat something and probably feeling pretty good about having won the battle, too. But before he got around to doing something more permanent to her, I fired my crossbow bolt. It struck him in the shoulder, penetrating just far enough to get his attention. I drew my sword and slid off Archimedes’ back. The dragon looked up at me, apparently having forgotten I was even there.

“Now you face me!” I shouted, not so much to be heard as to inspire a little belligerence on his part. I wanted him to forget about Eloise and focus on me. It worked.

The dragon roared. Terrible sound, that. Made my testicles shrink. I pointed my sword at him defiantly.

“You killed a human, lumpy. That’s against the rules. Now I have to kill you.”

And then the most curious thing happened. The dragon spoke. “Kill… me… ?” he grunted. Dragons don’t really have the right equipment—brains, vocal chords—to hold a conversation, so it was a guttural rasp at best. But I understood it all right.

“Yes, kill you,” I said defiantly. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”

I walked away from Archimedes—he was just about ready to panic—and staked a spot of nice open space, standing tall, in profile, sword in my right hand, behind me and partly obscured.

“KILL . . . ME . . . ?” he repeated. Maybe it was the only thing he knew how to say.

With a bloodcurdling bellow he charged, arms outstretched, leading with his claws. I was expecting just that kind of attack, as it was the one he’d opened with when he first closed the distance between himself and Eloise.

Then it was all a matter of timing.

I stood my ground until an instant before his claws struck, ducked straight down, then bounced up again. I brought my free hand up under his chin, popped his head back, and exposed the one place on his entire body he saw fit to protect, his neck. Next came my sword, which I lined up point-first with the soft spot in front of his throat. His momentum did the rest.

The dragon’s charge carried us both across the snow. The sword was jerked from my grasp, and as I flew through the air, I was forced to alter my priorities slightly to make sure I didn’t end up crushed under him or the victim of a broken neck after an awkward landing. He ended up on his side a few dragon-sized strides away from me, unmoving.

I got up slowly. A sharp pain in my left side—the creature’s knee had slammed into me there when we tumbled—suggested I might have a few broken ribs to worry about in the days ahead. But I got off easy by comparison.

My sword was buried nearly to the hilt in the center of the dragon’s neck. I knelt down beside him and found he was still alive, but only just. His eyes, so bloodthirsty a moment earlier, looked sad now. Pleading.

“I warned you,” I said.

Putting the heel of my foot on his shoulder—which still had a crossbow bolt stuck in it—I managed to yank the sword free. The dragon’s head lolled backward, his body no longer obeying any commands. Then I swung the sword down at the still-exposed neck and cleaved his head from his shoulders. I could have let him suffer and die on his own, but I was feeling merciful. Also, I didn’t know enough about dragon physiology to be entirely positive I’d administered a mortal wound. Removing his head seemed pretty final, as is generally the case with most beings.

I watched the blood pour out of his body for a few seconds, then tossed aside the sword and went to check on Eloise.

There are actually a fairly large number of ways to kill a vampire. (Or, re-kill, I suppose, since they are supposedly already dead. I never entirely bought into that whole “walking undead” thing, though. I suppose that’s an argument for another time.) Chop a vampire up into enough pieces—or simply decapitate them—and they’ll stay dead. Fire works, too. And there’s the whole sunlight thing, which is extremely effective. But wooden stakes, as I’ve said, don’t work at all. Nor will gutting a vampire, although the latter will hurt a whole heck of a lot and take a very long time to heal.

Eloise was curled up in a fetal position and clutching her stomach. She’d managed to keep her intestines inside of her by holding them in manually. Not a pleasant sight. I could have finished off what the dragon had started, were I so inclined. This was probably what she was thinking when she looked up at me wearing an expression of pleading similar to the dragon’s.

I sat down in the snow beside her and pulled her head into my lap.

“You did well.”

“Did I?” she whispered, sounding very afraid. The pain must have been extraordinary.

“Yes.” I pulled back my sleeve and thrust my bare wrist under her nose. “Let me help. Drink.”

Blood kicks everything in a vampire’s system into high gear, and that includes healing. Think of it as a battlefield transfusion.

A bloody tear streamed down her cheek. “Thank you,” she said, baring her fangs.

It took her a few minutes to get her fill. She finished around the same time Lord Harsigny reached the clearing.

Chapter 6