Hounded [Wild Hunt Series: 2]

7: The Tower

The thin night air echoed with flapping wings. Someone screamed, high and feminine, a sound not of pain, but shock and fear. I tried to look, but my view was flashing glimpses of tents flattened and scattered by the dragon's force.

An arrow lodged itself into the King's throat. Making an abrupt turn, he tore it out with his free paw and glared below us.

"Do not test me!" the King bellowed, reptilian anger lighting his eyes. His grip cracked my ribs. "She declared herself for me! Me!"

"St-stop it!" I screamed, trying to pry open his claws and pull myself free, knowing it was ineffective but desperate to escape. "You're hurting me."

"No worse than you've hurt me, my dear," he hissed, and smothered my voice against his chest, jammed my nose against his blighted sores. "The next fool loses his life."

The world was a spiraling flash of feather and scale and indiscernible faces shaded skyward. An odd silence, descended across the market, over which reigned the recurrent thrum of his rattling breath. Then, as the King cruised low over his subjects, crowing victory with an outstretched neck, there was a sharp, sudden jerk and a strangled squeal. Forward progress nose-dived into the market, spraying glass and stacked weaponry in a thousand different directions. His arm and paw,  pinning me suffocatingly tight to his chest, was what saved me as the King smashed chin-first into the ground. We skidded through several bodies and stalls, flipped and tumbled over and again.

The landing ripped his claws through my side. A hot rush of heat ran red over cracked boards., rushed across my fluttering stomach. Somehow I found my feet in the chaos, staggered out of the mess to glimpse Chiro, with Dakota just behind him, running toward us. He was yelling something. I couldn't hear him. I couldn't hear anything. In a daze I climbed over a broken barrel, flopped onto my side and rose again, held my hand out to him for help....

A wing swept him effortlessly into the nearest wall.

The King's paw slammed into my back and I was breathing dirt. He righted himself over my head, talons sinking into my shoulder, shaking debris from his wings. Dakota hefted a spear in one hand and threw it. It pinged weakly off one outstretched wing and thumped harmlessly on the ground.

With snake-like speed the King snapped. Chiro shoved Dakota to the ground. Dozens of teeth closed on the air over their heads. Her head banged hard on the rubble and she went still. Chiro lodged a sword into the dragon's tongue, and without a second thought grabbed Dakota by the shoulders and dragged her to the far side of an outdoor fireplace. Unable to roar, the King knocked the stones onto them and I could see no more because he'd towed me along for the ride.

My fingers curled around a shard of broken pottery. When the King's weight shuffled to yank the blade from his tongue, I shoved the shard down my shirt and into my bra.

The King crouched on the smashed stone that had entombed Dakota and Chiro, wings flicking off attacks left and right, claws grinding against my bones. I couldn't see who was there, lost track of motion and time as the breath left my lungs. The great muscles beside me tensed, and in a moment we were airborne.

Darkness above, the King's winding tail below, nothing but his swelling chest in my sight; for several endless minutes the Dragon circled and roared and climbed ever higher. Something sharp cut through my exposed limbs; what might've been an arrow lodged into my calf and tore sideways and buried itself deeper with the dragon's every wingbeat. He would dive, now and then, and send stone scattering as his talons gripped the parapets for mere seconds, and then he would push off and seek a new perch to scream from. The creature's monstrous head would curve around the greyed stone, leering out at the forest until some noise or monster or human returned his fury to the targets within his kingdom.