CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I was proud of myself that I didn’t panic when it went black. Mostly my composure could be attributed to the fact I recognized this darkness: it was like the blackness that Blondie took me to when she’d wanted to talk.

Which means I hadn’t actually gone anywhere. Indeed, Morrigan was still standing exactly where she’d been, a few feet from me. Her green eyes watched me, undoubtedly hoping I’d freak out and she could use my panic to her advantage.

But instead I took a deep breath, and gave her my falsest smile as I pulled my wrist from her grasp.

I’d remembered Blondie explaining to me how this mind trick worked, back when we were in that cave and she was about to send me to meet the creature. She’d needed to talk to me, so she’d put everyone in that cave into their own little illusory box. They couldn’t attack us, but we couldn’t attack them, either. She’d explained how the trick actually worked—that the best she could do was to put everyone in their own mental space, but that meant that they were still where they’d been standing. They just couldn’t see anything, like I couldn’t see anything.

Thinking hard, I tried to figure out how to use that information.

I was also trying to figure out how Morrigan had learned this particular trick. It had not been a part of her repertoire, at least that I knew, before she left the Compound.

“Well, Jane. Isn’t this nice? Just the two of us. Like we used to be, when you came to visit.” Morrigan’s accent was still upper-crust British, and it flowed from her lips too naturally to be faked. The Alfar queen was full of secrets, apparently.

I narrowed my eyes. “I thought you said no tricks, Morrigan.”

“Oh, don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud. This isn’t a trick! It’s a little gift—the gift of privacy.”

“I’d rather not be so private with you.”

“You wound me, Jane. You really do. Now, talk to me. Tell me why you’re a part of this rabble, a sweet girl like you?”

I stayed quiet. I didn’t even know what she was asking, exactly, so I couldn’t have addressed her question if I’d wanted to.

“I hear rumors, Jane,” Morrigan continued, unfazed by my silence. She paced in front of me, slowly, as if deep in thought.

“I hear that you have a weapon. That you were given power. Is that true?”

I touched the part of me that was the creature’s, that held the ax, and I was glad I’d kept it hidden for our meeting.

“I’ve always had power, Morrigan,” I said, instead of the whole truth. “But because I’m a halfling, most of your kind refused to see it.”

Morrigan smiled. “Touché. But I’m not talking about normal power. I think you know that. I think you know I’m talking about the power of the champion.”

“Me?” I scoffed. “The champion? I know you realize how ridiculous that sounds,” I said. After all, it was ridiculous that I was the champion. True, but ridiculous.

Morrigan’s mouth pursed in a grimace of concentration as she turned to look at me, her eyes narrowing.

“And yet you seem different, halfling.”

“Having your mother murdered and your best friend raped will do that to a gal,” I said, fury inflecting my voice.

“This is war, Jane. People die. People get hurt,” Morrigan said, taking another step closer. “And you do look harder, yes. But there’s more. There’s power…”

Before she could continue, I also took a step back, towards where I estimated Anyan should be standing, in his own little box. I didn’t know if I was moving only mentally, scooting a little image of myself around in my mind, or if I was actually moving. But I figured I had to be moving in the real world, since Blondie had brought me those milkshakes at that Ben & Jerry’s, the first time she’d used this trick with me all those months ago in Rhode Island.

“Speaking of changes,” I said, trying to keep Morrigan distracted as I took another step backwards. “You’re different too. You’re dressed a bit like the sleazy hanger-on of a movie villain, to be honest. I mean, you’re hot, but you definitely look less regal and more high-class hooker.”

Morrigan hissed at me—and I mean hissed—and took another step towards me that I balanced out with one of my own, backwards.

“Plus there’re the speech patterns. You were totally Alfar before. And now you’re all casual—almost human. And a British human, at that. Which is weird, Morrigan. What have you been up to? Or were you always just a big phony?”

Morrigan hissed again, and I could have sworn she was growing. Her pants suit definitely looked a little strained at the seams.

Those angry green eyes were larger now, in a face that was elongating.

“And what is it with those eyes?” I asked, taking another long few steps backwards, right towards where I knew Anyan should be standing, assuming that he hadn’t changed position and that I was actually moving. Otherwise I was going to have a very irate Alfar chasing me around my own mind for what could be millennia.

“They were blue,” I said. “You definitely had blue eyes…”

“And now I have green, yes,” Morrigan hissed, through a mouth gone decidedly snoutlike. “Would you like a closer look?”

At that second two things happened. First, Morrigan’s neck elongated like a jack-in-the-box’s, springing her gaping jaw towards me, her mouth suddenly full of very large teeth. I tumbled backwards to avoid their snapping cruelty, only to fall into my own familiar man-wall, Anyan Barghest.

As if I’d popped a bubble, the illusion around me shattered as my body touched Anyan’s. And then all hell broke loose.

“What the fuck?” Anyan shouted, pulling me back and away from the decidedly non-Alfar Morrigan standing in front of us. “Alfar can’t shapeshift!” he yelled, clinging to logic, as he sent a volley of mage balls winging at her, as well as a powerful battering ram of power using his elemental control over the air. Barghests were one of the very rare beings to control more than one element, besides the Alfar, who controlled all four.

Even Blondie looked scared, standing there with wide eyes. Her mouth was moving and I realized she was saying “no” over and over again.

Meanwhile, Morrigan kept growing. Her clothes were splitting at the seams, and her face wasn’t at all human, anymore. Her mouth kept elongating until it was like a long, thin muzzle while the rest of her face receded as if wrapping itself around a huge torpedo. Her shoulders were rounding, hunching as they grew in size. Her tailored cream coat ripped all the way, falling down to pool around her wrists as her body ratcheted forward, as if breaking in two at her lower back.

She howled, then, a sound of agony and release as her hands began to lengthen into long fingered claws. Her high heels ripped apart as scaled toes burst forth, scrabbling for purchase on the wood of the pier. Her forearms and calves rippled upwards with muscle as she began to grow at a ridiculously fast rate. The rest of her clothes shredded around flesh now mottled with what looked like freshly forming scales.

Her guards had fanned out behind her, mirroring our own forces that had taken position behind Anyan and me. But their side didn’t look like they were about to faint, as virtually everyone on our own team did.

Anyan called for us to raise shields, and we did. Then I wove my water power through them, coating our defenses with as many layers of my force as I possibly could while Morrigan just grew, and grew, and grew.

It was only when the mottles turned all the way to scales, and the form before us reared up to roar at the heavens that I realized what we were dealing with.

Morrigan had just changed into a dragon.

An enormous, scaly, motherfucking dragon.

A red dragon.

A red dragon, I thought, my mouth going dry as I realized, for the umpteenth time in the past few days, something I really didn’t want to realize.

For sure as shit, the dragon that had been Morrigan blazed crimson in the night sky. She looked more like the color of old blood in the moonlight, but I knew she’d burn like fire in the sunshine.

Suddenly, it all made sense. The physical differences—the eyes, the attitude, the clothes; the speech patterns; the seductive charisma.

The bones have a way of drawing people to them, I remembered being told.

Before us roared the reason Morrigan had searched for the bits and pieces of a dead queen. And why those pieces would want to be found, when they were missing parts and couldn’t be resurrected as they once had.

They didn’t need to be resurrected.

All they needed was a willing host.

Morrigan had become the Red Queen.

As if to remind us that she had, indeed, turned into a motherfucking dragon, Morrigan chose that moment to rear her head back, and then unleash a stream of fire that began burning everything in its path before it lighted on our shields.

Blondie pushed forward, her power booming out as she strengthened our defensive barriers. Her power was enormous, but I could feel the force emanating from the Red.

Even with the Original’s tremendous strength, she was going to need help against the dragon. So I focused the strength of my water, reaching into that space left in me by the creature, to saturate the air around us and keep us cool and moist. Or at least moist, for the heat was terrible.