“Oh no, you aren’t going to make this my fault.” I turned toward the entrance of the park. “You coming naked is all… uh… Jim?”

“Yeah, that’s a red dragon,” Jim said, turning to look with interest at the two men and one woman who stood blocking the way. “I was going to tell you that the shed smelled like some dragons had been around the area, and they didn’t smell like the dudes in the house we’re at. Oh, and now thanks to you being Hasty McDemonlord, I can’t even bite them.”

I eyed the three people before me. The woman said something, gesturing toward me. The two men with her stepped forward, obviously intending to grab us. I wanted very much to avoid that, just as I wanted to avoid having any contact with the swords all three wore strapped to their respective hips. I looked around for Istvan, but he had disappeared. “Jim, I’m going to give you an order, and I want you to follow it to the letter.”

“Attack the dragons?” he asked, watching as the men suddenly rushed forward.

I stepped back, clutching my hands together, very aware of the ring sitting heavily on one of them. There wasn’t any way to escape them, no place I could run to, and no Istvan to help me. I did the only thing I could think of. “No. Go to Kostya. Right now. RUN!”

I tried to reach for that whoosh of power I’d felt back in Sweden when the dragons attacked Kostya, but there was nothing there, just a faint sense of anticipation, as if the ring were cocking its head at me and waiting for me to do something. There was no time to stop and consider what the hell the ring wanted from me—I simply yelled a Viking battle cry and threw myself at them, praying the ring would give me the oomph to get past them.

“Well, hell!” I said a few minutes later. The two dragon men didn’t topple over from the combination of myself and the awesome power that was held by my magical ring. Instead, one caught me and twisted me around while the other wrenched my right arm behind me and up into a painful hold.

“Abaddon,” came a now-familiar correction.

“Oh no, Jim, not you, too.” I peered over my shoulder, and sure enough, another man and woman emerged from around a clump of trees with the naked Jim in tow. I fisted my left hand and held it close to my stomach, praying that the dragons wouldn’t notice the ring on my finger. If I could just get a moment where they wouldn’t see me doing so, I’d tuck the ring into the pocket of my jeans.

The dragons said something in harsh voices that made my skin itch and shoved us forward, toward the entrance of the park. I saw no signs of Istvan, which gave me hope that he’d gone for help.

“Sorry. I would’ve been much faster as a dog.” The look of accusation in Jim’s eyes was all too clear.

“You know what? I’ve had it trying to be nice, especially when you don’t understand that I was simply trying to make both our lives easier.”

“Nice? You call forcing me into a naked human form nice?” Jim shook his head. “Why don’t you use that badass magic ring of yours to lay out these dragons the way you did in Sweden, so we can go home and I can use the unsanitary toilet that all the dragons put their butts on.”

“A toilet is far more sanitary than… oh, never mind. Where’s Istvan?” I clutched my hand to my stomach even harder, at the same time casting a glance over at the nearest dragon. “And stop mentioning the you-know-what. There’s a good chance these guys grabbed us because they know we’re connected with Kostya, not because I have the thing in question. And frankly, I’d like to keep them from finding that out.”

“They can’t understand us,” Jim said with a shrug. “That curse thing works for them as well as the other dragons.”

“We don’t know that for certain, and I’m not going to risk calling attention to it just in case they can understand us.”

“In which case you just told them that you have an object of great importance,” he pointed out.

“Stop using your logic on me!” I commanded, and was about to continue when a sudden shout from the dragon to my right had my heart sinking. As we moved around a small fountain, the sight of Istvan trying to fend off three other red dragons had me leaping forward. They were all in human form (I assume there was some unwritten rule about appearing as a dragon in public), but Istvan was outnumbered. Two of the dragons had swords, one of which was raised high in the air as a dragon was clearly about to decapitate poor Istvan.

The dragon behind me jerked back on my arm so painfully that I saw stars for a second or two, but that just seemed to make something inside of me snap. With a roar that I was astonished came from my mouth, I summoned a ball of Kostya’s fire and slammed it into the dragon with the sword. It splashed against his chest but didn’t stop the downswing of the sword.

“NO!” I bellowed, and shoved my free hand forward in an instinctive attempt to block the attack. The dragon with the sword flew backward about twenty feet, slamming into a group of people that had come running at the noise. Istvan, who had been forced to his knees, struggled to his feet, taking advantage of the distraction to kick at the knees of the other sword-wielder, bringing her down before he snatched up the weapon and turned to the others.

They were all staring at me. Or more precisely, at my still-outstretched hand.

“Way to not let them know about the ring,” Jim said, giving me a wry look.

“Oh, shite,” I swore, pulling my hand back against my body.

“You said it, babe.”

The dragons left Istvan and circled around Jim and me. “I have a very bad feeling about thi—aieee!”

As I spoke, the woman nearest me made some sort of intricate gesture, almost as if she was drawing on the air. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a faint black image glowing in the middle of nothing and decided that drawing on air wasn’t such a bad metaphor at that. But it was what happened after the symbol dissolved into nothing that had me squawking. First of all, there was the matter of the woman reaching up and pulling back something—what, I have no idea, since there was nothing in front of her, but whatever it is she did left a big black gaping hole. And into that the two dragons holding me leaped, taking me with them.

Thirteen

I felt like someone had taken a two-by-four, wrapped it in velvet, and bashed me in the gut.