“Fuck man.” Rune rushed to his side. Ripping Levi’s shirt off, he then tore it to strips and tried to tie them around the worst of the wounds.
“Lyndi,” Levi said, hardly able to get the words out, his voice wrecked and hoarse.
“Where are they?”
“A cave. Mathai guards it.”
Rune went to go, but Levi grabbed his shirt with surprising strength. “That’s not Mathai. It’s an illusion. I don’t know where the fucker is.”
Which explained why Levi hadn’t attacked him when he’d been let up.
Rune paused, looking his brother, a relationship forged in battle and life, in the eyes. “Don’t you fucking die,” he said.
Levi managed a lopsided grin that faded in an instant, urgency turning his eyes darker. “Go save my mate.”
Rune left him there and ran.
It would take longer, but rather than risk shifting and being seen, Rune made his way across the mountain by foot. His injury forced him to take it slow, the clash overhead driving his urgency.
There. A dark hole in the ground behind Mathai’s illusion. The warlock again? Impressive.
He studied the surroundings, searching for any hint that the real Mathai was nearby. Tempting to hunt down the red dragon leader of the Alliance, but if he failed, his people were fucked. With slow, deliberate moves, placing his feet carefully and staying in the shadows, he crept around a boulder and into the hidden cavern.
Carefully, he lit the flames in his eyes, giving him enough black light to see his way down the pit that dropped into the earth at a steep angle.
“Lyndi,” he called out with his mind.
No answer.
Were they unconscious? Magically spelled so they couldn’t use telepathy like Levi had been with that net thing? Use of a warlock in battle was also prohibited. Did Mathai hate them so much he was willing to risk himself like this, using illegal methods to win? Why would any dragon shifters follow him now?
Rune turned a small bend in the tunnel only to jerk to a halt. A massive door, round and thick like a bank vault, stood in his way.
They weren’t unconscious. He couldn’t hear them answer through the bunker where they were being kept.
As quickly and carefully as he could, Rune inspected the door. Not dragon size, but human size. As far as he could tell, the thing would require a master safecracker to get in the usual way. He had only one option available that he could see, and that was a long shot at best.
Don’t be dragonsteel.
Maybe he’d get lucky. Something this large, clearly built into this mountain right here, rather than created outside and placed inside later, wouldn’t be possible to forge out of dragonsteel in this tiny space. If this was human steel, he could melt it.
Unfortunately, he’d have to do this in human form, with no space to shift here.
Igniting the flames inside his belly, Rune breathed in slowly, risking the bellows sound as he stoked the flame hotter and hotter. Then he blew a concentrated stream of flame over the large metal hinges of the door. The black-tipped flames hit the slick metal and turned back in on him, obscuring his view of what he was doing, but he didn’t let up, holding the fire steady.
A small red glow appeared between his black and silver flames, and he cut himself off to inspect the damage. The hinges shone bright red, superheated and hopefully turning pliable. Dragonsteel wouldn’t do that, but human metals would’ve melted by now. This must be a hybrid of the two.
Fuck.
He stoked his fire and kept going, cutting off the flames only to take a break every so often.
“Who’s out there?” Lyndi’s voice pinged in his head.
She could do that? Shift a small part of herself? Impressive. Rune shut off and smiled at the melted mess of a hinge. Had he thinned it enough in one spot to hear her?
“Rune,” he thought back.
“Thank the gods,” she answered, though the words were slightly garbled, like listening through water. “They have Levi.”
Don’t thank the gods yet. Her mate was still out there, injured, and the rest of the team was losing.
“No time,” Rune said. “Is anyone with you who can blow a steady stream of fire in human form?”
Because he was running out.
A dragon without fire was like a lion without teeth. But they needed the numbers, and a lion without teeth still had claws.
“I’m here,” Keighan’s voice came through, garbled as well.
“Me too,” Jiǎ said.
“And me.” More voices came through. Aidan and Sera. Rivin. Shula and Bree and their people. Lyndi and Levi’s boys. All of them still alive. Thank the gods.
“Hit the hinges with your fire. Hold it as long as you have to. Take the top.”
Rune moved to the bottom hinge and resumed what he’d been doing, holding the stream until the flames started to spit and spark. Still, he kept going. They needed the metal so pliable they could break it open.
The fire started to dwindle, coming in fits and spurts as he sucked up the dregs of fuel stored inside his body. He still kept going. He blew until the pain behind his sternum told him he was retching, with nothing left to draw forward.
Gagging, Rune pitched forward, hands on his knees, chest heaving.
“Keighan?”
“Almost there,” came the immediate thought, louder now. “You’d better step back.”
Rune moved around the lip in the corridor that had hidden the door from him in the first place. An explosion reverberated, loud and harsh in the quiet of the caves. A quick check showed the door only barely ajar. Without waiting, Rune left his people to it. He couldn’t help from his side. They were going to have to bust their way out from inside, but the noise was going to alert someone outside.
Time to track down Mathai.
At the next slam of sound, he started running, using the booms coming fast and louder now to cover his footfall as he sprinted up the steep incline of the tunnel to the top.
A different explosion sounded as he burst into the forest lining the mouth of the cavern, the sound of something hitting hard rock.
“We’re out,” Rivin’s thought was exactly what Rune needed to hear.
“Get your asses up here and into the air. We’re outnumbered. And we’re losing.”
Even as he sent the thought back, he searched the area around the pit, but the illusion of Mathai’s red scales body no longer peeked through the gaps in the trees. Rune shifted, right there and then, pushing his animal to the front faster than either of them liked, but still retaining control.