Armor-Piercing

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The first volley came through the observation glass.

Lucian felt it before he heard it: a flat pressure against his skull, the old reflex of a man who had been shot at since he was nineteen. He threw himself sideways, dragging Kaelen with him, and the glass burst inward in a glittering storm. Rounds cracked across the steel table. Sparks jumped from the wall where the dragon's head had been.

"Hold your fire!" he roared. "Hold your fire, that is a direct order!"

"General Thorne's orders, Commander." The voice behind the barrels was young and frightened and utterly sure. "Kill Lucian on sight. The beast is on his last legs. We cut out the dragon core and finish this."

*Kill Lucian.*

For a moment the sentence did not make sense. Then it did, all at once, and something in Lucian's chest went very still.

"He said to kill *me*," he said.

"Told you." Kaelen's voice came from the floor beside him, a rough ghost of its earlier fire. The serum was still dragging at him, his skin shining with sweat. But he was looking at Lucian with perfect, terrible clarity. "Your uncle smells like rot, Commander. Like a body left in a locked room. Under the cologne and the tea, he stinks of his own brother's blood."

"Silence."

"I smelled it on the night your father died. I smelled it in the vault when he handed you that needle."

"I said *silence*." But Lucian's voice cracked, because the intercom had gone dead. Every light in the corridor flickered, and a flat mechanical voice began to read out the sequence of a lockdown. Every communication line in the dungeon had been cut. No call to the garrison. No call to the Council. No call at all.

Then Thorne's face filled the cracked monitor above the cell door, and he was smiling.

"My dear nephew," he said. "You are every bit as foolish as your father."

The screen went black.

"Kill Lucian where he stands," said a voice from the corridor, quite calm now. "And bring me Kaelen's dragon core intact."

Lucian stood. He found he was shaking, and he found he did not care. Eleven years of loyalty, of a boy raised on his uncle's lap, of a man who had held him at his father's funeral, had burned away in a single sentence.

"I will avenge my father," he said, to no one, to everyone. And he opened his mind.

---

It was the wrong move. He knew it as the blue flood left him. His shield was already gutted, his reserves already drained, and the backlash hit like a freight train. His vision whited out. His knees buckled. He went down on one hand with blood running from his nose and mouth, and the rifles in the doorway came up, and a dozen helmeted men stepped into the cell.

"Commander." Kaelen's hand closed on his collar, hauled him up. "You threw everything away."

"Shut up." Lucian spat blood. "I only did it so I could learn the truth about my father's death."

"Your psychic power is gone."

"I noticed."

"The backlash is going to tear you apart." The dragon's voice was strangely tender. "Do not move. Your shield is shattered. Let me."

Lucian turned his head. Kaelen's face was a handspan away, flushed, wild, and utterly present. The golden veins under his skin pulsed in time with his breathing. When he lifted his wrist and dragged his thumb through the blood at the corner of Lucian's mouth, and then, deliberately, brought that thumb to his own lips, Lucian's stomach did something it had no business doing in the middle of a firefight.

"You taste," Kaelen murmured, "even better than I remembered."

"Stay back. Don't come any closer."

"General Thorne's orders!" screamed a soldier. "Open fire!"

The guns spoke together.

They were armor-piercing rounds, the kind made for tank hulls, and they would have gone through the steel wall and the stone behind it. They did not get as far as Lucian. Kaelen stepped in front of him, and the air in the cell turned to a sheet of orange light.

It was not a spell. It was something older. Dragonfire came out of the prince like a wave, a clean roaring curtain of gold that swallowed the bullets whole and turned them to molten rain. The soldiers' rifles went white-hot in their hands. Men screamed and dropped them. The visors of their helmets glowed and cracked.

"Impossible," someone whispered. "Those were armor-piercing..."

"You worthless insects." Kaelen's voice had changed; it had gone deep and strange, a harmonic of two voices at once. His horns had come up through the curls like black glass, and the veins of his arms were rivers of molten gold. "You dare aim your guns at *him*?"

He took one step forward. The corridor emptied.

---

The fire had burned itself out when Lucian came to.

He was being carried. He knew it by the rock of a stride that was not his own, by the arm under his knees and the other at his back, by the heat of a chest against his cheek. He opened his eyes on a stairwell, black with smoke and lit by the red wink of emergency lamps.

"Put me down."

"No."

"I am a Commander of the Frostline Guard."

"You are a man who coughed blood on my shoulder," Kaelen said pleasantly, "and the game is over, Commander. From this moment on, you are my prize."

"Don't be absurd. I can walk."

"Can you?"

He set Lucian on his feet in a service tunnel under the barracks, and Lucian promptly folded. Kaelen caught him before his knees hit concrete and eased him down against a wall, and Lucian let him, and hated himself for it.

"Stay back." He fumbled at his belt. "I have a med kit. I don't need your help."

"Your psychic power is so weak you cannot even push me away." Kaelen knelt, one hand braced beside Lucian's head. He did not touch him. He did not have to; his nearness was a physical thing, a bank of heat. "You spent everything protecting me back there."

"Do not flatter yourself. I'm here to learn who killed my father."

"Of course."

"How dare you..."

"You still do not understand your situation, Commander." Kaelen's smile was slow, and not entirely kind. "You do not give the orders now. I have remembered the taste of you for fifteen years, and you are finally in my hands."

"You're insane." Lucian pressed his back harder to the wall. Above them, boots thundered across the floor. A voice shouted something about the stairwell. "Thorne's dogs are still above us. If you want to bring them running..."

"Then bite down." Kaelen's hand came up and, very gently, pressed two fingers against Lucian's lips. "And keep quiet."

Lucian was about to bite those fingers off when the dragon bent his head and set his mouth against the torn flesh of Lucian's shoulder.

It was not a kiss. It was not quite a bite. A line of heat opened beneath Kaelen's tongue and spread like warm honey through the wound. Lucian's breath went out of him in a rush. Pain unspooled. Something in his ribs knit itself together. Overhead, boots paused, shifted, moved on, and he understood that he had not made a sound only because he had no air in his lungs to do it.

When Kaelen lifted his head there was a thread of gold on his lip, and his eyes were glowing like coals.

"What did you do to me?" Lucian said.

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