“Saving you.” Hank smirked over the bleeding corpse of the trampler.

“This is my battle. My fight. My victory!”

“I can tell from the way you’re losing. And to the very enemies you thought you could negotiate with! You’ve got a lot to answer for—”

They were interrupted by a bellow from above, and a swooping shadow. Hank threw himself to the ground, and Glory pressed herself against the bridge railing. A slim, black dragon with peach markings and a double tail darted past, its rear claws missing Hank’s scalp by inches, and its tail shaking the roadbed with a shower of sparks.

Behind them, several more dragons had dropped to the pavement and were fighting the beaststalkers Hank had led here. The swinging, snarling, and parrying was punctuated with genuinely violent attempts at breathing fire or shouting light—only to have the sources interrupted by new blows from a nearby enemy. Blood was spilling, slick and crimson.

Looking around, Hank was surprised at how few combatants were close. Beyond him and Glory, there was that lump of crippled girl-thing still writhing on the pavement, a dead dragon at his feet with his axe stuck in it, a dead teacher in a wheelchair on the other side of the translucent wall, a woman clinging to the dead teacher, a couple of teenagers beyond the dead teacher . . . and right here, on this side of the wall, was Jennifer Scales. She glared at him from under platinum locks and held out two daggers. As for the golden dragon-shaped statue . . .

Gone! It took him a moment to realize the truth. Jennifer Scales was the golden dragon!

“You’re a menace beyond words,” he told her as he reached down and yanked his axe out of the dead dragon’s throat. “It’s time you died.”

He felt a sting in his back. Twisting his head, he spotted a feathered shaft sticking from the flesh by his right shoulder blade.

“Wendy, is that you and your poor aim?” He turned his whole body and called out to the unseen archers. “Or is it Lizzy and her inability to make a shot that counts?”

The next shot answered his question.

“I guess the first one was Wendy,” Glory mused as Hank howled, grasping at the arrow stuck in his groin. She cast an eye above. “Libby, if you put one through his heart, I’ll have tea tomorrow with the dragon of your choice.”

Before anyone could take the mayor up on her offer, her cobalt bird rushed the western edge of the bridge and screamed. The sound wave hit the bridge’s superstructure, scattering those dragons still perched there and dropping two lithe figures forty feet to the pavement.

“Mom!” Jennifer ran past Hank and toward one of the women who had fallen. There was no need for concern. Both Wendy and Lizzy, Hank saw through the tears in his eyes, had rolled out of their falls and had suffered only scrapes and bruises. Collapsing to the curb, Hank bit his lip and broke the shaft of the arrow. He tossed the long, feathered piece aside. The pain in his groin was still intense. Funny, he thought, how you can get rid of eighty percent of the arrow in your crotch, and still have a major problem.

“I’m glad to see you girls are both okay,” Glory told the women. “Of course, I would have been happier if you hadn’t shown up at all.” She stuck her shoulder out. “Libby, if you’re done complicating things, could you do me the favor of removing the arrow you shot into me?”

“Stow it, Mother. You’ve hurt a girl here tonight. A girl!”

Glory looked down the street at the twisted form. “Well, the little brat interfered. I could have killed it, you know. I thought you’d appreciate the mercy—”

“Her name is Catherine Brandfire!” Jennifer screamed. Hank couldn’t decide what bothered him more—the arrow-point embedded in his scrotum, or this brat’s piercing whine.

“Control yourself,” the mayor scolded. “Have your parents taught you nothing? Comrades fall in battle.”

“There didn’t have to be a battle here at all,” Elizabeth argued. “Mother, why did you have Hank come here with those beaststalkers? Bad enough the Blaze is here, but at least we had a chance to limit the damage when it was just you and their Eldest squaring off. Now . . .”

“Now we have a proper fight,” Hank wheezed. Wow. Difficult to talk.

“Having Hank show up was not my idea.” The mayor sounded offended. “Neither was having you show up, or your daughter, or all these demons who just landed on my bridge. That said, I’m glad my people came, since I would have had a heck of a time killing every one of these dragons with your daughter flashing knives in my face and you and Wendy firing missiles at me.” She paused. “Please tell me I don’t have to fight you on top of all this, Libby.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother. I’m not going to fight you. With Jennifer’s help, I can make the dragons stop. But you need to stop your own people. You don’t have much time.”

Hank tried to argue further from his spot on the curb, but he couldn’t. Something was wrong. Something besides the blade scraping the insides of his testicles. He felt tired, too. When he saw the mayor take a lurching step, he understood. They’ve drugged the arrowtips. How disgustingly pacifist of them.

“Libby. Did you—” The mayor stumbled again.

“You’ll be fine,” Elizabeth assured her. She kept babbling on about how important it was to get everyone talking instead of fighting, and Hank was sure she would go on to propose gathering around a campfire and singing songs, but he suddenly wasn’t listening.

He caught sight again of the teenagers beyond the barrier, near the east end of the bridge. First he recognized Skip Wilson, the boy who had hurt his son, who regularly threw off the yoke of authority, who’d conspired with that ghastly Scales girl to destroy the Blacktooth Blade. Next to Skip on the pavement was his girlfriend. Unlike the hobbled girl-thing on this side of the barrier, who had slipped into unconsciousness, this one was still rolling on the pavement. Sick? Unlikely. Hurt? It didn’t appear so. Under sorcery? Hmmm.

She had been in this state ever since the fight began. Ever since Glory hurt that beast, Hank recalled. What the sorcery was precisely doing to this body, he did not know. But despite his increasing drowsiness, he was beginning to see how this might all end.

Little Andeana Corona Marsabio, he mused. Who was your father? What universe did he live in? Did he send you all this way to finish what he couldn’t in that other place?

The girl stood up. She looked exactly as he remembered her from the glimpse at Edmund Slider’s house. Dark hair, intense brown eyes, the muscled frame of a warrior . . . the father must have had darker skin, but everything else this girl has comes from the mother.

Her face held a deadly, distant aura. She revealed a knife in each hand. I could warn her, Hank thought as he turned toward the target. But then, I already tried. Eyelids falling, he observed Lizzy trying to get the mayor to sit on the pavement before the old woman fell asleep, as Hank was about to. Wendy and Jennifer were backing up to give them room. Will any of them see this coming? Doubtful.

By the time he swung his head back, the girl everyone knew as Andi had already run and leapt through the air, blades pointing down. She penetrated the barrier twenty feet above the pavement, her trajectory leading to the back of Glorianna Seabright.

The mayor stiffened, a mysterious sense warning her and injecting adrenaline just in time. She pushed Lizzy away and turned into the assassin’s descent. Her sword flung up and blocked the first blade; her free hand shot up and swept aside the other. A masterful reflex, Hank observed with reluctant admiration, and it stopped both strokes cold.

What it did not stop were the four additional limbs that sprouted from the assassin’s torso. Each planted a new blade in the mayor’s chest.

Perfect, he told himself as he watched the girl land on two sure feet. Her extra limbs vanished. Lizzy, Wendy, and Jennifer all backed up, mouths agape. The mayor staggered back and then forward in half-steps, staring at the pincushion full of daggers her own torso had become. “Who . . .” she tried to say, before a backhand across the face sent her spinning to the pavement.

“Queen to g3,” the girl spat, but with a man’s voice. “You’re tested. You’ve failed.”

Then the sorcery broke, and the teenaged brunette fell to her knees and began to cry.