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And he was, essentially. He straightened, swiped sweat from his eyes with the back of his glove, licked blood from his still-weeping split lip, and surveyed their immediate surroundings. He saw a crumpled bit of blue surcoat that marked one of his men felled: dead or unconscious. A few dead Strangers as well, taken out in the first, hectic moments of the gateway opening, before any of them had known what was going on.

For the moment, Sels and drakes appeared to have stopped coming through the swirling, purple-edged black hole that hung suspended over the road. A small mercy, given their current numbers, and the threat still posed.

But this battle – it was a skirmish, by the numbers, only the enemy much, much more difficult to fight than standard highway brigands – was no different than any other Reggie had participated in: there were gaps. Furious clashes, where blood spilled and sprayed, and men screamed, and fought, sweating and bleeding and swearing and dying by degrees. And then there were pockets, like the one in which he and Connor had found themselves, in which nothing was happening at all. Dead and dying Sels lay sprawled around them. One Stranger was bandaging the arm of another. But no enemies bore down on them, and Reggie let out a huge breath, and rested the point of his sword on the ground a moment, letting it take his weight as he fought to get more air into his lungs.

He also took a moment to marvel: he was alive. He had survived – thus far. As had Connor, who wiped his face on his sleeve, raked his hair back with an impatient gesture, and said, “Dear gods, look at that.”

Reggie looked, and saw what he at first thought was a tangle of purple drakes feuding with one another, rolling and snapping and hissing along the ground in a ball of scales and wings.

Then he realized that they were instead coiled around something else – a man. A man they were savaging with fangs and claws, shredding and snapping and biting, a trail of blood in their wake as they rolled along the road.

Then he saw a flash of golden hair, and one shredded, bare arm, and realized it was the Aeretollean prince they were killing. The heir to the throne at Aeres, Prince Leif.

“Shit,” Reggie hissed.

The cousin, Ragnar, was struggling to get to his feet a few yards away. One of his legs was badly broken, the shin humped and tilted. Reggie glimpsed a flash of white bone and his stomach rolled. He was trying to get to his leader – to his alpha – but he didn’t have a prayer’s chance of reaching him in time, not with that leg.

And not with a Sel striding toward the tangle of man and dragon, bright spearpoint winking in the sunlight.

“They’re going to kill him,” Connor said, flatly. Matter of fact.

Reggie was still struggling to get his breath back. “What will we do with all those wolves, then?”

When he glanced over, Conner returned his gaze, brows lifted. “Shoot them?”

“A waste of arrows.”

Reggie faced forward again. Too much blood on the ground, too much pain and anguish on Ragnar’s face, as he hauled himself up to stand on his good leg with aid of a broken spear shaft.

Reggie sighed, picked up his sword, and charged forward.

Connor cursed before following him.

~*~

Each time Leif attempted to shift, fangs pieced his flesh; claws raked across his belly, slicing leather, slicing skin. The pain was sharp, and poisonous, and he couldn’t follow through on the transition, beaten back into his human body each time. He tried grasping at rocks, and bits of weed growing up through the dry, cracked dirt of the road, tried scrabbling with his toes to gain some sort of purchase; flexed his spine, and twisted, and tried to bat the creatures away so that he could get his bearings.

But there were too many. And even if they were only a fraction of Alpha’s size, they were gods bedamned strong, and vicious, their sharp points sharper than any spear or sword. He couldn’t tell which way was up; his stomach rolled, and his head swam, and he would have been sick if he’d had the energy for it. He was so awfully tired, now. Could barely fight the weight of his own eyelids, much less that of the drakes.

He landed hard on his back, and claws pierced his chest. Eight brilliant points of heat. Something between his ribs gave, and went liquid soft. He choked. He floated.

He was dying, wasn’t he? After the disastrous festival trip, after surviving Ragnar’s machinations, and the imprisonment of the Fangs; after battling alongside an army of skeletons, and seeing a drake in the flesh for the first time; the march home, the attack at nightfall. After Ragnar’s bite, and the turning, thebecoming; after the siege of Aeres that had nearly destroyed the only home he’d ever known. After all of that…and he was going to die beneath the claws of a half-dozen pint-sized Selesee drakes in the middle of a road, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by strangers who distrusted him.

An ignoble end for a Northern prince – he wasn’t even on home soil – but an end he could see rushing toward him, now, clear and beckoning. He would die here, and his ashes would never be spread across the fields of winter snow alongside those of his father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather before him.

With a little more time and practice, Rune would make a good heir. He’d all but left him the role already. This would seal his brother’s fate.

Leif stopped fighting the drag of his eyelids, as the drake’s weight crushed him from above; ribs cracked, and claws tore at him, pain upon pain. It would be over soon. Hot, rancid breath fanned his face, as the creature screeched at him. He’d make an ugly corpse, if the thing bit off his nose…

“Cesso.” A single word spoken above him, in the tone of a command. A foreign word.

The weight left him, claws withdrawing as painfully as they’d pierced him. He felt heat and light on his face. The drakes were going.

He cracked his eyes open, just as a tall silhouette blotted out the sun. A massive figure, limned in gold. Faceless. Helmeted.

Leif saw the spear lift, and he tried to rally. Tried to force his body to move – but it was growing cold, and limp, and heavy.

He closed his eyes again, and waited.