Page 135 of Fortune's Blade

“What is wrong with her?” I heard Louis-Cesare snarl, and when I stood back up with my cheek burning once again, I had to grab her, because he only had her by one arm and it wasn’t enough.

He had Ray in the other, by the hair of his head, which he looked like he was about to pull out of his scalp. Which . . . I wasn’t necessarily against, depending on how this went. I stared at Ray, who I honestly didn’t feel like I knew anymore, because this . . . I would never have expected this.

“What?” he asked me, not even bothering to try and fight Louis-Cesare. “What the hell, Dory? It’s not what it fucking looks like!”

“Then what is it?”

“Like I know? I was asleep. I woke up. She was going crazy, all dead eyed and violent—”

“And how did you know that if you were in your own room?”

“I was in our room and—”

An explosion rumbled through the building, the tilt in the hall became more like forty degrees, and Dorina got away from me. Louis-Cesare let Ray go to grab her and I grabbed my so-called Second, slamming him against the incline harder than I’d planned because I basically fell onto him. He was talking but I couldn’t hear him, couldn’t hear anything over the noise, until something echoed in my head.

—listen to me! Things have changed since we saw each other last, okay? Your sister and I are together, it’s consensual, we’re all just gonna have to get used to that, and—

How are you in my head? I snarled.

I dunno. Maybe ‘cause I’m Dory’s Second now, same as yours? I could always read some stuff from you, but it’s easier now. I think I’m leeching off her abilities—

I stared at him. You’re together? What the hell does together mean? And why are you still alive?

Ray gave me one of those looks, the ones he saved for when I was acting stupid only I wasn’t acting stupid. I shook him again, banging his head against the tilted wall a couple times, hard enough to make him wince. And was about to give him a lot more reasons for that if I didn’t get a goddamned answer right goddamned now!

I’m alive ‘cause she saved me! Ray yelled in my head. We’ve saved each other more times than I can count and then it turned into this thing. It was her idea, but I love her, okay? I’m sorry, but I do, and nothing’s gonna change that. I wouldn’t have broken it to you this way, but—

“What have you done?” Louis-Cesare demanded, coming back and grabbing him around the neck.

“Urp,” Ray said, and considering that I had recently seen Louis-Cesare literally pop a guy’s head off one handed, I decided to slow things down. Or maybe speed them up, because this place was not going to last.

“Let’s get out of here and—no, don’t do that!” I said, because Ray’s eyes were starting to boggle. “Let’s go somewhere I can think!”

“That would be nice, but your sister is fighting me!” Louis-Cesare snapped. “I cannot get through to her!”

Let me try, Ray pleaded, and I glared at him, not knowing what to do. But the Ray I knew had saved my bacon a few times, too, and I trusted him. It remained to see if I could trust this one.

“Let him try,” I told Louis-Cesare, who looked at me like I was crazy, but released his hold.

And Ray grabbed Dorina’s face, looked her in the eyes, and kissed her. Something that would have won him a dual attack, both from me and an enraged Louis-Cesare, who hated rapists and had already decided for himself what this was. But that didn’t happen because . . .

It worked.

The wildcat I had barely been holding onto suddenly calmed down and stopped fighting. And smiled absently at Ray, before offering him her hand. I stared at the two of them, not knowing what the hell, and Ray led her back up the corridor, walking in the ditch the tilt had created out of the corner of the hall until they reached their room.

While Louis-Cesare and I just watched, our mouths hanging open.

And then followed them as fast as I could, because they didn’t need to be going in there. We needed to be getting out of here, all of us, before this whole place went up in flames or dropped into the void or just plain collapsed. Or all three, which was getting to be more likely by the second.

Louis-Cesare seemed to have figured out the same thing, because he scrambled down the hall alongside me, bursting into a large room with a rumpled bed, a balcony, and—

“Holy shit,” I said, with feeling, because the balcony was showing the mother of all battles outside.

For a moment, I forgot about everything else, holding onto the door to stay upright and watching what had to be hundreds of dragons, storms of blowing sparks and masses of crumbling buildings. Balls of fire the size of city blocks tore downward from massed groups of dragons working together. And blasted everything below them before the ricochet headed back upward in smaller, but still deadly explosions that looked like miniature atom bombs going off.

Fire tornadoes caused by all the heat and burning wooden buildings swirled across the ruins, which was all the city was going to be if this kept up for much longer, before running into small lakes, ponds or fountains and sending pillars of steam shooting skyward. Despite the need to hurry, I just stayed there for a second, having never seen anything like it in my life, and I’d seen a lot. I couldn’t even tell who was winning as I didn’t know Rathen’s people well enough to differentiate them from Steen’s.

And didn’t know what good it would have done if I had, since there was nothing that I could do about any of it.