“Nice kill on those two, but I didn’t need the help,” Nick said.

  “You look like you need a rest, though.”

  His chest rose and fell in heavy, deliberate breaths, his draconic snout letting out thin streams of greyish smoke. He braced his hands on his knees, gaze fixed somewhere above the concrete trees. The faint glow filtering through the cavern ceiling washed everything in shifting greens and purples. Up there, the drake I’d spotted earlier was descending toward us, drawn by Liora, who kept shifting colors, shining like a lure in the dark.

  “We stick to the plan,” Nick said firmly, reaching into his backpack for one of the protein bars he’d made himself, the kind inspired by his mom’s cracker experiments.

  “You sure, man?” Peter asked, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  “Yes. It’s a good plan. And I think we can make it happen… if Alexa’s magic works the way we intended.” That was a big if. Both physically and metaphysically, but I was deeply convinced that it should. I had convinced myself, at least, and hoped the drake would agree.

  “It’s not going after your lóng. It’s flying in here,” Peter noted.

  I knew that too. Lio was shining brighter with shadowlight, drifting steadily toward the mural I’d left in the clearing. We’d hoped the lure would be enough. But apparently, the drake was more interested in us, or in the free meal we’d just provided.

  “Let’s hide and wait,” I said, slipping toward the concrete trees behind us.

  Anansi, how does my progress look right now? I asked her in my thoughts.

  [You are at 25%. You need 75% more essence of Authority to initiate growth.]

  Twenty-five percent? In just three days? That’s… actually decent, right?

  [You’ve been fighting a lot, but your opponents haven’t carried much Authority, so essence gains are minimal. It would have been better if you focused on your craft more.]

  You think so?

  My second thought-strand, meanwhile, pushed Anansi to pull Liora out of the sky and hide with us. The drake was nearly upon the forum where we’d fought the giants.

  [I do. You’re about to face a beast well above your punching weight, so we’ll soon find out whether this changes the equation.]

  It’s the combined essence, me plus the soul core, right?

  [Yes. I sum it up for you, but the actual exchange only happens when you touch your soul core.]

  Is that why I had excess after the last growth? I filled the crystal, and whatever overflowed stayed inside me?

  [Exactly.]

  Neat. And resonance? Can you track that too?

  [I feel it, Alexa. So do you.]

  She was right. Every passing day, everything I could do seemed able to squeeze a little more force out of me, and out of the universe itself. Hard to quantify, though.

  [But there is no measure for it. Not like essence, which fills a vessel until it holds no more. Resonance grows… alongside.]

  “Nick,” I whispered quietly, but enough that Peter could hear too. “Is there a way to measure a mage’s resonance level?”

  “You’re thinking about this now?” he said, eyes still fixed on the sky where the drake circled lower and lower. “Seriously?”

  “Is there?”

  “Yes. The guild has devices that can estimate it numerically.” He hesitated, then added, “But there’s also a more intimate method.”

  “Intimate?” Peter asked. “Can we not do that right now?”

  “Yes,” Nick answered him, just as the drake landed with a heavy thump on the giants’ corpses, tearing into them with a primal appetite. Flesh came away in thick, wet chunks, one after another. It was time for us to claim its attention.

  “Run, guys,” I said. They didn’t hesitate, bolting right away toward the mural. While I stepped out of the grey flora, waving at the drake from a distance.

  “Hey! Big guy!” I shouted.

  The beast lifted its massive head, jaws full of giant’s meat, chewing with slow, grinding insistence. One clawed paw slid forward, talons sinking into the corpse as it dragged its meal closer, as if afraid I’d steal it. A pale ribbon of smoke curled from its nostrils, but it returned to eating, dismissing me completely.

  This wouldn’t work. We needed it elsewhere. So I had to be… unpleasant.

  I pulled out a card, infusing it with steel and fire, and flicked it toward the lizard’s head. It struck cleanly, then bounced off as if I’d thrown it at a steel wall instead of scales. The drake didn’t even look up.

  I glanced toward the guys, who had stopped farther ahead and were watching for developments. I raised both arms in the universal what do you want me to do now? gesture. We’d expected the drake to be easier to lure toward the mural, but I wasn’t done trying.

  “Hey!” I shouted again.

  This time I planted my feet firmly, braced with one hand on the ground. My other hand extended—middle and index fingers aiming at the target—as I channeled my Authority into both the reactor-painting and the military-grade laser etched into my finger.

  Magic accepted my call.

  The air hissed.

  A tight beam of light snapped into existence between me and the drake’s skull. I aimed for the eye again, but the beast shifted, and at this distance the shot was too long.

  Still, the beam was potent enough to carve a visible scar into those ancient scales.

  And that alone was enough to anger the drake. To tear it away from its meal. Its head snapped up, one burning, wounded patch of scales still smoldering from the insignificant damage I’d managed to inflict, considering how much energy I’d flushed through myself.

  A roar rolled out of its throat, and its body twisted like a serpent’s as it coiled forward. Its front limbs slammed down in a single, monumental leap. The ground trembled with the impact. Then both of us were running. Me leading, the drake thundering behind.

  The boys noticed the shift and resumed their sprint, which was a blessing, because I had to blink straight to them to avoid the wall of fire the drake spat at my back.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “Stubborn,” Peter muttered, glancing over his shoulder at the lizard as it took to the air, beating its maroon, leathery wings hard enough to stir the dust into little storms.

  “Or just hungry,” Nick added.

  “Just about two hundred yards, guys. Keep the pace.”

  But even as I said it, trying to sound confident, I knew Peter was far faster than either of us, and even he wasn’t going to make it comfortably with the time we had left.

  Above us, the drake circled, its shadow going fast, like a hunter’s omen. I saw it through the eyes on my hood and through Liora’s watchful gaze, still hovering near my mural.

  “Spread out!” I shouted.

  All three of us dove between a denser cluster of concrete trees, just as a rain of fire came down. The liquid flames splashed across trunks, bushes, and the grey foliage, igniting instantly, consuming them like real plants caught in an inferno.

  It was Peter who broke from cover first, darting out from between the trees and sprinting toward the clearing with the mural. I didn’t like it, but I understood it. So I asked Anansi to guide Liora quietly above the drake and keep him close, hidden in its blind spot.

  The beast surged after Peter immediately, its attention locking onto him with terrifying precision.

  The sight of it, the massive jaws opening, fire gathering between its fangs, it knotted my stomach hard. Both Nick and I chased behind the towering column of flame that erupted in Peter’s wake, the inferno following him with barely a foot to spare. The tongues of fire licked at his legs as they hit the ground, scorching him even as he ran at full speed, wrapped in that silvery-blue shadowlight and the strange greenish concrete-water swirling along his limbs, dousing every bit of flame that managed to cling to his clothes or skin.

  He wove between the trees, lengthening his stride by forcing more mass into his leg muscles. Even then, he was only a heartbeat ahead of the death-beam of fire chasing him.

  Nick and I veered to the side of the blaze, trying to keep pace. But with Liora gliding just above the drake, I decided it was time to intervene.

  I closed the distance to Nick, grabbed his arm, and blinked us both to Liora’s position high above, where gravity immediately claimed us. We dropped straight onto the beast’s back.

  “Oh hell,” Nick shouted, fingers digging into the scales. “I thought this was for the mural!”

  I didn’t answer. Ghostflame rushed into my hand from the Domain, and I drove it down into the drake’s protruding spine. To my surprise, the blade sank in slightly, carving a small but definite wound.

  The beast hated it.

  Its body twisted midair, wings snapping wide as it veered sharply, abandoning its attack on Peter below to focus entirely on shaking us loose.

  Nick, despite the panic in his voice a moment earlier, was already climbing toward the drake’s head. I kept slashing along its spine, aiming for the nerves, the cord, anything that would slow it.

  He moved with methodical speed, reshaping his arms and hands through his Domain into draconic limbs, claws biting into the armored hide as he pulled himself forward. His face, however, couldn’t hold the transformation; it snapped back to his usual bearded ginger features, strained but resolute.

  Nick reached the base of the drake’s neck just as the creature decided to thrash wildly, trying to hurl him off. But he was faster. He leapt from the swaying neck for a heartbeat, caught one of the horns jutting from its skull, and wedged himself firmly between them. Then, with a strength born from desperation and Domain, he forced the beast’s head downward, guiding its gaze toward the ground where Peter and my mural waited.

  That was all I needed.

  I focused on the section of the mural that held the trap: piles of gold coins stacked in glittering slopes, goblets, plates, swords, shields. Anything that whispered treasure. And within my aura, I let it shift, let it become a true Treasure Mound. As my Authority latched onto the image, the drake’s behavior changed instantly, and I saw the transformation through every eye connected to me. Through the one on Nick’s forehead, I felt the beast’s attention lock on the gold; through Liora’s vantage in the air, I saw its wings adjust, careful and controlled despite us clinging to its back; through Peter’s painted eye, I watched it fold its limbs inward for speed, diving toward the ground with singular hunger.

  Exactly then, during that controlled, arrow-straight dive, I released the scales I had been gripping for balance and sprinted along its back toward Nick. As soon as I reached him, I pushed off into the air, extending a hand. He caught it with a solid grip, and in that instant of contact I blinked us both away, straight to Peter, who was already backing toward the treeline.

  We reappeared beside him and fell into step without a word, just as the drake slammed down onto the mural I had painted atop the low hill, the illusion of the hoard completed.

  I was counting on the legendary dragon-lust for treasure, that ancient instinct to hoard. And it worked.

  And with one mind I wondered: was it drawn in by my myths, or by this world’s? But with the other, I was already working, already preparing to kill the beast with the landmine I’d painted at the heart of the hill beneath it. The drake curled greedily atop the mound, completely forgetting its chase, forgetting us. It was desperate to smother as much of that false gold beneath its body as it could.

  “Let’s move back a little more,” I said, and we retreated to the very edge of my aura’s reach, to the faintest limit of what I could still feel. When all of us were there—Liora included—I turned my will toward the second painting I’d hidden on the hill. Not gold this time, but something similar in look, yet far worse: a molten mass of bronze-orange-white metal, layered the way I’d seen in old photographs. A fused amalgam of concrete, steel, sand, uranium, zirconium, everything Nick had told me to include when I’d painted it.

  The Elephant’s Foot, captured at the moment of its birth in a failing reactor.

  I called to it, commanded it to become itself, to become the strongest source of radiation it could be, focused fully within that small, contained space.

  And the painting obeyed.

  “It's on, guys,” I said as a warning. My second thought-strain though, couldn’t help questioning why it hadn’t taxed me the way the laser did.

  “If it emits radiation like we hoped, we should see the first symptoms within minutes. It’ll hopefully weaken it enough for us to kill it within a few hours,” Nick replied. We watched the beast suddenly jerk its head back, then spew a vile stream of bile onto the ground in front of itself. It began coughing blood, struggling to stand, wings twitching.

  “That seems way too quick,” Nick muttered. “Elephant Foot killed within days…” The drake staggered as if trying to move away from the radiation source. “This seems way more potent,” he added, just as the lizard collapsed, overcome with fatigue. Its chest heaved up and down, blood leaking from every orifice.

  “Jesus…” Pete whispered under his breath.

  “Exactly. I thought we’d only confirm if it works and come back for the body in a few days if we couldn’t kill it weakened. The real thing killed people in days. People, not a flying magical beast the size of an actual elephant…”

  “Maybe the Soviets covered their asses with false info. Maybe at the start it was that deadly?” I said, watching a blister of skin bubble and burst on the drake’s flank, fluid oozing out. I withdrew my Authority from the trap, but the drake was already dead, unmoving. “I turned it off, guys…” I said, which prompted Nick to stand and move toward the carcass.

  “Wait!” I shouted, stopping him. Liora swooped from her vantage point and settled in the air near us. “This thing could be radioactive, right?”

  “What? No, no. It doesn’t work like that. It was irradiated, but it isn’t radioactive. Your trap was.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I fully intend to make steaks out of it. It’s perfectly safe. It would be unsafe if it were contaminated with radioactive material, but you turned everything back into normal paint.”

  “Seriously?” I pressed.

  “Yes. Food is often irradiated. A third of the spices in the US are irradiated.”

  “I didn’t know that. So this thing is safe to touch?”

  “Yes,” Nick said, and hurried toward the corpse.

  “How are you even going to cut that thing?” Peter asked. “It barely has any scratches, aside from those ugly ulcers popping off from the radiation.”

  “I… actually didn’t think of that,” Nick admitted, scratching his chin. “Could you get father here?” he asked me.

  “Yeah. It’d be a shame to leave it rotting,” I said.

  “Let me try it,” Peter said as he walked up to the corpse. Liora drifted after him, circling in that half-shadowlight form of his while Peter crouched beside the puddles of blood and ooze. With a pull of his will, he made the fluids drift upward toward him. Slow at first, then gathering speed, as if he’d become a small black hole dragging the mess off the ground. It swirled around him faster and faster until he condensed all of it around his fists, forming overlapping, saw-like rings of water-matter. Then he struck.

  The beast’s body shuddered under the blow, shifting from the force, but when Peter drew his hand back, only a thin cut remained on the drake’s scales.

  “Well, it’s going to be a long butchering session, guys,” I said.

  “Can’t you paint a hole on the scales and see if we can grab the meat that way?” Nick asked, while Peter continued punching his way through the hide with growing determination.

  “Wouldn’t… it… go… right through… the… whole thing?” Peter muttered between strikes, each blow leaving those beautiful ribbons of white and sapphire shadowlight trailing behind it. His magic was gorgeous, if you ignored all the carnage.

  “I’d say it depends on her intention,” Nick said, arms folded across his chest.

  “That’s probably true,” I admitted, rummaging in my bag for the black spray. “My intention works wonders in teleportation. It should guide identity magic too, right?”

  “You’re free to check,” Nick said, gesturing to the untouched side of the drake, the one not being pummeled by Peter, who’d made barely any progress. “We never would’ve killed it in any normal way,” he added a moment later. “This thing’s almost indestructible. I don’t even want to imagine how tough an adult dragon is.”