Firewalker by Allyson James Page B

dragon and fly us down, but he shook his head. “The fuel for that fire was me. It siphoned off every bit of my magic, and shifting to human took the rest of it. The dragon council fixed it so I locked my own cage.”
    “So, it was the dragons?” I studied the night sky worriedly, expecting to see flames on the horizon any second.
    “Don’t worry,” Mick said beside me. “They won’t come back.”
    “How do you know?”
    Instead of answering, Mick touched the white bandage on my head, his expression grave. “What happened?”
    “I hit her,” Nash said.
    Mick might be drained of magic, but his fury when he swung on Nash would have made a lesser man back down. “What the fuck, Jones?”
    Normally I’d delight in my six-foot-six biker boyfriend glaring at Nash with death-promising rage, but I was exhausted and aching and I wanted to be out of there.
    “He didn’t mean to,” I said quickly. “He thought I was an insurgent.”
    “What? Shit.”
    “I tried to get her to go to an ER,” Nash said as he stashed things in his backpack. “She refused.”
    “You should have tried harder,” Mick growled.
    Tears filled my voice. “Not and leave you out here trapped inside a mountain. Besides, I was under this compulsion spell, remember?”
    Mick cupped my face in his hands again and peered into my eyes. “It was a light one; that was all I could cast. It wouldn’t have let you die trying to fulfill it.”
    I realized the truth of it at the same time he said the words. The compulsion spell had led me to him, but it had been my own emotions that had made me so determined to get to him. “Doesn’t matter. I couldn’t go and leave you out here.”
    Mick’s touch softened on my face. “Well, you’re going now.”
    He snatched up the clothes I’d brought for him and quickly dressed, covering his naked body. I’d brought him his leather jacket as well, not knowing how cold it would be up here. Despite the rising sun, a chill wind blew fiercely along the ridge, and Mick shrugged into the jacket.
    “Which way?” he asked.
    Nash snapped off the flashlight. The mountains to the east cast deep shadows, but the sky above was already brightening to blue. We’d make it to lower elevations about the same time the sun did, and then we’d roast.
    Nash signaled us to follow him, and we started back down the trail, me stumbling and clinging to Mick’s hand.
    “How do you know the dragons won’t come back?” I repeated.
    “Because I know the dragon council,” Mick said. “Escaping was me passing a test. Putting me back would be cheating, and they’d never do anything so dishonorable.”
    “Passing a test?” That did not sound good.
    “Sort of like me making bail, or them honoring a truce.”
    “But what would happen when your magic ran out?” I asked. “The fire would die?”
    “No, I’d be dead,” Mick said, not sounding worried. “But they wouldn’t have kept me in there that long. We need to catch up to Nash.”
    End of conversation. Nash was marching at a swift pace, the soldier in him eating up distance. Mick propelled me along, keeping me too breathless to ask more questions, but no matter. I’d grill him later.
    We caught up to Nash on the narrow saddle that led to the next chain of hills. Without thinking, I looked over the edge of the ridge, and I bit back a hysterical cry. The dawn light showed me what the darkness had hidden—to either side of the path, cliffs fell away in ripples of gray and black, down, down, down through clumps of sagebrush and creosote to the darkness at the bottom.
    I saw something else down there. Eyes. Hundreds of them. Faint white light swirled at the bottom of the hill like mist. A vortex.
    From the vortex, demons were crawling. The shard of mirror in my pack started shrieking, drowning out my own cry of horror.
    Mick looked over the side, saw what I saw. “Aw, damn it. Up!” he shouted at Nash. “Back up!”
    He started hustling me along the path back toward the