“Oh fuck!” someone swore from nearby.

  “Paddle harder!” Stinger commanded. “If that dragon sinks the ship we’ll never make land alive.”

  “If that dragon wants to sink that ship, us being on it’s not going to make any difference,” Miles countered. He’d stopped his paddling and was staring up at the circling beast with a look of absolute awe and hopelessness.

  “Not if we get on it fast enough,” Stinger was paddling for all he was worth. Riki and Sirius were doing likewise.

  Miles shook his head. “We’ll never make it. That thing’s as big as the ship and they fly faster than we can sail.”

  “I said row!” Stinger commanded. Even without Miles they were still moving faster than they had been.

  Amanda grabbed a pair of ores and joined them, rowing as fast as she could. She wasn’t sure what they were going to do when they got back to the ship. She had dealt with dragon fire before, from small dragons. But this was no small dragon. This was quite honestly the largest dragon she had ever set eyes on. And Miles had a point, the dragon was obviously fixated on the ship.

  No, not the ship. Amanda glanced back again and watched its circles slowly tighten. It wasn’t focused on the ship, it was focused on the crates which were currently hanging off the side of the ship.

  As she watched, they cut one of the crates free. It fell into the ocean with a great crash. For a moment it bobbed and bounced, until the water found the open side, and then it quickly started to sink.

  The dragon’s reaction was instant. Its head sharply turned. Its narrow shoulder’s hunched, and then it opened it’s mouth and it breathed out a stream of hot flames.

  Amanda dropped her ores and raised her hands, trying to pull the flames away from the edge of the boat. Dragon fire was hotter than most, hot enough to vapourise steel. And it could spread like liquid.

  The ocean boiled and bubbled. The container melted into nothing leaving only a blinding orange lights and brown smoke which the dragon attacked at like a seagull consuming a fish.

  At this distance Amanda had trouble controlling those flames. She thought she’d pulled the worst of it away but the wood of the ship had a turned a crisp black. Water elementals, on board the ship had tried to help, lifting great waves up between the dragon and the ship. And there was another problem…

  While the dragon was now distracted, its focus completely on the fallen container, and despite the fact that ship was still standing, no longer was there a ladder down to the water. Even if they could get the longboat past the feasting dragon, there was no easy way to climb back on board the ship.

  They would have other ropes, Amanda was certain, but it would be a slow climb, and they’d never get there in time. Amanda could see from here that the crew weren’t planning on waiting around. Sails were being readied and the anchor was already being raised. When an entire ship of people was a stake, why would you wait for five individuals?

  The others in the longboat seemed to have realised the same thing for all of them had stopped rowing and were now just watching the scene unfold.

  Before their eyes, the ship slowly started to move and the dragon raised its beady black eyes.

  Amanda turned to look at Sirius, and then all of a sudden, he vanished into thin air.

  As she turned toward the others, the same thing happened to Riki. He was there and then he wasn’t. Stinger was already gone.

  Only her and Miles remained.

  And then he was gone too. But not because he’d vanished like the others but because she suddenly found herself standing on the main deck of the Wolverine. She blinked in surprise, had enough time to register Sirius standing only metres away with his sword pointed at Morgan’s throat, and then a sudden bout of nausea overwhelmed her and she leaned forward and vomited on the deck.

  A quick glance around the deck only moments later suggested some of the others had done the same. Nearby Riki was seated on a wooden crate looking sweaty and sick but otherwise unharmed.

  Sirius dropped his sword from Morgan’s throat and called out to Stinger, who was already climbing the rigging with other men, loosening the ties holding the sails, “Just cut them free.”

  “Are you mad?” Morgan shouted at him.

  Sirius turned to face her. “We need speed now!”

  “You’ll risk tangling the rigging.”

  “That dragon is going to be on us in seconds.”

  “We’ve still got two more containers to drop,” Morgan shouted back.

  But her words trailed off as a sudden gust of wind threatened to topple the whole ship sideways and a dark scaled head rose up beside the ship, its wings beating ferociously.

  “Shit,” she mumbled, then in a much louder voice she shouted, “Cut all the sails loose now!” Toward the side of the boat she yelled, “Cut the second container free.”

  “Wait!” Sirius yelled at the men who were about to do it. To Morgan he replied, “Wait until we’re moving.”

  Morgan’s eyes bulged but she set her expression in a hard decisive look and raised a hand to her men. “Hold,” she commanded. To Sirius she shouted, “And what exactly do you propose we do in the meantime?”

  “I have a plan,” Sirius shouted back, but he was no longer looking at Morgan and was already on the move. “Are you alright?” Sirius asked as he reached Amanda and gave her such a through assessment she was momentarily confused by it until she glanced around the ship once more and noticed Miles lying on the deck… in pieces.

  The man’s head rolled across the deck, leaving a line of red like paint over the warm coloured wood.

  “What happened?” was all she could ask, still extremely confused.

  “Are you hurt? Missing any limbs? Anything Riki can heal?” He was still trying to see if she was okay, his hands turning her around and lifting her arms, checking she was all in one piece.

  “No, I’m fine.” Apart from being a little shocked, not to mention exhausted from the last dive, it was the truth. “What happened? She repeated.

  “Gulliver messed up a summon. Riki fixed most of it.” Sirius couldn’t help his eyes wandering in the direction of Mile’s dead body.

  Amanda glanced over at Riki. He didn’t look like he was going to be doing any more healing. He looked like he was about to pass out.

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  “I guess smaller is easier,” Sirius said.

  Amanda frowned. She was about to ask him if he was okay, even though he seemed fine enough. Had Riki had to restore severed limbs? Or had Miles just got the worst of it because he’d been last?

  But she never got to ask, for at that moment, as the sails were dropped, they caught the wind from the dragon’s wing beat and instead of toppling them over, it propelled them forward, them, the ship, and the crates.

  The dragon’s eye caught the movement. It fixed it gaze on the containers hanging from the side of the ship.

  “Drop the crate!” Morgan yelled.

  “Not yet!” Sirius shouted.

  The men hesitated, their eyes jumping between Morgan an Sirius.

  Sirius turned to Amanda and spun her so she was facing the dragon. “You shifted the flames before, can you do it again? Push them away from us?”

  Sirius didn’t wait for her answer. He grabbed her and pointed her toward the dragon.

  The dragon was drawing back its head. It’s mouth was opening. Amanda could see the sharp points of its fangs, and the quickly increasing ball of light growing in its throat.

  “Are you mad?” she said to Sirius. But it seemed like she didn’t have any choice.

  “Do it!” he commanded in her ear and in a tone that said he had no doubts that she could.

  She wasn’t sure but his confidence bolstered her. She readied her magic, felt the heat in her fingers and reached out to connect it with whatever was about to come out of that dragon’s mouth.

  She tried to push it back into the dragon’s throat but she quickly realised that was too much. Instead she forced it outward in nearly every direction but forwards.

  The heat was like nothing she’d ever experienced. She could feel her skin drying, all moisture sucked from the air, every little bit of oxygen consumed. She’d never been so close to so much flame. She couldn’t breathe. Her eyeballs were so dry, she closed her eyes to protect them, but not before she saw the sails catch fire.

  “Drop the crate!” Morgan’s command could somehow be heard above the roar of the flames.

  And then the heat was gone.

  Amanda opened her eyes. The dragon was hidden, down beside the boat. She could still hear it, attacking the water and the second melted crate.

  Amanda glanced upward. The sails were burning. That she could fix. With a raise of her hand she snuffed their flames out to nothing.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Morgan yelled.

  The ship picked up speed.

  “How much of the other crate is left?” the captain asked her crewmen as she checked over the side to see for herself. Then she yelled, “Somebody fetch Pip.”

  “You did great,” Sirius said to Amanda.

  “You damn fool!” Morgan spat at Sirius.

  “Nobody’s burnt,” he countered.

  “Nobody would have been burnt if we’d dropped the crate,” she rebutted.

  “Then it would have got the belly of the ship.”

  Morgan’s only response was to glance up toward the sails but seeing they were no longer on fire she frowned and gave pause. She spun back to face behind them, where the dragon was greedily attacking the water. It wouldn’t be long before it was on them again though.

  Sirius stepped forward beside Morgan. In a practical straightforward tone, as if they hadn’t just been arguing he asked, “How much of the last crate is left?”

  “Enough,” was her reply.

  “Perhaps it won’t give chase once we drop it, since it’s the last. We’ve no other large quantities of metal.”

  Amanda could hear the doubt in his voice. She stepped up beside Morgan and Sirius and watched the dragon along with them.

  It pecked at the water and the air again and again, before raising its head back to swallow whatever molten metal or gases it had grabbed.

  “We’ll have to wait until its close to drop it,” Morgan remarked.

  Sirius gave but the barest of nods.

  “All its going to do is buy us time,” Morgan added.

  Sirius didn’t immediately answer but Amanda could see the cogs in his head turning.

  “I can’t do that again,” she said to him.

  He glanced at her and nodded, but the look on his face said that he already had an idea. “What about something different? Remember that manatee you made in the flame?”

  She frowned at him.

  “Dragon’s are territorial,” Sirius explained. Were his eyes always that bright? How could he look so happy right now?

  Somehow that look in his eye made all the chaos seem like background noise and for a moment she knew she’d go along with whatever he asked.

  “Fuck!” Morgan swore. But it wasn’t aimed at Sirius.

  Amanda’s gaze was drawn up and back.

  The dragon had finished the second crate and taken to the sky again. It was following the ship.

  “Ready the last crate!” Morgan commanded.

  Amanda focused her eyes back on Sirius. “You want me to create a dragon out of fire?”

  “What would that even do?” The question came from Stinger, who had just joined them.

  “Distract it, lure it away,” Sirius replied.

  “It would have to be big,” Amanda said.

  “I’ve seen you create enough fire to propel a ship from the heat and without burning the sails,” Sirius fixed her with a steady look. So much faith in his eyes.

  “No one can create fire that big,” Morgan scoffed, as she eyed the approaching dragon.

  “I’d have to do either a lot bigger than that or lead it away... and that distance…” Amanda trailed off. Bigger was the safer bet. There was no way she could maintain a flame for the distance required to get that dragon out of range. But to create something large enough to intimidate that dragon, and shaped fire at that would take everything she had, and she was already so very tired.

  A large crash interrupted her thoughts as the last crate was dropped, a little before the dragon arrived this time. Early enough that by the time the dragon spewed flame into the ocean, the boat was out of the way.

  Time was ticking. They were out of crates. Chaos of the outer world claimed her thoughts.

  “Would it help if you had something to burn?” Stinger asked. His voice was calm and kind, not an ounce of the urgency that Amanda felt a moment ago. In fact, as he spoke, before she even turned to look toward him she found she wasn’t feeling quite so worried or rushed anymore. There was still a touch of those emotions but it wasn’t overwhelming. ‘Empath,’ she realised, ‘Stinger’s an empath.’ The transition had been different and even though she knew this emotion wasn’t as real, not like what she’d felt a moment ago, it was still effective.

  She didn’t fixate on the thought too long. Her newly calmed mind worked over how to approach this. Was there a better option?

  She shook her head at Stinger. “Anything we used would burn up too fast.” She walked over to the edge of the boat. The closer she was to the dragon when she did this the better.

  All too soon it took to the air again. What had for a time turned into a small black dot, grew steadily larger and larger as once more it approached. This time they had no metal to throw into the water.

  “We could distract it,” Stinger suggested. “Send someone out to lure it away.”

  Again, Amanda shook her head. “I can do it.”

  “Who do you propose we send?” Morgan asked with a scathing tone.

  “Dragon incoming!” a sailor called out.

  “Focus on sailing. Full speed,” Morgan commanded to the crew. There was a tenseness in her voice.

  Amanda watched the dragon.

  “Gods help us,” Stinger mumbled from somewhere behind her.

  Amanda couldn’t feel the effects from his magic anymore. But it didn’t matter. She’d found her own sense of calm this time.

  “If you’ve any doubts, I can think of something else,” Sirius spoke. He was trying to speak matter-of-factly, and indeed his words were calm but from pace of his tone she knew he was out of ideas.

  It didn’t matter. Their path had been decided. She’d been born for this.

  The dragon closed in. She could see the edges of it’s scales and the strength in every wing flap.

  It was now or never.

  She took in a deep breath. Her fingers twitched, and from the air she drew forth fire. A swirling ball of flames and heat. No shape at first, just mass. But as it grew, she pushed it out in different directions. Tried to make a snout, and wings.

  The resulting form drew little resemblance to the real thing, only metres away. It was more like some misshapen cloud of fire, and it was too small.

  She put more effort into it. Bigger, longer, avoid the sails. She pushed it forward, elongated the neck. The ball of fire grew, as big as the ship then twice that. It took form. It lacked detail but the rough shape was there and the size gave the real dragon some pause. A sweat broke out on her skin.

  The dragon slowed. It circled. It didn’t approach directly but nor did it flee.

  “Bigger,” Sirius encouraged. “It’s working.”

  Amanda wasn’t sure that it was but she could hear the uplift in his voice and she trusted him. She put everything she had into it until a flaming dragon, that looked far more bird than dragon, towered over the ship.

  Still the black one did not flee. It hovered, obviously unsure. It’s body snaked back and forth in the air as if deciding whether to attack or not.

  “Send it toward it,” Sirius told her. “It will run.”

  Amanda didn’t have the energy to reply. She wasn’t even sure she had the energy to put that fireball out. If she let control of it go now she might just set the ship on fire. Sending it toward the other dragon was the only option, but if it didn’t work, there would be no second chance.

  With the last of her strength, she made it move. As it dove directly toward the other dragon she opened its flaming mouth, increased it’s wings as far as she dared. With all her will she pushed, sent the fire dragon careening toward the other, growing ever bigger.

  The real dragon disappeared from sight behind a flaming curtain.

  Had it run? Amanda didn’t get to find out, for at that moment, exhaustion and magic overuse caught up to her, and her world went black.