“So why did you let her go?” Leo asked as Melody recounted the story from her point of view.
They had made it back to the pawn shop and decided that since the place still wasn’t infested with monsters, spending a day doing absolutely nothing and hiding out didn’t sound so bad. After everything that had happened, neither of them was in a hurry to wander back outside. It had started raining too, steady enough to drum against the roof and darken the windows, so staying put felt like the easiest decision they had made in days.
They mostly talked.
Eventually Leo told his side of what happened, and then Melody told hers.
“Because, well...” Melody paused.
She didn’t really want to be a human killer. She had grown up on movies and comics where one of the greatest virtues a hero could have was possessing enough power to stop someone without needing to kill them. Being strong enough to provide justice without taking a life.
But that wasn’t really the reason.
“I don’t think she was completely in control of it. The artifact, I mean. She was definitely a sex freak, but I think the artifact took to her personality.” Melody gestured toward Leo’s golden sweatshirt. “Kind of like yours.”
Leo looked down at the fleece and pinched some of the fabric between his fingers. He wondered if it had become a sweatshirt because that was what he would actually want to wear, instead of turning into some giant golden sheep pelt or whatever else it could have been.
“But she didn’t listen when you explained what was happening,” he said. “So she became knowingly responsible, right?”
Melody stared at him for a second. “You know, for a thirteen-year-old, that was kind of wise.”
“It’s something I heard at a bullying thing at school.”
“Ah. Right.” Melody leaned back against the counter. “But I mean, I didn’t even know she was controlling people when I got there. If I did, I wouldn’t have... um...”
Leo looked at her.
“Had sex with her?”
“God, stop!”
Melody immediately pulled the neck of her sweatshirt up over half her face. Just remembering the beginning of it made heat crawl across her cheeks, which was annoying considering she barely remembered most of what happened after that. A very small, very embarrassing part of her also wished she remembered a little more.
“Ugh, don’t say sex! You’re thirteen!”
“I’m a teenager. Not a baby. I know things.”
“Ah, God, this feels wrong.” Melody lowered the sweatshirt enough to look at him again. “You’re supposed to be innocent little Leo.”
She looked off for a second, almost like she was remembering a more innocent version of the kid she had met all of a few days ago.
“Yeah... sure.” Leo sounded slightly annoyed at the babying. He stared down at his hands for a moment before speaking again. “I would have killed her if she made me kill you.”
There was something hurt underneath the words.
The line made Melody look at him. Really look at him.
His face wasn’t angry. If anything, he looked frustrated, like he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with the feeling.
“She doesn’t have the artifact anymore,” Melody said. “She’s just a normal person now. If she had been the one to punch a hole through you, she wouldn’t be alive right now. Trust me.”
Melody reached over and took his hand, meaning it as comfort.
For some reason, Leo’s face immediately went red.
“I just felt like I had seen enough blood,” she finished quietly.
Leo looked up at her face, and whatever frustration had been sitting there finally gave way. His shoulders loosened, and after a moment they shared a small grin.
“Thanks for stopping her,” he said.
“Thanks for coming after me and snapping me out of it with your healing sweatshirt.”
Melody smiled back, then looked down at the golden fleece.
“Now that I think about it, this thing heals you and apparently stops mind control. Your artifact is kind of OP.” Her eyes drifted toward the axe resting beside Leo’s sleeping spot. “And now you’ve got an axe that makes you grow. I can’t keep calling you squirt when I...”
She trailed off, thinking about the possibilities of that axe while twirling her new magical rock between her fingers like a fidget toy.
Leo followed her gaze and smiled.
Being that big had been incredible, but it had also drained him. Even after shrinking back down, he had felt like he had run until his lungs gave out. Whatever the axe did, it definitely wasn’t something he could keep active forever.
“Tomorrow we should totally check out how tall you can grow,” Melody continued.
Leo laughed and was about to agree when the entire pawn shop flashed white.
Melody flinched hard enough to nearly drop the stone.
Thunder crashed almost immediately afterward, so loud that the windows rattled in their frames and several antiques on a nearby shelf jumped against each other. Something small fell over behind the counter with a clatter.
Both of them were on their feet before the sound had finished rolling through the building.
Leo grabbed his axe. Melody shoved the stone into her pocket and reached for the snake sword, both of them reacting almost automatically now after everything that had happened over the last few days.
Another flash lit the windows.
Not lightning from the clouds.
Something had moved past them.
Melody rushed toward the front of the shop with Leo behind her. Rain hammered against the street outside, heavy enough that water was already running along the gutters and collecting around abandoned cars.
They pushed through the door and stepped into the downpour.
Something enormous flew overhead.
Melody barely had time to look up before it passed between the buildings, wings beating hard enough to throw rain sideways. Its body was long and dark against the storm clouds, flashes of blue-white light crawling between the scales along its neck and wings.
Leo stared after it.
“Is that a—”
“Dragon,” Melody said.
The creature banked above the street.
Its head turned toward a building farther down the block.
Its mouth opened.
Light gathered between its jaws.
For half a second Melody could see the entire inside of its mouth glowing blue-white.
Then lightning erupted from it.
The bolt crossed the street almost instantly and struck the side of the distant building. The explosion blew part of the wall outward in a shower of brick, glass, and smoke.
Melody froze.
The dragon continued past the intersection, disappearing behind another row of buildings.
Then it banked.
Coming back.
Melody looked at the open street around them.
At Leo.
At the dragon turning through the rain.
Running outside had been incredibly stupid.
“Get back inside!” Melody screamed.
She didn’t wait to see if Leo listened. Her hand shot out, grabbed a fistful of his sleeve, and yanked him toward the shattered front of the pawn shop while the dragon’s shadow swept over the street again. Rain hammered down so hard it bounced off the pavement in silver needles, soaking her hair into her face and making the ruined road shine black under each flash of lightning. By the time they stumbled back through the broken doorway, Melody’s chest was already tightening with that awful instinctive certainty that they had made a mistake just by being seen.
For one strange second, the sound of the rain seemed to dull.
Not disappear completely, but soften just enough for her to notice it.
That was somehow worse.
A tingling raced up the back of her neck. The air itself felt wrong, like the whole front of the shop had been charged and was waiting for permission to explode. Melody barely had time to turn her head toward the blown-out entrance before the world became white light and thunder.
The blast hit like a truck.
Glass, clay, splintered wood, bent metal, and chunks of the front wall tore through the pawn shop in every direction. Melody felt herself lifted off her feet and thrown backward into a display case that thankfully had already been half destroyed, because if it hadn’t been, the dragon probably would have saved it the trouble. The ringing in her ears came fast and total. She couldn’t tell if she had screamed or if the roar she heard was just the building coming apart around her.
Then something huge moved between her and the collapsing front of the store.
Leo.
Blue light surged beneath his skin again, tracing through his hands and neck in jagged glowing lines, and before Melody could even think to yell at him not to do it, he was growing. It happened so violently that the remains of the pawn shop didn’t even get the chance to pretend they could hold him. The roof cracked open around his shoulders. Support beams snapped. Rain poured through widening gaps as he shot upward through the wreckage, the golden fleece stretching with him, his axe swelling larger in his grip until it looked less like a tool and more like a piece of siege equipment.
“Leo!” Melody shouted, coughing through dust and rain and whatever powdered antique nonsense was now all over her face.
“I’m trying— it’s too tight—” Leo’s voice was already enormous, strained.
He kept growing until his head burst through what was left of the roof and into the storm. The whole building shuddered around his legs. Shelves tipped over. Floodwater from the blasted storefront spread fast across the floor, carrying broken trinkets and jewelry and old papers in little spinning currents. For one ridiculous second Melody had the thought that the pawn shop was now technically an indoor pond, which felt like the kind of thing her brain should not be wasting energy on while a dragon was trying to kill them.
Then the dragon came back.
It swept low through the rain with a body long enough to fill half the street, its black-blue scales shining slick beneath the lightning still crawling over them. The horns on its head glowed first, then the inside of its mouth, and Melody’s stomach dropped so hard she almost thought she was falling again.
“Leo, move!”
“I can’t— the building’s still on me—”
He tried.
He really did.
But when you were a hundred feet tall and half inside a collapsed building, apparently “move” became more of a long-term project than an immediate option. The dragon’s blast hit him square in the chest. Blue-white lightning exploded across his giant body and turned the rain around him into steam. Leo screamed, and the sound shook broken windows up and down the block. For one terrible second his whole body locked up, every muscle seized in place while electricity raced through him and down into the flooded remains of the pawn shop.
Then he fell.
He didn’t just stumble. He dropped.
The street jumped when his body hit it. Cars bounced on their axles. Water splashed up in huge sheets. The axe crashed out of his hands somewhere behind him with a metallic boom that got swallowed by thunder. Melody was already running before his body even started shrinking, scrambling over broken counters and chunks of brick and half-submerged junk just to get out of the wreckage and to him.
By the time she reached the street, Leo was already dropping back toward normal size. Fifty feet. Twenty. Ten. Then suddenly just Leo again, lying crumpled in the rain between a wrecked sedan and a bent street sign, the golden fleece smoking faintly where the lightning had hit it.
“No, no, no...” Melody dropped beside him so fast her knees slammed into the flooded pavement. Her fingers went to his throat, then his chest, then uselessly hovered because she couldn’t decide what she was checking first. “Leo? Leo!”
He was breathing.
It wasn’t a good breath. It was shallow and rough and way too still otherwise, but it was a breath, and that was enough to keep her from completely losing it. Only she didn’t have any time to actually feel relieved, because the dragon was already circling back through the rain for another pass.
Melody looked up, water dripping off her lashes and hair plastered to her face, and she had one of those brief, stupidly honest moments where she thought, I am so unbelievably tired of this.
Her hand went to the lynx dagger.
Heat answered immediately.
The dragon opened its mouth again, lightning gathering between its teeth, and Melody didn’t even think. She triggered the dagger and launched herself skyward just as another bolt tore into the street where she had been kneeling. The blast punched a crater into the pavement and flipped the nearby car onto its side. Heat chased her up into the air while spectral wings flashed from the dagger and sent her hurtling toward the rooftops.
She hit the edge of a building harder than intended, got one elbow over the ledge, nearly slid back off because rain made everything slick, then jammed the dagger into the masonry and hauled herself up. Her lungs were burning. Her whole body still ached from the basement, from the Mother, from being used like a puppet, from waking up with blood and horror and guilt all over her. Apparently the universe had decided that counted as rest.
The dragon banked above her.
Melody drew the snake sword and ran.
She crossed the first rooftop at a sprint, leapt the alley between buildings with another burst from the dagger, landed badly on the far side, and kept going before her legs could properly complain. The rain made every roof dangerous. Gravel and pooled water slid under her shoes, and more than once she had the nasty realization that it might not even be the dragon that killed her, just a stupid slip off a six-story building because apocalypses apparently believed in irony.
The dragon swung around again, flying lower this time, and Melody saw her chance.
“Come on,” she hissed, already running faster.
She triggered the dagger at the edge of the roof and shot upward in a streak of force and ghostly wings, rising fast enough to meet the dragon near the arc of its turn. For one beautiful second, she actually thought this might work. She brought the snake sword around with both hands and slashed hard across the creature’s side.
The blade hit.
Acid mana hissed.
And absolutely nothing useful happened.
The sword scraped across the scales with a shower of green sparks and sliding acid, but the dragon’s hide didn’t even scratch. Not a mark. Not a chip. Not so much as a courtesy crack to reward effort. Melody’s eyes widened in disbelief as she flew past it.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
The dragon answered by twisting its body and smashing her out of the air with one wing.
Melody hit the roof like a dropped bag of bricks, bounced once, then skidded through water and broken gravel until she slammed shoulder-first into a rooftop vent. Pain burst down her arm. She rolled instinctively as lightning blasted the section of roof she had just occupied, blowing apart tar paper and concrete like it was nothing.
Okay. Great. Amazing. So the sword that melted monster flesh and cut through giant snake hide was apparently worthless against lightning dragon armor. Fantastic.
“Dragon scales. Of course it’s freakin OP,” she muttered, pushing herself up.
Melody pushed herself up and ran again before the dragon could line up another shot. She jumped one gap, launched herself across another with the dagger, nearly missed a ledge, caught it with both hands, and hung there for half a second while rain streamed into her eyes. Somewhere below, the street was a blur of wrecked cars and water and ruined pavement. Somewhere down there was Leo, unconscious and small and so easy to lose in this mess that the thought alone made panic creep cold into her ribs.
She pulled herself up and kept moving.
Another rooftop. Another leap. Another blast of lightning narrowly avoided as it shredded a billboard behind her. Every time she tried to close with the dragon, it adjusted. Every time she thought she had a line, it went higher, faster, or simply turned its body so those impossible scales took the hit. She was starting to understand something awful.
She could reach it.
She could maybe annoy it.
She could not actually hurt it.
The realization sat heavy in her stomach.
By the time she made it to the next rooftop her breathing was ragged, her thighs were starting to shake, and rain was plastering her clothes so tightly to her skin that every movement felt heavier than it should. She turned in time to see the dragon circling back once more, electricity gathering in its mouth as it hovered beyond the next building.
Melody looked down toward the street.
She couldn’t see Leo through the rain.
“Leo!” she shouted, though she didn’t know if she wanted him to answer or stay unconscious and safe.
Nothing came back.
The dragon’s mouth glowed brighter.
Melody tightened her grip on both weapons. Her heart was pounding so hard it made everything else seem a little unreal, like the whole world had narrowed to rain, rooftops, light, and the sick understanding settling over her one slow piece at a time.
They had survived the ants. The snake. The Mother. The golem. Every time, somehow, there had been a move left. A trick. An opening. Some ugly, desperate way through.
Standing there in the rain with a sword that could not cut and a dagger that could only keep her airborne for seconds at a time, Melody wasn’t sure there was one this time.
For the first time since all of this started, it didn’t just feel dangerous.
It felt final.
The dragon loosed another blast, and Melody threw herself aside as white-blue death tore through the rooftop where she had been standing. The explosion lit the rain around her and sent chunks of concrete tumbling off the edge into the street below. She caught herself on one knee, chest heaving, soaked to the bone, and looked back up at the thing hunting them through the storm.
A cold thought slipped into place so quietly it almost felt calm.
They were really about to die.