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Chapter 24

Chapter 24

For a moment before the creatures clashed, Jeremy could see the car, the river, and the other side of the city beyond. The streetlights buzzed back on. Then a head-splitting crack ripped through the square as the kelpie’s hit landed. Jeremy and the others dove behind the massive tree roots they stood among. The blackness in the kelpie’s hand exploded, sending swirls and shards of inky nothingness outward. Everything it collided with shattered like cracked glass, then dissolved away.

The sides of the buildings around them collapsed into a wave of dust and rubble that rolled toward them in a second onslaught of dangerous shrapnel. Jeremy curled over Atticus’s carrier and put his arms over his head. This rubble was from in front of the tree and from above it. He was not sure how much the branches would protect them.

But not a single pebble hit him. He lowered his arms and looked up. Leaves drifted down from the limbs stretched above, disturbed by the attack. A dragon towered over the group. Her wings curled in a shield to prevent the rubble from reaching them.

Moira glared down with the bright, reptilian eyes and let out a growl. Jeremy doubted the rubble did much damage to her since she was bulletproof, and the fact that she was alive at all meant the blackness had not struck her. Knowing her, the growls were righteous indignation. Jeremy wondered if she could learn to communicate in this form somehow.

“Holy shit!” Caleb screamed at the top of his lungs, waving his arms around to draw her attention, “Is that you, Moira? You look fucking awesome!”

Sean stared up with an even more dumbfounded expression than before. His jaw slacked, and his eyes popped out of his head. Beside him, the goons scrambled back and lifted their guns.

“Don’t you know anything about dragons?” Jeremy scoffed at them. He let himself have a moment of smugness to get back at their superior attitude. “Their scales are bulletproof. Stop freaking out, that’s just Moira.”

They lowered their guns and stared up with boggled expressions. Moira lowered her wings and looked at the scene behind them. It was as if a tornado had whipped down the street. The sides of the buildings were simply gone, leaving cut-outs of the floors and rooms. Water spouted from the plumbing onto the torn-up asphalt below. The road was reduced to a pile of rubble except for the small, untouched island where the dryad stood. She clutched the kelpie's hand in one of her own.

“You think you can win against me?” She boomed.

The kelpie sneered up at her. “You are overconfident, and I am hungry.”

“You have no chance against me while we are on land.”

“While we are on land.” The kelpie repeated. Her head tilted. Her sneer morphed into another grin that split her cheeks far too wide. Then, she began to drag the dryad down the street toward the river. The dryad tugged her hand away, but it was stuck to the kelpie, and she could not let go.

“Oh shit.” Caleb said, “That doesn’t look good.”

“Just watch! The dryad has not even attacked yet.” Sean flapped a hand at him, excitement threaded through his voice, “There is no way she will let herself get dragged into the water.”

They reached about as far as the car before the dryad did anything. Sean watched with palpable excitement. No one else was able to look away, either. Their battle had the magnetism of a car wreck. Moira stomped her paws and shifted her wings but also looked on with interest. Then the dryad literally dug her heels into the ground.

The first thing Jeremy saw was a ripple moving through the asphalt, cracking and crumbling it. Then, the car jerked and flew up into the air. It smashed into one of the ruined sides of the buildings. All hell broke loose. Roots burst from the ground in a spray of dirt, gravel, and asphalt chunks. They demolished everything not destroyed by the kelpie’s attack as they wove through the street. Distressingly, they were headed toward their group.

The damaged buildings groaned and undulated on either side of the road as the roots heaved beneath their foundations. They shook apart further, their structures collapsing in. Atticus shifted about in his arms, making it difficult to hold her carrier. Beneath Jeremy’s feet, the ground vibrated. Then it swelled.

He dove away before a root burst through the spot where he had been standing. Caleb and the others also scattered, stumbling and lurching as the moving ground threw them off balance. The only place that remained firm was the buttressed roots of the massive tree. Jeremy scrambled onto one, the bark breaking away beneath his boots and fingers.

Only Moira remained in place. She stepped away when the ground swelled beneath one of her paws. Her wings arched over her back, poised for a quick take-off and for keeping her balance. They brushed the girthy lower limbs of the tree above her. She let out another rumbling growl of frustration.

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The ground settled beneath her. The dryad stood firm, anchored by the roots splayed beneath the crumbled buildings, connecting her to the huge, grounded tree. Sean laughed with no small tinge of hysteria in his voice from where he clung to one of the huge buttress roots.

“See!” He shouted, “There is no way she would let herself get dragged into the water.”

Jeremy shook his head. Each of the nature spirits had only made one actual attack so far. This could be considered the opening punches. Their warm-up. The feeling each other out before diving into the real fight. They had already decimated this entire block. This made his and Moira’s fight with the dragon seem like swatting a fly. That two-legged dragon had only barely scratched the buildings. These creatures decimated them.

“I think Moira was right.” He yelled in the moment of stillness while the kelpie tugged on the dryad while she stood firm. “We should get away from here.”

“No way!” Sean patted his root, “We are as safe as can be in the dryad’s tree. Best to stay here.”

“You seem to have a lot of confidence about this dryad,” Caleb called. He managed to climb up the tree and lounged in one of the dipping curves of a thick lower branch. One leg swung back and forth where it hung off as he carded his hair back to re-tie it. “I thought you people didn’t know anything about any of the creatures.”

Sean took a deep breath to retort but froze with his mouth open. His face twisted into some combination of arrogance and confusion like he himself did not know why. And that he could not believe he did not know. Jeremy shook his head.

The Kelpie was powering up another attack, again creating darkness and drawing upon it. Jeremy squinted. Perhaps she was not drawing upon darkness but light. This would leave only blackness visible since there was no refracted light for their eyes to pick up on. Either way, the area along the riverbank descended into eerie blackness again. It swallowed up both figures, the road, and parts of the collapsed buildings.

A cage of giant claws encircled Jeremy. He found himself lifting into the air. He watched with surprise as Moira also plucked Sean off the roots. She lowered her wings and placed them both onto one, then used it to flip them onto her back. She did the same for Sean’s two goons. Caleb lit up as soon as he saw what was happening. He leaped to his feet to throw himself from the limb. He landed beside Jeremy with an excited ‘oof.’

“Can you believe this!” He wiggled to look around, “We are going to ride a dragon!”

Moira grumbled beneath them, the sound vibrating through her scales. Jeremy patted her in shock, “I thought you said you were not going to give people rides.”

She ignored him. Keeping one eye on the yawning blackness, she backed away from the limbs of the tree, then lifted her wings and crouched down. Jeremy had a flash of realization that she had not actually flown yet. Hopefully, it came to her instinctually, like becoming a dragon in the first place. She rocked back and forth a few times like a cat getting ready to pounce, feeling her weight and building the tension in her coiled muscles. Hopefully, they were not too heavy. She was huge, but with five people on her back, it was pretty crowded.

Then, as the blackness imploded behind them, she leaped into the air. It was what he imagined fighter pilots felt when they accelerated. He was grateful that Moira’s back remained level because too much of a tilt, in combination with the force of her leap, would knock them clean off. On either side, her wings slammed down. They lifted further into the air, a little rocky at first, but she drew her wings back up and managed to stabilize them after a few massive flaps.

Jeremy glanced below him, dizzy from the lift’s force and the sudden height. For all that, they were only a few hundred feet into the air, not all that far from the dryad tree’s tallest branches. From here, they could watch as the blackness sucked in on itself again.

This time, it did not coalesce in the kelpie’s hand. Instead, it clung to the dryad’s form. She reached through it, the blackness curling around her hand as if it were a mist. Then she wrapped the hand around the kelpie’s head and slammed her into the ground. Roots burst forth again and wrapped the kelpie up, keeping her immobile.

From this high up, the actual figures were quite small, but their voices could still be heard clearly.

“You think these little tricks will work on me?” The dryad scoffed. Jeremy figured from the difference of two rings, that the dryad was more powerful. And terrain was important, even more so for nature spirits. While they were on land, the dryad did have an incredible advantage. From the prison of roots, the kelpie laughed.

“Fine, fine.” It chuckled, “I’ll stop playing around.”

Moira seemed to be struggling to gain any more altitude. Five people was apparently too much for her to carry. She needed a little bit more for her wings to clear the tops of the buildings on the down sweeps. With a little wobble, she gained a few more feet. But she needed to hurry up.

The entire river swelled in its banks. The water collected into one giant dark wave beside where the two creatures were locked together on the shore. It left behind the shadowy naked riverbed where fish flopped around and old metal construction and trash stuck out of the sediment. The dryad looked up at the looming wave.

“If I can’t drag you to the water, I will bring the river to you.” The kelpie laughed.

“Holy shit.” Sean stared down at the scene with wide eyes.

“Still happy you put your money down on the dryad?” Caleb asked him.

Jeremy wondered what the people on the other side of the river were seeing. He glanced down at the streets, which were about to be flooded. Thankfully, there did not seem to be anyone around. Hopefully, the car with Sean’s backup realized things were getting dicey and got away from the area for now.

Then, the wave crashed over the city blocks, enveloping the buildings. Some of the shorter ones were completely submerged. It swept around the thick trunk of the tree and beyond. Both the dryad and the kelpie were buried deep beneath its surface.

They all looked down in shocked silence for a beat of Moira’s wings. Then Moira’s dragon figure disappeared beneath them, replaced by her normal human figure. They hung suspended in an even more shocked silence before plummeting toward the water in a chorus of screams and shouts.