The transition from the elves' pristine underground city to the dragon's territory was like stepping from a luxury hotel into a condemned building. One moment, I was walking on smooth marble floors under soft, magical lighting; the next, I was picking my way across jagged rocks in the dim glow of my fshlight. The colpsed wall that connected their domains looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to reality itself, chunks of masonry and twisted metal creating a treacherous obstacle course that screamed "turn back now, idiot."

  But I'd never been good at listening to reasonable advice.

  The caverns beyond were rough-hewn and ancient, carved by something with cws the size of dinner ptes… I'd hate to see what they could do to a person. Scratch marks scored the walls in parallel lines, and the air tasted of sulfur and old bones. Charming. I'd been in worse pces, but not many, and certainly not by choice. The beam of my fshlight caught something that might have been a ribcage embedded in the wall. Human-sized. I didn't look too closely.

  My retirement had been going so well, too. Three months of sleeping in, drinking coffee that didn't taste like motor oil, and not getting into life-or-death conflicts with things that had more teeth than a dental convention. But here I was, trudging through Dragon Real Estate 101, because some elf with a pretty face and a sob story had convinced me that one more job wouldn't kill me.

  Famous st words, those. Lisa had better be alive when I found her. I wasn't interested in going through all this for nothing.

  The caverns stretched on for what felt like miles, twisting and turning like the inside of some geological intestine.

  Every few hundred yards, I'd stop and listen, trying to separate the normal cave sounds, dripping water, settling rocks, my own bored breathing, from anything that might indicate I was about to become a midnight snack. So far, so good, but I'd learned long ago that "so far, so good" was just another way of saying "you haven't stepped in the bear trap yet."

  I'd made it maybe half a mile when I heard footsteps behind me. Quick, light, and trying too hard to be quiet. I pressed myself against the wall and waited, hand drifting to the Colt .45 under my jacket. Old habits and all that.

  "Hunter," came a familiar voice from the darkness. "Hunter? Where have you gotten yourself to? I was supposed to show you the way."

  I sighed and clicked on the fshlight, catching Sylvanus in the beam like a deer on a midnight highway. The elf looked exactly like he had when I'd st seen him standing in my office a few nights ago, tall, elegant, and completely out of pce in a hole in the ground. He was carrying a sword that probably cost more than my st apartment and wearing an expression that mixed determination with barely concealed terror.

  "Let me guess," I said, not bothering to hide my irritation. "You couldn't let the professional handle it alone."

  "Look what happened st time." He stepped closer, and I noticed his hands were shaking. "After sending that young girl off to her doom, I couldn't stand by and let you go alone."

  "Lisa went up against a dragon solo and hasn't been heard from since." I started walking again, forcing him to keep up. I wasn’t a fan of how he seemed to have already written Lisa’s chances off in his mind… but he likely had never seen her fight up close. "She's harder to kill than you might expect for someone her age. What exactly do you think you're going to do that she couldn't, anyway?"

  "I don't know," he admitted. "But I have to try."

  I almost respected the honesty. Almost. "Stay behind me, keep quiet, and try not to get us both killed. This isn't some fairy tale where friendship conquers all. Dragons eat people who think like that for breakfast."

  We continued deeper into the caverns, our footsteps echoing despite our best efforts at stealth. The scratch marks on the walls grew deeper and more frequent, and the sulfur smell got strong enough to make my eyes water. The path began to slope downward more steeply, and I could feel the temperature rising with each step. Somewhere ahead, something was breathing with the rhythm of a sleeping freight train.

  About fifty yards from what I hoped was our destination, my foot came down on a loose stone. It skittered away from me with a sharp crack that echoed through the tunnel like a gunshot. We both froze, listening to the sound bounce off the walls ahead of us, getting fainter and fainter until it disappeared entirely.

  The breathing ahead of us never changed rhythm.

  "Careful," I whispered to Sylvanus, though my own pulse was hammering hard enough that I was surprised the dragon couldn't hear it.

  The cavern opened up suddenly, expanding into a space so vast my fshlight beam disappeared into the darkness overhead. But I didn't need to see the ceiling to know what we'd found. The hoard stretched out before us like a pirate's wet dream: gold coins, jewels, precious artifacts, weapons, and enough wealth to buy a small country. All of it arranged in careful piles around the sleeping form of something that made my reptilian brain scream suggestions about running away very, very fast.

  The dragon was beautiful in the way that avanches and forest fires are beautiful, magnificent, terrible, and absolutely guaranteed to ruin your whole day if you get too close. Red scales the size of roofing tiles caught the light from my fshlight, creating a scattered consteltion of reflected gleams across its massive form. It had to be sixty feet long from snout to tail, with wings folded against its sides like colpsed sails on some impossible ship. Its head alone was the size of a compact car, all teeth and horn and prehistoric menace. Each breath moved enough air to ruffle the coins nearest its snout, and the sound was like standing next to a steam engine that had been designed by someone with a serious noise fetish.

  And there, tucked away near one of the smaller treasure piles, was a human-sized birdcage that definitely hadn't been made for any bird I knew.

  Lisa sat inside it with her back against the bars, arms wrapped around her knees. Even from a distance, I could see she was alive, her chest rose and fell in the steady rhythm of sleep or unconsciousness. She was young, maybe nineteen or twenty, with dark skin that looked ashen in the dim light and loose natural hair that had seen better days. Her clothes were torn and dirty, but she didn't appear to be seriously injured.

  She looked small and fragile in the cage, a stark contrast to the mountain of death sleeping thirty feet away.I clicked off the fshlight and grabbed Sylvanus's arm before he could do something stupid like call out to her.

  "Wait here," I whispered. "And I mean it. Don't move, don't breathe loudly, don't even think aggressive thoughts. Dragons can sense that kind of thing."

  He nodded, though I wasn't sure he was listening. His eyes were fixed on the cage with the kind of intensity that got people killed in my line of work.

  I started forward, moving with the kind of careful precision that had kept me alive through twenty years of hunting things that considered humans a food group. Every step was calcuted, every breath measured. The dragon's breathing never changed,in, out, in, out, like a massive bellows working overtime. Coins shifted under my feet with soft metallic whispers that sounded like gunshots in the silence.

  Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.

  The dragon's breathing hitched for just a moment, one massive eye opening to reveal a pupil the size of a manhole cover. I froze, not even daring to blink. We stared at each other for an eternity that probably sted three seconds, then the eye closed and the breathing resumed its steady rhythm.

  My heart was trying to punch its way out of my chest, but I kept moving. Five feet from the cage now. Lisa had turned towards me, having heard the noise despite my best efforts at stealth. There were bruises on her arms and a cut on her forehead that had scabbed over, but she was breathing steadily, and I didn't see any obvious signs of serious injury. Her eyes went wide as they met mine, and I could see her tattoo on her cheek… a blue square with a star over the top of it. She once told me the star was because her uncle, and my friend, Tony, always said she was one. I wasn’t going to let her story end down here.

  "Hunter!" she whispered between her teeth, her voice barely audible.

  I held up a hand for silence and crept closer to the cage. The lock was massive, old iron worked with enough magical reinforcement to make my teeth ache just looking at it. But Lisa was already reaching through the bars, her fingers working at something I couldn't see.

  "The lock's got a ward on it," she breathed, so quietly I had to lean in to hear her. "But I've been working on it. Without my stones it’s been a pain."

  I nodded and gnced back at the dragon. Still sleeping, but there was something about the rhythm of its breathing that made me nervous. Like it was too regur, too controlled. Like maybe it wasn't as asleep as it wanted us to think.

  "Can you crack it?" I whispered back. I grabbed the lock, tugging on it as it held the door to the cage shut.

  To my surprise, the lock clicked open with a sound like breaking gss.

  Which was also exactly when every light in the cavern suddenly bzed to life.

  Not electric lights, dragon fire, burning from cracks in the walls and ceiling, like someone had just hit the switch on the world's most dangerous lighting system. The dragon's head rose from the hoard with the grace of a wrecking ball, those massive eyes fixing on me with the kind of attention usually reserved for particurly interesting insects.

  "Well, well," it said in a voice like grinding boulders. "Another little rat crawling out of the shadows to py."I did what any reasonable person would do in that situation. I grabbed Lisa's arm and ran like hell. We didn’t make it ten feet.

  The dragon's roar shook the cavern hard enough to bring down stactites, and a strong gust of wind from its wings knocked Lisa and me apart from each other. I dove behind a pile of golden goblets just as a gout of fme turned the air where we'd been standing into something resembling the inside of a bst furnace. Lisa stumbled where she nded, trying to regain her feet before the monster’s tail whipped around, knocking the girl back into the cage once again.

  "Stay low," I shouted over the sound of the dragon's fury. "I’m coming."

  My guns were in my hands without conscious thought, twenty years of training taking over from whatever was left of my survival instinct. I came up shooting, putting six rounds center mass into the dragon's chest. The bullets struck the red scales and bounced off like raindrops, leaving marks no deeper than scratches.

  "Oh, come on," I muttered, diving for cover as another bst of fire turned my previous hiding spot into molten metal. "That's just not fair."

  The dragon ughed, a sound like an earthquake with a sense of humor. "Did you really think those tiny toys would harm me, little rat? I am Pyraxes the Crimson Death, Terror of the Seven Realms. Your weapons are less than nothing to me."

  It had a point. My guns were great for vampires, werewolves, and most varieties of demon, but apparently, dragon hide was a little outside their weight css. Time for Pn B.

  Unfortunately, I was fresh out of Pn B.

  "Hunter!" Lisa screamed, the shing tail keeping her pinned inside the bird cage. "The crag! It’s too small for her to follow!"

  The dragon's head swung toward us like a searchlight made of teeth and malice. "You smell of fear and desperation, little rats. And something else... magic. Old magic. How interesting."

  I didn't stick around to discuss my cologne choices. A section of the cavern wall exploded as I rolled toward the passage. The narrow opening was barely wide enough for my shoulders, and I squeezed through just as the dragon's jaws snapped at empty air where we'd been a second before.

  "You cannot hide forever, little rat," it called, its voice echoing through the stone. "And your elf friend looks so very frightened. Perhaps I'll start with him."

  That got my attention. I looked back through the passage and saw Sylvanus standing exactly where I'd left him, frozen like a deer in headlights while several tons of irritated dragon turned in his direction. The elf's sword hung uselessly in his grip, and his face had gone absolutely white.

  Sometimes being a hero is a choice. Sometimes it's just the only option that lets you sleep at night.

  "Lisa, stay there," I said, already knowing it was probably the st stupid thing I'd ever do. "I’ll be back, I swear it."There wasn't time to argue. The dragon had taken a deep breath, and even from here I could see the orange glow building in its throat. Sylvanus was going to be charcoal in about three seconds.

  I burst out of the crevice. The dragon's head whipped back and forth, trying to track both targets, which gave me the opening I needed. I sprinted across the cavern floor, coins scattering under my feet, and tackled Sylvanus just as the dragon's breath turned the air above us into a river of fire.

  "Move!" I shouted, hauling the stunned elf to his feet. "Run!"

  The pair of us ran for the tunnel entrance, the dragon's roars shaking loose stone from the ceiling behind us. I could hear its massive form shifting among the treasure, coins cascading like metallic rain as it prepared to give chase. The tunnel opening looked impossibly far away, and I knew we'd never make it before another bst of fme caught us in the open.

  "Down!" I yelled, pushing Sylvanus toward a depression in the cavern floor. We hit the ground hard just as another gout of fire passed overhead, the heat so intense it made the air shimmer like a mirage.

  But we were close now. Maybe thirty feet from the tunnel. Close enough that we might actually make it if we could,The dragon's tail swept across the cavern like a wrecking ball, scattering treasure and cracking stone. It missed us by inches, but the shockwave knocked all three of us sprawling. My ears rang, and I tasted blood, but I was still breathing. That had to count for something.

  "The tunnel!" Lisa pointed toward our escape route from where the dragon kept her trapped. "Go!"

  We ran, stumbling and gasping, as the dragon's fury shook the entire cavern behind us. Just as we reached the narrow opening, I felt the heat building again and knew we were out of time. I shoved Sylvanus into the tunnel and dove after him just as the dragon's breath weapon turned the entrance into a deleted scene from Backdraft.

  The narrow passage saved our lives. The fmes couldn't follow us into the confined space, but the heat was incredible, baking the air until it hurt to breathe. We crawled through the darkness, following the twisting path that led back toward the elven city, while behind us the dragon's roars of frustration echoed through the stone.

  We'd made it. Against all odds and reasonable expectations, we'd actually made it. I hated the thought of leaving Lisa behind, but the dragon was keeping her alive for a reason… I had to trust that it would hold until I returned with much more… explosive means of making the giant lizard see reason.