Dragon Coast by Greg van Eekhout Read Free Book Online

his nerve endings, building painfully till he could feel it in his eyes and in his gums. He longed to release it.
    â€œHit the deck,” Daniel shouted. Moth and Em dropped, and Daniel unleashed bolts of blue-white kraken lightning, guiding them down the length of his arm.
    He targeted the main body of the leading ship, hoping to burn through the envelope and rupture its gas cells. Instead, the bolts were drawn to a spar protruding from the bow like a narwhal’s tusk. The arcs branched off from the rod, conducted down webs of wire running the length of the ship and away along trailing fronds. The ship continued to rise, revealing a gondola. The forward window was shuttered, leaving small portholes for the pilot. The only other openings were slits.
    With the noise of stuttering gunfire, the boulders at Daniel’s feet exploded in chips and powder. Moth crawled toward Em to protect her with his own body. He cried out, bullets tearing through his back and shoulders. Em scrambled over to him and deftly wrapped a length of rope through his armpits and around his torso to make a tow line. Only a quarter of his size, she dragged him to a cluster of boulders, bullets cratering the rocks around her.
    This was no longer a job going to shit. This was a job going fatal.
    All three ships had risen above the summit now, their great bulks passing fifty feet overhead. Daniel breathed fire at the nearest one, engulfing the gondola in a storm of blue flame, but it continued on, unaffected. The heated metal gave off unfamiliar aromas, the osteomancy of creatures Daniel didn’t recognize. These weren’t freight ships, but warships, equipped with magic Daniel had never encountered.
    An apple-sized thing fell from the gondola, and there was a flash of light and noise and then an echoing susurration, like waves in a sea cave. A cruel ache gripped Daniel’s head, and something gouged his spine. He’d fallen on his back against the jagged rocks. Through blurred vision, he watched lines unspool from the airships. Black-clad human figures slid down the lines. Daniel tried to stand but got only halfway up before he lost balance and crashed back to the ground. Then, like magic, he was in the air, floating.
    More gunshots and a grunt and hot blood splashing his face.
    He wasn’t floating. Moth was carrying him. The blood was Moth’s, from more bullets tearing through his body. Yet Moth ran, with Em alongside, firing shots at people in black fatigues. As Daniel’s vision cleared, he saw now that they were soldiers, armed and armored. Whose soldiers, he didn’t know.
    A blow struck his hip and he screamed out in pain.
    Moth got him to the shelter, collapsing to the ground as soon as they were past the threshold. Moth was in horrible shape, more blood than visible skin, and as soon as he dropped Daniel, he rolled onto his back and moaned. But he would heal. Moth always did. He had as much eocorn horn and hydra regenerative in his system as he had chili grease, and he would heal. But it would take hours. Maybe days.
    Em took up position, huddled to the side of the open doorway and dared a few shots when she could.
    Daniel checked his hip where the bullet had struck, using his knife to cut through the thick fabric of his insulated pants. There was no blood. The bullet hadn’t penetrated his flesh. It was worse than that. It had struck the case containing the axis mundi bone, flattening it.
    With dread, Daniel pried the deformed lid open. He gasped with relief. The little coin-sized bone remained intact.
    Still a chance to save Sam.
    â€œI can’t hold them off,” Em said.
    Daniel crawled over to her. “I just need a second.”
    He took a few breaths and thought of the black sea bottom, and crushing pressure, and the scent of whale blood. He forced more kraken magic from his cells until the charge coursed through his arms and blue sparks flared beneath his fingertips.
    The airships were equipped to