Stepping through the portal to my lair, I brushed my hands together to remove the stain of Agatha’s ash. I hadn’t hated her before. She had seemed… interesting. An unusual example of the kind of person this weird fucking world could produce. Charming, wise, seductive.

  But the vampire had kind of pissed me off, to put it lightly. As I looked down at Esme asleep on the camp bed, I understood why. Part of it was draconic. This woman was mine, in my head at least. I knew she was her own person, not some toy that I owned, but the urge to protect her was almost as strong as my urge to defend my shinies—some strange byproduct of mingling mammal and dragon, perhaps.

  Gledna, Tim, Simeon and Kat looked up at me as I stepped through the portal.

  “You’re naked, Bob,” Kat announced. I pulled out some trousers and took a moment to hide my shame.

  “How is she?”

  “She’ll be fine in a few more hours. Good job getting her to the dungeon as quickly as you did,” Tim said.

  Something left me at hearing those words. Her colour was better, cheeks less pale, lips less drawn, but hearing those words started the process of Wrath deflating in my mind that even my revenge hadn’t.

  “Thank you.”

  “The attackers?” asked Kat as she cracked her ball-punching knuckles.

  “Dust on the wind.”

  “Who were they?” asked Gledna. I really hoped her participation wouldn’t result in Esme leaving a snail trail for weeks, but even if it did, I wouldn’t be angry. Time was no longer an issue for Esme and me.

  “Vampires. A sect of assassins that live under Ankmapak. All dead now.”

  “Oh, great. Bob, you’ve got enough on your plate without going off on some hairbrained revenge rampage.”

  “I’m not going to rampage, Kat.” I tasted the air, tongue flicking out. “You all smell of fear and worry. I… I’m grateful to you. Gledna, Tim, I want you to teach me your healing spells. All of them. Then I’m going to pay the instigator of this… incident a visit.”

  “Who was it?” Kat asked quickly.

  “Dalgliesh.”

  “Bob, you can’t go after that bastard. You’re bound by contract to him! You could lose your system!”

  “I don’t have to go after him directly, Kat. I’ve got friends at court. But his minions… them I can go after. I can drop off his next delivery of arkendrite with the bodies.”

  “What friends at bloody court… oh. Yeah, that might work.”

  I crouched down next to Esme and stroked a strand of hair back from her face. “How long till she wakes up?”

  “Dibble too gay,” Simeon offered. I didn’t glare at the orlic. Just gave him a confused look. I didn’t know if it was my human part being soppy, or my draconic part being fiercely loyal, but these four would live long and happy lives if I had anything to do with it. Assuming Tim didn’t manage to tear open a hole to a new reality and kill us all.

  “Impossible to say,” Kat supplied.

  “Edible-Reg, you can stop fucking watching us,” I snarled. The Deathkinigit spun back around and faced away, resuming his guard position.

  “Keep your rotten eyes in your head, Reg,” muttered his companion.

  “I wasn’t leering,” Reg muttered.

  “And shut the fuck up! If I hear another word out of either of you, I’ll turn you into animated toothpicks!” I snarled.

  “Bob–”

  “No, Kat. Dalgleish is going to pay. How the fuck do I kill Big Kenny? Agatha recommended seduction and poison, but those aren’t exactly my forte.”

  “You were pretty seductive with me,” Esme said softly.

  “Esme!” I spun back to her and took one of her hands between my own.

  “I’m fine, Bob. You’d better not do anything stupid as a result of this.”

  “You seduced me, remember? That night at Restaurant One, that kiss? I won’t, but I will make sure they don’t try to do it again.”

  “You can’t burn the world, Bob. Don’t even try.”

  “Don’t want to burn the world. But I will take revenge.”

  “Pfft. Stupid man.”

  “I’m a dragon.”

  “Stupid dragon, then. Just make sure you come back to me.”

  I rested a palm against her cheek. “I will.”

  “Then go do whatever the stupid plan I can see forming behind your eyes is. I’m… tired.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “I’m taking that as permission, love. Kat, get Cyrus. I need to have a chat with him.” As Esme’s eyes closed, I turned to my minions, wheels turning in my mind. “He needs to come with me to the city.”

  “You can’t put him at risk like… oh. That’s cold, Bob. They’ll kill him if they can’t take him alive.”

  I produced a syringe of milky liquid from my possum pouch and rolled it between my fingers. “I’ve got that covered. Have those golems been stripped for parts?”

  “Most of them. We’ve been incorporating parts of them into the new cyber-bunnies. The mark thirty-two bunnyborgs are looking pretty solid. You haven’t promised any of them to the dwarves, have you?” asked Tim.

  “Just the basic variants.”

  “We stopped making those a few days ago. The new production has all got shields and upgraded mana-cannons now.”

  “Speaking of shields, I want one. Or several in fact.”

  “They are built into the meta-structure of the machinery, it’s not–”

  “Give me shields. I’ve got to fight in the arena soon as well.”

  “Tim, fornicating wields into fair refusals is potable,” Simeon added helpfully. I raised an eyebrow at Tim.

  “He means we can put them into objects, but he isn’t mentioning they’ll be shit tier one-shot trinkets!” Tim glared at the other orlic.

  “Shone pot I bent,” Simeon replied with a shrug. His prosthetic limbs had all been tucked away inside his back again, and he looked like a standard orlic once more, green flesh and armoured cod piece.

  “I got that one. I don’t care if they’re single-use if they can be set to only trigger under certain conditions.”

  “What conditions?” Tim asked. Simeon raised a green eyebrow at me as well.

  “Kill conditions. If they’ll ignore a hit that won’t kill me, that’s fine.”

  “But you won’t die. You took the Immortality–”

  “So because I took that injection, it won’t work? Can’t you rig it so a hit of a certain amount of power will trigger it?” I snapped.

  “Bob–”

  “No more excuses. Figure it out.” I caught myself. Wrath was running on fumes, but I was still under the bugger’s sway. “Please.”

  Tim looked at Simeon, who combined a shrug and a nod into one movement, then turned to me and nodded again.

  “Thank you. We need a distraction.”

  “Esme won’t be in a position to–”

  “Shut up, Gledna. And you can take whatever role you want in the dungeon, by the way. I need something to throw Dalgliesh and the shadow-weenies off my scent. They don’t know the Library made their move. I need to exploit that.”

  “I want laundry duties,” Gledna said. Everyone paused with open mouths and turned to look at her. “What?” she snapped.

  “Why?” I think I encapsulated everyone's various thoughts in a single word.

  “No one complains that their clothes taste bad,” Gledna grumbled. As someone who had eaten more than my share of clothing, not having stripped the soon-to-be-corpses before dining, I chose to hold my silence.

  “Do you know any moths?” Kat asked.

  “No, I don’t know any bloody moths!”

  “Ok!” Kat glanced at me, and I shrugged. “Laundry duty it is,” I finished to Gledna. A small enough reward for the part she’d played in saving Esme. “I’m going to need some of the new model bunnyborgs,” I said, turning to Tim.

  “That’s Simeon’s territory.”

  “Dour in a beak.”

  “Four in a week?” It was starting to worry me that I could translate his nonsense in my head. He nodded at me. “Not enough.”

  “We’ve got nearly four thousand of the older models available,” Tim said nonchalantly. He froze as my eyes swung to him, purple and gold motes raining down around me.

  “That’s an army.”

  “It would be larger if you’d let me use more necromancy. Imagine a few thousand bunnyborgs supported by tens of thousands of zombies, skeletons and undead abominations.”

  “No– what would you need to make these abominations?” I asked cautiously.

  “That cannot be allowed.”

  I turned slowly to find Bulb pushing his weirdly reflective spectacles up his nose. MJ Bunny was leaning on Bulb’s side with his arms crossed.

  “Music and Light. Anyone else joining us?” I groused as the others shied away; even Kat took a step backwards, moving behind me.

  “No. You don’t have enough reputation with the others, hee hee!” Music replied.

  “I didn’t do anything to build rep with you two either.”

  “Sometimes things just work out a certain way, Bob. Your goals are… admirable, for now. But unleashing a horde of the undead in the greatest city on Helstat would not be in our service. It would, at best, aid our opponents.”

  “I want to stop sparkling,” I growled.

  “It’s part of the deal.” Bulb shrugged as though he were helpless.

  “The dance must go on, Bob. Shamone! I’m not angry that you killed the greatest singer alive, and Frankl–Bulb doesn’t mind that you’ve killed a few people he had his eye on for future greatness. IMPS weaves a confusing web, and we’re all subject to its whims. Hooooo!” He went on tiptoes and grabbed his crotch.

  “So help me. They’ve got to pay.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Can’t?”

  “Won’t then. Whatever.” Bulb scowled at me, his glasses flashing. “If you’re going to really go after the shadow gods, you’ll need our help. And the help of our friends.”

  “And what exactly do I need to do to earn your mates' help?” I growled.

  “They cannot be allowed to keep control of Cyrus. They will be able to acquire the reagents for the Immortality Injections. It will cost them, but Dalgliesh is desperate to skip the rest of his puberty,” Bulb said, and Music nodded along with his words like he was dancing to their rhythm.

  “So what? I’ll give Cyrus the death inoculation before he goes. I’ve got enough unicorn horn now. I’m an infinite supply of angel feathers and dragon blood, so he’s set. We can mass produce the damn things.”

  “If there’s a spare injection on the go–”

  “I’ll think about it, Tim! Now is not the bloody time!” I snapped.

  “Tresmegistus isn’t terribly happy about that idea either, shamone!”

  “Who? Why should I give a shit? I’ve been dumped here. I just want to make some gold and not be an asshole!”

  “Then release the undead dwarves,” Bulb replied calmly. I glanced at Kat.

  “They’ve boosted the mining program by a huge amount. And the walls. Baginton, Longbottom and the Mill are now decently fortified as a result of their, uh, involuntary labour.”

  I looked away from Kat and back to the gods, smiling. “That’s a nope. When the war is done, maybe. But they’re evil dwarves. It’s not like I’m enslaving Oompa Loompas. You bloody told me it was fine to do what I liked to the bad guys!”

  “That didn’t involve ripping their souls out of the afterlife and tethering them to rotting flesh, Bob. Shamone. You’re breaking the flow, man.”

  “You weren’t a necromancer at that point,” Bulb pointed out as a follow-up.

  “So what? I couldn’t conjure barnacles back then either. Are you going to tell me they are real barnacles ripped from the ocean floor and teleported to my target to die? Does that make me the villain?”

  “Well, actually, Bob, yes.”

  “The hell you say?”

  “Barnacles… are a special circumstance. Unicorns can get away with it because, well, they’re special too.”

  “Shitty my little pony ripoffs,” I grumbled.

  “Spiritually special. You got downgraded to a dragon. All of them got upgrades. Karmically and reincarnation-ally speaking.”

  “You’re shitting me? Bulb, you saw them chop me open, negate my system, and make me perform like a puppy in a cosmetics testing facility?”

  “They weren’t that bad, but yeah, we saw.”

  My mind turned over for a moment. I was getting better at thinking before I spoke or acted. Not by much, but when the baseline was so low, any improvement could appear significant.

  “Were any other gods watching that shit?”

  “Umbrati, of course. Heehee!”