How to Lose Your Dragon (The Immortality Curse Book 1) by Peter Glenn (beach read TXT) 📕

my head, then, and I spun as the ground came up to meet me once more.

“Ow!” I shouted, cradling the new bruise, but my assailant didn’t seem to care.

Another club came at me, this one aimed at my abdomen. I brought my free arm up to try and block it and heard a loud crunch as another wave of pain shot up the arm.

I glanced at the battered appendage. My hand was hanging at an odd angle, and I was pretty sure something was broken. This was not going well at all.

“Aah!” I shouted as I waved my sword around again.

I heard it sink into another opponent’s leg and maybe something else, but my strength was failing fast.

My head spun again as another heavy blow smacked into my other side, and I thought I was going to lose the cookies from earlier all over the floor. Now that would have been embarrassing.

I saw two blades swim in my clouded vision, poised just over my head. I raised my arms to wave them off, but they hung there like they were waiting for something.

One of the attackers raised their weapon to finish me off.

“Wait!” that same chilly voice from before called out. “Don’t kill him yet.” It was Boudicca of all people, who was somehow saving me from certain doom this time.

“Humph,” I muttered. “It’s about time someone realized this whole thing was pointless.”

The area around me cooled down several degrees, and the wave of bad guys pushed themselves out of the way. I glanced upward with my failing vision to see Boudicca walking toward me.

She crouched down in front of me and placed one shadowy hand underneath my chin and jerked it upward. Her pale skin was icy cold to the touch. The freezing temperatures actually served to pull my consciousness back from the brink just a little bit.

Helpless as I was, I stared into her dark, glowing red eyes, wondering what kind of fresh hell she had in store for me now. Boudicca’s lips curled into a wicked grin, and her eyes narrowed as they bore into my head.

“Not so tough now, are you little rat?” she spat at me.

“Tough enough to get your notice,” I fired back, grinning slightly.

Without warning, she backhanded me with her other hand. My head spun again, and I coughed, bile rising to my throat, her icy touch lingering on my cheek.

“Tie him up next to the dragon,” Boudicca said as my consciousness started to fade. “I want him to watch her die.”

Well hell. Looked like I was going to need rescuing, too.

16

It was only a few minutes later, but it felt like it had been a few hours. I knew it couldn’t have been that long, though, because when my eyes started to regain their focus, I could see that Queen Boudicca still hadn’t finished her ritual, and the world hadn’t ended.

That meant the dragons hadn’t attacked yet, so there’s no way it could have been more than a few minutes that I was out.

“Good,” Boudicca’s icy tones declared a moment later. “You’re awake.”

She was standing nearby, with a fiery expression on her face as she glared at me. It looked a little like she was smiling at me, but an angry smile, if that made any sense. Her form had much more substance than it had even a few minutes ago. From what I could tell, it looked like she’d been quite beautiful in her previous life. She likely would have made some man a lovely bride, had her sisters not been raped by the Romans.

Behind her was the altar where Mei lay, unmoving, under a mountain of chains. Arlan stood next to her, towering over her prone body. He had a smug expression on his face.

Even from this distance, I could see little beads of sweat breaking out on Mei’s forehead, and her skin had a pale sheen to it that I didn’t remember. Poor thing. She was fighting this hard, but it was no use. Boudicca had her held fast, and her ritual was sapping Mei’s very essence.

“Good evening, Li Xiang,” Boudicca said to me.

She took a few steps to close the distance between us. With one icy, bony finger, she caressed the side of my head where the wound from earlier was still oozing a trickle of blood. I tried to remain calm and still, but her icy touch against my bruised, bleeding scalp was too much, and I shivered a little at her touch, which only seemed to delight her even more.

“Do you like that, little rat?” she asked, her eyes full of some sick, twisted form of glee. She caressed my face again, and I shivered anew.

I coughed involuntarily and tried to stand tall, but bound by chains as I was, it was useless. I tried to clear my throat a bit and tasted a mix of bile and macadamia. It wasn’t something I’d remember fondly.

“D-Damian,” I said through labored breaths.

Her eyes looked cross. “I beg your pardon?”

“Damian,” I repeated in a stronger tone. “Call me Damian, please.”

Boudicca’s lips twisted into something of a frown mixed with a scowl. “Damian?” she said, sounding uncertain. “What kind of a name is that?”

“The name of your killer,” I said, grinning broadly.

Boudicca reared back and smacked me across the face again. I felt my cheek go numb from the cold in her touch as my vision swam and my head spun, then everything died back down.

“Insolent little worm,” she spat. She gave me an icy glare, then trotted off a few steps. “No matter. You’ll die soon enough.”

She turned around to face me once again. As she spun around, I saw a blade sitting there, dangling at her side. Grax’thor. Somehow, she was tall enough that she could wear it like a regular sword without it scraping the ground as she walked.

And here I thought ancient peoples were supposed to all be on the small side. Must have been part of her undead magic. Magic did weird things like