“What do you mean you’re not sure? What’s going on? Where’s that bastard Basarab?”

I never knew whether it was Pritkin calling out his name, or Mircea himself deciding to interrupt our conversation, but suddenly I was seeing through a different pair of eyes. Ones that were looking at a small, pink balloon being borne aloft by—

“Oh, shit.”

“Is that you?” Pritkin’s voice demanded accusingly. “Tell me that’s not you!”

“Um—”

Pritkin said something very rude, right before the goat thing jumped him. Damn it! And then Mircea was talking very fast and very loud in my head. “Cassie, listen to me. You need to bring the creature back this way, do you understand? I can try to get in its head, but it’s too far away and I don’t have a connection with it—”

“Bring it back?”

“—and therefore must be closer in order to—”

“How the hell do you expect me to bring it back?”

Considering that I was currently dangling from the giant paw of a massive black dragon, I thought that was a fair question. But then Mircea sent me his plan, which had me uttering some of Pritkin’s best verbal explosions, not that anybody could hear them. And then grabbing the damned skirts and using vamp strength to rip them off, giving me a free field of vision.

Which I could have really done without.

A huge expanse of black scales gleamed above me in the weak sunlight. They weren’t smooth like a snake’s but ridged, each having a little mountain in the middle of it, like an alligator’s hide only pointier. It made the creature look like it was bristling all over and would shred any skin that it came into contact with. And I was pretty sure that I wasn’t able to borrow Mircea’s healing abilities, since my hand was still on fire.

This was really going to suck.

“You can’t overpower that thing!” Pritkin yelled, as if hearing my thoughts, and maybe he could. “Use magic!”

“I don’t have my magic—”

“You don’t need yours. You have mine!” And the next second, he sent me a spell so strong and so compelling, that I felt my lips forming the words before I could stop them.

A massive ball of blue flame erupted out of nowhere and shot straight up the monstrous body, as if the creature had been doused in propane. It hit mid-way on the chest, as if I’d just lobbed a bomb into the middle of a 747, and ran over the gnarled old scales like water. In seconds, the entire top half of the creature was burning.

Only no, not burning, I realized sickly.