Amos's roar filled Eden. It rose into the sky, dove into cracks and crevices, made insects shiver in midflight, and knocked the travelers off their feet. It skimmed over the Fountain of Eternal Fire, and the lava formed waves, lapping dangerously near the edges; it made the sword vibrate in Cain's hands and the leaves shimmer on their twigs. Outside the entrance, the guardian fell to his knees, hands clapped over his ears. The roar began as disbelief, melted into horror, into despair and sorrow, and finally, ended in a rising crescendo of fury.
Amos's wings clapped open as he arched to his hind legs, roaring his heart out for all the world to hear. And then his breath ran out, and he fell to all fours. His lips curled back over his fangs; his forelegs thumped the ground mere feet from the travelers as his nose lowered to them, breathing smoke.
"You really should have slain me as I slept," he growled in a voice that was like the grumblings of the Earth, "because now I'm stronger than five ice dragons, and I'm going to kill you all." He drew in a terrific bellyful of air.
"No!" Abel shouted. He dove for Ruth and scooped her into his arms with all his vampiric speed, rushing her out of the way of the flames and into the nearby undergrowth. As Amos exhaled, Cain dove under the flames, ignoring the way they seared his hair and arms as he passed. He thrust upward with his sword at Amos's neck, slicing neatly through scales.
Amos roared again, this time in pain. He staggered back, dancing to the side lest he topple into the fountain. His forepaws touched his neck in astonishment, and it was with new respect and fear that he looked down at Cain. "You have the guardian's sword," he said wonderingly. "How did you slay him and take it from him?"
"He gave it to me-to stop you!" Cain yelled. He leapt forward, dancing up the dragon's tail toward his back. Amos twisted, but Cain stayed on with preternatural balance and strength. He upended the sword and plunged it down, but the movement took a moment, and Amos had time to raise one of his legs and swipe Cain off his back.
Cain adjusted immediately, twisting in midair and swinging himself one-handed from Amos's paw. He pulled himself up and sliced the delicate skin of his palm.
Amos threw him to the ground, spitting a thin, white lance of super-hot flame after him.
Cain somersaulted out of the way-and directly into the path of another lance, which seared off a chunk of his shoulder. Cain howled in pain. His shoulder was aflame! Dodging further lances of fire, he darted away, toward the little rill. He threw himself in the water just long enough to douse the burning, and then out of it again, as another lance vaporized the spot.
"I am young again!" Amos bellowed. "I am strong again. You will die, little vampire."
"Not before you do!" Cain replied. "You know why?"
"Enlighten me."
"Because I know something you don't know!"
"And I've heard that one before," Amos said, stalking nearer, his talons sinking deep into the grass.
But Cain had been telling the truth, for Abel was waiting for Amos. Abel might not have had a flaming sword, but he did have Cain's stone knife, the one he had used against the ice vampires. Silent and swift, Abel ran up the hard scales of Amos's back as lightly as he had sometimes run along the surface of snow. Under the guise of Amos's distraction, he jumped from the dragon's back to the head and, using all his strength, drove the knife into Amos's right eye. It sank deep, and Abel let go even as he was flung free, landing catlike on one of the pillars of the pavilion.
Amos was in any agony worse than any he had ever known, save the time when Eve had burned him. He lost all control, stomping and breathing fire everywhere, without aim or purpose. He fell over twice, crushing greenery beneath him, deafening every living being in Eden with his cries. Talons scrabbled at his eyes, pushing the knife in further, until finally, he flicked it out.
"Vampire!" he screamed. "Vampire, you will burn!"
The brothers wisely kept silent. Abel was still crouched atop the pillar, with an excellent view of everything. Cain was below, concealed in the undergrowth. The rill had stopped the worst of the burning in his shoulder, but the burn was still a terrible injury, and would take a long time to heal. He was forced to wield the tremendous sword one-handed, and with greatly increased difficulty. They needed to cut this battle short, before they both became too injured to continue.
Abel scanned the landscape, searching for something to help him. There was the Fountain of Eternal Fire, of course. Amos had already bathed in it once, and become rejuvenated and fiery. What would a second bath do?
Kill Amos, probably, but there was no way to know. What he did know was that attempting to use it was risky. Abel had no doubt that it would kill a vampire in one agonizing moment; from above, he could feel the heat rising from it like a physical thing, and it occurred to him that perhaps it was this fountain, usually kept hidden, that made Eden the tropical paradise it was.
No, they couldn't risk the fountain; not unless it was the very last option.
Abel examined Amos, looking for weak spots. The sword was so long that a precise strike into an eye would drive right into Amos's brain, but Amos was now on the lookout for that sort of move, and Abel doubted they could get close enough. That left the heart.
Abel's keen eyes pierced the night as easily and keenly as an owl's, and he spotted the dragon's other weak spot: the delicate skin of the underarm. If Amos raised his left foreleg, a clever strike under the arm could drive directly into the heart.
Abel mimed this information to Cain, who signaled back that he understood, but could use a distraction.
Amos was recovering. His eye was a pulpy white mess in its socket, but greater concerns focused the dragon, and he sniffed the air and listening and searched the undergrowth with his remaining eye, looking for the vampires.
Time for that distraction. Abel stood atop his pillar and shouted. "Hey, Amos! Hey, you great ugly worm! Guess what?"
Amos whipped around, fire spewing from his mouth. Abel leapt easily to the next pillar, out of his way. "Guess what? Eve told us all about you. She told us how you were always teased and left out while you were growing up. Is that why you became evil?" (Dodging another flame.) "Because you had a tough childhood? Well guess what, we had a tough childhood, too. Our own village threw us out to die in the cold and then we spent the next thousand years wandering alone. But you don't see us" (dodge) "trying to destroy the world!"
"You don't know anything about it!" Amos thundered.
"Actually, I do," Abel said. "I have visions, you" (duck) "see. I saw how much Eve loved Adam. I saw how much she didn't care about you. I saw how you tried to get the Fountain of Eternal Fire before, and" (leap) "how Adam and Prince Joseph defeated you. And you know what I think?"
"I don't care what you think."
"I think you were right."
"I said I don't-" Amos stopped short, registering this. "What?"
"I mean, why shouldn't you turn yourself into a fire dragon? Sure, Eve still wouldn't have loved you, but at least the other dragons wouldn't have been so horrible. Because they were horrible, you know. You didn't deserve what they did to you."
"I-didn't?"
"Oh, you do now, of course, since you've gone on a rampage and murdered them all and most of the world with them, but you didn't then. You were an innocent kid. Weird and maybe a bit of a creeper, but that's understandable under the circumstances."
Amos was so struck by this that he was frozen, left paw halfway raised in a motion to flick Abel from his pillar.
"Problem is," Abel went on, "you did try to destroy the world, and now you're trying to kill us. And that is evil."
"Yes," Amos admitted, "it is. But what else is there?" And he finished his movement, talons coming down in a cage around the now-weaponless Abel.
Unseen below him, Cain leapt up from the ground, more than twenty feet, both hands holding the sword despite his agony, and plunged it into Amos's underarm and far into his flesh. Then he dropped and rolled away, leaving the sword where it was.
But he had failed; the sword hadn't gone far enough in, and it hadn't pierced the dragon's heart.
Amos screamed and ripped the sword out and threw it away, so that it soared over the cliff wall, up and over, landing where neither of them could retrieve it. Talons still clutched around Abel, eyes completely mad, Amos turned and breathed all his fire, hotter and more intense than anything before, coating the landscape with it in wide, sweeping blankets, covering everything in its path. The vegetation, more magical even than dragon fire, took no hurt. But Cain fell burnt and smoldering to the ground. A thin, high scream emerged from him as he lay there, and it took all his will to worm and crawl toward the rill. He had to cool the burns immediately, or they would consume him.
Neither he nor Abel had any time to think about what might have happened to Ruth.
Amos turned back to Abel, who was still entrapped in his talons.
"Wait," Abel said hurriedly. "Please, wait. Before you kill me, there's something you need to know."
"There's nothing you could tell me," Amos spat.
"You forget," Abel said, "I have visions. But I learned this somewhere else. It's important."
"I don't care." Amos leaned in, intending to nip Abel's head from his shoulders.
"It's about Lilith!"
Amos paused. "Lilith?"
"Yes, Lilith. Your wife."
"Lilith is dead."
"But I know the true story," Abel said quickly. He could smell the sulfur on the dragon's breath, and he knew that if Amos squeezed any more tightly, Abel's ribs would crack and break. "She wasn't what you thought she was. We met the surviving vampires-the ones you made-and they told us the true story."
"Some of them survived? Lucifer? . . . Lilith?"
"No; they're dead. But Belial and twenty others had a village-"
"I'm going to kill them."
"Yes, well, we already did that. Long story. But the point is that Lilith tricked you. She never really loved you; she just wanted to be a vampire. That's why she married you, and why she faked her death to get away."
Amos was regarding him with a very strange expression in his slitted yellow eyes. The fury had drained out of him, to be replaced by despair. "Yes," he said quietly. "I know." Turning away, he released his grip on Abel and fell to the ground, great gulping sobs convulsing his body. "Do you think I don't know that? I've always known. But I thought . . . I thought . . ."
"Eve wouldn't have loved you as a fire dragon," Abel told him gently. "And Lilith only wanted what you could give her."
"She was so like Eve, in some ways," Amos said, mostly to himself. "So alike. Her voice . . . Eve wouldn't have tricked me like that. And I kept thinking, if Eve wouldn't, then maybe I'm misjudging Lilith . . . Eve, Eve!"
"You loved her," Abel said.
"Of course I loved her! I would have done anything for her, everything for her!"
"And now you have done everything."
"But it was never enough, never enough. She married that-that-he tormented me, you know. Adam. Going around with Prince Joseph, always thinking he was better than everyone. He married Eve to spite me. I'd been friends with Eve for decades, was practically her slave, but she married Adam. She didn't even know Adam, but oh, wasn't he handsome, wasn't he perfect. . . ."
Amos dissolved again into such tears that he could not speak. Abel took the opportunity to look around for Cain. He had lost track of his brother entirely, and could only hope that he was still alive.
But maybe it was time to focus on Abel staying alive.
"You haven't done everything to make her love you, you know," Abel told Amos carefully, although he also took the opportunity to spring out of easy grabbing range.
Amos raised tearful and oozing eyes to him, half not believing that anyone would bring this up to him at such a time. "Be silent," he rasped.
"There is one thing you could do for her that would be beyond everything else," Abel went on purposefully. "One thing that is far beyond anything Adam did or could have achieved."
"It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. My Eve is dead, and there's nothing I can do to bring her back."
"You don't have to bring her back," Abel said softly. "You can go to her."
"Too late, too late."
"And in going to her," Abel continued, "you can save the world."
Confused, skeptical eyes rose to meet his.
"Adam could never do that, could he?" Abel persuaded. "He could never save the world. He couldn't even save himself, and he could certainly never save Eve. He wasn't strong enough. But you are. Look at you: you're powerful, beautiful, the eldest of elder dragons and yet with all the skill and appearance of youth."
"I don't understand," Amos said dully. "Explain it to me."
"You're full of anger and hate," Abel said, "and if you go on, you'll try to destroy the world again. You'll never find love or happiness that way, and you know it. The fountain has given you eternal life, which means you'll never stop suffering. Never. And you'll never stop making other people suffer. And that is exactly what Eve disliked about you: your cruelty. But I knew Eve for a long time, and I know what she respects: strength, courage . . . and sacrifice."
Amos's gaze never wavered, although his tears had somewhat abated. "You aren't tricking me, you know," he said slowly. "I'm not simple, and I'm not going to be taken in. I know you want me to kill myself. And don't give me anything about saving the world, even for her sake. I don't care about saving the world; I'd rather see it burn. So what are you going to tell me next? That the fountain can bring Eve back to life? That everyone will love me?"
"No," Abel replied. "I'm going to tell you this: you want to die. You've wanted it for a long time, and you've wanted it because you loathe yourself. If you throw yourself into the fountain a second time, if you let it consume you, you may not earn anyone's love . . . but no one will ever loathe you again. No one will fight you or mock you. No one will bully you or let you down or betray you. Everything will end, and you will have peace at last."
Amos, last of the ice dragons, last of the fire dragons, last of all dragons, said, "And that is the truth." He tucked his head under his wing and shook. And then, summoning up his courage, looking neither left nor right, he rose to his feet.
The cloak of dignity was back, as was the magnificence. He might almost have been royalty, this dragon among dragons, this last of all, as he ascended for the final time the steps of the pavilion and cast himself into the Fountain of Eternal Fire.