Free Ghost Dagger by Jonathan Moeller Page A

now in Malarae’s dockside warehouse district. Helena might have been born in Malarae, but Caina suspected she did not know the dockside streets and alleyways. 
    Caina plunged back to earth, her boots making no sound against the street, and hurried from shadow to shadow. The shadows flowed around her in response to her mental command, and she moved far more quickly and with greater stealth than she could have managed in the waking world. 
    “Face me, Ghost!” screamed Helena. A black-armored shape shot overhead, holding an enormous axe fashioned of living flame. Helena fell to earth like a comet and began stalking through the street, making warehouses and taverns disappear with a wave of her hand. Yet Caina remained hidden. The shadows followed her, keeping her wrapped in the darkness.
    Helena could not find her. 
    “Come out, damn you!” shouted Helena. “You cannot hide forever.”
    Caina didn’t intend to.
    Helena walked past her hiding place, and Caina focused upon the daggers in her fists. They began to glow white-hot, like bolts of captured lightning. Helena started to turn, sensing something amiss, but it was too late.
    Caina sprang upon her, both the blades punching through Helena’s armor to sink deep into her flesh. 
    Helena screamed in pain and slammed her armored fist into Caina’s chest. The force of the blow hurled her backwards, and she smashed through a dozen brick walls like a tumbling boulder, coming to a ragged stop on one of the piers jutting into the harbor. Pain flooded through her, and she could not stand. 
    Helena bellowed again, and the city of Malarae exploded. Warehouses crumbled into dust, and the mansions of the nobles toppled and collapsed. The Imperial Citadel itself wavered atop its crag and slid down the side of the mountain in an avalanche of white rock. The ground heaved and bucked, great chasms opening in the earth to swallow the ruined city. 
    And in the midst of the chaos, Caina saw the silver door. 
    It stood at the end of a street, floating a few feet above the cobblestones. Deeper cracks rent the silver metal, and the fiery light leaking through the door had gotten brighter. Helena had been so desperate to lure Caina through that door. But what if…
    Helena dropped from the sky and buried her axe in Caina’s chest. 
    Caina shrieked, agony flooding through her limbs. The fiery axe had torn through the steel plates lining her jacket like paper, and she felt blood flowing down her torso to spill against the ground. She tried to stand, tried to push out the axe, but could not move through the pain that flooded her body.
    Helena snarled as a yawning chasm opened in the trembling ground next to Caina. 
    Dimly, Caina wondered how Helena had survived the dagger wounds. 
    “Die,” Helena spat. She ripped her axe free from Caina’s flesh, blood sizzling on the fiery blade, and Caina rolled over the edge and toppled into the chasm.
    She tumbled into the darkness, smoke pouring from the gaping wound in her chest. The darkness reached for her.
    One thought flickered through her mind.
    How had Helena survived those wounds? 
    The answer came to her.
    Because Caina had not actually stabbed Helena. In fact, she had done nothing to Helena’s body at all. Their bodies lay unconscious in Reorn’s storeroom. Caina had only dreamed that she had stabbed Helena, and one could not die from a wound inflicted in a dream.
    Which meant that Caina’s axe wound, too, was not real. 
    It vanished from her chest. 
    She concentrated, and her fall stopped. She floated in midair, chunks of wreckage from Malarae falling around her. This was all a dream, and none of it was real. How, then, could she defeat Helena, if she had no real weapons?
    That silver door. 
    Helena had tried to lure Caina through that door over and over.
    And what would happen, Caina wondered, if she forced Helena through the door?
    She rose upward, borne aloft by her will, and found Helena. The noblewoman circled above the