Hands Of Flame
Nightmares drove her out of bed to run.
She'd become accustomed to another sort of dream over the last weeks: erotic, exotic, filled with impossible beings and endless possibility. But these were different, burning images of a man's death in flames. Not by flame, but in it: the color of her dreams was ever-changing crimson licked with saffron, as though varying the light might result in a happier ending.
It never did.
The scent of salt water rose up, more potent in recollection than it had been in reality. It tangled brutally with the smell of copper before the latter won out, blood flavor tangy at the back of her throat. She couldn't remember if she'd actually smelled it, but her dreams tasted of it.
Small kindness: fire burned those odors away, whether they were real or not.But that left her with flame again,andforall that she was proud of her running speed, she couldn't outpace the blaze.
There was a dragon in the fire, red and sinuous and deadly. It battled a pale creature of immense strength; of unbreaking stone.
A gargoyle, so far removed from human imagination that there were no legends of them, as there were of so many of their otherworldly brethren. < ... read full excerpt from: Hands of Flame ebook
