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Somewhere close by, a familiar voice screamed his name.

~*~

“Leif!LEIF!”

The pain in Ragnar’s leg was nothing – nothing compared to the vice grip of panic, choking him more thoroughly than any torq ever could.

He wasn’t fast enough. He couldn’t make it.

The drakes slithered back, undulating over the ground like serpents, red in tooth and claw. The Sel had brushed them back with a single command, and now lifted his spear aloft, over Leif’s broken, bloodied form. The flicker of his lashes as his eyes closed was the only sign of life.

“Leif!” Ragnar hobbled forward, panting, eyes stinging. He wobbled, nearly fell, and hurled his spear-turned-crutch at the back of the Sel’s head.

It fell wide, landing with a harmless clatter on the ground.

“Leif! Get up, you bastard!”

The raised spear reached its zenith. Began its fall.

“NO!”

The spear fell – but it did not punch through Leif’s heart, as intended. It strayed left instead, and its puncture was shallow. It sounded wrong, skidded off his breastbone and lodged beneath the thick muscle of his chest.

Because someone had tackled the Sel at the last minute. Someone in dusty silver armor, with a headful of bright gold hair, and a face fair as a maiden’s.

Lord Reginald L’Espoir, of Hopewell.

They landed on the ground with a sound of expelled breath and clattering armor plates, Reginald on top, a knife rather than a sword in his hand. He got the Sel on his back, surprise working to his advantage, and straddled his chest. Stabbed down toward the man’s helmet visor.

The brunette who wanted to play at woodsman, Lord Connor, joined him, grabbing the Sel’s wrist when he tried to block Reginald’s blow, giving the other an opening in which to slam the knife through the visor slit and into the Sel’s eye.

Ragnar left them to it, and collapsed at Leif’s side. He was aware of the drakes circling, hissing and chittering, fussing at him. They would pounce on him, next, and then he’d be laid out beside Leif, no better off.

He didn’t care about that, now. Inside, his wolf was howling.

Outside, he laid his hand on the bloody wreck of Leif’s chest and whined. There was so much blood. So many wounds. He leaned over Leif’s face, so his hair fell around them both, a curtain sealing them in together, and whispered his name. “Leif. Leif.Alpha.” He whined again, and stroked a bloodied cheek.

Leif’s eyelids twitched, but his eyes didn’t open.

“Alpha,please.”

Clear droplets splattered down onto Leif’s cheeks, carving clean rivulets in the blood there, and when Ragnar wiped at his own face, he was shocked to find that it wasn’t rain falling on his alpha, but his tears.

~*~

The portal was finally empty. Nothing else came out of it.

From a distance, it looked harmless, like a shiny puddle of black oil, hanging vertically, impossibly a foot off the road. But as Alpha flew closer to it, Amelia felt its crackle of magic. It’s pull – it was pulling her. A low pressure just behind her navel, very nearly arousal, tugging her, towing her toward it. She heard a whisper in the back of her mind. Words in a foreign tongue she couldn’t comprehend, but whose meanings were clear:come. Join us. Come home to where you belong.

An image filled her mind of a city, agreatcity, one with countless towers, and turrets, and gleaming crystal domes. A city of tree-lined streets six carts wide, and iron railings, and trailing flowers on stone balustrades. The sky was awash with a faint purple tinge, and there were drakes of all shapes and sizes flying overhead. A river gleamed, teeming with ships. And in the highest tower of all, on an open stone terrace, stood a man with a banner of white hair, and a flapping coat of deepest indigo velvet lined with white fur.

She glimpsed his eyes, the pale lilac of them, the burning intensity in them–

And then Alpha bleated a warning and rolled in the air.

“Ah!” Amelia clutched at the saddle, but would have spilled to the ground if not for the straps and clips that fastened her on. Alpha righted; she tightened the reins, and searched for a threat – but there was none. Not immediately. The remaining small drakes were engaged on the ground, assisting in skirmishes. She and Alpha flew alone, straight toward the portal, and the warning had been a means to snap her out of whatever vision into which the gateway had pulled her.

Cold fear gripped her tight, and she shook her head to clear it. Swallowed hard and tried to force down the pulling in her gut, the siren’s song of some other place, and some other people; a man with lilac eyes wanting to lay claim to her.