Page 19 of Dragon’s Mate

O rnix

The castle wall cracks with the impact of my nephew hitting it. He spits blood out of his mouth as he slides down the wall. The little shit thought I’d be confused by his magical misdirection, but I felt Melissa’s departure the moment it happened, and I knew it happened from my very own palace.

The door to his chambers hangs open, ripped from the hinges by my fury.

The computers he uses to perform his insolent programming and undermining of my rule are smashed to a thousand pieces.

He will never touch a keyboard again. After this, assuming he survives it, he will be imprisoned.

I have already decided. He is far too dangerous, impudent, and interfering to ever be trusted again.

He lies at the base of the wall, winded. I see the look in his eyes. He is considering whether or not he should get up. I make the decision for him. I stalk over to him, pick him up by the throat, and pull him back up so I can pin him against the wall.

“Where is she? What did you do with her?”

He twists his face as he replies, daring to judge me even as he admits his treasonous betrayal.

“I sent her back where she belongs. You stole her from her world. You had no right. You interfere. You claim. You take what you want and you don’t care what it costs anyone else. I let her go because she deserved to be free of you.”

“You are my brother’s son, but I will kill you if you do not send me to her this moment,” I swear.

He swallows in fear, but he answers back anyway, because he is impertinent.

“You killed my father. Why not me? You will do it anyway, as soon as she bears your whelp, you’ll no longer need me. Your lineage will be direct. I’ll be a threat. Disposed of.”

This is the worst possible time for family politics to emerge. Every family has its problems, its dark secrets, its cruel regrets, its unforgivable actions. One of them is unfolding now.

“So that is what this is about. You sent my mate away because you are scared of a baby who is yet to be born, or possibly conceived. You are afraid of a collection of cells who may or may not even exist. Your father died because he forced my hand. Don’t make the same mistake he did, Equinox.

I adore you, but right now I want to kill you.

Open a portal to my mate. Now, or you will die. ”

He doesn’t hesitate with his response. “No.”

I let him go and backhand him. Hard. Hard enough for him to spin across the wall, blood spurting from his nose and his mouth. This is still more gentle than he deserves. I should be breaking every bone in his body. I should be crushing him bit by bit until he takes me to my mate.

“Monster,” he curses.

I hit him again, closed fist this time. Dead center of the stomach. It’s not as satisfying as it should be. And it does absolutely nothing to get me any closer to what I want.

“Don’t make me become seriously murderous,” I tell him. “I have kept you alive for as long as I have because I am fond of you. That liking is fast expiring.”

He is bent double, but straightens through the pain to look in my eyes.

“She’ll die like my mother did, giving birth to me. You’ll take her life, and the whelp will spend the rest of its life owing you something.”

I soften. Slightly. Fractionally. He’s trying to make up for a past loss by creating a current one. I can’t say I intend to tolerate it, but it does make me moderate my response a little.

“Equinox, your mother’s death was a tragedy.”

“A preventable one. Human women are not built to birth dragon babies. I killed my mother, and you are going to force your whelp to do the same. I’m not telling you where she is.”

I wrap my hand around his throat and I squeeze hard enough to very nearly close off his breath forever. I could rip it out if I wanted, and I am very much on the verge of wanting that.

“Yes. You are. I will imprison you and torture you for a thousand years if you do not tell me in the next two minutes. I will make you wish you had never been born. I will ensure that you regret your existence for the rest of it. I want my mate, and I will commit unspeakable cruelties to have her.”

He knows I mean it, because I do. I will not kill him. That would be too merciful. What I will do is make his eternity more painful than he can possibly imagine. He has crossed me at a level nobody should ever cross me.

“If I lose her because of you. Actually, no, if she has so much as a scratch because of you, I will do the absolute worst things I can do to you and I will do them over and over and over until you curse the day your blessed mother was born.”

I loosen my grip slightly as he starts to turn blue. “Last chance. Now.”

“I put her back where she came from,” he rasps out.

In an instant, I am portaling through to Earth.

I arrive in the house where I took her, taking my human form and usual suit. I can already tell she’s not here anymore. I can’t feel her here. I can hear the sound of the other girl playing on her phone, and I can hear her father lying on the phone in his office. Melissa is not here.

I go out the front door and try to imagine where a young woman, scared, confused, absolutely filled to the brim with dragon seed, would go.

Common sense says down toward the city, but something else draws me uphill.

I can feel her. Her, and something else.

I can feel power emanating from somewhere up the winding road.

“Stay away from me!”

She saw me before I saw her. Interesting.

She is standing on a corner with her jacket off, and the back of her shirt in tatters.

It’s the strangest thing. I don’t think anybody has hurt her.

She doesn’t look like she’s been assaulted.

But the shirt has been rasped away by repeated rubbing.

She was doing that back at the castle too, and in the forest. I did not think much of it at the time, but now I am realizing I should have paid attention immediately.

There are buds rising on the backs of her shoulders. I know what they are, because I have seen them in whelps before. They are the precursors to wings. But humans do not develop wings. Humans also do not return to the human world after going to the dragon realm and being bred three times.

“Melissa, I’m not here to hurt you.”

She looks at me with eyes full of mistrust, then turns to walk away.

The sight I behold when I have the full view of her back is very disturbing.

The shirt is almost entirely missing, and where it was is raw flesh, blood, and the beginning of an unfurling that cannot possibly be allowed to happen.

I have to get her off this plane immediately.

I start to run after her, which is a mistake. I start running, and she starts running, and before I know it, those wings that had barely begun to emerge are ripping out from her tender skin and expanding at a horrific rate.

“Melissa! No!” I try to call out, try to stop her from doing what I know she is going to do. It’s another mistake. I should never have chased. I should have tried to talk, seduced her back to my realm rather than tried to force her.

It’s all too late.

I watch my mate erupt from the ground, her wings expanding in a swift, dramatic motion that bears her aloft in an instant. They move seemingly of their own accord. They are not scaled. They are… leathery. Deep black leather with claws on each end of them.

There weren’t that many people on the street when the chase started, but somehow there’s suddenly a lot of them, almost as if they all spawned in at once.

“Batwoman!”

“The devil!”

“OMG, the special effects are insane!”

They point their phones and their eyes skyward.

I know that this feels like a moment of revelation, and maybe ten to twenty years ago it would have been, but things have changed a lot lately.

Humans no longer entirely believe the evidence of their eyes, and that is a very good thing, because what is happening before their eyes would have caused a worldwide crisis if it had happened any time before the advent of artificial intelligence, Photoshop, and mass media manipulation.

People are recording this, but their videos will be instantly discredited. It’s happening with the Hollywood sign in alignment behind her, so it looks like an attempt at viral marketing.

She is beating her wings, going far too high. She cannot help it. It’s reflex, one she does not understand and cannot control. But she cannot stop, and there is only so far one can rise before the wings start to tire.

She falters.

They’re too much for her. I do not know that her body has any ability to use those wings properly. Does she have the muscular control? Does she have the skeletal structure?

She starts to fall. Tumbling head over heels, wings askew.

I take my dragon form. I have no choice. I burst from the ground and of course I catch her in my talons, stopping her from falling and being destroyed on the ground.

We have to go. We cannot stay in this world. Whatever is happening to her is not born of this place.

I open a portal in the middle of the first O of the Hollywood sign, and fly through, tearing it into pieces in the process.

Just insane enough that nobody will ever believe what they saw.

It will all be forgotten in a week, just the way the spate of actual UFOs was that one time.

The world no longer has eyes for miracles.

I step from the human realm straight back into the Golden Keep.

“Medic!” I call for aid even as I take her to the infirmary. This is not good. She will survive, but she is clearly in pain. The whimpering sounds she is making are quite pathetic and nothing like the ones she makes while being punished. This is a different kind of agony.

Her wings are bloody from their first emergence.

I think they might also be broken because of the way she fell.

They are quite large, and wings are delicate things when they bend the wrong way.

Young whelps learn to fly when they are much lighter and smaller.

To be suddenly saddled with wings you don’t know how to use as an adult is a horror.

I take her straight into the infirmary, where she is sedated and given pain relief. Her wings tuck up behind her, but do not disappear the way dragon ones do when we take out different forms.

“What happened to her?” I ask the healer, Aja. “Have you ever seen such a thing?”

She sleeps on her stomach as her wings are carefully expanded and inspected. There is an air of curiosity and reverence in the room. We are witnessing something unprecedented. A human with full span developed wings capable of flight.

It takes some time before Aja speaks.

“Usually a human takes the semen of a dragonkin and produces a whelp who conforms to dragonkin shape and has a human form, a humanoid form, and a flight form. What’s happened here is… different.”

“Help me, don’t just tell me it’s unusual. I know it’s unusual.”

“Did anything happen out of the ordinary?”

“She escaped to the human world.”

“Oh,” he says. “Well. That is not how it is supposed to work, is it. You see humans must stay in the dragon realm once they are seeded. Their bodies are, well, by their definition infected. Returning to the human world changed her human form. These wings are… frankly, mutations. Abominations. They are not the wings of a dragon. They are, like humans, entirely unscaled. They don’t have the structure or the strength they would need in order to attain sustainable flight. I recommend amputation.”

I nod. “Take them off.”