Page 43 of Fae Tithe (The Cursed Courts #1)

N o!

For the briefest of fleeting moments Helena felt nothing. A bittersweet release from the white-hot pain and flurry of anxious thoughts welcomed her. A blissful oblivion opened its arms in a gentle embrace, and she grasped for it.

No. You must stay here with me.

Helena’s release was short-lived. The excruciating pain from the injuries inflicted by the Seelie King’s Dragon Flame coursed through her limbs again.

She awoke flat on her back, covered in ash.

Helena gasped. She panted with lungs full of smoke.

Her only working eye fluttered open to take in her surroundings.

Stay awake.

Helena looked up into the scarlet sky. The pressure on her chest almost overtook the throbbing pain that wracked her body.

She tilted her chin down, and her eye widened in shock as she saw the very tip of a huge, serrated talon protruding from the toe of a paw.

The point of the claw pressed directly onto Helena’s heart, as though it was forcing it to keep beating.

Your Siren’s magic is reaching us here in Muspelheim. He will show us the way. You must stay here with me. Give him time.

The earthquake voice shook the ashen ground beneath her.

The smoky air swirled. Somehow, the voice was both inside and outside of Helena’s head, making her ears ring and rattling the teeth in her gums. Her eye closed again.

She could not stay awake. She longed for the painless oblivion that had briefly welcomed her before she was dragged to this bizarre, fiery place.

The tip of the claw pressed slightly harder into Helena.

I said you must stay.

“I’m trying,” Helena whimpered. She forced her eye open. She hurt everywhere, but nowhere more than her left hand and arm. It throbbed with white-hot agony. “It hurts.”

It will, the voice responded.

If Helena did not know any better, she could have sworn there was sympathy in its tone.

“Your claw is making it hard to breathe,” she gasped out.

Her chest fought to rise and fall beneath the heavy press of the talon. Helena squinted up and could just make out a towering outline through the swirling smoke.

I am holding you here with me.

“If I can’t breathe, I won’t be able to stay,” Helena reasoned back between gasps.

The voice said nothing in response, but the creature released its claw from Helena’s chest, placing its massive paw on the ground next to her.

She eased herself upright. Her core muscles screamed under the strain to stay there.

Helena’s stomach twisted into a savage knot.

She vomited ash and blackened blood down her scorched shirt and onto her shredded leggings.

With each retch, pain shot through her. Agony radiated from her left arm.

Helena held the hand to her face, narrowing her eye at the sight.

Each finger was tipped with a flat obsidian claw. Her eye traced the outline of her hand and arm. They were ashen grey, and the veins beneath her skin had been replaced by lines of glowing amber.

“It hurts,” Helena whimpered.

It will, the voice repeated. The deep bass rattled the bones in her body.

“Where am I?” she asked, peering up into the smoky scarlet sky.

Muspelheim.

“What is Muspelheim?” Helena asked.

Muspelheim is this cursed place. I was trapped and sent here long ago. The Seelie Kings kept me here so they could siphon my magic.

“Who are you?”

I am Atlas.

“Atlas?” Helena asked. She knew that name. She raked her memory for it, vaguely recalling a festival puppet show she had seen in her youth, based on the tales from early Seelieland history. “Atlas… isn’t he… the Last Dragon?”

The mountainous figure lowered his scaled, serpentine neck through the smoke. His head lined up with her slouched body as she strained to stay upright. Each of his eyes was the full height of Helena’s body. They glowed like the sun, each dissected by a long black pupil.

The Dragon’s muzzle was vaguely wolf-shaped, with two large teardrop-shaped nostrils at its end. Atlas’s breath blew the hair that had escaped from Helena’s bun around her face. He briefly opened his gargantuan maw in a yawn, revealing canine fangs longer than her arms.

Helena ogled the crown of horns at the back of his massive head.

Two, set back from his eyes, were particularly long.

They swept back from his face and upward, impaling the scarlet sky above.

The colour of the Dragon’s scales reminded Helena of obsidian and matched the new colour of the fingernails on her left hand.

A faint amber glow radiated from the joins between each large black scale.

Atlas huffed heavily through his nostrils, blowing his hot breath against her skin. Hair slipped loose from Helena’s ruined bun.

Last? I would describe myself as ‘lost’.

“Lost?” Helena’s face met the glowing suns that made up his eyes. “What do you mean, ‘lost’?”

I was two summers past my fledgling age and undertaking migration for the first time. I was blown off course while flying through an awful storm and ended up in what you now call Seelieland.

He was so young when he got lost. Helena grunted as another throb of pain radiated up her arm. “How long have you been here?”

Since I refused to do Theo’s bidding. When I did not wish to aid him in subjugating the faeries further, he used his own and his slaves’ magic to bind me to his line and send me here.

Helena could not help herself. She felt a stab of pity for the Dragon. Rose had said, more than once, that she had a bleeding heart for waifs and strays. He had been the equivalent of a young man leaving home for the first time when he had been lost and then sent to Muspelheim.

“Why are you so set on keeping me here with you?”

Do you not want to return? A low growl emanated from the Dragon’s throat. I saved you and kept you here. Do you not want to go back to your offspring and Siren mate?

“Of course I do!” she exclaimed. Helena’s brow furrowed, stinging her blistered forehead. “Wait, how do you know about them?”

Atlas rumbled in his broad chest. She suspected the Dragon was laughing. Because I am in your mind now and I have fragments of the most important memories. You must stay here with me so I may go back with you.

“What?” she asked.

Helena could not process what was being said. Despite her limited education, she considered herself a reasonably smart person. Her mind was addled from the pain and her reality being rapidly upended.

How would that work? What is he talking about? Another throb up her arm scattered her thoughts further, making her hiss through her teeth.

When the Seelie King burnt you... Atlas said, angling his giant head and huffing through his nostrils onto her grey arm.

...it gave me the opportunity to flee the bindings that connected me to Theo’s descendant.

Rian used enough of my magic that I could slip out of him and into you.

I could anchor my mind in yours and protect you from the curse he forged with a combination of his own and my magic.

When your body died on Midgard, my anchor in your mind was lost, but I could not let you go.

I pulled on that tie between us and brought you here.

“Your anchor was in my mind? So, you were planning on coming back, but only in my head? What is Midgard?” Helena’s head spun. She scowled at the Dragon again. How dare he? This is my body. My head.

The Dragon puffed loudly through his nostrils. It is your head, that is correct. My mind could pass through my Flame into you. Midgard is the world we are from, Helena. Atlas rumbled with laughter again. At least, that is where my ancestors settled when they left Vanaheim.

Midgard is the world…? There’s more than Seelieland, Unseelieland, and the Faerie Isles? I didn’t know that. Why didn’t I know that? She rubbed her aching temple.

There is much beyond—

Helena’s back cramped, sending spasms up her spine.

She collapsed backwards, the ashen ground hard on her skin beneath her ruined clothing.

“Atlas,” she hissed. Hunger gnawed at her belly and thirst clawed at her throat.

“How long have I been here? It feels like… I don’t know, days, weeks.

I don’t know how much longer I can stay for. ”

You will! Atlas roared, baring his gargantuan fangs.

You will stay. I saved you, Helena. My magic is saving your life.

It brought you here and it is keeping you alive.

You cannot leave me now. If you do, we both die.

When the Seelie King burnt you with the curse and I decided to protect you from it, it tied us together.

I have waited for tens of thousands of years to escape this place, so you will stay here with me until we can leave together, the Dragon ordered.

“I can’t…” she responded, eye closing.

You can. You will. Helena felt the tip of his obsidian claw press into her grey-skinned arm. Do not leave me here!

Helena’s eye snapped open as agony throbbed from the point. She shot upright into sitting position with a scream from her hoarse throat. Helena glared up at the Dragon with her healthy eye.

“Fuck you!” she shouted. “I will never, ever be forced to do anything I don’t want to do again, Atlas. My body is mine, my mind is mine—”

You—

“No! I am not finished. Of course I want to go back to El and Lance, to my whole family. If that means I have to take you with me in my head because it will keep me alive, then so be it. I need you to understand, Atlas.” Helena took a deep breath.

“I am in charge. Me. Not you. I don’t give a fuck if you’re a Dragon.

My life belongs to me! I have fought too long, too hard, to yield to you!

” she ranted, her chest heaving as sweat poured down her face.

Atlas blinked. He lowered his head next to Helena and laid the bottom of his jaw on the ground at the end of her stretched out legs.

I am sorry. I just do not want to be left alone anymore, and I do not want to die, he admitted.