Page 54

Jaz

I lay in Zyair’s dragon arms and willed him to live.

Xandros and Rhodes were raiding the galley. The comm was still open, so we were privy to the many reasons why Xandros would never be sitting in the pilot’s seat. The predominant theme seemed to involve the much-mentioned comet…

Zyair sighed as I hit the shutoff button and their voices were silenced. “I usually mediate their arguments,” he admitted. “Today—today they can solve their own disputes.”

His voice reverberated with pain and exhaustion. He was getting worse. We needed to get to Amelia.

“I will be fine, Jaz,” he soothed. “When Amelia has purged this venom from my blood, I will take you on a flight to see the sunset. Do you think you can grow those scales over your entire body? It will be too cold above the clouds for human skin.”

I hugged his arm. “To see a sunset, you bet.”

We waited, as in our minds, Rhodes and Xandros made wraps crammed with as much meat as they could fit in.

“Will the Tazier come after us when we emerge from the slipstream?” I asked.

“Unlikely,” he replied. “They will not want their deception known among the clans. And Brentoq will not come after us in an area occupied by Drakes.”

“Maybe Brentoq is dead.”

His lip curled into a smile. “Maybe. She is a tough manticore to kill. But shaftz, you were so sexy challenging her.” His scaled arms tightened. “Your actions—they appeared nonsensical at the time. However, you are one smart little female.”

I basked in the warmth of his approval. “What happens when we get back?” I asked.

The question wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of clarity, but he knew what I was worried about. “We will go to Azrome, and see Amelia.”

“But, after that?”

He looked away from me. “Azrome has always suspected that Drakes colluded with the Nirzks to wipe out Raptor Clan. We now know Tazier Clan was involved, but still, we lack proof. Azrome can decide what course of action to take with what we have learned.”

“Will the Taziers come after you on Earth?” I asked.

The slightest shake of his massive head. “They would be foolish to do it openly. Everything about Senaik taking us to Brentoq was designed to keep their corruption quiet.”

That might be true, but the Taziers were powerful enemies.

He exhaled softly. “Do not worry. We will protect you.”

“I will protect you , you mean.”

He snorted a laugh. “Yes. Of course.”

Through the link, I caught a hint of the depth of his exhaustion. “You need to rest,” I said. “We are safe, now.”

His emerald eyes blinked. “I do not want to.”

“Why not?” I asked.

He hesitated, and then he confessed, “Because I am afraid this has all been nothing but a dream. That I will wake up, and you—you will be gone.”

I met his gaze, and saw the very real fear deep within it, and my heart twisted. “It wasn’t your fault that I didn’t know what we were getting into.”

He snorted softly. “You were right to be angry. I should have made sure you understood.”

I laughed. “Yeah, well, comments like ‘Let’s mate for life’, and ‘you can have my dragonlets’ would have been serious buzz kill at the time.”

“Buzz, Kill?” he asked.

“Offputting. Ruin the moment.” I ran my fingers along his jaw. “Anyway, I’m not going anywhere,” I stated emphatically. “So go to sleep. We have hours in slipstream before we get to Earth.”

I stroked along the underside of his muzzle, where the scales were small and smooth. By the fourth time drifting my hands over him, his gleaming eyes closed. He lay his head down alongside me, and sighed. Moments later, his breathing steadied.

I nestled against him, intending to sleep as well. But although I was exhausted, the heat radiating from him revealed just how sick he really was.

It worried me so much that I couldn’t do more than doze as the slipstream carried us home…

By the time the slipstream spat us out, Zyair was burning up. His wings and talons were so hot I could no longer touch them. At some point in the last few hours, he’d stopped responding to me and had fallen into a coma.

My heart was breaking. He was slipping away, and there was nothing I could do.

Rhodes and Xandros exchanged a meaningful look as they assessed him. Rhodes vanished to the bridge, while Xandros curled up with us.

They hadn’t needed to speak. Their worry radiated along the link .

The Nipslep slipstream port spat us out where we’d begun this adventure—in Earth’s solar system, but still hours from my home world.

Hours from Amelia.

I still lay in Zyair’s arms. When I ran my hands over his closed lids, there was no response.

Xandros tucked himself tighter against me as he lay with us. “He is strong, little drifter. We are almost there.”

I leaned into him, hoping with all my heart that it was true. As the hours passed, I sensed Zyair fading. Being strong wasn’t enough.

Rhodes must have known it, even from the bridge. “I am bringing us right into the compound near the mountain,” he announced.

“That is risky,” hedged Xandros.

“Azrome ordered it,” Rhodes countered.

That seemed to settle it for Xandros. Minutes later, the engines altered their roar, and the repulsors came online. Rhodes set us down with a bit of a bump.

It was a sign of how concerned Xandros was that he didn’t criticize. Rhodes appeared briefly at the door.

“Stay here. I will get her.”

He didn’t have to elaborate on who “her” was. I rested my forehead against Zyair’s scaled cheek. Even it burned against my skin.

Rhodes reappeared so quickly that I knew Amelia had been waiting for us to land.

I looked past him, to another Drake—almost as tall as Rhodes, with the same narrow features, but more heavily muscled and with Zyair’s red-gold hair.

The clan tattoo on his face gleamed almost gold, and he wore a broad metal band around his throat.

Azrome.

Beside him was a beautiful, shapely woman with long golden hair, and eyes that glinted a metallic version of the same color. She was clad in gleaming pale scales that hugged her every curve.

Rhodes introduced Amelia and Azrome .

I managed to sketch a smile at her, but she understood me perfectly—with a small smile of her own, she walked straight up to Zyair and laid her hands on the side of his head.

Azrome spotted the crate sitting along the wall, and moved it over to her. Lost in her healing trance, she seemed oblivious, but he got her to sit by lifting her onto it.

Moments later, a murky fluid began to run from the corners of Zyair’s closed eyes. Xandros lifted me away from it, refusing to put me down until we were in the doorway.

“This might get untidy,” Azrome rumbled. “The venom has been in process for too long. She will have to work hard to separate it from his tissues.” He turned to me. “Do you have an electrolyte solution on board?”

I stared at him. “We might have some energy drinks.”

“She gets depleted while healing and must be sustained—I can do some of it through our link, but her body will require its own energy to keep going. I have a Drolgok friend getting some from the house, but for this”—he broke off and swallowed—“she will need every advantage we can offer to her.”

I didn’t want to leave Zyair, but Xandros took my elbow. “Last time, she worked on him for hours,” he said. “He is worse this time. We might as well rustle something up, and then get comfortable.”

Get comfortable? My mind spun as we all followed Xandros to the kitchen, where Yani was already hard at work preparing a meal. Or at least tea and pastries. And snickerdoodles for Sookie.

The pastries were no longer as fresh as they could be, but Xandros dug in eagerly. On the surface, he appeared unfazed by his brother’s struggle to live, but along the link I sensed how, for him, eating was a way to cope.

Rhodes was the opposite. He even waved away the tea, and leaned on the wall rather than sit.

Azrome cleaned the fridge out of energy drinks and vanished to take them to Amelia .

“Sit,” Yani ordered when I dithered. “We’ve done all we can for him. It’s up to the healer, now.”

So, I sat. Azrome reappeared and took a seat as well while Rhodes began to fill him in on our entire adventure.

I barely heard him. Sookie scampered over to me, and I gathered the hedgegopher into my lap. Her rumbling purr dictated a normalcy that I didn’t feel.

“Will she eat this?” Xandros asked, offering her a piece of what looked like apple fritter.

“The apple, maybe,” I hedged.

Sookie snatched the offered chunk and inhaled it. Xandros’s lips twitched into a small, sad smile.

I wanted to hear him laugh again. Wanted him and Rhodes to argue, so that Zyair could step in and solve it all.

Wanted Zyair to wake up. To smile at me. To live.

Handing the hedgegopher to Xandros, I rose. He did, too.

“No,” I said, sharper than I intended. I reached out to touch his arm. “I just need a bit of time alone.”

His brows lowered, but he nodded. I sensed both him and Rhodes watching me as I passed them and strode up the hall.

My feet took me to the bridge. The view outside the Stardrifter was of mountains and an evergreen forest. I sat in the pilot’s seat and remembered Zyair joining with me.

Both the first time, which had been rather deliciously awkward, and the last, when he’d needed the spark of pain to reach culmination.

I’d once thought I wanted to escape both the Drakes and my life on Earth. Now here I was, mated to three of them. My father, and Yani, had been the only family that mattered to me. And after his death, the Drolgok and I had learned to rely only on each other.

Yet now it seemed like Zyair, Xandros, Rhodes, and I had always been together. At one time, I would have thought it merely a spiritual thing—but I knew the truth. It was Fated. We were bonded. As one. Would Fate work so hard to put us together, only to pull us apart ?

Zyair had to live. I couldn’t imagine life without him.

A pulse of reassurance from Rhodes. Xandros sent me the equivalent of a mental hug. I opened my heart to them—they were hurting too.

When I didn’t return to them, they set out to cheer me up by regaling me with images of their brotherly adventures growing up.

They included Zyair as a youngling, with a mother they barely remembered.

Their early schooling, which had a very Drakonian emphasis on fighting skills.

From what they showed me, they’d gotten into a great deal of trouble, especially once they’d entered their teen years.

The memories really began to roll, then, until I was caught up in them. After a particularly entertaining pictorial altercation with a barmaid and her enormous husband, I sensed something.

Looking up, I saw Amelia standing in the bridge entrance.

I shot to my feet, and she smiled gently at me. Her face was lined with exhaustion, but her eyes glimmered with her news.

“He’s going to be okay.”