Page 36

Chapter 35

A zriel had but one thought as Razer shot through the sky towards the bronze dragon: Ariadne. Ariadne. Ariadne . She kept him moving as he hunched over on his bondheart’s back, sucking air through gritted teeth while pain radiated out from the wounds on his arms and chest. Too many close calls. Too many blades pushed aside at the last moment to skip across his pectorals rather than lodging between his ribs.

There was no chance to grapple in the air, and his size and strength couldn’t compare to pure-blooded dhemons. Not with blades alone. The only upper hand he had was speed and the thought of her .

Ariadne.

Distance always made his mind foggy. Despite having seen her, smelled her, held her so recently, holding onto his memories and purpose became a struggle. With it came the sensation of helplessness—the same way he’d felt while trapped in Algorath. Helpless to get to her. Helpless to save himself.

But Ariadne was his foundation—the one thing he could never forget, no matter how much his bond tried to trick him. It showed her decapitated head, the usual wave of horror and agony accompanying the image. The illusion Melia had painted of her in Loren’s arms haunted him just as often. Moreso, however, that horrible monster concocted new visions to torment him: visuals of her dangling from chains before Ehrun’s knives or pinned to the ground by dhemons in a dark cell. He contended with false memories of her dying after falling from Razer or being cursed by mages hunting them after the escape from Algorath.

Yet the true memories were what cut him deepest, even mid-flight while sporting an array of injuries. Front doors slamming as she left him. Her laughing at Loren’s jokes as they walked through Laeton Park. The hurt beaming back at him when he told her they could never be friends.

Ehrun wished to make some of those come to life. For some twisted reason, his own bond blamed her bloodline—not only the deceased Markus Harlow—for his wife’s death. He’d convinced himself over the years that by causing Ariadne pain, he could find some scrap of peace. What his inner monster never told him, however, was that he’d be chasing that tranquility for the rest of his life with no chance of catching it.

Unless they connected him to the Underworld.

It was their only hope in regaining a powerful ally against the vampires. Assuming, of course, Azriel could take the bastard alive. If they killed him, they risked his army seeking revenge, and as much as Azriel hated it, they couldn’t let that happen. Not when there was so much more to gain.

Sehrox was, possibly, the largest dragon to have hatched from the Irem Tundra. His bronze scales almost glowed in the moonlight, and his eyes flashed with a wicked temperament. That his mind was being slowly poisoned by Ehrun’s insanity didn’t help. Mhorn had gone through the same thing, with Razer and Brutis connecting Azriel and Madan—the last figment he had of Mariana’s blood—to his father as the only reason he never lost complete control.

There was no safeguard between Ehrun and Sehrox. As such, the dragon had quickly become the most volatile of the hatchlings.

The massive beast pushed off a high ridge, his focus near the base of the mountain—near the tomb and, therefore, Ariadne. He tucked in his wings and shot downhill fast as an arrow. To Azriel’s relief, the duo were still far enough away that it’d take time to get there, no matter the speed.

Without needing to communicate, Razer changed trajectory. Neither of them focused on the precise location of the cave. If Ehrun or Sehrox got an idea of where the center of their shared heart lay hidden in the mountains, they’d exploit it mercilessly. Everything they did would return to that cave. That tomb.

Ariadne.

“ Above .” It was the only word Azriel needed to say.

Wind filled Razer’s membranous wings, lifting him over Sehrox rather than on a path to crash into him. Doing so would be unwise with the bronze dragon’s size. Azriel stood at the base of his bondheart’s neck, one foot on a spike, one hand gripping another to keep himself steady, and Kall’s ax, shining with blood, hanging on the other side. Wind whipped by him, blurring his vision with the hairs that’d pulled free of his top knot.

As Razer coasted over the great bronze dragon, Azriel jumped. The distance wasn’t far, but enough to make his stomach lurch in the process of freefalling.

With the other dragons, Azriel had aimed for their backs—aimed to land beside their riders and begin the fight to the death. This time, however, he wasn’t looking to kill. He’d promised Ariadne, after all, and he would do his best to never break a promise to her.

Instead, he dove with the intention of maiming Sehrox to the point that he couldn’t follow Ehrun once they took the dhemon prisoner.

So when Azriel landed on the outstretched wing, he dug the blade of the ax into the membrane underfoot and let the wind push him back. He held onto the handle and stood as straight as possible. In doing so, each beat of the wing, combined with the rush of air, shoved him closer and closer to falling off the edge, tearing as he went.

Sehrox roared and turned as though to fling Azriel off like a gnat to be dispatched.

But Azriel was ready. Holding firm to the ax, he pulled his sword free and stabbed it straight into the membrane mere feet apart. A second hole opened up, resulting in another screech from the mighty dragon.

It didn’t take long for Ehrun to notice. The dhemon stalked down his bondheart’s spine, his own ax in hand. So similar to Kall’s, Azriel wanted to take it from him.

Ehrun didn’t deserve anything that resembled his friend. All he deserved was to suffer with the knowledge that he was the cause of his own misery. That he was responsible for pain and heartache across the Keonis Valley.

Red eyes glowing, Ehrun’s mouth twisted with delight as he stretched out the single taunt, “ Dhomin .”

Distracted by Azriel, the great brute didn’t see as Whelan dropped from above onto the other wing, his own sword digging into Sehrox. In response, Ehrun screwed up his face against the pain that radiated through his vinculum with the dragon. He shoved it away with a jerk of his shoulder and stepped out on the wing towards Azriel.

Madan landed between them, sword held at the ready. The size difference between his brother and the false Dhemon King was almost comical. In any other instance, it would be. Instead, it sent fear crashing through Azriel. Of the three of them, Madan was most likely to fall against Ehrun.

“ Keep him alive .” Azriel yanked the sword and ax free, then pivoted and hacked into the membrane again, perpendicular to the previous slashes, to expand the tears.

To his credit, Madan didn’t flinch or retreat at the dhemon’s approach. But he did send back, “ That seems counterintuitive .”

“ By order of Yvhaltrinja.” Azriel’s hands grew damp from the blood spraying up from the damaged wing, making his grip on the weapons more and more perilous. “ Focus on keeping Sehrox from following us when we take him .”

So the three dragons dove in again. With their orders clear, they set about the massive bronze dragon and attacked from different angles. They wouldn’t kill the beast outright, but enough damage to his wings would prevent him from flying for several weeks as he healed.

Razer rose up from below to grapple head-on with Sehrox. Their maws gnashed at one another as he dug his claws into the bronze dragon’s body in order to hold himself in place. Brutis angled down to his flank, crashing into him with force as he tore into Sehrox’s hindquarters. As the fastest and most agile, Oria raked her long claws through his wings.

Yet Sehrox never twisted. Never turned. Never rolled to toss them all free. He kept as level as possible, protecting his bondheart. If Ehrun were to be dislodged with the rest of them, there would be a chance no one would catch him in time.

Bursts of fire blew through the wind as Sehrox wavered, then crashed belly-first into a rocky mountain peak. Every one of them on his back tumbled through the air and landed in scattered heaps nearby.

Head swimming from slamming into the rocks, Azriel shoved back to his feet and looked around as his vision cleared. They were far enough from the cave now that he couldn’t even see the steep slope leading to the entrance. Good. Keeping Ehrun away from—

A fist slammed into his face. Everything darkened just long enough for a second hit to knock him back again.

“Where’s your pretty little wife ?” Ehrun snarled as he stooped to pick up his ax, blood dripping from his split knuckles.

Azriel blinked back the pounding in his head and adjusted his footing without speaking. The words were mere bait. He wouldn’t bite.

“Did she run away when she saw you for who you really are?” He paused to grind his teeth, bracing from an unseen injury at the same moment Sehrox shifted behind him. The pain from the dragon was leaking through their vinculum, then. “Or maybe, just maybe…she ran away with the man you thought was your friend.”

Though Azriel spoke no words, he snarled in response. The bond latched onto Ehrun’s words, forming images in his mind of Ariadne and Kall locked in a passionate embrace.

Impossible.

Kall was dead. Dead because of the man before him.

Then the ax swung. Azriel leapt back, nearly taking the blade across his gut. His weapons having been dislodged from his grips, he had nothing left with which to parry. Instead, he dodged a second attack and rushed forward with empty hands.

Horns connected with horns as Ehrun bent to take the charge head-on not unlike a ram defending his authority. It wasn’t often that a dhemon allowed their horns to be grappled in such a manner. They were used for blunt force, not as a technique to win a fight. Nonetheless, Azriel twisted his head, catching the curve of Ehrun’s horn with his own and yanking it down to meet the knee he brought up hard.

Laughter spilled from the great brute. Ehrun drove forward and slammed Azriel’s back to the stony ground. He fumbled for a grip on a horn, keeping Azriel from turning to escape.

“The better question is,” Ehrun snarled, setting the ax down to crack his knuckles across Azriel’s face, “where is her precious little shadow? Don’t tell me he actually died ?”

That did it. That was enough to stoke the fire in Azriel’s blood. He bridged his hips and punched the dhemon in the side—right in the liver. “Fuck you!”

At first, Ehrun merely grinned. But such a well-placed strike always had a delayed response. A breath later, the dhemon buckled over, his fingers loosening on Azriel’s horn. The pain didn’t last nearly long enough, however, and only served to piss Ehrun off even more.

“Rest assured,” Ehrun hissed, grappling for his ax with his free hand, “I will take excellent care of Yvhaltrininja .”

My Little Queen .

Azriel squirmed beneath the bloodthirsty dhemon, desperate to find any escape as the ax raised higher and higher. This would not be how he died—pinned to the ground by his enemy, unable to protect his wife. His queen. His heart and soul.

The scream that tore from him, filled with rage and desperation, only made Ehrun grin.

Before Ehrun could bring the huge blade down, Madan was there, sinking a dagger into the soft side of his belly. In the same breath, Whelan slipped his huge arm under the false king’s chin and squeezed hard.

The ax dropped, and Azriel twisted to avoid its fall, the blade skimming past his ear with white-hot pain. Azriel shoved out from under Ehrun as the dhemon’s hands grappled against Whelan’s arm. But those vicious red eyes rolled back in his head from lack of oxygen nonetheless. Blood streamed from the wound in his side—enough to keep him weak without killing him outright.

“Tie him up.” He looked to Whelan, who pulled off a rope slung across his body. Seeing the dhemon whom he’d hated for so long prone before him gave him a strange mixture of feelings. Relief to know they finally had him. Anger at how easy it’d been once they finally put their minds to it. But mostly, to Azriel’s utmost confusion, he felt pity. “Check him for weapons.”

Madan conducted the search as Ehrun’s limbs were strapped together and tightened. While they worked, Razer, Brutis, and Oria made themselves a wall between them and Sehrox. The bronze dragon wheezed and sputtered fire but could do nothing more than turn his head to see what was happening to his bondheart. Deep puncture marks on his chest were mirrored by Razer, who bled from the face-to-face conflict in the sky.

“ Can you fly ?” Azriel asked his bondheart.

Razer rumbled deep in his chest, then made an odd coughing noise. Blood sputtered from his gaping mouth. “ Yes . I think .”

When Ehrun’s eyes peeled open, his consciousness slowly returning, Whelan slammed his elbow back down though the curve of his horn to the dhemon’s temple. The false king’s body relaxed again—enough for Whelan to then haul him onto his shoulders and carry him to Oria. There, he slung Ehrun at the base of her neck like a saddlebag.

“ Do you think Sehrox can fly ?” Azriel asked next as he dragged himself onto Razer’s back. His body ached with every movement as the adrenaline ebbed away.

“ I broke his wings ,” Oria said and backed up, never taking her eyes off the massive dragon. “ It’ll take him weeks to heal .”

“ Good .” Azriel took one last look at the bronze dragon, then twisted in his seat to locate the direction to the tomb. “ Take me back to my wife .”

When Madan and Kall had described the vinculum to Ariadne back in Algorath, they had conveniently forgotten to mention how utterly painful it was. Maybe it had not felt that way to them. Perhaps it had been so long, they could not recall the exact feeling of the connection forming.

Whatever the meaning behind it, Ariadne would have words with her half-brother about the experience one day. Harsh words. And perhaps a punch or two. Given their success with the ritual and getting her connected to the Underworld where Kall now resided, she would hunt him down in the afterlife and give him a piece of her mind.

Assuming, of course, there was any mind left to give.

Ariadne had not experienced a headache of this magnitude since her time as a daywalker prior to her transition into adulthood around the age of sixty. She had gone into Laeton proper with Emillie, Camilla, and Revelie and spent the hours sipping some of Valenul’s finest wines—and some that came from the Vol Isles, which were, undoubtedly, better. Before a vampire aged into their fangs and all the perks that arrived with the curse in their blood locking into place, they were about as prone to ailments as a human.

The headache she had garnered from the superfluous amount of wine had been, quite possibly, the worst head pain Ariadne had ever experienced up to that point. Combined with the severe dehydration stomach-sickness, the hours after were miserable.

None of that compared to how it felt to create a vinculum with a dragon. It ravaged her mind and had her pausing every few steps to keep from hurling the meager contents of her stomach onto the beautiful garnet floor of the cave.

Worse still was the odd flickering of her vision. One moment, Ariadne was stumbling into the second chamber of the cavern system, where bits of rock were beginning to poke their way through the thick layers of garnet. She saw the glittering walls, the vast emptiness, and nothing else.

The next moment, she looked down at Emillie and Luce, who had taken on her lycan form and placed herself between her sister and…

Well, Ariadne could only assume it was the dragon hatchling.

“Put your swords away!” Edira’s voice was in Ariadne’s head as though she had taken up her place before the other high fae. “It will only take it as a threat.”

Then a voice Ariadne had never heard before echoed in her mind, more coherent and well-spoken than she would have wagered, “ I am not an it.”

The cave of garnets before her true body returned. Sucking in a steadying breath, Ariadne pushed forward and started up the next passageway. Her head throbbed in unison with her heartbeat—then picked up a different pace as though competing with the beat of the dragon.

“ Do not hurt them ,” Ariadne thought back, hoping beyond hope that she was communicating with the dragon properly. She had never really asked how it worked for Azriel or Madan. “ They are my friends .”

Emillie’s face swam into view again.

“ My sister ,” she corrected. “ That is my sister . Please keep her safe .”

A flash of understanding, then Ariadne was back in her own mind again. She stumbled into the first cave. Bending over, she placed her hands on her knees and tried again to calm her breathing. Nothing was working. Nothing kept her stomach from roiling or her head from spinning.

“ Where are you?” Confusion tugged at the forming vinculum.

At once, the connection between them became clear, and she felt it deep in her bones. In her very soul. It was like a spool of thread. One end knotted firmly around Ariadne’s heart. The other twisted through the ether—a sensation she had never before experienced—to tie her to the dragon at the far end. The ends whorled together at the center, stretching out and winding up as the physical distance between them changed.

“ I have to leave for a while …” Fuck. This had been everything Ariadne wanted mere weeks ago to ease the strain on Azriel’s bond, and now she ran from it. She hated herself for every step she took. “ Do not let them follow me . I will not be gone long .”

But stopping would be worse.

Outside the cave, Ariadne looked to the sky. Wisps of clouds moved overhead, blotting out the stars in slow intervals. No signs of a dragon. Not even the sounds of a battle reached her vampiric ears. They were out there somewhere, risking their lives to not only keep her alive but to put an end to Ehrun’s twisted rule over renegade dhemons.

If Ariadne could just get to the soldiers marching closer, she could convince them to take her back to Laeton. Take her back to the Harlow Estate. It would be mere nights away from Azriel—mere breaths in which she would have to endure Loren’s self-righteousness between searching for the book. Once she found it, she would leave. Escape. Run back to the arms of the man who needed her most.

No one would ever wonder why she holed herself up in her family library over the nights to come. It had always been her favorite haunt, and she had decades of practice in sneaking books throughout the manor. All her study time had been used up reading ridiculous tales of love.

Another sharp pain rocked her. Losing her footing, she slid down the hill, away from the cave, with a strangled cry. She raked her hand down the steep slope to slow her fall at the same time the unfamiliar voices of the soldiers came into earshot.

“I heard something just there.”

“Near the hill.”

“Go see what it is.”

“Probably just some creature…like a knife-eared merchant.”

A chorus of cackles followed the last statement, making Ariadne’s stomach curl. The racism ran rampant through the Caersan vampires especially. As though they, who were created through a mage’s curse, were better than those whose races had been birthed by the gods themselves. It was no wonder Keon hid from the world—the children he had brought forth from the Underworld to protect his precious Anwen were treated like cur by the people who stole their land.

Pushing back to her feet, Ariadne picked her way toward the copse of trees separating her from the highway. This had been the place where Alek Nightingale died. At least…it was close, according to Emillie’s calculations, and her sister was rarely wrong. That meant they were also not far from the Hub.

And that only weakened her resolve.

The thought of even seeing Loren Gard again made her queasy. That vile excuse for a General, let alone a King , had fooled her once into believing he cared for her. She was only grateful to have seen the truth of him prior to being forced in front of the High Priestess with him at her side instead of Azriel.

Before she could lose her nerve completely, Ariadne raised her voice as she drew nearer the trees. “Help!”

Another smattering of comments. The voices turned her way in tandem with the sound of footsteps crunching through the underbrush.

Ariadne rushed into the trees. At least in there, the soldiers would not be able to see the cave entrance. They would not question her or demand they investigate the cave itself. She was but a wanted Caersan woman who needed asylum from the horrible people who had captured her. Of anything she said, they would believe that.

“Where is she?” said one soldier.

Another, nearer now, replied, “I think she is just over here.”

She wove through the trees, heart thundering. Her hands shook, and as that spool of thread connecting her to the dragon unwound more and more, her head throbbed again. Stumbling, everything went dark.

Then she was looking at Pol as he tried to widen the gap in which the dragon stood as though to get around; the garnet did not respond to his fae magic. A worried sensation rippled through her, and her own voice echoed in the dragon’s mind: Do not let them follow me .

So her jaws—no, the hatchling’s jaws—snapped again, closer this time to the high fae.

“I see her!” The soldier’s voice sounded so far away, but the ground beneath Ariadne’s hands swam back into view.

“Gods!” Another voice as she blinked to clear her vision. “It is Miss Harlow!”

Oh, she was going to be sick with the whiplash of going back and forth. Entire body quaking, Ariadne lifted her head and tried to take a deep breath. This was not the time to be fighting to hold onto a vinculum. Was that even what she was doing?

Yes. The thread between them only grew stronger the longer she held onto it. Stronger even when she wanted nothing more than to let it go because keeping a firm grip only made the headaches worse.

“Miss Harlow!”

That was a voice Ariadne knew.

Her heart sank like a stone as she turned to look up at the one man she had hoped to avoid at all costs. What was he doing out here? Should he not be sitting on his throne being pampered? Maybe she had fainted during a training and all of this—the journey, Kall’s death, and the sudden appearance of the man she hated—was all a dream. Gods, how she prayed it was a dream…

But the distance between them closed in a rush, and before she knew what was happening, Loren crouched before her, his sapphire eyes wide with wonder as he breathed, “I found you at last.”