Page 12 of Valor’s Flight (The New Protectorate #5)

Chapter Seven

It was the warm background hum of wards, strange and yet painfully familiar, that woke him.

Magic soaked the very air he breathed. It tasted sweet on his tongue and woke him from his deep slumber like fingers of sunlight on his face — so soft, so loving, just ticklish enough to draw him to the land of the living once more.

It was a stark contrast to the chills that wracked his frame from the inside out.

His head was much clearer, though it took him some time to realize it. This was partially due to the pain that made his entire body into one great, throbbing wound, but most of the blame could be laid on his surroundings. Taevas had no idea where the fuck he was.

He knocked his tail off his snout and worked hard to lift his head.

A splitting headache rang his skull like a bell, forcing him to squint his eyes against the harsh glare of sunlight streaming in through a partially obscured window.

Something dark covered most of the old, bubbly glass from the outside.

Only a few spots of light could come through the gaps, but it was more than enough to assault his sensitive eyes.

His tongue felt rough, his eyes gritty. Pain was a low but constant roar in his mind.

The chills were endless, and the churning of his guts reminded him of the handful of times he’d gotten the stomach flu.

His body had turned on him. It had focused all its energy on hunting down some poison in his system, seeking to purge it, and he was left helpless as the war was waged.

And yet, despite everything, his muscles were loose. He’d slept hard and long, well into the late morning. His dreams had been blessedly blank. He was… comfortable.

A huff escaped him as he squinted at the old but well-kept tile of a kitchen floor. It gleamed in the light, freshly cleaned.

Ridiculous, he fumed. My first good night’s sleep in a century and it’s on the floor of a hovel. It was better than the barn, he supposed, but only just.

Why was I in a barn?

Memories came to him in a steady trickle. Much was patchy, but he could at least reason out why that was so.

Taevas’s lips pulled back from his teeth. A terrible growl built in his chest as flame licked upward to flicker between incisors the length of a man’s hand.

Ambushed. Drugged. Beaten. Captured.

He’d been leaving a meeting in New York and since it was a short flight, he and his Wing had decided to forgo the jet.

It was all painfully mundane and safe. After all, they’d land on Drummond Island just before sunrise, which was more important that day than usual, since it was the summer solstice.

It was a holiday and a short routine flight in the darkness. There was no reason to think anything would go wrong. His last clear memory was of standing on the edge of the platform, ready to launch into the air, half his Wing ahead of him and the other half to follow.

What happened to my Wing?

Dread, cold and sickly, slithered through his veins.

The dragons who made up his personal guard would’ve fought to the death to protect him.

Taevas couldn’t recall a fight, only a blinding flash, then nothing at all.

His next memories were filled with the burn of drugs being injected into his thigh.

He’d fought, he was certain, but beyond the impression of rage and pain and disorientation, there was vanishingly little to find in the recesses of his mind.

Taevas shook his head in an attempt to clear it and immediately regretted it. Agony bloomed behind his eyes. Did they take out my implant?

His stomach turned. The pain in his head suggested they might’ve removed the subdermal communication device he and his Wing used. It did nothing to dwell on possibilities without evidence, but he shuddered at the thought. If they could do that, what else had they done to him?

I need a phone. I have to find out what happened. Who’s alive. Who needs killing.

But when he tried to climb to his feet, he found his limbs uncooperative. They could barely hold his weight, and the attempt saw him crashing into things on either side of the kitchen. A chair was sent flying, and pans came clattering down from hooks on the wall, making a terrible clatter.

Helpless anger sent his tail lashing against the far wall. He couldn’t understand how he’d ended up in a damn kitchen in the first place, and the knowledge that he couldn’t even shift to make the experience more comfortable was more fuel on the fire.

He needed to be gone from the hovel. He needed to know his people were safe. He needed to find some control again, to get back on his feet, and rain unholy retribution on those who’d thought to bring him down.

Fire snaked up his throat; a cruel, hungry serpent ready to strike.

A pair of bare feet stepped into view. They were attached to finely wrought ankles and shapely legs. Taevas blinked.

A woman stood before him, one hand on the door jamb.

Her skin was a perfect, deep gold and her curly hair was the darkest shade of mahogany.

Her generous hips and chest were swathed in a simple wrap dress.

She wore no makeup, no ornament, and stood there silently, her full lips unsmiling.

For just a moment, the great Isand felt all of two inches tall.

“If you’re going to burn my house down, I’d appreciate a bit of warning.”

How could I forget? Taevas’s rage died in the space between heartbeats. Alashiya. A nymph. Yes. Yes, I remember her. She’s helping me. I need her.

He stared at her, dumbfounded. Cypress and her unique personal fragrance filled the room. It mixed with the scent of hanging herbs, green things, the impressions of thousands of meals and cooking oil and cleaning solvents.

It was the scent of home.

He could say nothing even if he had the means.

The almighty Isand was struck speechless as the nymph gave him a withering glare.

Her feet made hardly any noise when she padded meaningfully around him, using the tiny amount of space he didn’t occupy to reach the cooking area.

She cast withering looks at the chair and the pans.

The narrow shafts of sunlight struck her as she filled a dented copper kettle in the deep basin of the sink. For just a moment, she appeared ethereal, her skin made of shining bronze, her curls of pure gold. His breath stuck in his throat.

Never in all his long life had Taevas seen a creature as lovely as Alashiya.

With a graceful flick of her wrist, she sealed the kettle’s lid and placed it on the stove.

He watched with confusion as she reached for a lighter on the spice rack.

A few strikes saw a little flame spring to life, which she used to light the burner beneath the kettle. His sense of disorientation grew.

What on Earth… I haven’t seen a stove like that in seventy years.

She didn’t spare him another glance as she moved about. Even when she had to step over him, or nudge him aside to open a drawer, she kept her gaze firmly away from him.

Something deep and fundamental in him balked at that, but Taevas could only watch her, his higher mental processes ground to a halt.

That scent. That face.

The events of the previous day came to him all at once. He’d crashed into this nymph’s barn and she’d taken care of him. Then something went wrong. She left him there, defying orders she couldn’t hear, and drove him into a panic so sharp it’d cut him deeper than any of his wounds.

It was an unbeatable compulsion, the urge he’d felt to follow her.

It’d nearly killed him to do it. His progress was slow and painful.

The sight of her narrow doorway had nearly driven him to tear the whole house apart in order to get to her, but he’d used what little sense he still possessed and managed to squeeze inside.

He’d been deeply vexed by her. She wasn’t allowed to storm off, not when there was a threat around, and certainly not when he didn’t know where she’d gone off to. Didn’t she know who he was? He’d commanded her to stay.

He was Isand. His orders were followed without question. Taevas never had to ask twice, let alone follow someone.

But he’d followed her. He didn’t have a choice.

He’d dragged himself through the rain, his belly and tail slipping through the mud, as thoughtless and desperate as a beast. There was no pride. There was no Isand. There wasn’t even Taevas.

Just her.

He experienced the oddest sensation of vertigo.

It was the result of realizing that, for only the second time in his life, he’d been driven by nothing other than instinct.

It had possessed him, body and mind, until even the pain of his wounds hadn’t been enough to deter him from seeing its will done.

Just as it’d been the first time, it was, in a word, revolting.

“I’d offer you a cup of coffee, but you said you don’t drink in that form, so I won’t.”

Alashiya poured the hot water through an old-fashioned enamel pot.

The scent of fresh coffee bloomed all around her as she slowly spun to face him.

There was something flinty in her large doe eyes.

Bruises decorated one side of her face, giving the look far more weight than it otherwise would’ve had.

He tensed, claws curling into the tile and tail rattling with furious intent. Who did that to you?

His knee-jerk reaction to the sight was just strong enough to out-muscle his instinctive revulsion to being so… not himself. Out of control. Wrong.

“I don’t know who you are,” she began, her tone painfully measured, “and at this point, I really don’t care. You’ve scared me. Battered me. Held me against my will. And then, against all good sense, when I helped you anyway, you broke into my house and got mud everywhere.”

Taevas balked. I did that to her?

He had vague impressions of her saying something like that to him before, but his head was clearer now. Hurting her intentionally was still beyond outrageous, but if he’d been careless—

How could I be careless? I’m never, ever careless. I don’t lose control like that.

Except for last night, he silently reminded himself. Except for when you dragged yourself on your belly through the filth like an animal to follow her. Do you really think you’re not capable of causing her harm after that, mighty Isand?

Acid churned in his stomach. Every instinct screamed that he couldn’t have hurt her, that he’d never hurt her, but he’d been drugged, injured, and hunted. If she stumbled on him at the wrong moment…

No wonder she’d defied him. He was lucky she hadn’t run screaming to the nearest person with a bolt gun.

Taevas was famously good with words. He was charming, even rakish. Normally he could be as audacious as he wanted to be, knowing that there was very little he couldn’t get away with. His reputation as Isand went far. His looks and wit carried him the rest of the way.

But absolutely none of that mattered now.

Charm and wit meant nothing when he couldn’t speak or write. His looks were even less helpful. All he had to recommend him was his behavior and his reputation, and he’d been so drugged out of his mind that he’d already blown that.

I’m so sorry, but I need your help, he wanted to explain to her. I can’t shift until the worst of my injuries have healed. I wish this wasn’t the case, but I need you.

As much as he wanted to leave her hovel behind, he was grieved to realize that he couldn’t.

With the extent of his injuries, going to ground for a few days was his only option.

The fact that he’d managed to land in what felt like a wild fortress of protective wards was a miracle — and perhaps the only thing that had saved him from being pursued by his captors.

It was a miracle he was thankful for, but he couldn’t help but wonder why in the world she needed all that protection in the first place. Not that he could ask, of course.

Alashiya continued to stare at him from beneath her dark brows, unable to hear a word of his spinning thoughts.

He was at a loss. There was no way to tell her what he needed.

All he could do was plant himself there, praying she wouldn’t do the smart thing and contact authorities to have him removed.

He’d been ambushed and kidnapped, then held only the gods knew where, drugged, and beaten.

Protocol refined over decades dictated that he get a direct line to his Wing before contacting anyone else, eliminating the chances of interception by enemies.

No one except his Wing could be trusted, and Taevas had no idea what territory he’d landed in, making it even less safe to seek the help of any authorities.

When he tried to use his innate internal navigation to figure out where he was relative to his roost, it spun in a confusingly tight circle around the kitchen.

His instinct told him he was in his roost, in the very heart of it, but that was so laughably wrong that he could only blame the drugs still in his system. Or perhaps a head injury.

Either way, he had no damn idea where he was, which was historically a very, very bad thing for a dragon.

He hoped he was in the ’Riik, but there was every chance he was in the middle of the Orclind, even as far as the Elvish Protectorate.

They were allies of the Draakonriik, but if his attackers were smart, they’d be watching, waiting for any sign that he might’ve been found, knowing he couldn’t fly far when his wings were damaged.

It would be big news if Taevas A?daja turned up in some small town. One stray word, one unencrypted message, and he’d be pounced on.

His mind raced as panic edged in. He needed to stay there, and he needed her to keep her mouth shut about it, and he needed her to stay close or he’d have to follow her again and—

Taevas shook his head. Stop. Stop it.