Page 4 of Valor’s Flight (The New Protectorate #5)

Chapter Three

Magic saturated the air in his lungs, wind howled through the gaps between old wooden boards, and Taevas was pretty sure that something was wrong with him.

His body hurt in too many places to count. The air was warm and moist in his nostrils, and a great many scents assailed him from all sides. Breathing was a problem, though he couldn’t rightly explain why.

Thoughts were fleeting and disconnected. Everytime he thought he had a handle on a thread, it snapped and the pieces fluttered away into the ether.

Frequently, a warm wind carrying droplets of water would whip through his hiding spot and vibrate the sensitive membranes of his wings. He didn’t mind. Dragons could take weather in all its extremes, and the warmth was better than the bitter cold of high altitude when he ached as much as he did.

But he couldn’t allow the rain within the circle of his mantled wings.

That was imperative. It was an urgent, throbbing directive — not a thought, per se, but as natural an urge as breathing.

Within his wings, it must not be wet or uncomfortable.

It must be safe. He mustn’t squeeze too hard and be mindful of his tail, because something fragile lay there. His to guard, his to treasure.

The thought tickled something in the back of his mind. It was important, he was fairly certain.

Taevas tucked his snout closer to the fragrant thing in his arms. Thinking was exhausting.

He was exhausted. He couldn’t remember not being tired.

He’d been ground down to dust, and now his body hurt too much to move, and all he wanted to do was sleep with the familiar, luscious scent of cypress and woman in his nose.

Woman? He flexed his wings, drawing them in just a little closer. I don’t bring women back to my roost.

It was the first clear thought he’d had in… a long time. It felt like a long time. It was impossible to say concretely, though, because everytime he tried to focus on exactly what had happened, where he was, or how long he’d been there, the thread snapped and fell away like all the rest.

But even when he decided to stop grasping broken threads, the scent kept drawing his thoughts in a more linear direction. He explored them tentatively and was immensely relieved to find something he could hold onto. Really hold onto.

Soft, he thought, rubbing the end of his bloody nose against the fragile thing in his talons. Soft like silk. Smells like home.

But he wasn’t home, and something about that was very, very wrong.

His homes didn’t smell of green things and decay.

There was perfect environmental conditioning that filtered out too much humidity and the extremes of weather.

There was no wood dust left by generations of termites or hard, unclean concrete floors.

His homes were ultra modern, sparkling clean, and high up in towers.

He had two of them, one in New York and one on Drummond Island, and even when he was away from them, he only slept in the best hotels in the world.

He’d spent too many years living in hovels to stomach anything less than the best. It was one of the rare luxuries he allowed himself as Isand of the Draakonriik, and one he took seriously. A dragon’s pride was his roost and his heart was his nest. So why was he sleeping in the dirt?

More importantly, why was she?

Taevas lifted his head. He got the vague sense that it was early in the morning. The strangest impression came to him then, half-formed and fleeting: that it’d been a long time since he saw the sun.

Light, cool and bright, glowed through the thin membrane of his wings. It gave everything within their span a soft lavender glow — including the woman clutched possessively in his talons.

He didn’t recognize her. Even in his foggy state — drugs, he thought with a slow blink — he would’ve recognized the proud nose, the thick, dark curls, and those sad eyes.

But at the same time, he knew her. He knew the scent of her flesh, her hair.

He knew it mingled with the scent of himself from the deepest, softest parts of his nest. Something ancient and needy slithered in the back of his mind, a great beast awakening from slumber.

Peering at her, trying to force his brain to work through whatever had poisoned it, he was startled to at last notice she was looking back. Dark eyes watched him from beneath heavy, angular brows.

He was so used to the scent of congealed blood that he hadn’t noticed it until he gave her a proper look.

She was covered in it. It was smeared in her curls, along the front of her thin nightgown, down the curve of one supple cheek.

There were bruises on her golden brown skin.

The front of her thin housecoat wasn’t just bloody.

It was badly torn, too, revealing a lush shape covered in flimsy cotton.

Rage bubbled up his throat in boiling blue flame. Someone had hurt her. When? Who?

He tried to ask her, but all that came out was a furious growl.

It was then that he realized he wasn’t in his bipedal form.

Of course I’m not, he thought uneasily. But when did I last shift?

He couldn’t remember that either. His memory was too slippery.

There were too many of those damn broken threads.

The clearest recollection he possessed was the flash of silver in the dark, and the panic that overtook him when the little woman ran from him — directly into the claws of the enemy, out of the shelter of his wings.

There was danger everywhere. There were enemies everywhere. She couldn’t run into the night without him. He wouldn’t allow it.

He only wanted to protect her, to hide her, so why did she look at him like that? Her face was ashen. Her eyes were so wide he could see the white all around the reddish-brown irises. Combined with the blood and the bruises, she looked like every victim he’d ever pulled out of bombed buildings.

Except she didn’t look at him like her savior. She looked at him like he was the bomb.

More alarmed than ever, Taevas clawed at clarity, desperate to explain what was going on.

Without thinking, he deposited her on the floor and stood, wings snapping back into place as he struggled for balance.

Blood rushed to his head and he swayed, his vision blotting.

Pain ricocheted out from his wings in a blast. Unshielded by them, warm, wet air swept in to disorient him further.

The woman scrambled to her feet. Her legs gave out, but it didn’t stop her from crawling away from him as quickly as possible. A loose braid, so thick it rivaled the width of his forearm — in his bipedal shape, at least — swung around to drag in the dirt.

Taevas tried to lunge for her, driven by jumbled instinct, but his limbs failed him. One foreleg gave out. If she hadn’t crawled away, he would’ve crushed her under his great bulk.

He fell on his side, too dizzy to hold himself up.

The force of it shook the building and all the detritus around him, sending boxes and rotten boards tumbling.

He let out what would have been a curse if he’d been able to speak properly, and watched with horror as the woman managed to get back on her feet just out of his reach.

She looked wild. Windswept, bloodied, and dirty, she dodged debris and ran for the closed door to what he dimly suspected was a very old barn. The woman was his only point of focus as his vision swam.

Don’t leave me, he silently begged. It’s not safe!

It was all he could do to let out a long, beseeching whistle. Even in his state, he knew she wouldn’t understand it like a dragon would. She was clearly not one of his kind, but it was all he had.

He didn’t honestly expect her to stop.

The woman stood with her hand on the latch, her shoulders hunched and her legs trembling. She stuffed one hand into the pocket of her robe and retrieved what appeared to be a heavy-duty flashlight. Her knuckles bleached white with the strength of her grip.

“Can you understand me?”

Taevas jolted at the sound of her voice. It was slightly roughened and not at all friendly, but it was still pretty. Lilting, even, like she was on the edge of a song.

Realizing that she was waiting for a response, he let out an urgent chuff. Come here. Come back.

It was his job to protect people. He made them feel safe. He needed that, because if he didn’t have that, he had nothing. Even when his mind refused to hold anything else, he understood that with perfect clarity.

He could barely lift his head up from the dirty floor, but he made the effort when she slowly turned around.

It looked like it was the last thing in the world she wanted to do, which he found a little insulting.

Memory was a slippery, elusive thing, but he knew people loved him.

People wanted to be near him all the time.

No one had looked at him with as much suspicion and fear as she did in… at least a century. Not since the war.

People gazed at him in awe, with reverence and pride. Occasionally he got an annoyed look, but admiring glances and blushing were much more common. People certainly didn’t raise flashlights up like they needed a baton to keep him away.

“Shift so we can talk.” Her voice shook, but the tilt of her chin was firm.

He didn’t know why he found that charming. Perhaps because he was so used to giving orders, or possibly because she stood at all of five feet and five inches — a generous estimate — and thought she could command the Lord of the Dragon Clans under threat of an improvised club.

Unfortunately, no matter how amusing he found her, it didn’t change the fact that he couldn’t shift.

Survival instinct wouldn’t allow it. He was far too weak.

Healing would happen faster if he stayed in one form, and even if it didn’t, he was far less vulnerable in his tough dragonhide.

It took a bold soul to attempt to hurt a transformed dragon, injured or not.