Torrence grimaced, and Rhelia’s eyes flared in the low light of the stone room.
“If you usssse thissss for any purposssse but the one we’ve requessssted, I will end you sssso painfully you will wish you had never exissssted.”
Torrence nodded, but said nothing, his eyes drifting shut in apparent effort and concentration.
The rest of us just stood there awkwardly for a few minutes, while he did his secret blood magic thing.
Is this going to take a while? I asked Rhelia eventually.
Did you have ssssomewhere better to be, Living Cat?
Nope. Just have to pee.
Rhelia’s eyes flashed again, but this time I thought it was with contained amusement. Good, that’s what I’d been hoping for.
I have never sssseen a blood ritual performed before. It issss a forbidden art in both the dragon realm and the human one.
Is that just because it’s super creepy, or…?
It issss conssssidered a violation. From my undersssstanding it requiressss the casssster to project their own dark matter into the blood of another. Thissss issss almosssst alwayssss againsssst the other’ssss will.
And how does that help us?
It can be ussssed to track people. I share ssssome of my blood with Ssssiara, and thussss my blood, in the right handssss, can be ussssed to find her. It issss how the Dragon Hunterssss tracked ussss and alsssso how they bound ussss. It issss the only way they were ever able to defeat ussss. Or ssssso the sssstoriessss ssssay.
Let me guess, the dragons did whatever they could to make sure those stories didn’t get around.
We had little to do that the Dragon Hunterssss themsssselvessss did not do for ussss. They had cornered the market, if you will.
The thought of Torrence and his allies using the dragons’ own blood against them made my stomach turn. Especially when I considered that if I’d been born a few hundred years earlier I certainly would have made the list of acceptable targets. The thought hit me a little bit harder than it should have. I still hadn’t fully wrapped my brain around the idea of being a dragon.
Finally, Torrence’s eyes opened, and his hand glowed a dull red.
“I believe this will work. As I said, it would be much stronger if Nethia had cast it—she was our expert blood mage—but this will suffice to let me lead you, as long as we are quick. I am sorry that I could not attach it to some sort of talisman, and thus free you of the burden of my company.”
Rhelia rolled her eyes, and the rest of us just stared at each other in bewilderment.
“I’m hungry,” Seamus said from the floor. “Is anyone else hungry?”
~~~
We arrived in the Dragon Realm a few moments later.
In a display that seemed to fit no one’s mood, the moon was full and shining in a cloudless, star-filled sky, as we stepped out into the same valley where we’d arrived the very first time Rhelia had brought us here. I took a deep breath, filled with the scent of earth and wildflowers, and then almost choked on my own saliva when I saw Torrence basically prance through the aforementioned wildflowers and then fling himself down on the ground to stare at the sky.
Ok. Maybe the clear sky and moonlight fit someone’s mood.
Rhelia was looking at the bull-man as if he had two bovine heads instead of one, and I almost lost my shit at her expression.
“I think he likes flowers,” I offered.
Rhelia turned her baffled gaze to me, then rubbed her eyes.
“Can you pleasssse take Nethia to your brother to deal with, and collect whoever issss available to help ussss?” she asked. “We do not have time for all of ussss to walk there, and you should ssssave your shiftssss with multiple people for when it countssss.”
“Sure,” I said, grabbing the still-unconscious Nethia by the arm, and picturing Rhelia’s home in the small main drag that constituted the weredragon portion of the Dragon Realm. “Does Trev know a good dungeon to throw her in?”
Rhelia’s smile was cold, and didn’t reach her eyes.
“More or lessss.”
I decided I didn’t really want to know, so I left Rhelia, Seamus, and Sol to keep Torrence in line. Or in flowers. Whatevs.
We’d debated rendering Torrence unconscious for the duration of our visit to the Dragon Realm, and Torrence hadn’t objected, but he’d admitted that he couldn’t be sure that the spell would hold up if we had to knock him out and revive him. He seemed to sympathize completely with Rhelia’s reluctance to take a known Dragon Hunter into the Dragon Realm—one that she wasn’t planning to throw into prison immediately, that is, she’d been more than happy to bring Nethia along—but we couldn’t figure out any way to avoid bringing Torrence along, awake, without devoting way too much time and energy to what was likely to just be a quick respite on our way to a very difficult rescue mission. We had to come to the Dragon Realm to drop off Nethia, debrief Trev, and see if we could recruit a few more people for the next part of our plan. Not knowing how much MOME knew about our movements, and not being sure when they were planning their own attack against the non-magical world, we couldn’t afford to waste time keeping Torrence away from the Dragon Realm right now. I needed to minimize my shifting so I would have enough energy for our rescue operation, and any other iteration of the plan split the group in too many ways to make sense. In other words, we were stuck with him. But that didn’t mean that Rhelia wanted to drag him into the middle of the residential portion of the Dragon Realm. So, we’d decided the most efficient thing for conserving my energy and keeping Torrence as much in the dark as possible was for me to do in-world shifts only, to avoid shifting between realms, and to take as few people with me as possible for each shift. Hence why I was leaving everyone in this field of wildflowers out of sight of town, while I took Nethia off to be delivered to justice.
Nethia, or her barely living body, and I arrived directly in front of the door to Rhelia’s office, skipping past trivialities like front doors and the rest of the house, and I knocked before pushing it open to find Trevor staring intently at one of his two enormous monitors (not to be confused with Rhelia’s even larger set of monitors, which took up the other half leg of the giant L desk covering half the walls), scanning through lines of code.
“Vic!” he said, sounding surprised to see me, even though I was pretty sure Rhelia had been communicating with him telepathically as soon as we’d hit Dragon Realm soil. I hadn’t tried to get in touch because I’d been too wary of a cold reception.
“Hey,” I said, wrapping him in a hug when he stood up to greet me. “I’m playing Hermes today. You’ve won a mostly dead Dragon Hunter, and a request for all the backup you can spare for a covert rescue operation.”
Trev hugged me back with enough enthusiasm to erase some of the distance I’d felt between us in the past 48 hours, and then he looked at Nethia behind me (I’d left her in the doorway) and sighed.
“I’ll have the Dragon Elders come collect her. Best if we don’t let General Aira know she’s here just yet,” he said.
I didn’t particularly want to know what they were going to do with her, or why General Aira should be kept in the dark, so I didn’t ask. I just reminded myself that she’d tried to kill Torrence, almost killed Seamus instead, and had likely been trying to take out Torrence in order to kill ALL of us, so… whatever they were going to do with her was fine with me.
“And my backup?” I asked.
“We don’t have much we can spare from the twelve reconnaissance ops that General Aira is running. She’s not willing to sit around and wait while we find Siara and Emil. Not to mention, she’s unwilling to send any more big booms into MOME territory.”
I raised an eyebrow for a moment, then my brain caught up.
“Right. No dragons or weredragons for this mission.”
Trev nodded.
“In fact, Rhelia is probably going to be pissed at me, but…”
Trev’s voice faded, and I wondered if he didn’t want me to know that he was about
to tell Rhelia she couldn’t go, even though that had been obvious as soon as he’d mentioned the no weredragon thing. I assumed the only reason I was allowed to go was that I was just a baby weredragon, and a baby everything else, and… well, we needed my emergency escape powers. I was just about to ask Trev if the cat had his tongue, when that train of thought was derailed entirely by the sound of feathers brushing wood.
“Hullo, Luv,” said a familiar voice behind me.
I turned to see a dark figure with silver wings blocking out most of the door frame, just as Trev said, “I suppose I can spare Azrael, though.”
“WHAT IS SHE doing here?” Torrence asked, in a voice somewhere between turned on and put out. He was no longer lying in the meadow flowers gazing at the night sky. Instead he was standing in the meadow flowers, swaying gently, as though he were a flower himself and the wind had taken him. Somehow, he’d found time to make a crown of daisies and drape it be-tween his horns in the few minutes I’d been gone.
I tried staring into the moon to keep myself from laughing unnecessarily. I really didn’t want to discourage anyone embracing nature, and it was honestly awesome that a giant bull-person like Torrence was super into flowers, but some visuals are just too striking to do anything but conjure mirth.
“Azrael was invited, because Azrael is part of our strike team,” I replied, doing my best to gesture towards the succubus without looking directly at them again. Though it might have been an excellent way to avoid laughing at Torrence, I wasn’t in the mood to be distracted by my own hormones, and Azrael was nothing if not distracting, when they weren’t a demon squirrel.
Seamus, Sol, Torrence, and even Rhelia all took a moment to stare at Az, which made me work all the harder not to. Trevor stepped out from behind the succubus and made his way to Rhelia to wrap his arms around her, a gesture she returned in full as soon as she pulled her eyes away from Az. It didn’t seem possessive at all; Trev had spent the whole day worried about her, and it showed.
“Please try to focus, people,” I said, wanting to shove Azrael behind me or something. Not that it would have helped. They were a foot taller than I was. Maybe if I’d had a blanket or something, I could have done something effective, but as it was we were just going to have to push on through.
“Not even going to look at me, Vic?” Azrael’s voice asked from behind my neck, apparently having closed the distance between us while I wasn’t looking.
“You give me a headache,” I replied, looking resolutely forward.
“I can fix that,” Azrael said, running their breath along my shoulder in a way that left little confusion about how they would fix it.
“Yeah, maybe, but we don’t have time for that, and I don’t trust you not to steal my soul.”
“Ugh, so tetchy.”
“What do you mean she gives you a headache?” Torrence asked, seeming genuinely curious.
I normally would have insisted it was none of his damned business, but since I wanted to focus on anything other than the breath running over my shoulder, I threw a light elbow behind me and stepped forward without looking back, taking no small amount of pleasure in Az’s muttered “ow, not nice.”
“Azrael gives me a headache because I can see both of their forms at the same time, unless we’re surrounded by people who all find the same form attractive.”
“Interesting,” said Torrence, looking me up and down in a way that made me wonder what assumptions he’d made about me, and how he was rearranging them.
I shook my head, reminding myself that I didn’t really care what the giant tauren thought of my sexual orientation, and hoping to get us all back on target. Azrael had a way of making everyone in the immediate area unnaturally horny and that was actually the larger portion of why I wasn’t looking at them.
It was true that it gave me a bit of a headache to see a six foot tall, gorgeous man with giant silver wings superimposed on top of a six foot tall gorgeous woman with giant silver wings, both of whom were largely naked and who moved at exactly the same time and said the same things. But more than that, I found both of them incredibly hot, and it was distracting, obnoxious, and felt really awkward because part of my brain still recognized Azrael as a red-skinned, largely furless, demon-squirrel thing.
“So, about this mission,” I tried to get everyone’s attention, which had once more wandered back to Azrael. Trev was staring too now, his pupils wider than normal and his hand clenching Rhelia’s even tighter than before.
“Damn it, Az, can’t you put on more clothes or something!?”
“She’s wearing a suit,” Seamus said, still sound-ing awed.
“Really?” I almost turned around to check, but stopped myself just in time.
“Didn’t want to be a distraction,” Az said.
“Right. Thanks, I guess. So, then why…”
“Well, I’m still me, Luv. Can’t turn that off.”
I chuckled. “Not on this planet.”
I felt fingers pinch my side, hard, and I shot another elbow behind me, this time without hold-ing back at all, but the elbow connected with nothing but air and then, suddenly, Azrael was standing directly in front of me. Both of them.
The pinstripe suit that both forms were wearing just made the headache worse. The two outlines of the feminine and masculine atop each other were extra dizzying with the added barcode of the stripes.
“Can you just choose one?” I asked.
“Can you?” they replied.
“Touché.”
I blinked and held the sides of my head.
“Seriously, does no one else have to put up with this?” I muttered.
Rhelia chuckled. “Once you said that you could see both, I started seeing the female form, but for me it flips all the way from one to the other.”
I decided to close my eyes.
Azrael sighed dramatically.
“Alright, I will spare you. Vic, give Seamus a kiss.”
I tried to glare at them with my eyes closed.
“I promise it’ll help,” Azrael said.
I opened my eyes and turned towards Seamus, who looked perfectly happy to oblige, and even did me the favor of nodding visibly, so I didn’t have to ask.
Not wanting to drag this out any longer, I stepped over to Seamus, wrapped my arms around his waist and planted a kiss on his mouth. It was quick, and fairly chaste, since we were surrounded by people and about to head out on a potentially lethal rescue mission, but it was enough to wake up the mating bond within me and get my blood going. I stepped back quickly, before the mating bond could get too excited about anything, and looked around the field.
My eyes were instantly drawn to Azrael, who was now very decidedly a man wearing a pinstriped suit with no wings, silver or otherwise, in sight.
“Weird. You did mention once that my attraction varying could change how I saw you, but I didn’t really believe you.”
Azrael shrugged.
“I meant what I said. If you ever need to stop seeing double, try pushing your attraction more to one side or the other.”
“But what if no one else is around?” I asked, before I could stop and think.
“Well, if no one is around, I’d prefer you were focused on me, Luv,” Azrael said, with a grin that did strange things to my insides.
“If you weren’t so damned good at killing vampires, you would be off the team right now.”
“Oh, is that why the succubus is here?” Torrence said. “I had wondered.”
“Doesn’t everyone know that succubi are renowned vampire hunters?” I asked, looking from Sol to Rhelia, to Seamus, to Trev, to Torrence.
Judging by the blank stares I was getting, I was gonna have to go with “no.”
“Huh, I just assumed that would be common knowledge. I mean, since when do I know anything about this world that you guys don’t?” I shook my head. “Ok. So, we have our vampire take-out ‘squad,’ we have our intel, we have our hackers, we have our muscle and we have…”
“Our
bait?” Seamus suggested, with a small frown.
“I was going to say decoy, but yeah. We have our bait.”
In truth, the lines of our team weren’t nearly that clear cut. Except for Seamus—he really was our bait.
“Now, can we please talk about the freaking plan? We’re down to just over 36 hours before Rebecca Dryer makes good on her threat.”
Everyone nodded and I took a deep breath, about to go over the details that Rhelia, Sol, Seamus, and I had sketched out as we’d made our way out of Nethia’s underground spellcasting lair.
“Perhaps I can be of some use?” asked a familiar voice that had me spinning on my heel before I could even begin to speak. Of course she arrived from an angle that left her backlit by the sun—it wouldn’t be dramatic enough otherwise—but eventually I made out a curvy silhouette, which was making its way closer and closer to our little posse.
“Hey Gwen,” I said, sighing as the redheaded goddess of fortune came into full view. “I have a feeling you could be useful, yeah.”
“BECAUSE WE CAN’T risk them using you as a bomb,” Trev said for what seemed like perhaps the 20th time.
I stared at the blue sky, took a deep breath of sun-warmed flowers, and wished that I’d walked off with the rest of the group when this argument had started. For some damned reason I’d wanted to show solidarity with my so-recently-estranged brother. Now I was wishing I’d just let him dig his own grave.
“They were more than happy to use you as one, Trevor! They could use any of us!” Rhelia’s sibilant accent had dropped away for this argument, and I couldn’t tell if that was because she was angry, or just impatient and the extra sibilance took too long. Maybe a bit of both.
“But dragons make the biggest bang,” Trev replied. “Rhelia, we’ve been over this. MOME must have wanted to start small, or maybe Dryer was just in a hurry to get rid of me because of how much I know about MOME’s inner workings, but you are made of much more dark matter than I am. You know that.”
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 43