by Ann Gimpel
Nikolai shook his head. “I was ashamed. I’d failed, and—”
“Enough of that,” Konstantin boomed. “We move forward from today.” He tossed his hair back over his shoulders. “I will go to the sixth world.”
“Damn! I’ll be a dragon’s uncle,” Nikolai muttered. “Once we understood our comrades had fallen under sea-serpent sorcery, the sixth world should have been our first stop.”
Solemn nods ran through the assembled shifters. “If the serpents could locate us here, they had the means to find our fellows,” a russet-haired female growled. Fire blatted from her open jaws.
I was certain she was one we’d rescued. She appeared to be making a solid recovery.
“I’ll go with you,” Erin offered.
Konstantin angled his head to one side. “All right. But this is not the place to experiment with your fledgling magic. After what we discovered here, I have little faith in what we’ll find there.”
The smile on Erin’s face faded. “I don’t have to come.”
She didn’t have to say anything else for me to know what she was thinking. In the world we knew, both of us were considered more than competent. We sat at the top of the ladder in our respective disciplines. It was quite a tumble to go from top dog to greenest of the green neophyte.
The air around Konstantin developed a liquid aspect, and I recognized teleport magic. “If you’re coming,” he told Erin, “move close to me.”
I watched her, not worried she’d think me rude for staring. Would she stand on ceremony? Let her hurt feelings trip her up? Or would she embrace this new life of ours, even if it meant following orders from the man who might well become her mate?
Women had deferred to men—at least on the surface—for almost as long as humankind existed. Not that it was right, but it was accepted until the last couple of generations when females demanded—and grudgingly received—equal treatment. At least on paper. Most of them still didn’t earn as much as men in equivalent jobs.
Smoke puffed from my jaws, reminding me how far removed I was from a place where equal wages for equal work even mattered.
After a hesitation, while Kon’s spell gathered momentum, Erin hurried to his side. The next moment, the place they’d stood was empty.
“Do you think the other dragons will aid us?” Katya asked.
“I have no idea,” Nikolai replied. “We were of two minds about remaining with the other shifters. The dinosaurs and their ilk. We weren’t getting along all that well. The primary world in this system is big, but not large enough to constantly be at odds with others living there.”
“It took quite a while before we agreed leaving was the only logical solution,” another dragon spoke up.
“Are there no humans in this borderworld system?” I asked.
“Yes, but they’re on the fifth and eighth worlds,” the blonde shifter replied.
“Could you please tell me your names?” I looked around the group. “Katya knows all of you, but I do not.”
“You know who I am,” Nikolai said. “Moving to my left you have…” he rattled off fourteen names. I learned the blonde was Teena and the silver-haired woman, Melara. The burly dark-haired man was Boris…
Other than Nikolai, everyone else was naked. I was getting used to it. Europe is full of nude beaches, but I never had the time or inclination to frequent them. If I had, the transition might have been easier.
Nicolai paced in a rough circle, hands clasped behind him. The robe—open down the front—fluttered in a breeze that had blown up. Channels were opening in the ice, and the sound of running water was one familiar element in an otherwise alien landscape. It reminded me of lying in the chromium dig site for some reason, although listening to water run down the wall there had been torture since I was thirsty and unable to do anything about it.
“I should follow our prince to the sixth world,” Nikolai said.
“Give him more time than this to return,” Melara countered.
“Yes, if he’s not back in one turn of the glass, then several of us can offer our assistance,” Boris growled. The barrel-chested dragon shifter turned to one of the resurrected dragons. “How is it you did not reply to our many efforts to reach you? Did you not hear us? Or were you constrained in some way and unable to respond?”
The five dragon shifters who’d been buried in ice moved until they stood close to one another. “A better question to ask”—the russet-haired female—Daria—raised a perfect brow—“would be what happened to Loran?”
“All right.” Nikolai planted himself in front of the group of five. “Did you know he’d been tainted beyond redemption?”
“We weren’t sure,” Piotr, a gangly, silver-haired shifter replied in a thoughtful tone. “The day we were snared, Loran located the serpents first. By the time the rest of us arrived, he was settled on an ice floe chatting it up with them as if they were old acquaintances.”
I edged nearer the dragon, not wanting to miss any of his story. I had a lot of questions, like why Loran had been so trusting, given the serpents’ history, but I was the new kid on the block. Better to listen than to pepper the dragons with interminable questions.
Katya sidled next to me and tapped my arm. When I looked at her, she said, “This has the feel of a setup to me.”
It took me a moment to connect the dots. “Are you suggesting Loran had been in contact with the serpents before they showed up here?”
Every head swiveled to face me.
Katya grimaced. “No more telepathy for you until you learn to direct it to a particular person.”
I mumbled, “Sorry,” except I wasn’t. Not really.
I pressed my shoulders back. I had no excuses, nor did I offer any. “I was human until just a couple of days ago,” I reminded the group. “It will take me a long while to learn enough about how magic works to avoid making rookie mistakes. My ineptitude is not the point here, though. If Loran—who presumably understood what traitors the serpents were—was treating them like friends, my guess is he had already been recruited.”
“But what inducement could they have offered?” Piotr sounded confused. “Loran ended up just as trapped as we were.”
“Yes, but what if they made promises and welched on them?” Katya asked. “It’s very like something a serpent would do.”
Fire shot from many mouths, mine included.
“We have a potential explanation for Loran’s perfidy,” Nikolai said sadly. “I cannot believe his dragon would have agreed with such a plan, yet Y Ddraigh Goch didn’t offer clemency to his beast, either.”
“How could he have?” Katya demanded. “Dragon and human become more and more alike as years pass. Had the dragon been worth his scales, he’d have severed the bond, or petitioned the god to. Were the dragons as mired in the sleeping spell as their bondmates?”
“Yes,” Daria answered. “I clung to consciousness, but I’d have given anything to be asleep—or dead. To be aware I was helpless, that I had no power to do anything except lie buried in ice while parasites sucked the marrow from my bones was the worst torture imaginable.”
She inhaled raggedly and blew out smoke and ash before going on. “Sometimes my dragon would almost break through. Almost. Sometimes I would, but I could never claw my way through the last of the barrier. It was as if those horrible things feeding from me knew their meal ticket was potentially on her way out. They upped the ante, fed more darkness into the binding spell. I’d sink, screaming my defeat—except no sound came out—and fall forever.”
“We never hit bottom,” Piotr broke in. “I urged my dragon to leave, to return to the dragons’ world for help, but he was just as trapped as I was.”
“Even if Y Ddraigh Goch had killed us all,” Daria growled, “it would have been an improvement over where we wandered.”
“Your dragons?” Nikolai asked. “They all seemed well, but—”
One by one the five shifters weighed in. Mercifully, the dragons hadn’t been harmed. The net result of their lengthy impr
isonment was fury.
“I am missing an elemental bit in the sequence of events,” I said. “The five of you came across Loran chatting it up with the serpents. How did you end up snared?”
“I asked myself the same question many times,” Melara focused her golden eyes dead on me. “Loran encouraged us to land. The moment my hind feet connected with the ice, I was doomed. Consciousness deserted me. When I woke—if you can characterize any part of my imprisonment as being totally awake—I was sheathed in ice. I couldn’t move. At first, I thought it was a mistake. An accident. Until I cast every spell at my disposal, most of which I had a hell of a hard time remembering, and none of them made any difference at all.”
“Cursed ice.” Daria shook a fist skyward.
“It is, indeed, unnatural ice that has been cursed,” Boris agreed.
I realized I’d slacked off on drawing heat upward from this world’s core to warm myself, yet the temperature wasn’t intolerable. Not like it had been when we first arrived.
I looked from one dragon to the next, hoping for an answer. “This world is warmer than it was. Is it because the serpents’ magic was defused?”
“I’m not sure it’s the serpents,” Nikolai said, adding, “Feel free to disagree with me, any of you. My sense is that this world is outraged at being shanghaied in the pursuit of wicked magic. When it formed ice sheets and became cold, it was trying to create an environment so uninhabitable, the serpents would give up and leave.”
“They did the same thing when they showed up in Antarctic waters,” I murmured.
“Where is that?” Piotr glanced my way.
“The extreme southern end of Earth,” Katya replied. “At the time, I thought the serpents were creating the ice, but Nikolai might be onto something. Power is vested in the land. It’s what makes my twin a prince among us.”
“Has he established the same connection with Earth that he had with Mu?” Nikolai asked.
“I don’t believe so,” Katya replied. “Or if he has, he’s kept it to himself. When most of the dragons in our flight left in search of more habitable lands, he took their departure personally. He’s only just now starting to recover.”
“Understandable.” Nikolai nodded. “Knowing your twin, he selected that particular spot because he believed it would be good for dragonkind. To have many dragons decide otherwise must have angered him.”
“No. It made him doubt the wisdom of his choice,” Katya said. “And whether he still deserved a leadership role among our people.”
I leaned closer, wanting to understand. I’d wondered why she didn’t appear to share his status. If dragon royalty was blood linked, she should hold an equal rank to her twin’s.
As if Katya intuited my confusion, she went on, “Dragon shifters were linked to Mu’s magic. Kon was in sync with that world. It was when we realized he was our prince. It was also how he understood we had to leave because Mu was dying. The land confided in him, trusted him. Konstantin opened channels on Mu. Using them, we could augment our magic by joining with the land. On a much more modest scale, it’s why we can draw warmth upward from whatever world we’re on, and why we’re impervious to the elements.”
“Worlds welcome our presence”—Piotr offered a small, sad smile—“because they understand we will treat them with respect. It was a great boon when Konstantin resurrected our age-old tradition of joining with the land.”
“Who was prince before him?” I asked.
“Inmar,” Katya answered. “But many centuries came and went between when he chose to fly with Y Ddraigh Goch and when Konstantin learned the land link hadn’t faded with Inmar’s leave-taking.”
“I don’t understand. You—er, we’re—immortal. Why would this Inmar fellow abandon you?”
Nikolai trained his golden gaze on me. For a bare moment, I looked into his soul and saw world-weariness that was an eye-opener.
“Abandon is not the right word,” he corrected me. “Inmar left because he could no longer bear the weight of his life. Our god offers…options. The dragon shifter may fly forever in the golden one’s realm. Or the bond may be severed. In that case, the dragon returns to the beasts’ special world, and the human eventually withers and dies.”
I had a feeling both options were permanent. As in dragon shifters didn’t get do overs if their brand-new existence wasn’t everything they’d hoped for.
“Do not leave before I return,” Katya told Nikolai. Next, she angled a pointed glance my way, said “Walk with me,” and set off across the cracking ice.
I followed her without question. But then, I’d have followed her damn near anywhere. I don’t care if it makes me appear weak. Many Dutch men pride themselves on running their households with an iron hand. I was never one of them, perhaps because I never had a home that was more than a spot to eat and sleep while I was in Leiden.
Katya stopped about fifty meters from the rest of the dragon shifters on a newly melted-out patch of muddy earth. She turned to face me and folded her arms beneath her breasts. “How are you doing with all this?”
It was a fair question, so I didn’t gloss over it with a pro forma answer like, I’m fine. “I am absorbing everything I can, but I look forward to some uninterrupted time with the books and scrolls.”
“What if you don’t get that uninterrupted time?”
I shrugged. “I will keep going, gathering information and adding it to what I have learned so far. It is a slow process, but no matter how I approach things, it will take a long while. At least now I understand why you are not second in line for the crown.”
“Think about it,” she challenged me. “If blood were the deciding factor, how could we choose our leaders? All dragons are related in some fashion if you go back far enough. Besides, we live forever. It would never work to have some crown prince lurking on the sidelines plotting ways to make the current prince so miserable he opted to leave the same way Inmar did.”
I did think about it. The living forever part was the stumbling block that would take the most getting used to, but it was one of the cornerstones of what it meant to be a dragon shifter.
“Kon and I had lived over a millennium in Earth years when I began to suspect there was something special about him,” she went on. “I’m who encouraged him to talk with the land. He thought it was ridiculous. So much tripe.”
“What would have happened if you said nothing?” I asked.
“His destiny would have found him sooner or later.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “Destinies are like that.”
A corner of my mouth twisted upward but stopped well short of a smile. “You can run, but you cannot hide,” I murmured.
“Something like that.” She nodded. “Anyway, it’s why he’s a prince, and I’m just a dragon shifter. I wouldn’t want the mantle of responsibility. It’s a heavy weight, and about to grow far more onerous.”
Katya gripped my forearms. “We are in full on preparation for a major war. One we have no certainty of winning. The universe is a big place. If we fail and Earth falls to the serpents, there are many other worlds.”
A string of protests bubbled up, but they were swept away in a haze of fire and smoke, courtesy of my dragon.
“Earth is far more important to you and Erin than it is to the rest of us. Our fight is against the serpents. Earth is secondary. We would push forward with this battle no matter where it was.” She took a measured breath. “It may seem we stumbled onto the sea-serpents’ hatching grounds by sheer, blind happenstance, but it might not be as random as all that.”
“Not random, as in someone sent us here?”
“Nothing that organized, no.”
“Are you worried we will find other dragon shifters similarly encumbered?” I considered the ramifications and came up lacking. I had no idea how many worlds existed. Should we be out there searching every single one?
It was impossible. By the time we’d covered even a small portion of them, the serpents would have snatched up Earth and made it theirs
.
She tightened her hold on me. Where she touched me, heat traveled up my arms. An urgent, alluring tingling that shot straight to my groin. This time when I wished for clothes, it wasn’t for warmth but to conceal my unruly appendage.
“I share your concerns about the serpents and how wide their reach extends,” Katya said, her tone solemn. “And yes, I’ve been tracking your thoughts. After today, Y Ddraigh Goch and his minions will travel far and wide, searching for serpent contamination and setting things to rights.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Because I trust our god. For him to sever a bond as he did between Auta and her dragon told me how horrified he was by what occurred here. He will not leave even a single spot where dragon shifters reside to chance.”
“Did he know what Auta would choose?”
Katya trained her gaze on me and nodded. “It’s the only conceivable reason he would have freed her dragon. It was bad enough he condemned Loran’s to death.”
Katya believed her assessment, so I tried to lay my concerns aside—at least about that problem. “Do you suppose the dragon god knew Loran was a mole?”
Her forehead crinkled. “Moles are creatures with poor eyesight who live beneath the ground.”
“They are also spies, turncoats, and double-agents.” I wrapped my arms around her and breathed in her scent. Her hair tickled my nose, and she molded her body to mine. I could have held her in my arms forever, but I let go and stepped back a pace. My cock jutted from my body. Nothing I could do about it. Desire for her swept through me in a sweet, slow tide of longing.
I needed information more than I needed sex, though. At least, I told myself that was the case. “Describe this link to the land? What exactly is it, and how does it work?”
Katya raked her appraising gaze from my head to my feet and back again. “If he chooses, Konstantin can speak with the land, urge it to take certain measures. Worlds are living entities that wish to survive just as any of the rest of us do. They have innate knowledge that recognizes both good and evil, but they move slowly. One of the reasons we took such good care of the blind fish was to curry favor from Earth. When our crops failed—due to incompatible soil and no direct sunlight—Konstantin could have appealed to Earth.”