“You can’t be alive. They said you died.” He took a step forward and I backed up, keeping him at the same distance.
“I assure you I am alive, but I need your assistance to leave this place. I’m ill…” I wiped beads of sweat from my brow and refocused on him. “I need to go out the way you came. I cannot explain it.” I could smell him now—his scent was masculine with a hint of cardamom. My senses were heightened and I could smell the moist dirt beneath my feet, the tangy scent of the grass. Salt hung in the air from an ocean I couldn’t see. And then there was this man. Strange scents clung to his clothes—an unfamiliar musk of some type of animal. Sand? Perfume?
“You don’t remember me?”
I opened my mouth to tell him I remembered no one, but then thought better of it. “I need to leave, sir. Those stones are a doorway. I don’t know how or why, but they are, aren’t they?”
He nodded and tightened his fingers around the handle of a small dagger he was holding. I hadn’t noticed it before. It was short, no longer than the length of his hand. The blade was half that and triangular in shape. The hilt was gold, at least the part I could see. And his response to my question told me it was essential to using the gateway.
“If I let you out of the Veil, you have to promise to stay with me.”
I narrowed my eyes and the beast within me pushed against my mind. The pain was so intense, as if someone were holding my face against hot iron. I screamed and fell to my knees. Something was happening that I couldn’t stop. Ice flowed along the ground from me, spiraling outward in a circular pattern.
“Stop!” he shouted, running toward me with his hands raised.
An invisible force pushed on me and I screamed again. He was making the pain worse. Anger surged from deep within me and I stood, fighting through the searing pain and faced him. For a second, I saw hesitation in his pale gray eyes.
That was my moment. I lifted my hand and ice coated him from head to foot, except for the hand holding the small golden dagger. It amazed me that I could control this power with so little focus.
I should’ve been terrified, but instead it felt natural. The ice and the beast were part of me. I’d just forgotten them.
That was a problem for later. Now, I needed to escape and return to my life—a life I couldn’t remember, but a life I wanted desperately to find. And those handsome twins from my dreams—perhaps they could tell me what happened to the baby.
The ice around the stranger began to crack.
I wrenched the dagger from his hand and ran to the stone circle. The mist didn’t reappear. Nothing happened. I could see him breaking his way out of the icy coating one chunk at a time. It would take him only a few more minutes to free himself completely.
I frantically searched the stones for markings, running my fingertips around the smooth surface looking for anything that might tell me how to open the doorway.
There were none.
I ran from one to another and then to the large pillar in the center. A bloody handprint stared back at me from the far side. It looked fresh. In fact, the entire pillar was covered with worn and faded handprints. All in shades of red and brown. All made with blood.
My fingers tightened around the handle of the dagger. It was worth trying. Nothing about this world made sense. Why wouldn’t there be a magickal doorway? I dragged the blade across my left palm, wincing at the first burn of the cut. Blood pooled in my palm. I closed my hand into a fist to smear the blood and then slapped it onto the face of the pillar.
Energy shot through my body and the world moved around me. The pillar was gone. In its place was a waist-high altar of stacked stones held together by mortar. The towering pillars around the edge of the circle were also gone. Instead of large, freestanding rocks, there were smaller rocks stacked together to create a dozen pillars in a circle around the middle altar. And instead of rolling hills of green grass, I stood in the center of an unfamiliar forest.
I dropped to my knees and dug a hole at the base of the altar. After wiping my blood off the small dagger, I placed it into the hole and covered it quickly. The man would most certainly come looking for it and instinct told me it wasn’t safe to carry it around.
My palm still bled from the cut so I tore a strip from the bottom of my shift and wrapped it around my left hand. I hoped it would be enough to stanch the flow of blood.
I closed my eyes and turned, listening to a force I couldn’t explain tell me which direction to walk in a land I knew nothing about. Bloody hell of a mess this was.
Taking a deep breath, I opened my eyes and took several steps. The ground was rocky and cold here, not grassy and soft. My feet were already tender from running on the sharp rocks at the tower. I couldn’t last long out here without shoes, and the terrain was too jagged to ice the ground. I’d be on my bum more than my feet.
Choosing each step carefully, I climbed away from the hidden stone circle and picked my way through the dense, pine forest. The dead needles on the ground stuck into my feet like slivers of glass, but I had to keep moving. The sun was falling and it would be dark in a few hours.
There was no telling what might come out hunting under the cover of darkness. I could protect myself to a point, but I could not just freeze everything that came near me. Or maybe I could, but I didn’t want to. There had to be someone somewhere who could help me figure out who and what I was.
Someone who didn’t want to hurt me.
Chapter 3
XERXES
I stormed into the palace at Orin and glared down the center aisle at Kevan Incanti on his throne next to his brother, Leif. They were blond giants as men. Fire-breathing dragons. And liars.
Diana Karlson Blackmoor was alive. Her family and many others had been executed during the war in the Veil. I had helped the Incanti take power. I’d told them to kill every Blackmoor and they’d listened. Almost.
But their dicks had gotten in the way. The two brothers desired Diana, the Blackmoor princess—a rare prize in the Drakonae world after the civil war that tore apart the Drakonae race. She was one of the only ice-breathers left alive. Gorgeous, hair as white as the ice she created, and skin so smooth it was like porcelain. I would’ve fucked her, so I couldn’t blame them for their desires.
The Incanti brothers had tortured the princes, Miles and Eli Blackmoor, by chaining them to the two dragon-steel pillars in the center of this very room and flogging them until they couldn’t stand. And then the Incanti had drugged and raped the Blackmoor princes’ mate in front of them and the entire Drakonae royal court. What was left of it, anyway. It had happened over a thousand years ago, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.
When Diana hadn’t collapsed after their assault, the Incantis sentenced her to life in the tower dungeon, north of the city. No one, not even the strongest dragons, survived there more than a dozen years. So how had she?
I walked down the purple carpet to the dais where the three stone thrones still sat. Strong and beautifully carved, the chair backs were fashioned to look like raised Lamassu wings. These were my people’s thrones first, and they would be mine again once I acquired the Sisters of Lamidae –a race of semi-human women who could foretell the future.
Leif sat on the right and Kevan on the left. The center throne was empty. They must’ve killed their most recent plaything, again. There weren’t that many female Drakonae to begin with, but these conceited reptiles used up women as quickly as water evaporated in a desert.
I only visited the Veil every century or so. And I’d yet to see the same woman in that center throne more than twice. There were whisperings that the Incanti brothers were mad. I was quite inclined to agree with them.
Most who knew me called me cruel and heartless, but Leif and Kevan Incanti were just as bloodthirsty, vicious, and barbaric as myself. We all enjoyed pain and torture for the pleasure of it.
But, I wanted to rule a world of people, not bones and ash. When the Incanti took power, they slaughtered and burned half the population of
the Veil.
At least they hadn’t destroyed this beautiful city and the world around it. Only their subjects trembled in their presence, cowering against the walls like they’d forgotten they had wings, claws, and could breathe fire, too.
It didn’t matter. Their fear would make them that much easier to conquer when the time was right.
The dragon kings’ faces were grim, anger burning in their glowing, yellow-orange eyes. The warning bells still tolled from the tower east of the throne room. They knew they’d lost their prize. Unfortunately, they probably didn’t know yet that she had escaped the Veil entirely, taking one of the four pieces of the key with her. Anger seethed in my chest. It disgusted me to ask them for another of the Shamesh daggers to replace the one she’d taken. But the Incanti only held the Veil because of me.
They owed me. They would give me another.
“Amir Xerxes Hilah,” Leif’s voice carried through the throne room. “It has been a long time. Though it always is.”
“How is your vendetta?” Kevan asked, a grin turning up the corners of his mouth. “Has Rose bottled the last of your genies?”
I glared up at him and snarled. “Diana Blackmoor looked quite healthy on her way out of the Veil. I don’t suppose her escape was on your agenda for the day?”
The heat in the room escalated. Kevan stood from his throne and walked down several steps to me. When his face was even with mine his I stared back at eyes swirling yellow and orange, like liquid metal in a forge. Sweat beaded on my forehead from the heat of his breath, but I wasn’t concerned. The brat wouldn’t try anything against me. I stood between them and the Blackmoors’ vengeance.
“You opened the portal?” he said, heat from his breath blasting my face like waves from a furnace.
“Momentary lapse in judgment,” I answered with a smile. “She froze my ass in place and took the key from me.” Crossing my arms over my chest, I glared back at him until his eyes changed back to brown. “Odd thing, though. She didn’t recognize me and was confused by the portal. Have you two been messing with her mind?”
Kevan snarled and stormed back to his throne, ignoring my statement and sitting with a huff. A slight hint of concern flashed across his brother’s face, though.
Shit. They had wiped her memory.
I shook my head, irritated by their carelessness. She was a loose cannon on earth. A dragon out in the open without knowledge of history could be worse than the damn riots in the U.S. after the Lycans went crazy on that Instinct drug fifty years ago.
Leif and Kevan were psychopathic and vicious, but they weren’t stupid. At least I hadn’t thought so until now.
“Prepare the guard. She must be caught,” Leif’s voice thundered through the cavernous room. His voice echoed back to the dais, but still no one moved. His gaze focused on me and then fell to my hands. “Release them, Xerxes, and I will grant your request.”
I smiled and dropped my fingers, releasing their guards from my paralytic hold. “You haven’t heard it, yet.”
“Speak it now and go. We’re busy.”
“I want another dagger. She took mine. I will get it back, but until then—”
He waved his hand to silence me.
Bastard.
His elder by thousands of years, I should be sitting on one of the stone thrones, not him. I bit my tongue. Now was not the time. This war would be won later.
“Bring the box.” Kevan ordered. Two guards brought up a black trunk and lay it at the foot of the kings. He took a small, bronze key from around his neck, opened the box, and pulled out a gold dagger identical to the one Diana had taken from my hand. A cut from its blade and blood sacrifice was the only way to open the portal between this world and earth. The hilts of the four daggers connected to create the symbol of Shamesh, sacred to my kind. The complete set used to hang in the temple I guarded in Babylon millennia ago.
“You will return this dagger to us after recovering yours, Xerxes. Or the guard will be forced to come after you next.”
I stepped forward and took the shining weapon from his hand. “Don’t threaten me, Kevan. You aren’t in a position to do so.”
The dragon king’s lip curled, but neither he nor his brother disagreed. They might be the kings of the Veil for now, but that position was precarious, at best. Still, something about their smug faces made me wonder what information they were keeping from me.
Chapter 4
DIANA
I stepped out of the forest onto a stone road and followed it south. The sun was setting on my right, but there was at least another half hour of daylight. The town below in the valley spread for miles. I couldn’t believe how many buildings I could see. It was a wealthy city, indeed.
Every so often, metal carriages whipped past me on the road. If I’d not seen their wheels turning with my own eyes, I would have thought they flew. They moved so fast, although nothing pulled them.
As I reached the outskirts of the town, I saw many people. One old man with a long, white beard and long, oily, gray hair approached me. His clothes were dingy and smelled of feces. He held out a cup, but I shook my head and showed him my palms. I had nothing to give him. Shame filled my heart as the desire for his tattered coat crossed my mind. My shift was still damp and every time people stared, I cringed. The thin fabric clung to my every curve.
I passed by a small, brick building with a glowing sign in the window. It was a beautiful shade of pink. It was as good a place as any to start asking for help. Perhaps they could at least direct me to those in charge of the town.
My hand shook as I lifted it and knocked on the bright red door. A loud voice from inside yelled for me to come in. I did as told and yanked on the door until it swung wide open.
The booming sound of something that might pass as music hit my ears with the force of a storm. I winced and the beast within me shrank back at the sound of the tones and the vulgar lyrics. I couldn’t tell where the music was coming from. No instruments or musicians were visible.
A man with arms the size of my thighs turned around and grinned at me. His full set of white teeth surprised me, as did the green stripe in his hair, and the ink covering his arms and bare chest. He was still handsome and I could sense his attraction to me immediately. How, I didn’t know. It was as if I could smell it coming from his skin. The attraction consumed my mind, but fear of these strange surroundings kept me from being that forward with a complete stranger in a public place.
“Well now, what’s a li’l bit like you doing in my shop?” He held a buzzing metal pen in his hand and a woman lay half-naked on a table at his side.
“I am so very sorry. I did not mean to intrude. I will leave you with your woman.” The noise from the object in his hand was unlike anything I’d heard before. And the lights on the ceiling were brighter than any torch I’d ever seen, burning a bright white and illuminating the entire room without difficulty. But I couldn’t see the fire or what was burning.
“My woman?” He raised an eyebrow in confusion.
I gestured to the naked back of the woman on the table.
His eyes widened with realization. “Oh, no, li’l bit. She’s not mine. I’m just giving her a little ink.” He held up the pen. “Were you looking to get a tattoo today?”
I stared at the pen and then at the half-inked woman’s back. Realization struck and I shook my head. “No. I hoped you could tell me who runs this town.”
“The whole town? I guess that would be the mayor.”
That word was not familiar either. Where the bloody hell had I ended up? Or more importantly—when?
“This mayor, sir. Where would I find him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe his house? I don’t really keep track of politicians.”
“Oh.” I took a deep breath and sighed, not really understanding. This strange man wasn’t going to be helpful. And the way my body was heating up from the inside out, I needed to get out quickly. I turned back toward his doorway and stopped when another man came barreling throug
h the front door. He brushed past me as if I were not present.
“Jackson, you done yet? This’ll be the last time anyone else mistakes my bitch for being available.” He walked to the woman’s side and slapped her backside hard.
Hard enough that I winced in sympathy.
She barely moved and didn’t make a sound, but I saw tears well in her eyes.
The man looked at me next. His gray eyes were ice cold at first, but then I saw something in them I didn’t like. A primal hunger. He was dangerous.
“Thank you for your help, sir.” I spoke politely and reached out to open the door. Before I could slip out, a heavy hand latched onto my shoulder.
“Where’s a pretty thing like you going right before curfew? The soldiers will throw you in lockup if they catch you outside after sundown.”
“I have to go,” I said, twisting from his grasp. Ice started to spread across the floor from my bare feet and the air around me chilled. I sucked in a quick breath. “Please, just let me go.”
The male hissed and pulled back his hand. His thick fingers were blue with cold. Instead of backing away, he struck out and I gasped as the force of his slap knocked me to the ground. Pain radiated out from my cheekbone.
He leaned toward me and I held up my hands. “No!” A moment later a wall of ice grew from the floor to the ceiling, separating me from the three strangers.
Scrambling to my feet, I yanked open the door and ran out. A loud horn on my left made my stomach leap into my throat. One of those horseless carriages was careening toward me. There wasn’t any time to move.
I held up my hands and closed my eyes just as it was about to hit. Instead, I heard a loud crunch. I opened my eyes. Another ice wall had formed between me and the careening hunk of metal on wheels. I ran my fingertips up and down the slick wall, staring at the confused and irate face of the woman in the horseless carriage on the other side. The front of her vehicle was smashed beyond recognition and the clear glass over the front had cracked.
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