He sliced the blade across his forearm, opening a thick cut. Fire danced across his skin, and the edges of the wound blackened. He let out a sharp hiss and staggered back.
I jumped to my feet and ran to him. “What are you doing?”
“Testing it out, since you won’t do it yourself.”
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone!”
He gave me a sharp look as he pressed a hand over his wound. “I hope that mercy won’t hold you back when the time comes.”
I rolled my eyes. “Let me see your wound. Maybe I can do something for it.”
“I doubt it.”
I clasped my hands over the wound, feeling how hot his skin was, while blood slipped through my fingers. “I was able to heal the Fire Priestess.”
“Were you?” His eyebrow arched. “Guess it can’t hurt to try.”
I focused on his wound, trying to stop the bleeding, reaching for the life magic always lingering inside me. It was much harder to send it into my father than it was to heal my mates. He and I didn’t have the bond entwining our lives together, but there was something else instead. A recognition that a part of us was the same.
Slowly the bleeding stopped, and the cut sealed itself up. The burn took the longest to heal, as if the fire magic that caused it was fighting me still. But in the end, I won the battle, and his skin was smooth again.
Doran held up his arm and inspected it. “Impressive. I’m not sure even Nysa could heal someone who wasn’t one of her mates.”
“It only worked because you’re my father. The magic sensed that we were connected.” I took the sword from him and sheathed it. “Well, did it meet your expectations?”
“It did. I wanted to make sure my water magic wouldn’t block it, but that wasn’t a problem. Instead it burned me with fire, while air and earth helped make it stronger. Quite painful and potent. It will be able to take down any of the Dragons, including Nysa once she’s weakened.”
I sank back onto my tree stump, suddenly exhausted from the healing. “Why have you been so distant for the last few days? Ever since we met with the elementals you’ve been acting oddly.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I got upset when Reven arrived and I realized none of you trust me still. I don’t care about what the others think, but I thought you and I had become close.” He ran a hand through his long, sandy hair. “Or as close as we could be, considering the circumstances.”
“I do trust you, but I also knew that Reven was right and we had a better chance of getting the elementals to help us without you there.” I sighed. “Not that it made much difference in the end.”
His hand rested on my shoulder. “You did the best you could. The elementals were never going to help us.”
“I realize that now. I just don’t know how to defeat the Dragons without them.”
“Hmm.” He glanced up at the sky. “It won’t be easy. Especially since the Dragons know we’re here now and have probably guessed our plans.”
I sat up straight, my muscles tensing. “They do?”
“I’ve felt both Sark and Heldor’s presence nearby.”
“Will they attack Clayridge?”
“No, they’d have to be stupid to do that. We outnumber them, and you can control all the elements now. They’re just watching and waiting to see what we do next.”
I chewed on my lower lip, worrying about the innocent lives in this village. Doran couldn’t know for sure that the Dragons wouldn’t attack. “Maybe we should leave soon.”
“Wherever we go, we’ll put people at risk. That’s why we have to face them soon. Only problem is, they know we’re coming. They’ll be preparing too.”
My fists clenched. “So be it. As you said, this has to end soon. One way or another.”
Doran’s eyes caught mine, mirroring my own. “Just remember, you’re my daughter. Whatever happens, I’m on your side. Always.”
I swallowed the unexpected emotions rising inside me. “I know, father.”
28
Auric
“Today we’re going to work on combining the elements,” Doran said. It was time for yet another training session, and we all stood beside the river and faced him, with the afternoon sun bright in the sky. “I already know you can do lightning, thanks to Kira hitting me with a bolt when I was rescuing her.”
Kira shrugged. “I thought you were taking me to my death.”
Doran snorted. “How did you learn to do that one anyway?”
“Enva told us it was possible and then it was a lot of trial and error,” I said.
“And frustration,” Jasin added. “Mostly frustration.”
Doran scratched at his scraggly beard. “You’ve done well, considering you had no one to train you. What other combinations can you do?”
“That’s it so far,” Kira said. “The bond with Slade and Reven was too new to do any others yet.”
Doran nodded. “Hopefully it’s grown enough by now. The benefit of combining elements is that there’s no immunity to them. Both Sark and Isen can be hurt by lightning, for example.”
“What will we do about Nysa?” Reven asked. “She’s immune to every element.”
“You let me worry about her,” Doran said. “After the other dragons are defeated, she’ll be vulnerable to attack.”
I thought about asking whether that included him, but the troubled look on Kira’s face made me hold my tongue.
“The hardest elements to combine are the two opposite ones,” Doran continued. “Fire and water make steam, while earth and air create sandstorms. We’ll work our way up to those. You can already do lightning, so we’ll skip that.”
“We want to learn to make lava,” Slade said. “Or at least be able to stop it.”
“A good choice. Probably the mostly deadly and destructive of the combined elements. Fine, you two can work together today, while Auric and Reven will make fog.”
“Fog?” Jasin asked. “How will that be useful?”
Doran crossed his arms. “Not everything is about striking your enemies down. Sometimes there are better ways of handling things. Fog can conceal and confuse. It can hide a huge group of soldiers on the battlefield. It can make it easier to escape from a bad situation. And when you get good enough, you can make clouds and cover the sky with them too.”
“It sounds perfect,” I said, thinking of all the possibilities. With both Reven and Jasin’s magic flowing through me, I could create entire storms on my own.
Reven and I moved closer to the forest, while Jasin and Slade headed for the edge of the river in case they had problems. But as I faced Reven, I began to have doubts this would work. I didn’t know him all that well yet, and his bond with Kira was new. Jasin and I had become close, despite our differences, and Slade and I had an easy understanding and friendship. But Reven? He was hard for all of us to get to know. Kira had often commented on how Reven pushed her away or locked her out, but it wasn’t only her that he kept at a distance. Combining our magic took a connection, and the man was a wall of ice that was nearly impossible to cross. Luckily, I knew how to fly.
“Fog would have been useful in your previous profession, I imagine,” I said.
Reven let out a soft grunt in response. “Those days are over.”
“Yes. I wanted to thank you again for what you did for my father. You didn’t have to do that.” Reven had taken the contract on my father’s life to make sure no one else did, even though it ended his career with the Assassin’s Guild forever.
“I wasn’t going to kill him,” Reven said, sending me a sharp look.
“No, of course not.” Damn, I was really bungling this one up. “I simply meant that I appreciated how you handled it, and the sacrifice it required of you.”
“It was time to move on from that life anyway.”
“And yet you went back to them to ask for their help. Was it a problem, since you failed to complete your last mission?”
He smirked. “It was, until I turned into a dragon in front of them and m
ade it in rain in the middle of the room.”
I grinned back at him. “I would have loved to have seen their faces.”
“All right,” Doran called out, interrupting us. “Try to reach for your partner’s magic through the bond. It might be difficult to find at first, but it’s there. Once you’ve found it, grab tight and let it loose with your own magic.”
I stared into Reven’s cold blue eyes, searching for him within the bond. Jasin was easy to find, like a bright spark jumping behind my eyes that grew stronger with my attention on him. Slade was harder to find, but when I focused on him, his steady, strong presence filled my mind. Creating a storm of sand or dust with him wouldn’t be too difficult, I imagined. But when I searched for Reven, I felt nothing.
“This isn’t working,” Reven said.
“It will. It took a long time for me and Jasin to figure it out, but we did eventually.”
“The two of you are close,” Reven said, his lip curling as if the idea bothered him. “But you and me? We have nothing in common.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” I tilted my head, studying him. “Jasin and Slade both let their emotions dominate them. With Jasin it’s obvious, but Slade is just as guilty of it, he just doesn’t react as passionately or as hastily. His emotions build up under the surface, until they can’t be contained anymore. But you and I—we think things through. We take our time. We research different options before we come to a decision. We both value knowledge above most other things. Our lives have been completely different, but we’re more alike than you think.”
“I suppose,” Reven said. “Although you value knowledge for the sake of having it. I value what it can do for me. It’s a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.”
“True, but we still prefer to trust our minds more than our hearts, which can make it difficult for us to open up to people or can lead us to make bad decisions. I made mistakes with Kira that I now regret. I kept secrets from her about who I was, because my mind told me it was the best thing to do at the time. Maybe if I’d listened to my heart, things would have been easier.”
Reven was silent, staring at the river’s flowing water. Behind us, Jasin let out a shout as he and Slade made the ground rip apart and lava shoot from the cracks, while Kira and Doran applauded.
“Maybe you’re right,” Reven finally said. “I locked away my heart for so many years I’d convinced myself I didn’t have one anymore. Kira forced me to realize I was wrong about that.”
I chuckled softly. “She has a way of making us confront the things about ourselves we would like to ignore. Annoying, isn’t it?”
“Very.” Reven let out a long breath. He glanced over at Jasin and Slade, the star pupils of today’s training session, as they made lava spurt into the air. “We can’t let them show us up. How do we do this?”
“Jasin and I found it easier if we were holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. Maybe that would help?” I stretched out my hands toward him, palms up.
Reven rolled his eyes and grabbed my hands. “Fine.”
His skin was cool against mine, and his eyes were the pale blue of the early morning sky. When I searched for him through the bond this time, I found a small, cold ripple. I grasped onto it, pulling it toward me, unwilling to let go, and the ripple became a wave, growing stronger the more I tugged at it. Now that I knew what he felt like in my mind, I was certain I could find him again, and it would be easier next time.
When Reven’s breathing suddenly changed and his eyes widened, I knew he’d found me through the bond too. His fingers tightened around mine and something passed between us. The air around us began to grow murky. Fog rolled off the water, creeping around the forest, becoming thicker with each passing second. Soon, I couldn’t see anything except Reven. The rest of the world had been cut off, hidden away by the magic we’d created. I saw the wonder in his eyes as he took it in, and then we grinned at each other. Somehow, I didn’t think we’d have a problem connecting anymore.
29
Kira
Over the next week we trained harder than we ever had before. We faced each other in teams and one on one. We fought with our weapons, with our magic alone, or—for the men—in their dragon forms. Doran barked out orders the entire time, pushing us to fight harder, to keep going, to never back down. He gave us tips on the other Dragons’ weaknesses and showed us how to use our powers together to defeat them. We learned more from him than we had in the entire few months we’d known each other.
And I worried it still wouldn’t be enough.
Every night, we returned to our rooms in the inn, exhausted, beaten, bloody, and burnt. My men and I had no energy for lovemaking—we simply curled up in bed together, all five of us holding each other tenderly, and my touch healed my mates while we slept. Our bonds grew stronger, and with it, our magic.
The other Dragons had hundreds of years on us. We would never be as strong or as experienced as them. But we had something they’d lost over the years—love.
The days rushed by, and soon it was time for another bittersweet goodbye as we said farewell to Slade’s family and the town that had sheltered us not once, but twice. We packed our things, hugged everyone tightly, and then prepared to take off—and that’s when I noticed we were one person short.
“Where’s Doran?” I asked, as I glanced about.
Slade frowned. “It’s not like him to run late.”
“I saw him fly away last night,” Leni said. “I assumed you knew, so I didn’t mention it.”
I took a step back as my knees nearly gave out on me. The world spun around me, and I felt like I might actually throw up. “He left?”
“Oh Gods,” Auric said, his eyes wide. “Doran had the map with all the battle plans. If he took that with him…”
Jasin swore under his breath. “That bastard. I knew he’d betray us!”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Brin said, though her voice wasn’t very convincing. She rested a sympathetic hand on my back. “There must be some explanation.”
“Yes, exactly.” I clung to her words, desperate to hold onto hope. I refused to believe my father would betray us, after everything he’d done. “He told me to remember he’s on my side. Maybe he’s not really betraying us but trying to help us in some way.”
Slade wrapped a strong arm around me. “I know you want to believe that, but it doesn’t seem likely. If he was helping us, he would have told us his plan, not sneak off in the middle off the night.”
“The Water God warned us about this,” Reven said. “He said Doran would turn against us because he would never be willing to give up the power and his own life.”
“But why would he help us all this time only to betray us?” I asked.
“Because he wanted us to trust him!” Jasin growled. “Now he’s run back to Nysa and he knows all our weaknesses and our plans.”
“We’ll have to completely redo our strategy,” Auric said, his brow furrowed. “If that is even possible.”
Jasin’s eyes flashed with anger. “We can adjust some things, but he’ll be able to anticipate which ones. We’re doomed. We might as well call this all off now.”
“We can’t call it off,” Brin said. “We’ll just have to do the best we can.”
I stared at my mates, feeling their rage and frustration through the bond, and knew they were right. My father really had betrayed us. Everything he’d told me was a lie. All this time he’d been working for Nysa, acting as her scout and her spy, like he always did. And we’d played right into his hand, doing everything he asked, falling for all of his lies. In the end, he was as corrupted as she was, and there was no redemption for him.
I clenched my hand around my sword, feeling the magic within it. “We’re going to continue with our plans. And when we come face to face with the Dragons, we’ll destroy them.” My voice hardened into steel. “All of them.”
* * *
We set off for the Spirit Temple, which was in the middle of
a large plain just south of Soulspire. We’d advised all our allies to meet us in a valley east of there on the day of the Fall Equinox. It would take us a few days to get there, and it never escaped my mind that Doran was hours ahead of us with all of our plans. My mates pushed themselves hard, flying as fast and as long as they could, and every night they were completely exhausted.
On the last night before we expected to arrive, I tossed and turned beside my men, unable to sleep. All I could think about was facing my father, and what I would have to do to stop him. Eventually I stood and walked away, hoping the quiet forest would bring me some peace.
I found Enva sitting on a large rock nearby, like she’d been waiting for me for hours.
“Hello, Kira. Come sit beside me.”
I leaned against the stone, gazing across the dark forest and listening to the quiet sounds of night. “Did Doran really betray us?”
“It seems that way. He’s heading to Soulspire now with your battle plans. I’m sorry.”
I covered my face with my hands as I tried to gain control over my emotions. “I can’t trust my mother. I can’t trust my father. I’m not even sure I can trust you. The only people I can count on are my mates.”
“Yes, as it should be.” She patted my arm softly. “Doran had to return to Nysa. He is bound by magic to be loyal to her. He might have been able to resist it for some time, but when she calls him through the bond, it’s difficult to ignore.”
“Does he even care for me at all?”
“Yes, I’m sure he does. He did save your life as a baby, and he has watched over you your whole life, much as I have. But he has been bound to Nysa for nearly a thousand years. Their lives are entwined. It’s difficult for him to fight against her, even for you.”
“I feel so stupid. Everyone warned me not to trust him, but I wanted to believe in him.”
“You’re not stupid. You wanted a father. There is nothing wrong with that.”
Ride The Wave: Her Elemental Dragons Book Four Page 13