by Kiersten Fay
He reached out to trace the curved spine of the marble dragon, then he gazed down at her, something inscrutable shifting behind his eyes. Her cheeks flared under his pensive scrutiny. She fought the urge to fidget. Then, with sure hands, he lifted her by the waist and spun her in the air before setting her on her feet and murmuring in her ear, “Until then, I will dance with you anywhere you like.”
Their lips met in a blood-searing kiss that convinced her he was about to caveman-style throw her over his shoulder and heave her back to their room when he pulled back. “I have something for you too.”
“You do?”
He nodded and reached into his pocket.
“Wait, my gift has another part.”
He glanced up. “Oh?”
Grabbing him by the hand, she pulled him to where a flat screen had been set up. As they approached, the screen flipped on, playing a recorded image of Kyra’s heart-wrenching speech during the treaty ceremony. When Kyra spoke of his father, the camera landed on Tristan, showing the unfettered pride and love in his eyes.
“This is being broadcasted all over the kingdom. I thought it was important for your people to see their powerful leader in action, honoring your father and the Faieara alliance.”
“You truly amaze me.”
Smiling, she dipped her head to hide a blush. “So, what did you get me?”
He retrieved a small box from his pocket, a red bow decorating the top. “This must have arrived at the same time as your gifts. You see, Cale found it in the throne room back on Evlon.”
Her eyes glittered with unshed tears as she peeled off the lid to find Jordan’s Swiss army knife settled in a bed of tissue paper.
“It came with a note that read you’re lucky I already have one.”
“Oh my god,” she breathed, and went on her tiptoes to gift him with a sweet kiss. “Thank you.”
“I love you, June of Earth, my ice queen.”
“And I love you, my dragon king, for forever and a day.”
See what’s next
Keep reading for a sneak peek from the next book in the series:
SEDUCED BY THE DRAGON LORD.
1
Earth
Black River Forest, several weeks ago
* * *
Jessie Jane Knight stamped out the last of the fire pit’s steaming coals with the soul of her well-worn, shearling-lined boot, popped in her earbuds and turned up Imagine Dragons’ Radioactive, belting out the chorus at top volume. “Welcome to the new age…to the new age!”
A flock of birds perched in a nearby bush lifted off into the sky and scattered.
“Everyone’s a critic.” Heaving her pack over her shoulder, she started the long trek back to civilization, glancing back only briefly to make sure she’d left no traces of her short stay. Her little forest hideaway looked as she’d found it but for a flattened tuft where she’d set up camp and the scorched earth where she’d cooked her meals.
Even though it was a chilly autumn morning and rain clouds were moving in, Jessie had donned her camo shorts and a comfortable black tank top, knowing the five-mile hike would keep her body temp up. Actually, she’d expected cooler temperatures this weekend, but most of the northeast was experiencing a gorgeous Indian summer, which was fine by her. If this weather kept up, she might get in another weekend of camping before winter set in.
A soft autumn breeze played through her hair, bringing with it the musty scent of the coming storm. She glanced up, squinting through the leafy curtain of elms. The sky was darkening by the minute, clouds rolling in faster than she’d anticipated.
Suddenly a flash of lightning split the sky, immediately joined by a crackling boom of thunder. As a strong wind kicked up, she realized she had underestimated the weather. This storm had barreled in like a herd of raging bikers who’d been promised free booze. With any luck it would pass just as fast. In the meantime, it would be wise to take shelter and wait it out. She’d be pissed as hell if she got herself lightning-fried to a crisp before she got to test out the new Cartman adjustable bungee cords she’d ordered for the shop. Not to mention the travel-size burn ointment she’d packed would so not suffice.
Under a field of lightning-rod trees, she hurried down the slope to where she recalled seeing a little alcove that preceded a small cave she’d intended to explore on her way back anyway. Before she reached her destination, the heavens tore open and dumped the Atlantic Ocean down on her, soaking her clean through. Lightning cracked again and again above her, like a Titan shooting bolts with her name on them. Her heart drummed along with each boom, while her feet kept tempo with the song streaming through her earbuds.
Just a little farther…
Finally, she darted into the safety of the dark-mouthed cave, wiping her dripping hair from her forehead as she leaned against the wall…the solid steel wall?
Even before her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized something was terribly wrong. Unless she had entered an alternate reality, caves did not come equipped with dim overhead lights, smooth aluminum flooring, and wide hatchways.
What the hell?
She popped out her earbuds, and the music instantly cut off, making way for the soft whirring that filled the strange corridor.
“Uh, hello?” she called, instantly wishing she hadn’t. Why did she suddenly feel as though she’d entered the plot of a horror movie? Was she to be the poor curious soul in the first scene who got herself murdered?
What in the hell was a clandestine place like this, wide open, unguarded, doing in the Black River Forest? It looked almost military, reminding her of the many vessels her late father had been stationed on. Was this a military outpost of some kind?
She glanced back the way she came. A few steps in reverse, and she’d be back to reality…none the wiser.
Another snap of lightning lit the sky, the thunder so close and loud she worried it had struck a tree. She faced the peculiar corridor once more.
Well, at least she had an excuse for being here: good ol’ damsel in distress. Although she was the last person to ever consider herself either a damsel or in distress, but she’d play it up if necessary.
Out of precaution, she reached down and unsnapped the sheath that held her Ka-Bar military grade utility knife at her waist—her father’s old knife—but left it sheathed, hoping she would never have to use it on anything bigger than a plump trout. Easy access to her 9mm would have been preferred, but she’d already unloaded it and packed it deep in her pack for the hike.
With light feet, she crept forward and peered around an open hatch, the soft rumble of machinery following her. She debated calling out again, so as not to catch anyone off guard as she surveyed the room. No one was inside what looked like some kind of storage area with a few crates packed around the edges. The next hatch was closed with no way of opening it that she could discern. She listened for sounds of life, hearing none. “Hello?”
No answer.
The next hatch was closed as well, but offered a small window through which she spied rows of green leafy plants, like a miniature hydroponics farm. Maybe this was a botany lab or a bio-dome. However, bio-domes didn’t exactly work as intended when the front door was left wide open.
Unease slithered along her shoulders. She could hear her father’s voice in her head: Curiosity killed the cat, Jessie, but the fox knows better than to lose a life in the first place. Are you a fox or a cat?
She had always answered “fox” because everyone wanted to be the fox in that scenario, but as she entered the farthest room, she mentally meowed.
It appeared to be some kind of state-of-the-art surveillance room. The mounted screens were dark, but the consoles were lit up by colorful buttons marked by strange symbols that would require a manual for her to decipher.
One flashing button was particularly bright, urging her closer. Dust covered the symbol. She reached out to graze her finger along the top—
Apparently, that was all it took.
An ominous whir
ring sound echoed from the corridor. Was that a hatch closing?
Uh-oh.
Stomach twisting, she darted back into the corridor and rushed for the exit—
Which was now blocked by a set of heavy doors.
Palming the metal, she searched for a way to pry the hatch open when suddenly a deep robotic voice sounded all around her, speaking in tongues. A vibration started in her feet and then snaked up to her spine before enwrapping her whole body. Had she triggered an earthquake?
The floor became unsteady, rocking unnaturally, forcing her to cling to the wall for support. The shrill sound of machines flooded the space, drowning out her yelps of surprise. The air grew pungent, as if ozone was suddenly being pumped through the ducts.
Then, without warning, gravity took on a different weight, almost as if…the entire building was rising!
She raced back to what she had previously thought was a surveillance room, seeing it with new eyes. Her gaze flittered between the center console, like a captain’s post, and the surrounding consoles, all facing a single direction, and she realized what she was looking at. A command center…
Of a ship…
With hieroglyphs not of this world!
A staccato clanking, banging, and clangor from above made her envision pebbles, stones, and dirt shaking free of a ship’s surface.
She kicked the insane thought away.
It couldn’t be possible.
She couldn’t be in a spaceship…an alien spaceship!
Sudden G-forces knocked her down, and she skidded across the floor and came to a hard stop against the wall. “This can’t be happening.”
Scrambling for purchase, she pulled herself along the floor toward the captain’s chair and crawled up to plant her ass in it, her nails digging into the armrests. Her weight must have triggered something, because a crisscrossing harness wrapped her torso just as the G-forces turned unbearable. She let out a bloodcurdling screech.
The screens in front of her blinked to life, revealing a perfect view of the storm clouds bearing down on her. Lightning slashed across the screen, then a plaster of gray before breaking through to a pure blue sky. The pressure lessened slightly as the blue morphed into a deep purple and then finally…black. A starlit abyss.
“Oh, God.”
Her mind raced like a stock car fighting for first, gunning it in an attempt to pull ahead of this mess and reconcile her unusual, unfathomable, unreal circumstances. Her heart thundered, beating so hard her ribs might just break from the impact. She couldn’t get enough air. Her lungs burned from the struggle.
She wondered how much oxygen was left in the small space, knowing she could be using it all up in her panic.
As the ship’s rumbling eased and space took on a menacing shade of black, the harness around her torso retracted. Cautiously she stood, testing her feet. There were no more G-forces, and gravity seemed normal. Wasn’t that unusual for a ship in space? If this truly was alien technology, perhaps they’d figured out how to generate gravity. Or maybe she was still on Earth and this was one big, elaborate joke.
But something told her that wasn’t the case.
She approached the big screen, like a massive window to the unknown, and placed her hand on it in disbelief. “Well, Dad. Looks like I’m not the fox after all.”
And curiosity had just cost this kitty all her lives.
2
Planet Legura
Royal shipyard, present day
* * *
“She’s a wild one,” one of the guards declared while storming away from the warship, his boots eating up the pavement between him and Orik.
“She’s feral, is what she is,” the second guard agreed, trailing close behind the first.
Orik, head of the king’s guard, had just arrived in the shipyard after learning his men had intercepted another Kayadon ship on its way to Evlon, or wherever the Kayadon were hiding out these days. And just like the one before, there was a female aboard, presumably human.
“What do you mean, ‘feral’?” Orik proceeded past them toward the moored ship. The two guards fell in step beside him.
“She’s barricaded herself in and will no’ allow anyone near,” the first guard explained.
Orik tried to place his name. Garrison. Yes, that was it. The second guard, if his memory served, was named Kellvin. “Barricaded how?”
“It’s, uh, difficult to explain,” replied Garrison.
“Try.” Orik was already losing his patience.
“She’s managed to jam up the entire entryway.”
“Jam? With what?” Orik marched up the gangway, his curiosity piqued. The Kayadon ship was under heavy guard within the much larger warship’s docking bay. They couldn’t be too careful where the Kayadon were concerned.
“With everything but the latrine,” Garrison answered sardonically.
The dark metal enemy craft appeared to have been designed for the purpose of intimidation with blacked-out windows and sharp angular corners, but right now it looked benign, posed like downed prey surrounded by soldiers.
Orik passed though the ring of guards and entered the enemy ship. Inside, the lighting was dim, but his eyes quickly adjusted. Yet, it took him several moments longer to comprehend what he was seeing. From floor to ceiling in front of him was a gnarled tangle of metal blocking the passage.
As a child he’d once played a game with the young princes where he would tangle an array of puzzle pieces together consisting of various shapes to make a complicated structure, and the others would have to figure out how to untangle it within a given timeframe.
This was the life-size version.
“And why has the debris no’ been cleared?” he demanded of the two guards close on his heels.
Garrison raised a fist to his mouth and cleared his throat. Was that a little blush in his cheeks? “She has managed to sharpen a piece of metal like a blade and sticks us with it through the cracks when we try.”
Orik blinked in astonishment. He could hear soft breathing beyond the barricade, indicating the human was on the other side, listening to their conversation. At a safe distance, he leaned down to peek through a small opening in the clutter where a bit of light shone through. He froze. A single hazel eye peered back at him.
He heard a feminine gasp, and then the owner of said eye was gone from his line of sight.
“Hello?” he called.
No reply.
“I’m Orik Theroux, head of the guard. What is your name?”
Again, no reply.
“We’ve no intention of harming you.”
Something like a snort filtered through the debris. “Yeah, right,” came a clipped female voice. “You’ve abducted me with the intention of giving me hot chocolate and massages, I’m sure.”
“We have no’ abducted you.”
“It’s funny then, how I’m here instead of back on Earth…where I was abducted from. Would you prefer the word kidnapped? Snatched? Or taken?”
“How about intercepted?” he offered.
She went silent for a beat. “Call it what you want. I’m here now. What do you want with me?”
“Nothing.”
“Bull.”
“Pardon?”
“Bullshit,” she said louder. “You don’t go through all this trouble for no reason. Are you planning to attack Earth? Am I here to be a lab rat? Am I a prisoner of war? If so, you are dumber than you sound.”
He pursed his lips in displeasure. “We hold no aggression against you or your people. If you’ll agree to come out, we can explain.”
“You can just as easily explain from where you’re standing. No need to put my life, or yours, at risk.”
He cocked his head, prickly irritation skittering up his neck. “Is that a threat?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?”
Orik blinked at her crass words. This woman was nothing like their human queen—although, could June still be considered human? He made his voice harder. “The fact is, you’r
e in an enemy ship, and I canna be sure you are who you say you are, or if this is a trick by our enemies.”
“Ditto.”
“Huh?” The word made no sense to him. Although Portia, a powerful Serakian witch, had spelled all humans to understand his language, several words still failed to translate.
“You’re more likely to be the one tricking me. Hello? Abducted here. You expect me to come out without giving me a reason to trust you?”
“Trust goes both ways, does it no’?”
“Not when one of us was stolen from her home by the other.”
“As I said, we saved you from the ones who are responsible.”
“Sure you did. And I’m just supposed to believe that?”
Frustration burrowed into the base of his skull. “If you cooperate, we can help you get back to Earth.” He regretted the statement immediately, but if it garnered her cooperation, he could deal with the fallout later.
A short silence followed, and he thought he’d gotten through to her, but then the mortal turned even more sarcastic. “Oh, yeah? You’ll help me? Pah-leez. You want me to cooperate with my own vivisection, maybe? When you have me sliced open, I can point to my organs and explain what they do. Does that sound about right?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We just want to talk with you. Find out how you came to be on this ship.”
“Talking requires the participation of two parties, instead of being barked at, cursed at, and threatened, like I have been.”
Orik glared over his shoulder at the two guards, who both flushed with guilt.
“She was stabbing at us,” Garrison defended, self-consciously rubbing the back of his neck. Kellvin merely nodded in abject solidarity.
The woman countered, “I told you not to touch my things.”
Orik sighed, growing weary of this. “Look, woman, we can return you to Earth, but we’ll need you to come out of there first.” He reached out to remove a piece of the metal blockade. “So I’m going to—”