by Lili Zander
Damn it, she’s right. I am the mate of the dragon princes. Everyone will be watching me. Judging me. Pitying the dragons for being mated to a lowly Norm.
Everyone will think I’m helpless and weak, and I’m neither.
“No vault,” I reply. “I’ll fight.”
10
Erik
“Don’t do this,” I beg Aria. “Let them have the grimoire if that’s what they desire. I know Natalya Ivanova. She’s a strong mage, and she’s cunning.”
“She also doesn’t know I have magic.”
Per dragon rules, the dual will take place at sundown. The twin dragons have departed for the moment, promising to return in a few hours. “You saw the way she looked at me. She’s totally underestimating me.” She heaves a deep breath. “You don’t think I can handle this?”
I take Aria’s hands in mine. “Princess,” I tell her. “I saw you defeat Zyrian. I think you can handle anything life throws at you. That doesn’t stop me from worrying.”
She stands on tiptoe and brushes a kiss across my lips. “I’m not fooling myself,” she says. “The only reason I defeated Zyrian is because of the piece of the Bloodstone inside me. But Maija Essen is right.”
“Maija Essen? What does she have to do with it?”
“She told me I’d look like a coward if I didn’t fight.”
My blood boils. “She can go fuck herself,” I say angrily. “She’s dead. We’re not her puppets. Especially not you. She’s done controlling us. Ignore her.”
Aria gives me a steady look. “Come on, Erik. You know she’s right.”
Damn it. “It doesn’t matter.”
Her lips lift in a slight smile. “Don’t worry. There’s no real danger. It’s perfectly obvious that the ice queen just wants to poke around inside Zyrian’s vault. If it looks like I’m going to lose, I’ll forfeit, and she’ll be able to explore to her heart’s content.”
I put my arms around her waist and tug her near. “You promise?”
“Absolutely.” She kisses me again. “Trust me, Erik. I most certainly don’t have a death wish. I have plenty to live for. After all, I still haven’t managed to beat you at a game of pool.”
11
Aria
This castle is strange. We’ve been exploring for the last hour. Mateo and Casius are in the vault, looking for any sign of the Runestone. Bastian and Erik have volunteered to search the dungeons. More power to them; I have no desire to see what Zyrian’s hiding there.
That leaves Rhys and I to explore the main levels.
Which is where things get weird. None of the rooms are furnished. No bedrooms for guests. No study. No dining room. “I guess Zyrian wasn’t in the habit of having people over,” Rhys remarks. “I was wondering how only three servants could run this huge place, but now I understand.”
“What about Zyrian’s own comfort?” I muse out loud. “I can’t see him sleep on the floor, can you?”
Rhys pushes open a set of doors. “He didn’t,” he says, whistling through his teeth. “Look at this.”
I step into the room, and my mouth falls open. Wow, Gideon Zyrian had gaudy taste. Gold walls, an elaborately carved gold headboard, a mirrored dresser, tufted velvet armchairs… the effect is overwhelming.
“Fuck me, this is hideous,” Rhys says cheerfully. “What terrible taste. Garish fellow, Zyrian.”
“That’s an understatement.” I move into the room and start opening doors at random. A closet filled with boring black suits. A door that leads to a balcony. Then I open another door, and once again, my jaw hits the floor.
Holy crap, Gideon Zyrian has a nice bathroom. His shower is larger than my bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen. This tub is big enough to hold three people comfortably. And are these jets?
“That’s more like it,” Rhys says approvingly. “There’s still far too much gold in the decor, but I can’t complain about the amenities.” He gives my shoulder a squeeze. “You’ve had a long couple of days, love. Do you want to soak in the tub for a while?”
The moment he says it, it sounds like the best idea in the world. I know I should be preparing for my battle tonight, but right now, I need to unwind far more than I need to train.
Rhys chuckles at my yearning expression. “I’ll leave you alone. Want me to find you some wine?”
“It’s eleven in the morning.”
His lips twitch. “Is that a no, then?”
I’m pretty sure I’ll need to be stone-cold sober for my fight with Natalya Ivanova. “No wine, please,” I tell my laughing mate. “Just the Jacuzzi.”
I’m soaking in the bathtub when a wraith flits into the room. It’s the woman that talked to me earlier. The one who told me that she was Zyrian’s lover.
“Hey,” I say indignantly. “A little privacy here, if you don’t mind.”
The wraith is looking around with undisguised interest. I’ve never been here before. It’s so grand.
Huh. She did say she was murdered more than six hundred years ago. Tastes certainly change.
“You haven’t been here before?” They certainly seem to flit around the rest of the castle. “Why not?”
Her expression turns cloudy, and she hesitates. I don’t know, she says. Would you want to see Gideon bathe?
Not Gideon, no. But if I were a ghost, I’d be spying on my mates. I’m pervy like that. Then again, none of my mates would kill me to steal my magic.
She’s done looking around the bathroom. She drifts over to the tub and settles herself on the lip. Free us.
“Trust me, it’s on the list. As soon as I fight the Russian dragon mage.” A thought strikes me. Maybe the wraiths would know where to find the magic crystal. “According to Maija Essen, your souls are trapped inside the Runestone of Brísingr.”
I thought that might be it, she sighs. The Runestone is old magic, lost in the mists of time. It dates back to the creation of our species.
“Norms?”
She gives me a puzzled look. No, dragons.
I sit up in the tub, sloshing water over the sides and onto the marble tiled floor. “You’re a dragon?”
She nods. A dragon mage. An ideal target for Gideon.
I sink back into the steaming bath. “Okay, if you’re a mage, you might know the answer. Maija Essen thinks Zyrian hid the Runestone in the void and tethered it to this world using a string of magic. Do you have any idea where we might find that string?”
She shakes her head. I’ve been bound to this castle for more than six hundred years. I’ve combed every inch. It’s not here.
Fuck.
12
Aria
It’s time for my duel. Time to show Bitchy McBitchyface that I’m not a pushover, and I’m not going to back down from this fight.
“I’ve seen Natalya fight,” Bastian says calmly. “A long time ago. She switches seamlessly between her human form and her dragon. Just when you think you have her cornered, she’ll transform. Watch for that.”
“You’ll have a split-second warning,” Mateo reminds me. “You’ll be able to sense it.”
He doesn’t seem as worried as the others. I lean in. “You’re not freaking out about how I’m going to do?”
“I taught you,” he says, with a flash of arrogance. “Someone as unimaginative and set in her ways as Natalya Ivanova will never defeat you. She’s isolated herself for two hundred years, Aria. She’s out of practice, out of touch.”
“She’s a dragon, Mateo.”
His voice is confident. “You’ve got this.”
Evidently, dragon duels happen outside at sundown. Which, because it’s winter in Alaska, is five in the evening.
It’s freezing. I don’t want to do my warmth spell. Natalya Ivanova doesn’t know I’m a mage, and I want to keep that a secret as long as I can. I’m counting on the element of surprise.
“Are we really going through with this farce?” The Russian ice-bitch calls out to Bastian. “Call off your Norm pet, Jaeger before someone gets hurt.”
“You call her that once more, and I promise you, you will regret it.” Bastian’s voice could freeze a lake.
“That’s okay, Bastian.” I pull Endellion out of its sheath. Norm toy? I will show this arrogant dragon mage exactly how much damage this toy can do. “I can handle her.”
Natalya turns to me with a mocking smile. “On your head be it.”
“You may begin dueling on the count of three,” Casius says. “Ready? One... Two… Three.”
She lunges at me, sword in hand, a smirk on her face. I parry her stroke easily. In our practice sessions, my dragons do not go easy on me. I’m used to their speed. Compared to them, Natalya’s as fast as a tortoise with a broken leg.
I suspect she expected me to yield right away because she appears surprised. “Interesting,” she says, and attacks again, coming at me with a swift, jabbing stroke. Once again, I block it and dance away.
Tell me again how useless I am, dragon bitch.
Her eyes narrow, and she starts circling me.
She’s in a difficult position, Natalya. She might want to win this fight, but it serves her purposes better to force me to yield and allow her to take what she wants from Zyrian’s vault. If she were interested in killing me outright, the fastest way to do it would be to assume her dragon form and toast me, but so far, she hasn’t made any attempt to do that.
We circle each other for a full minute. She’s waiting for me to drop my guard. I can feel her frustration start to build. For the moment, I’m content defending myself and getting the measure of my opponent. In training, I could be certain that none of my dragons would ever lose control and seriously hurt me, but with this woman, I have no such guarantees.
The watching dragons are quiet. The only noise is the sound of the wind, which has picked up again. There’s a dampness in the air that suggests snow can’t be far behind. For the moment, the evening is mercifully clear, and nothing disrupts the visibility.
She rushes at me all of a sudden, her sword raised to slice across my front. This time, she attacks with full dragon speed, throwing her weight behind the stroke, and I barely have time to bring Endellion up and block her attack. The blades ring in the quiet twilight as they clash, and a shock runs through my arms. Fuck. That hurt. Element of surprise or not, I’m going to have to use magic soon.
Sooner than I think. The second after I defend against her strike, she reaches in her belt, moving so quickly that her motions are a blur, and she throws a small knife right at me.
My reactions are pure instinct. I dodge the blade, and at the same time, I throw a net of protective magic around me to shield myself from further attack.
She inhales sharply. “Magic,” she says, her eyes wide. “You have the gift?”
Finally, some grudging respect. When she thought I was one-hundred-percent-Norm, I was worthless, but now, because of my magic, I’m worthy of her consideration.
Bite me.
“Not too bright, are you?” I taunt. “Did you think that I defeated Zyrian by fluttering my pretty Norm eyelashes at him?”
I’m done with this shit. All I want to do is free the trapped wraiths and get back home. I don’t want to camp inside Zyrian’s castle. I don’t want to spend any more time here, where Silas almost died. I don’t want to be sneered at by this bitch queen.
For more than two months, I’ve been lurching from one crisis to another, and I’m done. I’ve reached the ‘zero-fucks-to-give’ stage.
Natalya Ivanova reads my rising anger and counters with her own aggression. Her control snaps. She’s furious now, and she’s done toying with me. I feel the threads of power shift and hum as she focuses inward.
She’s shifting to dragon.
There are a lot of frighteningly effective ways to be killed by a dragon. She’s going to squash me like a bug. Or barbecue me. Or slash me with long, lethal claws.
Think, Aria, think.
I see a wraith flit by out of the corner of my eye, and my thoughts wander for a split-second. Funny thing about the wraiths. They’d helped my dragons enter Zyrian’s stronghold. Drakkar Raedwulf had told them about an unguarded gate in the castle walls, but it had been the wraiths, the women whose magic powered the castle protection spells, that let my dragons enter.
Raedwulf. Of course.
A mad, crazy idea enters my head. Raedwulf’s little boy Tristan couldn’t shift. His wolf was trapped inside his body, the spark of magic not enough to power the transformation. I’d been able to lend my strength to the child, to fan the flames so his own magic would burn bright.
Can I do the opposite to Natalya Ivanova? Can I douse her inner fire and stop her from transforming?
It’s certainly worth a shot.
My magic is a weird hybrid of dragon and gemstone and whatever-else. Dragons can’t see other dragons in their minds’ eye. Mateo can’t translocate a dragon unless that dragon is directly in front of him.
Natalya Ivanova has spent two hundred years in isolation. Mateo was right; her world-view is limited. She’s inflexible. She’s never considered the prospect of a Norm with magic. She’s never thought that my powers might be different from her own.
I push my right hand—the one with the mating mark—out in front of me. I feel the heat of her inner flame burn my palm, but I ignore the pain. It isn’t real. Taking a deep breath, I close my hand over the fire in her heart.
She cries out in anguish, dropping to her knees, her shift to dragon abruptly cut short by my action. “What are you doing?”
Don’t underestimate me, lady. “Giving you a choice,” I reply steadily. “You can either accept my claim to Zyrian’s treasure and leave here, or you can find out exactly how much power I have.”
Sharp fire burns my palm. Agonizing pain shoots from my hand up my arm, and through the rest of my body. A dragon’s fire is not so easily extinguished.
But she doesn’t know that.
She glares at me, her eyes burning with hatred, and then she caves. “I concede.”
Phew.
13
Rhys
It’s late at night. The Ivanov twins are gone, and good riddance to them.
I’ve no doubt that the rumor mill will be at work. In less than twenty-four hours, every single dragon will learn that Aria is our mate, and more importantly, they’ll learn that she has power.
There aren’t going to be many more claimants to Gideon Zyrian’s treasure.
“Now the Runestone,” Aria sighs.
My poor mate. She looks pale and exhausted. Winter shows no sign of coming to an end, and Zyrian’s chilly, drafty castle with its fifteenth-century heating is not helping. What she needs is a week in the sun, lying on a beach, drinking fruity drinks laced with alcohol.
She hasn’t had much chance to travel; I want to change that. Even before she got involved in our curse, she’s been running herself ragged, trying to earn enough money to pay for Silas Archer’s medical bills. She deserves to relax and to enjoy herself.
We can’t leave this castle unless we find that Runestone and free the ghosts. So far, there’s been no sign of it. It’s not in the vaults. It’s not in the dungeons. It’s not in the empty stone rooms of the keep.
Except it must be. The wraiths are tied to the castle, unable to leave the island. The crystal can’t be buried in the foundations, because Zyrian is a murderous bastard who killed and trapped magicals all the bloody time. It has to be somewhere easily accessible.
“Let’s go over everything we know,” I say out loud. “We’ve searched the castle, and it’s not here.”
Bastian frowns. “Mateo and Aria are the only ones with magic,” he points out. “If the Runestone is indeed in the void, we won’t be able to sense it.”
Mateo looks up. “You said the dungeons looked like nobody’s been down there in decades. Zyrian’s killed for magic more recently than that.”
“That’s true,” Erik says. “Still, maybe tomorrow, Mateo and Aria can go over the dungeons with a fine-toothed comb.”
And
if we don’t find it tomorrow, then the day after. Fuck. At the rate we’re going, it might be spring before we get out of here.
If I wanted to stay in a cold, damp, miserable castle, I could just retreat to Ynys Dewi. Castle Griffith has shitty insulation too, and last I heard, the roof leaked. Arwel Tannor had sent me an email about it.
My heart aches when I think of Arwel and Elinor, slaughtered in their den. I couldn’t get to the funeral; it wasn’t safe. I need to get back to Wales soon. I’m not big on duty, but the Tannor clan deserves better from me.
We’ve all lost people we hold dear. We all need to heal. Staying here in Zyrian’s castle just rubs salt on the open wounds.
“The wraiths have searched the dungeons,” Aria murmurs. “They’ve searched the main floors. They’ve even looked in the vaults. Nothing.”
Something prickles at the back of my mind. The Runestone was Zyrian’s most precious possession. Would he have put it behind locked doors, or would he have put it somewhere so unobtrusive that no one would ever think to look there?
“Hang on,” I say slowly. “There’s somewhere the wraiths haven’t searched.”
“Where?”
Could it be this simple?
“The wraith you talked to said she’s never been inside Zyrian’s bathroom before.” It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. “Could that be where the Runestone is hidden?”
“You’re right.” Comprehension dawns on Aria’s face. “That’s exactly what she said. And when I asked her why, she didn’t seem to know, really.”
I jump to my feet, ready to get the hell out of here. “Let’s go look.”
14
Aria
Tucked inside Zyrian’s toilet bowl, anchored to this world by a wisp of magic, we find the Runestone of Brísingr.