The Dragon King

by Heather Killough-Walden

  He’d hated her the moment he’d met her. Evangeline. The Legend.

  She’d been so confident – beautiful, strong, smart. And she fucking knew it. That was the worst. If she’d been in the dark, a little less sure of herself, a little more easy to control, he could have summoned patience for her. But she’d burned through what little patience he’d had for her half-way through their first meeting. Confident women always did.

  And now she thought he was dead.

  He chuckled at that thought.

  “She will be yours,” the Entity told him now. “As promised.”

  Arach glanced at his boss. “She’s insufferable,” he countered. “And uncontrollable.”

  “On the contrary,” the Entity replied. “She’s a challenge. Think of how much sweeter it will be when you break her.” He smiled that too-wide grin he was infamous for. “And do not fret. She will be taken down a few pegs before she is handed over to you. As you believe appropriate.”

  It was oddly endearing that the Entity was taking the time to reassure him at this particular moment. He couldn’t have had much energy; his power was so diminished in fact, that Arach could actually feel the weakness of its waves as they emanated from the Entity’s body. It made sense. Could anyone really claim to be at their best when freshly dragged from the recesses of the Abyss?

  The Entity had been right. The sons-of-bitches would eventually succeed in killing him. But he was unstoppable, seemed to know everything, and planned for every contingency, even this one. Hell, especially this one.

  He’d known that it was a distinct possibility the kings and their queens would one day get the better of him, so he’d put a plan in motion for just such a day. He had literally torn himself in two, and placed half of his miraculous being in a pendant, something he called an Animus. Arach wore the Animus now, a rather intricate and admittedly beautiful creation of black platinum that was covered top to bottom with inscriptions almost no one in the realms could read. The words were the Entity’s real names, and there were dozens of them. Maybe hundreds.

  Some of the kings and their irritating constituents had in fact noticed the Entity’s general weakness. They’d chalked it up to inhabiting too many forms of late. But the reason he’d been weak was not because of how many bodies he’d possessed; it was because he was literally half the being he’d been before.

  That was the thing about the Entity. He was strong enough and immense enough that even half of him was ample to be frightening. Half of him was sufficient to take on a personality of its own and carry out a plan. He was just that tough.

  What the Entity had not planned on was that Amunet would be killed at the same time, and that her body and soul would need to be extracted from the Abyss along with his.

  Arach leaned his normally strong body against the cavern wall and rested his head against the stone. He closed his eyes. He was enveloped with pain and exhaustion. Putting the Entity back together had been the easy part. But Arach had known that doing so without saving Amunet, the woman the Entity loved, would be suicidal. So he’d used every last ounce of his power to save her next.

  It had literally taken blood, sweat, and tears to pull her from the gravity of the Abyss before she’d been too far gone to wrest from its clutches. He’d set the spell in motion the moment he’d learned everyone was headed there. The Entity had been given no choice; that was where Amunet’s body was. But the Abyss that had developed due to the imbalance of life and death in the Duat posed a very real problem, one that Arach had recognized from the beginning.

  He’d just known the goddess would fucking fall in. Leave it to a woman to cause the most trouble. And that, she had. Amunet had tumbled to her nearly ultimate undoing along with the Nightmare King and the Entity. But again, by that point Arach had already set a spell in motion.

  Casting it was the most painful thing he’d ever done, including going up against Chantelle, and it left him without his dragon magic for an untold amount of time. Hell, it had left him anemic and dehydrated, and several of his vital organs had begun to fail. Fortunately, the Entity still saw him as useful, still had a bargain to keep with him, and seemed to want to reward him for thinking of Amunet’s well-being. That was probably why he was trying to reassure Arach right now about Evangeline, and it was also why he had given Arach several magical items to help him while he was on the mend.

  Now Arach leaned against the wall and willed the items to work, because if he had to submit to this amount of pain much longer, he was going to lose his ever loving mind.

  “Come here, Arach.”

  The former Dragon King opened his eyes. He could feel them burning in his skull, spinning between the green they normally were and the red they became when he was emotionally charged. The Entity was watching him from across the cavern, beyond where Amunet’s casket lay in the center of the stone floor like a coffee table.

  All around them, the cave had been outfitted with modern amenities, from electric lamps to sofas and love seats, a massive carved wooden armoire, tapestries on the walls, and throws draped over the backs of seating arrangements. The Entity had done it all with a snap of his long, thin fingers, too. Apparently he wanted Amunet to be comfortable when she returned to the world of the living. It was a small thing.

  He planned for her to take over the world. So whatever helped.

  Arach pushed away from the wall and strode across the room, trying his best to ignore his discomfort as he approached his employer. The Entity was in half-form at the moment. That was what Arach called, it anyway. Half human, half bizarre as fuck scary as hell shadow thing from some multi-realm version of Hell. That half-form turned to face him, tall and skinny and full of smiles that were full of teeth which were full of dark promise. “You did well, dragon,” said the Entity as Arach approached. “You should not be suffering.”

  With that, the Entity reached his long, shadowy, bony arm toward Arach, and for a split second, the former Dragon King was certain the monster was going to just out-and-out kill him. After all, what better way to end suffering?

  But there was no death. Instead, there was a brief repass as the pain ebbed away. His blood stopped boiling, his eyes stopped burning, his head stopped throbbing, and the wound in his abdomen closed back up again. At least that was gone.

  “Thank you,” he said calmly as he turned to glanced at the sarcophagus. “What will you do with her now?”

  “Why, awaken her of course.”

  That stopped Arach. He turned back to the Entity, his brow furrowed. “Come again?”

  The Entity laughed. It was a grating, terrible sound. But he had to be forgiven. He was only half-throated at the moment. “You were marked when you came to work for me,” the Entity reminded Arach. “As are all of my servants.” He paused, letting that sink in.

  That’s right, thought Arach. He’d just been thinking of it, in fact. The Dragon Queen was marked. Of course, she hadn’t been a queen at the time. Or she probably never would have agreed to being marked.

  What did a servant give when he or she was marked? Their blood. And what was the one necessary component to awakening the former goddess that had, until now, remained inaccessible? A queen’s blood.

  “Holy shit,” mouthed Arach. He slowly turned back to the sarcophagus, and his hand absently touched the crescent-shaped mark on his stomach. Evangeline the Dragon Queen bore a similar mark.

  And the Entity had her majesty’s blood.

  Chapter One

  You almost never see death coming. It’s almost always a surprise. You laugh and joke or you cry and complain and you trudge through the day or the night taking existence second by second, trapped in the now. You wake up groggy and stumble for your coffee and you smell it and it’s nice, but you never think, “This is the last time I’m going to smell coffee.” Or you pull up a song in the car and it’s a favorite so you sing along, but you never think, “This is the last time I will ever sing with this song.”

  It’s not as bad for the one who never see
s it coming, though. One second you’re there and the next you’re floating and then you’re gone. It’s so much worse for those who never saw it coming… and are still around to see it go. The ones left behind.

  The funny thing is, when you lose someone you love, all of those moments just before – the sights, sounds, smells, every tiny detail – they become imprinted on your mind forever. Like a brand, indelible. That smell of coffee you had just before you rounded the corner to find her lying on the kitchen floor will always remind you of your wife. That song you were listening to just before you answered the phone will always make you think of your sister.

  Indelible.

  That was how Evangeline saw, heard, smelled, and felt the details of that morning.

  Her mother had been gone several days. She’d left to travel to nearby villages for supplies, supplies humans needed and dragons didn’t. Eva missed her horribly, but her father seemed to know he needed to fill the empty space she left behind, and he’d spent a lot of time with her that week.

  That day was supposed to have been a clear day; that was what she’d hoped for anyway. Her father had promised to take her to the top of the mountain and practice gliding from the cliffs. But the smell of rain and the sound of thunder woke her up in the den. When she entered her parents’ room, their bed was empty.

  She stepped out of their home and into a building rage of a storm. Clouds had gathered low because they were high in the hills, and when clouds gathered, they always gathered low. But these clouds were dark. They were filled with anger.

  Wind whipped at her long white hair, tangling it as it brushed past, sweeping up the mountain toward the peaks in the short distance. That was where her eyes traveled, following the wind as if it were saying to her, Look Evangeline. Look here. Look now.

  At the end of the winding ribbon of trail, at the very tip of the craggy hill she’d traveled many times, two figures were discernible beneath the building gale. One was dressed in white. The other was dressed in clothing the color of unspent charcoal. Both were instantly recognizable.

  The figure in white was crumpled on the ground in an unmoving heap of snowy hair and white scale armor. It took a moment for young Evangeline to fully register what she was seeing. But once she did, she realized she was already moving. Her legs, her body, and her racing heart all figured it out before her mind accepted it.

  “Pata!”

  She ran as fast as her legs would carry her, but she was still so young. She could count her years on one hand. She’d couldn’t even fully transform yet. She was slow. So very slow.

  Something was wrong with her father. He didn’t answer her, he didn’t look up at her. He always answered her right away. “PATA!”

  It took her forever to reach the cliff. She remembered the air smelling like dragon magic. It was an electric scent, so strong it almost burned her nostrils. It was the scent of her father’s magic, terribly powerful. And another’s… but she couldn’t place it. She’d never smelled it before.

  As she ran, the world grew darker, the storm so deep it seemed night had fallen on the land. A lifetime passed before she was dropping to her father’s side. She shook him with her too-young arms. She shook him with all of her strength, but there was no life in his body. The world grew blacker.

  But she could still see his face. His eyes were too white. They were usually white, unless he was angry or happy or excited or feeling mischievous, and then they turned red. She loved his red eyes; they were ruby and deep and glittering. But right now, they were neither silver-white nor ruby-red. They were unseeing. There was no smile on his lips. He didn’t chuckle, he didn’t reach up and hug her. He just stayed there on the ground, unmoving.

  The storm overhead let loose, screaming at last as lightning slammed into nearby trees, splitting them in two and setting them alight. Thunder crashed around Evangeline, outlined by the crackling of a newly ignited fire. She barely heard any of it.

  Through blurry sight, she looked up at the Great Gray standing over her. He was nearly invisible in the unnaturally dim light, his outline dark against the building blaze behind him. But he met her eyes just once, and she was caught in the gray-white flames of his gaze. Those eyes had always reminded her of what fire would look like if all of the color was taken out. Rather than yellows and reds, it would be whites and grays, flickering and blazing hot, but without hue.

  He stared at her steadily, with the only part of him she could see.

  “Why?” she finally asked. But her tiny, quivering question was swallowed by the storm. And then he was gone, whisked away with another flash of lightning and sudden night.

  A hand was on her shoulder. Eva looked to her right to find her mother kneeling beside her, blue eyes bright as Eon Blooms. The bluest eyes the world had ever seen. How she’d managed to be there at that moment, she would never know and she didn’t care.

  “Come to me, child,” her mother said, holding her arms open. She was a human then, frail by dragon standards but oh-so-beautiful. She had long red hair that flew all around her in the storm. Eva had inherited her own strange purple eyes from her parents, a mixture of a Great White’s strong-emotion red and the blue eyes of a kind Nomad. But right now she could not see through them. The rain and her tears were drowning out the world.

  Eva rushed into her mother’s arms, falling into them as if all of the bones had been taken from her young body, leaving her as lifeless as her father. And there, she joined the storm in her fury.

  All around them, the fire spread. Trees went up like candles, reaching long, crackling arms to the sky. The two of them stayed there in a circle of safety for hours, the dragon child and her not-so-human mother, as the world went up in smoke. In the billowing black of the dying woods, the dragon dens were destroyed. The village dispersed. The dragons disappeared.

  Legends were born that day, stories that grew as twisted and faded as the years, like all stories. Thousands of years had gone by since that morning. She’d seen the dawning and dying of countless civilizations. She’d grown up and grown strong.

  In the first fifty years of her strange, relentless life, she’d witnessed her Entity-human mother grow old and die, only to take the form of something else. A fae, an animal, another human… and little by little, the small changes became glued to one another like snowflakes, until they piled up to make one big change. One that covered up the past. Making it unrecognizable.

  Except for that one day. That one morning when she’d lost everything.

  And the man who had taken it from her.

  Chapter Two

  “Evangeline,” said the Dragon King with a smile. “It is indeed a pleasure.”

  His voice was deep and laced with that singular intonation Evangeline had long since equated to powerful magic. “Mimi has told me a good deal about you.” He held out his hand in an offer to shake.

  Eva was burning up inside. A grayscale fire was eating her alive. She’d never expected to actually meet up one day with the man who killed her father. She’d never expected to be standing so close to him, face to face. And she’d never imagined that when she did – if she ever did – he would be staring at her like that, that he would be so gods-awful beautiful, even in his human disguise. Or that she would be destined to become his queen.

  Never had she dreamed such a thing. Who would?

  But there he was. And she was a foot away. And her entire life came crashing in on her in that moment.

  There were a million ways this could go down. A million destructive, combustible ways. But they were in a mall, surrounded by countless humans – and Mimi. So Eva did another thing she had never imagined she would do and steeled herself like she never had before. And she took his offered hand.

  “Has she?” Eva asked. Her voice remained even. She glanced down at the young red dragon who was grinning ear to ear as she spooned up her next mouthful of yogurt. “Don’t believe any of it.”

  “Oh I don’t,” said Calidum as he shook her hand. “It’s all good, after all
.” He grinned, flashing white teeth. “And you can’t fool me.”

  The words echoed in her mind, laced with radiant magic.

  Taking his hand might have been a mistake. His fingers were curled around her in a powerful grip, and his magic flooded her at once. He didn’t do anything specific. There was no attempt to control her or put her to sleep or set her on fire or turn her invisible – all things the Great Gray was reputed to be able to do. He simply sent a thick cord of his power into her, a cord that shot through her body and wrapped around her from the inside, reminding her all at once exactly who and what he was.

  It was a warning. It may also have been a promise. After all, he damn well knew who she was too. And so, he would know she was after revenge.

  You can’t fool me, she recalled his words.

  A weird, hot kind of chill went through Eva, hanging onto the coat tails of the Dragon King’s subjugative power. Calidum hadn’t yet let go. In fact, his grip had tightened. Eva felt heat flood her cheeks, and she had no idea why.

  Mimi giggled. The Dragon King glanced over and winked at the younger girl.

  At that point, Eva barely refrained from yanking her hand out of his.

  Calidum was model gorgeous, of course, appearing before them as a brown haired six-foot-five man in a tight gray tee-shirt and tight worn blue jeans that hugged every ripped muscle in his beautiful body. He had brown eyes with amber rings around their irises. Mimi thought he was a red dragon, like her. In a vague sense, he resembled “Sam Winchester” from Supernatural. She knew a few fangirls who would have swooned in his presence.

  But Evangeline knew better than to take him at face value. He wasn’t the vision standing before her looking so very handsome, and yet so fundamentally human. In actuality, the Great Gray could look like anything he wanted. He was neither night nor day, he was not set in stone. And because of this, he could be anything. Any dragon. Any man.