The Dragon King

by Heather Killough-Walden

  “Now I must insist you eat something,” he told her frankly, moving in long strides to the kitchen, where he opened the refrigerator and pulled out a platter. It was topped with numerous fine foods from chocolate covered strawberries to mini cakes. Loads of sugar…. Eva’s stomach growled again.

  Arach turned to her with the platter in one hand and a knowing smile on his handsome face. “It isn’t poisoned, if that’s what you’re afraid of. So, what have you got to lose?”

  Everything I have left of myself, she thought hopelessly. She needed to get out of there. She needed to escape – obviously. But he was right. She was weak. Eating could only help her. Right?

  Yeah, her inner voice said sarcastically. If you don’t mind eating crow.

  As if he could hear her thoughts and knew better than to waste time arguing with her, Arach picked up a chocolate strawberry, took a big bite, and chewed casually, leaving the remainder of it on the platter, which he then set down on the marble counter top. He moved around the counter as he licked his thumb and forefinger, his leather soled shoes sounding crisply on the marble floor. Eva watched him make his way to an ornately decorated and extremely well appointed bar on the other end of the overly spacious room.

  He stepped behind the bar, which also sported a marble counter top, this one darker and veined with gold, and proceeded to pull several bottles out from their places, mixing up a drink as if he had all the time in the world.

  Eva stayed where she was, hugging herself.

  “What do you think of the place?” he asked without looking at her.

  “It’s gold gilded,” she said, referring to the term gold gilded prison. She knew he would make the reference. “But it won’t hold me, Arach.”

  He smiled to himself as he finished mixing the drink. “Oh, I think you’ll find it will.”

  He replaced the crystal decanters and bottles he’d been pouring from and moved around the bar to make his way to where she stood, at the center of the grand space. He came within a foot of her, and she felt his newfound power wash over her, dark, twisted, dangerous. He held the drink out to her. “This will make things easier on you, Eva. I highly recommend you take it.”

  Instinct dictated her reaction before she had a chance to quell it, and her hand was moving lightning-fast to knock the drink from his grasp. But it never happened. His free hand wrapped firmly around her wrist long before it would have made impact, and not even a hair on his perfect head was out of place. He’d fully known she was going to do that. And he’d completely stopped her.

  She clenched her teeth together and glared at him.

  “Not thirsty, I take it,” he said, his green eyes glittering. “Very well.” He turned slightly to set the drink down on yet another side table that she hadn’t seen there before, and then he turned back to her. “I am.”

  With that, he shoved the sleeve of her jacket far up her arm in one fluid movement – and sank his fangs into her wrist.

  Chapter Twelve

  Eva felt the sinking of his teeth like a vice that broke the skin, tight, hard, and deep. She inhaled sharply with pain and attempted to pull away, but Arach simply turned with her, knocking her off her feet before taking her to the hard, marble floor. She hit with bruising force, the impact knocking the wind from her lungs and setting stars flying in her vision. She was encompassed in a cocoon of pain.

  Distantly, she felt him pull the blood from her vein, drawing it to the surface and drinking deep. Her mind reeled, and motes of unconsciousness threatened at her outer edges. She almost moaned in misery, but managed to stifle it. “What are you?” she asked instead, her voice pained and raspy, filled with the weakness he was worsening within her.

  He slowly withdrew his fangs before sending his tongue over her wounds in a sick display of sexual delight. She closed her blurring eyes and turned away, wondering why she had suddenly found herself in such a helpless position. This wasn’t like her.

  She was Evangeline. She was strong.

  “I am many things, Eva,” he told her. His voice had deepened further. “And you will come to know them all.” Then he stood, and Eva suddenly found herself being lifted whiplash fast, and thrown back onto her long legs. The stars in her vision exploded, and she immediately began to topple, but Arach righted her once more.

  She closed her eyes and focused, sending strength into her limbs.

  “Come come, Eva,” Arach scolded her. “If you’re this weak, you know you can’t afford to fight me.” He slowly released her, and Eva forced herself to stay standing. “It only hurts you, believe me. I have all the time in the world.” He was utterly composed, completely in control. She had expected something raging. She had not expected a man who was anything but at the verge of losing his temper. He was exacting, but calm about the torture he unleashed. For some reason, this was far more frightening.

  She had no idea how to deal with this. She had no idea what to expect from him. She certainly hadn’t expected him to behave like a vampire. Dragons had fangs, to be sure. Dragons were ancient, and ancient was primal. And nothing was more primal than sharp teeth.

  But he was using them against her, drinking her in a way that was different. He felt entirely deadly, and he’d never felt that way to her before. She hugged herself hard despite the pain in her wrist and licked her lips. “What are you going to do with me, Arach? You have to know that I will never accept an existence with you.”

  “Never is a long time, Legendary.” Arach walked away, heading back to the kitchen to leave her where he’d pulled her up from the floor. He turned once to smile at her over his shoulder, flashing those white fangs. Eva looked down at her wrist. The wounds were tiny pinpricks now, half healed. But bruising was already forming around them. And her wrist hurt. A dragon bite would have healed at once. It was one of the benefits of being a dragon. This wound, however, lingered and pulsed, a throbbing reminder of how he’d changed.

  “Now you begin to see how little good it will do to resist me,” he told her frankly, taking the tray from the kitchen counter and approaching her with it once more. “Let’s try this again, shall we?” He held the tray of sweets up for her. “Eva, I think you should eat something.”

  Eva looked from the tray to him and back again. She was going cold inside with realizations. They were hitting her like blocks of dry ice, freezing her from the inside out.

  Arach had effectively just punished her for not obeying her. And that was how it was going to be with him. Forever. Which he was right about; it was a long time.

  Unless she broke free. Right now.

  Eva blinked. She stared at the strawberry he’d bitten into. She noted the indentations of his teeth. She thought of her wrist, of the way he’d slipped his teeth into it as well. She thought of the way he treated people, like objects or food. She thought… of her mother.

  The man who killed my father is behind me. But before me stands the man who killed my mother. It was a younger voice making the sudden realization within her. And yet she spoke of it with the simple clarity of someone much, much older.

  And something inside Evangeline, in that very strange moment, just… snapped. She almost heard it. Like a twig in the forest or an elastic band.

  SNAP.

  Evangeline was a rare dragon, half Legendary and half Nomad. But what was more rare was that, even after thousands of years, she had yet to transform fully into her true dragon form. She’d changed bits of herself here and there, from eyes to fangs to her clothing, but there were aspects to her dragon self she had yet to discover. She wasn’t sure why. That was just the way she was.

  Now, as she heard that distinctive cracking sound in her soul and her gaze shifted into shades of red, some long lost aspect of her inner dragon was at last and all at once released.

  Like lightning, Eva knocked the silver tray out of Arach’s grip. In the next second, a stream of something black and purple instantly and violently erupted from her outstretched arms, sucking the light out of the room as if it were a black hole. Th
at crackling, sparkling, spinning black hole stream shot through Arach’s chest like a cannon ball, sending him flying across the room to slam into the opposite wall. At the same time, the blast was so catastrophic, the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows all along one wall of the room shattered. Beyond the shattered glass, the water in the Olympic sized swimming pool began to instantaneously boil.

  Eva stared through terrified, wide eyes at the destruction she was letting loose. She thought, for half a second, about trying to reel it in. But there was something else in charge now, something not the least bit related to logic or conscious thought. It was something primal and furious.

  The black hole stream died, and the lights in the room flickered, brightening once more. Without stopping to think about it, Eva wrapped her arms around herself and called up a transport spell. She felt weakness warring with wrath inside her, struggling for control of her form. Lucky for her, wrath was still in charge.

  But the wind kicked up, and the transport portal began to form in front of her – and then quickly died again.

  Evangeline felt the remaining anger coarse through her like tiny sparks left over after a lightning strike. They rode over her nerve endings, pricked her skin into goosebumps, and then flickered away altogether, leaving her utterly and completely drained.

  I can’t leave, she thought hopelessly. His words returned to her.

  It won’t hold me, Arach.

  Oh, I think you’ll find it will.

  He’d been right. There was something about the house that she couldn’t escape. She looked up toward the opposite end of the room, where she’d thrown her captor. He wasn’t there any longer. But her confusion was overridden by the fact that she realized she’d fallen to her knees. She had nothing left.

  A shoe click to her right drew her attention to her side. She turned and looked up once more.

  Arach’s chest smoked, his clothing burned away to reveal a ripped and strong physique underneath. But aside from this clear sign of recent distress, he looked unharmed and unfazed by her attack.

  Outside, the pool’s water slowed in its roiling as it gradually cooled.

  Arach’s eyes glowed blood red. “You’ve made quite a mess of things, Eva,” he told her in his strange and powerful voice. “And you’ve left me in a quandary.”

  He knelt down beside her, placing his forefinger beneath her chin to ensure she maintained eye contact. His own eyes flashed with unspent lightning. “Your outburst demands punishment. And your gilded cage requires cleaning.”

  He moved again with that fluid and unnatural grace, and Eva closed her eyes as his hand circled her throat. He used this terrible hold on her to lift her from the ground. Her hands wrapped around his wrist in a faint effort to dislodge him. But of course, she was absolutely ineffective. The wrath that had given her untold and unanticipated strength only moments earlier had effectively done nothing but poked the bear. It left her abandoned and spent, betraying her to the cruel grip of a pissed-off madman.

  “You need a whipping boy and a maid.” He pulled her closer, so that his next words whispered across her lips. “Perhaps your little friend Mimi would make an excellent use for both. Would do her some good to learn a little respect.”

  Eva’s heart went cold.

  Arach’s mouth curled into a knowing smile. “Let’s fetch her and find out, shall we?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  He pulled up a portal and dragged her into it.

  It was possible to hate a moment in its entirety, from the way it sounded, looked, and smelled to the way it felt. In every angle, depth, and perception, it was possible to inject pure and unadultered loathing in a single section of existence, in a single trice of time.

  For Eva, that moment was now.

  He had her in relentless grip, and her neck was beginning to hurt from where his fingers wrapped around her throat. She knew there was still something left inside her, some final corner she hadn’t yet cleaned out, a door she hadn’t ever opened – that true and final dragon form she’d never changed into – and with all her might, she wished she could access it now. But it eluded her.

  Run, Mimi, she thought desperately, willing the young dragon to hear her. Hide! Find Calidum! He will protect you!

  It was a strange thing for her to think about the man who had destroyed her family all those years ago, a man she had been so certain she hated. But she hadn’t the mental capacity to ruminate on how odd her choice was, how contradictory. She only knew that out there – with Calidum and the Thirteen Kings – was safety. It was better.

  In here, with this monster of a man, there was only pain, and the promise of more of it.

  Eva thought of the redhead girl who had befriended her, and her misery ratcheted up a notch. “Ar…rach,” she gritted out with the minimal air the bastard was allowing her.

  He sneered down at her as the portal swirled around them both. “Do you have something to say to me, my queen? You’d like to apologize, perhaps?”

  She nodded.

  He loosened his grip on her throat, letting her go. Clearly he wanted to allow her to verbally bow and scrape as he obviously felt any woman should. He even moved back a little, perhaps curious what she would do.

  Eva bent at the waist, bracing her arms on her knees, and took a moment to get the air back into her lungs. She closed her eyes against the dizzying weakness that was moving through her. Anger, she thought desperately. Fury, feed me.

  Then she swallowed hard and from her bent position, looked back up at her enemy. “If you harm a single hair on that girl’s head, Arach,” she told him softly but clearly as she straightened so she could deliver her ultimatum standing. “I will skin you, tan the skin, and make you into a new handbag.”

  Arach simply looked down at her for several long seconds before he finally said, “He told me you would be fun to break. And now I can see what he meant.” He shook his head, then raised his hand, giving her a quick glimpse of his knuckles before they descended toward her cheek. She closed her eyes, knowing she wouldn’t be able to move out of the way in time.

  But the sound that came next wasn’t his flesh against hers, nor was it the explosion of pain she was fully expecting between her ears. She opened her eyes in confusion, blinking several times at the scene before her.

  Calidum had stepped through the swirling walls of the portal, and his fingers were wrapped tightly around Arach’s wrist, rendering his blow inert.

  Eva stepped back, shock giving her the strength she’d been looking for seconds earlier. He’d stepped through a portal wall!

  “You’re so predictable,” Cal told the Traitor, his gray fire eyes flashing with red lightning. Then he hauled his right arm back, and with strength and speed that became a charcoal gray blur, punched Arach in the face.

  The Traitor stumbled and spun, and blood sprayed the walls of the portal. Cal moved with the same blurring gray power, closing the distance between him and Eva until he was taking her wrists gently but firmly in his hands. “Hang in there,” he whispered. “And stay close.”

  He spun again, lifting one hand toward the portal wall. The wall’s swirling colors separated, allowing him passage. He stepped through a second time, pulling Eva close in his wake.

  She felt the air heat up behind her as she passed through, and a sense of drastic urgency drove her to increased speed through the exit. She jumped out, using Cal’s grip on her to steady her wobbly legs, and found her boots touching down on concrete.

  A second portal was opened in front of them just as quickly as the first had appeared, and Calidum pulled her through that as well.

  Then a third.

  They moved from portal to portal, coming out in an alley at one point, a parking lot at another, on a mountaintop third, and finally they were stepping out into an honest to goodness vast, sandy desert. Warm wind touched her cheek.

  “Where the hell are we?” she asked, glancing around as the last portal closed behind her.

  “The Sahara. But we aren’t
finished yet.”

  He opened yet another portal, but this one looked different from the others, and it took longer to form. “Step back, Eva,” he commanded. But the command was softly spoken and laced with honest concern, so Eva, as weak and exhausted as she was, simply stepped back.

  The teleportation spell always begins with a rippling effect in the air in front of the caster. That rippling then spreads to a small opening, like a whirlpool forming in a body of water. The opening will sparkle and swirl with random colors, depending on the caster and destination. It will then widen, and as it does, a tunnel becomes apparent beyond the entrance. When it’s large enough, the caster steps into the portal and is whisked through time and space, as if through a wormhole, to his or her destination.

  This time, however, the air did not ripple. Instead, it grew darker, as if a tiny bit of twilight were appearing in a very specific bit of space in front of Calidum. It was like a shadow without anything blocking the sun. That shadow continued to darken, until an actual hole had formed in front of him. Not a portal. But a hole.

  Eva took another step back, just in case, and watched in fascination as the hole widened, becoming large enough for a person to step inside. There was no visible destination at the other end of the tunnel. There was no tunnel to have an other end. It was simply a hole.

  “You know,” she said, “the term ‘crawl into a hole and hide,’ isn’t meant to be taken literally.”

  Calidum glanced at her over his broad shoulder, flashing a beautiful smile. It caught her off guard, that smile. “Take my hand,” he told her, holding is right hand out to her. “We haven’t much time. I can feel Arach moments behind.”

  Arach managed to follow us? Trace us? A Legendary and a half Nomad? Through all of those portals? Her mind was spinning with bewildered questions. But it also seemed to be spinning with its own answer: Of course he did, Eva. You blasted him with some of your most powerful magic and it didn’t put a dent in him. He’s changed.