by Loki Renard
“It’s probably your damn portal generator which brought them here,” she said. “I told you, those things suck power. We might have our own generators, but that doesn’t mean the power can’t be detected. This island probably glows on their scanners thanks to all the electromagnetic activity.”
“I had to test it,” Eldor snarled.
“Why?”
“For this very reason,” he growled. “For the day when the humans would come and we would be trapped like rats on this cold rock.”
“You brought them to our door,” Aria told him. “I’m not the one who betrayed us. You are. In your desperation to escape, you have killed us all.”
There was a silence following her words, broken by a growl from Eldor. “Get your pet under control, Vyktor.”
“I don’t think we should open the portal. I think we should stand and we should fight,” Vyktor growled, wrapping his arm around Aria’s shoulders and pulling her away from the increasingly agitated Eldor.
“For what? We could be victorious over these helicopters, but they will send more. They will not let us rest, Vyktor. They will hound us to the very ends of their earth. We must escape. The portal is not stable, but I believe I can power it sufficiently to draw us through.”
“I’m not leaving,” Vyktor declared. “Not without Aria. And I can’t take Aria, so I’m not leaving.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No,” Vyktor said, his expression as intense as Aria had ever seen. “I am not.”
The tension in the room was so thick that Aria almost choked on it. Vyktor and Eldor stared at one another with gazes filled with something close to hate. Eldor’s anger at Vyktor’s insubordination was obvious in every line of his body, and in the clenching of his fists. For his part, Vyktor held his head high and stared the grey-eyed dragon down.
“I will give you one final chance to comply, General,” Eldor insisted. “We do not have any more time to argue, and I do not have any more time to entertain your fantasies of living a human life.”
“And what will you do to stop…”
Vyktor never finished the sentence. One of the other dragons who had been standing behind him lifted a heavy piece of metal and brought it down on the back of his head. Vyktor dropped like a stone and Aria heard herself screaming as he fell unconscious to the floor.
“What are you doing?”
Nobody answered her. They ignored her completely. She tried to rush forward to see if he was okay, but they blocked her with their bodies and her attempts to break through them were useless. They were moving in a way that suggested that they had planned this. Aria watched, stunned at the betrayal unfolding before her as Eldor’s men picked up the unconscious Vyktor.
“What the hell!” Aria stepped forward, putting her hand on Eldor’s arm. “What is this? What are you doing to him?”
“Sorry,” Eldor said. “But Vyktor is too important to leave here, and we will not allow him to die for the sake of his…” he looked at her with a curling lip, “…curious obsession with a human.”
He turned his back on her and started barking orders.
“The portal will be open for less than thirty seconds. Move through quickly. Do not attempt to take your flight form until you have returned to our realm. Ready?”
“Ready!” A chorus of voices answered him.
Aria could not stop them. She did not have the power to overwhelm them, and even if she could have stopped Eldor from opening a portal, to do so would be to sentence Vyktor to death. A small army was descending on their location.
He activated the portal. For a second, nothing happened and Aria was simultaneously happy and horrified. Then a small circle opened in the air. It opened swiftly to around six feet in diameter, and finally Aria got what she had always wanted—to look through and see the world beyond. She saw tall white cliffs populated with great spiraling buildings. She saw a clear sky filled with whirling dragons of all colors and sizes. She saw a world that Vyktor belonged in—and she did not.
The dragons carried Vyktor’s insensate form through the gleaming portal, exiting within the thirty-second window Eldor had mentioned. It was well they did, for the edges of the thing shimmered and then collapsed in on themselves a couple of seconds later.
“Goodbye,” she whispered as the portal closed, leaving the thick stone walls around her and the sound of heavy boots descending down the myriad stairs above.
In a matter of seconds, she was on her own. Betrayed and heartbroken, Aria sank to the floor and sat there. The only small spark of hope she could cling to was the knowledge that Vyktor was alive on the other side of the realm’s divide.
She ached without him. It was an immediate, almost physical pain that paralyzed her. She began to sob floods of tears, filled with grief that made her feel as though her heart was truly breaking. There was a pain in her chest and a hollowness in her stomach that made the world feel sore and sad all at the same time.
Above her, she could hear the military breaking down doors, rummaging through the various rooms and storage places. They would be finding the gold and the jewels. They would be finding all the evidence of her life with the dragons.
Finally, a detonation above her blew the final door open. The sound was enough to temporarily deafen her, and the light from the explosion left her stunned and disoriented as a horde of military flooded down the stairs toward her.
“Where are the fucking dragons!?”
They screamed the questions at her, their weapons pointed at her in terrifying fashion. Grabbed roughly and dragged first up to her feet, then pushed back down to her knees, Aria was certain that she was about to die. These men had come for blood, and it had been denied them.
“They’re gone!”
“Where!?” She was shaken roughly, her teeth chattering as fresh adrenaline flashed through her body. If Vyktor were there, he would have killed every one of these men where they stood, she had no doubt about it.
“Back where they came from!” she screamed back at her interrogator.
“Liar!”
“I’m not lying. They made a portal. They activated it when they heard you coming. And they left.”
“Fuck!” The man questioning her kicked the portal generator hard. “Get this bitch out of here.”
A dark hood was put over her head, her hands were zip-tied behind her back. She’d known from the beginning that if they came for her, it would not be a rescue mission. She was half surprised they hadn’t summarily shot her. Maybe they thought she knew something.
She was dragged up from the ground and roughly manhandled back up the stairs of what had once been her home. Finally, they tossed her into a waiting helicopter. None of them said a word to her, but she could feel derision flowing from those she had once known as comrades. They thought of her as the worst possible thing any person could be: a traitor. Not just to her country, but to her whole species.
Chapter Seventeen
“What!?” Vyktor’s rage made the very stone of the mountain shake. He had woken in the dragon realm with a sore head and a great fury. “Where is Aria?”
“She is back where she belongs, with her people,” Eldor said calmly. “We did this for your own good, Vyktor. You were obsessed with her. She’s just a human.”
“A human who…”
“Yes, I know, saved our lives. The fish we eat save our lives by sustaining us, but we don’t form romantic relationships with them, Vyktor. You’ll see now that you’re back here. Your head will clear. You’ll understand that I did the right thing for you.”
Vyktor snatched Eldor in his hands and snarled, his teeth snapping at the ends of the man’s nose. “You will build another device. You will open the portal and you will return me to Earth, or I will take you apart piece by piece until I do. Like one of your machines, Eldor. I will lay out the little bits of you and I will feed them to the birds as you watch.”
The threat was delivered at a volume no louder than his normal speaking voice, but it was all the mo
re frightening for it. All who heard it knew instantly that he meant every violent word.
“I can’t make another…”
“You figure out how,” Vyktor insisted. “Or it will be the end of you. I promise that on my father’s heart.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Listen,” the sleek man in the lumpy suit said. “They’re not stupid. They know the lizards needed help, and they know you provided it. There’s security footage of your moving their gold for them, making purchases, aiding and abetting them through criminal acts. There’s a stolen car…”
Aria was barely listening to the man. She was exhausted and miserable beyond what she had known her capacity for misery could be. She had been thrown into a cell, clothed, but stripped of all hope. The collar Vyktor had made for her had been cut from her neck and had no doubt been entered into evidence against her. It was strange, but she could still feel it in spite of its absence.
She sat in the tiny cell, with the light perpetually on, the walls so close she could reach out and touch them with both hands. Guards came twice a day to feed her, but not on any particular schedule. It would have been bad if they had called her names or judged her, but what they did was worse—they ignored her completely. The treatment was designed to break her spirit, a cruelty on top of the cruelty of her situation.
Aria did not know how long it had taken for this lawyer to come and see her. It could have been a day. It could have been a week.
Things have to get worse before they get better.
Vyktor’s words came back to her, floating through her memory. She smiled down at the table a little. She missed him with all she had, but parts of him were still with her. Even with her feet shackled to the floor, her hands shackled to the desk, there was a little tiny part of her that felt free in his memory.
“Listen,” her lawyer repeated. “If you ever want to see the light of day again, you’re going to have to explain how you were captured and tortured…”
“I wasn’t tortured,” Aria said bluntly. “I was… tamed.”
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “What do you mean, tamed?”
“I mean…” How to explain what she’d been through without sounding insane? Aria really didn’t know. These people didn’t understand. The matter was simple to them. Dragons = evil. The only reason someone would offer the dragons aid was if they were insane, or evil themselves. The government was making the latter case against her, looking for the death penalty.
“They confined you against your will?”
“I was a prisoner,” Aria said. “Right up until they attempted to make their retreat. They behaved with honor. We did not. We…”
“So you were held captive,” her lawyer interrupted her. He wasn’t interested in learning the truth, he was just trying to cobble together a narrative that would get her out of trouble. She supposed that was a good thing, but it wasn’t the truth. This close to death, the truth of what had really happened suddenly mattered to her a lot.
“They wanted to know how to get along with humans,” Aria tried to explain. “They wanted to see if there was a way to… train us.”
Nothing she said made the process sound any better. Had she been brainwashed into thinking she loved Vyktor? Was it really as her lawyer was telling her it must have been? If so, why had it felt so different?
“In the beginning, yes, he was experimenting, I guess,” she said, trying to explain better. “But he did it because he wanted to find a way to stop the battle. The dragons didn’t really know what we were. They thought we were like animals.”
“So he trained you like an animal?”
“At first, yes.”
“Was sexual contact involved at any time?”
Aria nodded.
“So you were abused.”
“Not by him.”
“By who?”
Aria looked her lawyer dead in the eye. “You.”
“Me? I wasn’t there.”
“I mean you as in… society. I was a lost, fucked-up kid when I joined the service. They took care of me, and then they used me as a tool to get a job done. I was okay with that. But he taught me what it was to be a woman. And they… the dragons… never wanted war. They wanted to retreat.”
Her lawyer didn’t seem to care about any of that. His face was bland and unsympathetic as he repeated himself yet again. “I’m trying to get you off a charge of treason, Ms. Thomas-Jones. It carries the death penalty.”
“Maybe I was meant to die,” Aria said. “In that desert, when my plane went down. If that dragon hadn’t been on my ass, I would have died there and then. He gave me months of a love hardly anyone gets to have. If I die now, fine. At least I won’t spend a lifetime missing him.”
Her lawyer gave her a long look. “I’m going to argue diminished capacity and psychological compromise,” he said. “Whatever they did to you, it changed you.”
“That is true,” Aria agreed.
“It’s in your best interests to make an appeal to the court as a victim. You were a prisoner of war.”
“Yes,” Aria nodded. “I was.”
“So all we have to do is explain why you helped them after the Final Strike. Coercion on their part, perhaps. Did they force you to assist them? Were you a captive on that island?”
She should just lie. Vyktor was gone and she was on her own. But Aria couldn’t bring herself to do it. All she had left was her memories, and the truth of what had been between them. Besides, she didn’t believe for a second that she was ever going to get off these charges. The government were determined to make an example of her. Her face had been splashed over every magazine, website, newspaper, and letterbox flyer in the country. In the eyes of the world, she was deeply guilty already. They didn’t understand that the government had lied to them and blamed much of the destruction they had caused on the dragons.
A tap on the door interrupted the meeting. Her lawyer looked relieved.
“We need the prisoner. We need to run some medical assessments on her.”
“You have to make sure I’m healthy before you execute me,” Aria laughed sadly. “Just give me a bullet and be done.”
Nobody paid attention to what she said. Nobody cared. They unshackled her and led her to a medical chamber where she was shackled to a bed while a doctor with a chronically flat affect went through the motions of an exam. Aria did as she was told, there was no point resisting. She peed in the cup when they asked her, then went back and allowed herself to be shackled again.
“Oh,” the doctor said a few minutes later. “That’s interesting.”
“What?” Aria lifted her head.
The doctor looked at her with his dull milk eyes and said two words that changed everything.
“You’re pregnant.”
Aria stared at him. “I can’t be. I haven’t been with a man in…”
She hadn’t been with a man—but she had been with a dragon. Vyktor. Holy… was it even possible?
“Lie back, please,” the doctor said. “Lift your shirt.”
He produced an ultrasound machine, squirted gel on her belly, and began moving the probe back and forth over her stomach. Aria watched the doctor’s face as it began to contort.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I think it has a defect.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It… er… it… uhm… it has…” The doctor called his assistant over. “What would you say that looks like?”
“It looks normal. Strong heartbeat… all limbs present and correct… and…” The assistant’s voice trailed off too. “Wings?”
Oh, god. It was Vyktor’s.
The doctor was talking again, not to her, of course. “We will have to make alternative arrangements until the… offspring is born. The possible studies are…”
Aria had thought she knew fear when she flew her first fighter mission. She had thought she knew fear when the dragon ripped her canopy off and stood above her with its fire breath and sharp claws. But she had never known the d
eep, primal, true fear of someone wanting to harm the life inside her.
“No,” she said, her voice shaking with rage. “No, you will not hurt…”
“Sedate her,” the doctor ordered his assistant.
Obeying directly, the assistant pushed a dose of sedative directly into Aria’s neck. Almost immediately, the world began to fog over.
“No…” Aria reached out for her cuffs. She had to get free, but already the weakness was overcoming her.
She felt herself being unshackled and moved, but she was powerless to do anything as two guards lifted her onto a stretcher and began carrying her back to her cell.
“Lizard fucker,” one of them muttered. “She fucked the lizards. Now she’s got a lizard in her belly.”
“Maybe they made her,” the other replied.
“Nah, she’s defending them,” the first guard said. “She’s a filthy lizard fucker. That’s what she is.”
Where the fuck were you when I was flying missions, huh? Down here in this bunker, nice and safe, I bet. You’ve never been within a hundred miles of a lizard, let alone close enough to be fucked by one. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Neither one of you.
She tried to say all that and more. But it all came out in a long, incoherent moan of vaguely word-like sounds that didn’t do anything but make the guards laugh.
*
When she came to, Aria ached with the agony of a sadness so deep she could barely stand it. When it was her and her alone, she had been content with death. But that was no longer the case. She had someone else to fight for. Someone infinitely vulnerable. Someone who would be born of her body and Vyktor’s blood—if the doctors did not decide to do their ‘studies’ first.