by Shannon West
“Sorry. I can’t do that.”
“Take these off!” I watched as he shook his head calmly. God, he was really making me angry, and I was scared too, but I didn’t want him to see it. My head felt like it was going to explode. I felt disoriented, and I was handcuffed to this gorgeous man, but not in a good way.
He gave me an apologetic look and said quietly, “Sorry, Luca. You have to come with us.”
I kind of lost my mind then and reached up to hit him but he grabbed my hand. That precipitated a little scuffle and Sebastien, who was driving the car, looked back over his shoulder. “Having trouble back there, Dmitri? Do you need some help? You want me to pull over?”
I felt my captor stiffen, as if insulted at the thought that he couldn’t handle me on his own. Then his muscular arms, feeling like two steel bands, circled my body and held me completely still. He looked toward the front seat and said, “Just keep driving. He’s under control.”
I have to admit that his voice did sound a little strained. I don’t think it was because of the effort to hold me still—but I still took some pleasure in it.
“Okay. We’re almost there, anyway.”
I perked up at that. “Almost where?”
Dmitri looked down at me. “The airport. There’s a plane waiting for us.”
“To go where?” Honest to God, it was like pulling teeth trying to get information out of him.
Dmitri hesitated for a second, no doubt trying to decide if he should take me into his confidence. Then he seemed to relax and turned toward me. “To my home.”
“Where’s that?”
He gave a long, exasperated sigh. “Didn’t your father teach you anything about Dragons?”
I snorted. “No. Like I told you, the only time he spoke to me was when he was yelling at me to get him another drink.”
He looked down at me like he wasn’t sure if I was kidding. Then he shook his head and didn’t say anything else for a while. The thing is, I did know a little about Dragons, just like everybody else. But when he said he was taking me to his home, that left a lot to the imagination, because the truth was that Dragons were from places all over the world.
Back in the ancient times, when the first maps of the world were drawn, if a country was unknown, the map makers put the Latin phrase, Hc Svnt Dracones, or Here Be Dragons at the edges of their known worlds. For hundreds of years, historians thought that just meant that the regions were unexplored, but in the nineteenth century, when these unexplored places became a bit fewer and farther between and only the remotest areas were left uncharted, scientists discovered these far-flung, outlying areas weren’t so uninhabited after all. The old maps had been correct after all. There really were honest-to-god Dragons living in those places.
The world reacted with fear and shock, about like what you’d expect. But when they figured out that Dragons mostly wanted to be left alone and that they had no ill intentions toward humans, everybody kind of relaxed. Treaties were signed, laws enacted and the world went back to ignoring the existence of Dragons. Except for when the Dragon Spawn caused trouble, that is.
Still, some intrepid explorers began to filter into the various Dragon territories, Dragons decided to pull up their welcome mats and let it be known that trespassers weren’t just unwelcome, but that if they were found in Dragon territory, they’d be eaten. That put a stop to it.
So these Goldens could be from just about anywhere—Greenland, Bhutar, Borneo, New Guinea, or the rainforests of the Amazon. There had been reports of Dragons in the archipelagos of the South Pacific, the rainforests of the Congo and the deserts of Namibia. Anyplace remote or where conditions were too harsh for humans was perfect for a pure-blood Dragon. They were impervious to the environment, and they were the fiercest predators on the planet. They were smart, ruthless and preferred solitude, and most humans were glad to give it to them. So were Spawn for that matter.
“I don’t have a clue where you come from. Why don’t you tell me?”
“My family are from Russia, Luca. The Kamchatka Peninsula.”
Shit. The Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia. I had to look it up once in high school for a term paper and found that it was a peninsula lying between the Sea of Okhotsk on the west and the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea on the east, and it was one of the most remote spots on Earth. If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have remembered. It’s where Goldens and a few Reds had lived for centuries. And though they shared the territory, which was bigger than France, Belgium and Luxembourg all combined, so there was plenty of room, they had at best an uneasy truce. “If your father is a Red, he probably came from Russia, too.”
I had nothing to say to that so just kept quiet. I didn’t know much of my father’s history. He wasn’t the sharing kind.
“Well, look. I couldn’t care less about where he came from back in the day. I consider myself to be an American citizen. Period. So, I’d very much appreciate it if you’d just take me back home and leave me the hell alone. I have absolutely no desire to go to Russia.”
As we pulled into a parking lot, he said, “I’m sorry, Luca, but leaving you here is not an option.”
“But why? I don’t understand.” I wasn’t proud of it, but there was a little whining involved in this statement. I heard it, but couldn’t stop it.
“Because I’m bringing you home with me.” Before I could respond to that, he looked at the guy driving and asked, “How much time do we have, Sebastien?”
Sebastien looked back over his shoulder with a worried expression.
“Not much. I’m pretty sure we were being followed, but I lost them, I think. I’m just hoping that we can make it to the plane before they figure it out.”
Once the car was parked, Sebastien jumped out of the driver’s side quickly and opened the back door on my side. I didn’t have any choice but to get out since he was pulling on me from the front and Dmitri was pushing at me from the back. As soon as we were out, they each grabbed an arm and started running. I was getting dragged along, and mostly carried, since they were both quite a bit taller than me and had a much longer stride. It didn’t faze either of them in the least. As soon as we got to the terminal, which by the way, didn’t look like any normal entrance, they hustled me inside, and I stopped dead still and bent over. I was afraid that I was about to throw up. Or pass out. How embarrassing would that be? I mean, I’m in pretty good shape, but they were running like they were going for a medal at the Olympics.
Dmitri bent down so that he could look at my face. “Are you all right? What’s the matter with you?”
By this time, I’d managed to take in some oxygen, so I was able to stand up again. I was able to say, “Dmitri, you’re going to have to let me catch my breath here.”
He gave me a stern look. “I can do that, but you need to try harder to keep up.”
“I’m trying.” Which was a lie, of course. I was still feeling cranky and my head felt like it was about to explode. I was about to ask what the fuck was in that injection he gave me when suddenly, all hell broke loose again.
It was Spawn—four of them this time, but at least they were in their humanoid form and not partially shifted. They came at us across the terminal, expressions of menace on their faces. They were roughly brushing past passengers and airport employees, knocking them out of the way of they didn’t move fast enough. I recognized a couple of them from the neighborhood and knew they were in Artie’s gang. They were big guys, “roid” monsters, with the typical huge gnarled muscles, leathery skin, and puffy features that marked them as users of steroids to enhance their muscles and build their bodies up. They were irritable too and aggressive as hell in the best of times and this apparently wasn’t one of them.
As Spawn, they already had enhanced strengths, in shifted form or not, but for some Spawn it wasn’t enough. They wanted to be just as tough as a pure-blood, but it wasn’t like that, and many of them couldn’t accept it. Pure-bloods didn’t need bulky muscles to make them strong. They just natu
rally were.
As they got close, one of them, a huge guy with bright red hair, grabbed my arm and started pulling me toward him until he realized that Dmitri and I were tethered together by the handcuffs. He almost yanked my damn arm off, ignoring Dmitri and then started cussing me, like it was my fault I was handcuffed. He took a swing at me in his frustration at not being able to grab me and haul me away. Dmitri blocked it, spun to the side and gave him a sideways kick like one of those UFC boxers right upside his ugly head, and he hit the floor unconscious. I didn’t have time to appreciate Dmitri’s martial arts style because as soon as that first one fell, another one of them attacked Dmitri from behind. Dmitri reached back and pulled him over his head and slammed him to the floor. “Who sent you?” he snarled at the guy, staring down at him, but the guy laughed, showing blood-stained teeth from where he’d bitten his tongue, I guess.
“Fuck you!” he yelled at Dmitri, who wrapped one hand around his throat and tried again.
“I said, who sent you? Are you part of the Spawn gang?”
I was watching all this with my mouth hanging open and saw the guy dart his eyes to the side. I glanced up and saw another one of them barreling toward us and stuck out my foot in front of him so that he went sprawling across the floor and right up to where Sebastien was struggling with two more of them. Sebastien glanced down at him when he hit his leg and casually kicked him. The roid guy’s jaw snapped with an audible crack that made me wince.
Sebastien finished off his two in the next few minutes and sauntered over to us, just in time to nod a warning to Dmitri about another one coming running toward us in a rage, shouting obscenities.
Dmitri rolled his eyes at him and then aimed fist that connected with his temple, knocking a hole in the side of his face. A hole. In the side of his face.
I started trembling, remembering the time I shoved him and how he told me not to start something I couldn’t finish. I felt more than a little sick. I guess I must have swayed or something, because he looked down at me and leaned over to speak softly in my ear.
“Don’t worry, Luca. I won’t let anything happen to you.” I nodded, believing him, because for a pure-blood, he’d been surprisingly patient with me so far.
As the Spawn was flopping like a fish on the floor, Sebastien yelled over to Dmitri. “Get him out of here, Dmitri. I’ll hold them off long enough for you to get him someplace safe. Then, you can let me know where to come pick you up.”
“No,” Dmitri said. “I’m not leaving you here to fight them off by yourself.”
“Just go. I’ll be fine. Most of them are out of commission now anyway, and the police aren’t going to get involved in Dragon business. You need to get Luca to safety and this is the only way to do it.” He glanced down at his watch. “Mitya, you already missed your flight. We can try again tomorrow when things cool down.” He pulled Dmitri into a one-armed embrace that made me surprisingly jealous. That and the little nickname Sebastien called him. I assumed they were partners, but who were they to each other really? All I knew was I didn’t like Sebastien hugging him. “I’ll be waiting to hear from you,” he said and Dmitri started dragging me toward the front entrance of the terminal.
“Where the hell are we going now?”
“Just keep moving. I’ll explain when I get us out of here.”
I held up my arm with the cuff on it. “Do I have a choice?”
“No, actually, you don’t.”
“Dragons are such assholes,” I muttered under my breath, but he must have heard me because I felt him yank on my arm and looked up into his murderous gaze. I smiled at him, giving him lots of dimple and batting my long eyelashes a little. “Did I say Dragons? I meant Spawn.”
He growled again, giving me a look that said he wasn’t buying it, but was choosing to ignore it—for now. He pulled me along behind him so fast I almost found myself sprawled out at his feet, but at the last minute, he steadied me and we kept going.
He veered toward the down escalator and hauled me along with him. In a minute or two we were standing in front of a Rental Car place, and he was taking out his platinum MasterCard. He also leaned over and passed the agent some kind of folded bill, a bribe to get the paperwork done faster, and the next thing I knew he was being some keys and he was rushing me out to catch a bus to get to the rental car. With his usual less than impeccable timing, we missed the bus by seconds, and wound up standing by the curb while we waited for the next one. Considering the fact that Samboa’s gang was no doubt still searching for us, I felt more than a little uneasy.
The bus finally arrived and by this time I was used to people’s eyes going directly to my cuffed wrist. I ignored the driver, who was ogling me, and meekly followed Dmitri to a seat near the back, trying to look harmless and like I had no idea how that cuff got on me in the first place. The bus took off a few minutes later and I was glad of Dimitri’s warm body pressing up against me, keeping me from falling off my seat as the driver careened out of the airport on two wheels.
Chapter Three
Dmitri
I glanced down at the little dragonet beside me and breathed a sigh of relief. So far, so good. At least I had him out of danger for the moment and his small warm body felt good next to mine. If the Spawn got their hands on him, they’d take him to Eldor, and while I wasn’t sure exactly what Eldor wanted to do to Luca, I knew it wasn’t anything good.
Luca’s father had done a good job over the years of hiding him away. He’d also done a good job of trying to destroy his pride and self-worth, and this boy had no idea of how prized he truly was. And it seemed like Luca had no idea of what he was either. Of what his mother had been. He called himself Spawn, and technically he was, being only half Dragon. Though even that didn’t seem exactly right. Dmitri could smell a little human blood in him, which was a bit puzzling, since he had no idea where it came from. His father was a Red and Luca’s mother had been Wyvern, a close relative of the Dragon, also known as dragonets. Still, Luca was a treasure beyond imagining, because he was the last of the dragonets. Since his mother died, he was the very last Wyvern left alive on the planet. And now, he was all mine.
Wyverns, or dragonets, looked like Dragons, but there were significant differences. Wyverns had two legs instead of four, and their wings were larger in proportion and more powerful. In their shifted form they could fly for great distances. In addition, their tails were barbed and emitted a poison that could be fatal if not treated immediately. It was their only real weapon. They were much smaller in the flesh than Dragons too and only roughly human-sized in their shifted form. They didn’t breathe fire or shoot lightning from their mouths, unless they were fire drakes. I figured Luca’s very slight abilities in that area came from his father, a Red Dragon.
There were all kinds of myths and legends surrounding the Wyvern, and it was hard to know what was truth and what was simply made up by writers in the Middle Ages like Geoffrey of Monmouth, who lived in the eleventh century and was one of the major figures in the development of the tales of King Arthur and Merlin. He’d written a so-called history of Britain which was almost completely bogus, made up by other writers and himself, and he was the first to put forth the idea that Wyverns were a treasure beyond imagining.
To a Dragon like Dmitri, who loved treasure, the idea was positively orgasmic. The problem, of course, was that nobody seemed to know exactly why dragonets were supposed to be so valuable, though plenty of medieval kings tried to find out. In his writings on Merlin, Geoffrey of Monmouth had listed all of Merlin’s prophecies which were as obscure and confusing as most of the legends about the wizard. But Merlin had made a mysterious prophecy about the last dragonet.
That one was particularly strange and faintly ominous. And though the entire prophecy was long and I couldn’t remember all of it, I did remember the part about the treasure—
Precious wealth he is, far greater than any gold. His heart is the hardest treasure to hold.
Because of this prophecy, dragonets had been
hunted almost to extinction. For their wings, their scales, their bones, their blood, and anything else the kings could think of that might prove to be the “precious wealth” mentioned in the prophecy. Of course, they never found anything with any intrinsic value. Luca was the last Wyvern left alive, and I was determined to do whatever it took to keep him safe. If he proved to be valuable, and I picked up a bit more treasure along the way, who could blame me? At least I was trying to save him from harm.
The kings of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, hated all Wyverns. They hated Dragons too. Every time one of the kings heard about a Dragon living nearby, knights in their clunky armor would come to “slay” us and take our gold. Since we didn’t plan on giving it up, and because the knights were truly annoying, we killed every knight we encountered just on general principle. Soon they began to fear us too much to antagonize us without a really good reason.
So the kings, to save face, and their remaining knights, decided to go after only Wyvern and leave the much stronger Dragons alone. Wyvern were not particularly aggressive, and so they began dying by the hundreds. After a while, there was dissension among the knights. They were the ones who had to leave all those Wyvern babies crying over their parents’ bloody corpses after all. So the kings gave their knights what they needed—a noble cause—to cover up the fact that they were murdering innocent Wyvern by the hundreds and stealing their gold.
The kings told their knights that Wyvern were evil monsters and descendants of Cain in their Bible. They said that killing them all would be a holy endeavor and ensure them a place in Heaven. So, knights in their shiny armor sneaked up on Wyvern lairs, killed them and their entire families, including the children, by any means possible, and even felt good about it, because this was a holy endeavor now and sanctioned by their religion. Then they stole the Wyvern gold. The kings even got their poets to make up stories to lend it even more glamour and sometimes they even threw in a fair maiden just to keep things interesting. The poets gave these stories a fancy name. They called them Dragon Quests.