by Silver Milan
He slowly allowed himself and Ariel to fall back, and when the pair were at the rear of the party, he drew her aside and pressed her up against a tree, pinning her. “I don’t think I can wait until we get back.”
He sucked at her neck possessively, hard enough that she would bear a mark of passion later.
She ran a hand under his shirt, pressing her fingers between his powerful pecs.
He planted his lips on her mouth and drank of her freely. The copper taste was gone, replaced with the familiar special blend that was all Ariel.
“My lioness,” Jett said, ending the kiss, but keeping his face close to hers. His voice rasped with want. “My beautiful, ferocious lioness.”
“I’m looking forward to having little dragon-winged lions with you,” she said.
Jett laughed in that boisterous, deep-chested way of his youth. A laugh that only she could bring out.
“Someday, my lioness,” Jett said. “Someday. The future is an open road. We’ll take each day as it comes. Do you remember when I mentioned the defining moments of my life to you? Do you remember how I held back the third, perhaps most important moment?”
“Well don’t hold back,” Ariel said, combing a strand of hair behind his ear.
He couldn’t help but smile at the tender act. “The third moment—the most important moment—was when I met you.”
She melted in his arms, her eyes welling with moisture.
His lips found hers and they kissed each other hungrily.
Epilogue
Medeia Tenebris opened her eyes. She lay on the ground. Tall blades of grass thrust from the land directly in front of her, partially obscuring her vision. It was late evening, judging from the light levels.
She was hungry. So hungry.
The smell of the dead—sweat and blood, voided bowels, rot—proved unbearably strong to her enhanced senses, and only deepened her hunger. There was a particular undertone to the scent that told her she was smelling the fallen bodies of her own minions: the acrid, bittersweet aroma of reanimated flesh. Or in this case, formerly reanimated.
The air was thick with the buzzing of a thousand flies; within that buzzing, she also heard a squishy sound that repeated at random intervals: carrion eaters feeding.
She remained motionless for several minutes, listening from her supine position in the grass. In addition to the previous noises, she heard only the occasional cawing of crows.
When she was certain she was alone, she pushed herself up on shaky hands, lifting her upper body to examine her surroundings. Her enhanced vision readily picked out the details in the low light of twilight.
She lay in the shade of a great oak on the periphery of the clearing; it was fortunate she had fallen here, away from the ravaging rays of the sun, or she would have never revived.
As was obvious from the smell, the shifters hadn’t bothered to prepare a funeral pyre, instead leaving the bodies of her minions where they lay to serve as a feast for the crows, who were growing fat on the dead. None of the carrion eaters had dared bother her, of course.
With one hand she touched her chest where the bullet had torn a hole through her trachea. She could feel the dried blood around the area, but otherwise she had completely healed. She also noticed that while she still had her bone gauntlets, her tiara was gone, as if it had fallen away when she hit the ground. Yet she could not see it anywhere nearby.
This was all very odd. It shouldn’t have taken her so long to recover. A chest wound of that caliber wasn’t particularly fatal to a vampire her age. In fact, after taking the shot, she had already felt herself beginning to heal, but then she had blacked out.
The only explanation was that one of the shifters had come upon her from behind and completely separated her head from her body. But if that was the case, she should be dead. Even she wasn’t old enough to survive such a devastating attack.
Could they have knocked her out another way? A blow to the skull perhaps? Doubtful… there was no real superficial trauma that could have affected her. And besides, if she had merely blacked out, the dragon king would have never left her alive. He would have finished her off where she lay. She simply had to face the truth: she had indeed taken a fatal blow to the head. She should be dead.
And yet she lived.
It didn’t seem possible.
She felt the faint echo of power pulsing through her veins, and understanding slowly dawned on her. The dragon blood coursing through her system had worked in conjunction with the healing abilities innate to her advanced age, saving her. It had taken days to repair the mortal injury, judging from the sorry state of the bodies around her, the dragon blood slowly dissipating as the healing progressed.
The blood of a dragon king.
She had come so close to achieving her aim. So close. Her minions were supposed to keep watch on the perimeter and ensure that none ambushed them, but they had failed. She glanced at their mangled bodies. They had paid the price for their failure. Then again, most of them would’ve viewed death as a welcome release.
As she continued gazing at the fallen, she wondered if they might be able to serve her one last time…
Crawling on hands and feet and trembling uncontrollably, she went to one of the bodies. In all her long years she had only twice dined on a corpse. Each time the bodies had only just expired, the blood still warm in the lifeless veins. She was fairly certain these corpses wouldn’t provide sustenance, especially considering that they had been reanimated for a week already before they were slain, but she had to try.
She placed her shaking palms on either side of the rotting neck and leaned forward. All of her senses shouted at her to stop. The blood was obviously bad. But her ferocious hunger overrode the revulsion; she forced her canines to elongate, then she drank a small, test amount.
She pulled away with a hiss and dry heaved.
Yes, that wasn’t going to work. The blood was rancid. Inedible. Like trying to pump motor oil into her veins.
She scanned the other bodies, her eyes alighting on a fat raven that dined nearby. It picked at the contents of an open bicep.
Medeia was too weak to Siphon the Strength needed for even a simple trap of Air, so she dropped lower and slowly crawled toward her prey.
When she was close, she called upon her reserves and struck. The crow squawked in outrage as her fingers wrapped around it in a blur, and it attempted to get away. She almost lost the bird; squeezing hard, she quickly brought the crow to her lips and stabbed her canines through the feathers of its neck. She drank deeply and the strident squawks abruptly cut off. The taste sickened her, but the animal blood filled her body with at least a modicum of strength.
The next raven proved easier to catch. The next after that, even easier.
And so she moved among the dead, staying in the shadows, draining the ravens, growing stronger and faster with each she devoured. When she was done she stood to her full height, retracted her teeth, and wiped the back of her hand over her blood-wet mouth. She was no longer shaking.
Her gaze lingered on the clearing and the dead it contained for several moments. She was too weak to reanimate them, but even if she could the bodies were in such terrible condition that they would’ve been useless to her anyway. Such a waste.
There was no sign of her apprentice Derek among them, but even so she was certain he had died in the fighting: she had given him strict instructions to retrieve her body if anything bad happened during the ritual. She had turned Derek into a vampire only last year, and he was just strong enough to control the undead in her absence, but otherwise too weak to heal any but the most minor wounds. She had spent a lot of time and effort training him in the ways of the Death affinity after turning him, and she hated seeing the fruits of her labor thrown away like this. No matter. There were always others who desired power.
She observed the scorch marks in the grass, the crushed armor and limbs, the wide craters in the ground. That could only mean the dragon had gotten loose after she had fallen.
Freed of his collar, the dragon king was much too powerful to face alone. Medeia would have to gather more hunters, and perhaps more witch apprentices this time. She chuckled when she thought of how easy it had been to acquire those hunters. A few posts on social media describing strange ritualistic gatherings, and the ancient enemies of the vampires were drawn like moths to the flame. The witches were a little harder, but she had a few candidates in mind.
Yes, with more hunters and more witches she could take this dragon. Especially if he was foolish enough to remain among the lesser shifters. And once he was hers, she could use him to take Midnight.
Medeia scratched her chin for a moment. If the dragon king had his full powers, that meant...
Keeping to the shadows, she crossed the ruins of the camp until she stood where the prisoners had been staked, and then she searched the shrubs. Her night vision allowed her to see as if it were day, but to her disappointment, she couldn’t find the collar that had formerly constrained the dragon king. The making of such a valuable artifact was known only to a precious few, and she certainly didn’t have the knowledge, nor access to replacements.
But perhaps all was not yet lost.
She was uncertain whether she was strong enough to siphon the Strength, but she tried anyway. She focused on the bone gauntlets that encased her forearms, reaching inside them with all of her being. Her consciousness momentarily expanded as she touched the outer extremities of the power within, and that heightened state of being allowed her to witness everything around her in exquisite detail. She used those super-senses to search for the collar, but again found nothing.
Next she attempted to press through the boundaries of the power she felt beyond those gauntlets, hoping to achieve the Siphoning, but failed. She tried again, thrice more, and on the fourth try she penetrated.
Strength erupted into the gauntlets, flowing through them unchecked into her body like a river coursing through a burst dam. She surrendered herself to that power, letting herself be drawn along by that raging river. Her consciousness shrunk so that she was back inside herself once more.
She began adding barriers to the river, redirecting the different branches, forming a Weave of Darkness mixed with Fire.
When she had the necessary design, she resealed the dam, cutting of the flow, and placed the resulting Weave on her forehead. It sunk into her flesh.
She sensed the distant Strength imprint instantly. A mixture of Earth, Fire, and the repulsive Life. The imprint was weak, but it was a beacon that drew her into the forest.
She followed a trail of trampled grass; she suspected that at least some of her undead hunters had fled, perhaps by order of the apprentice, and this was the route they had taken.
The imprint grew stronger and stronger as she followed the path. And then there it was, a thin collar lying in the grass before her. The minion who had taken it had carelessly dropped the artifact as he fled.
Smiling widely, Medeia retrieved the open band of silver.
Thank you for reading!
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Afterword
Please help spread the word about Dragon’s First Rule by leaving a one or two sentence review. The number of reviews an indie book receives has a big impact on how well it does, so if you liked this story I'd REALLY appreciate it if you left a quick review. Anything will do, even one or two lines.
Thank you very very much!
About the Author
Silver Milan is a USA TODAY BESTSELLING author of paranormal romance and urban fantasy novels. Publishing under different pen names since 2013, Silver has sold more than 300,000 books.
Get in touch:
www.silvermilan.com
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Acknowledgments
A big thank you to Melody Simmons for coming up with the fantastic cover. I was wavering between an Urban Fantasy versus a Paranormal Romance theme—since the novel easily falls into both categories—and when she sent me the draft PNR cover she came up with, I fell in love.
Mistakes and grammatical errors are a big distraction to readers, and can especially be a problem with indie books. So I have to give special thanks to Arthi of Gray Feather Copyediting and Proofreading for helping edit an earlier draft of the book.
Blurbs are the be-all and all when it comes to book purchasing decisions. If readers aren’t inspired by the blurb, they probably won’t buy the book. Thanks to Alix of Blurb Spa for helping massage my blurb into tip-top shape!
You can write the best book in the world, but if nobody hears about it, then it won’t sell. So the next three shout-outs are to those who helped me market Dragon’s First Rule:
Thanks to Ram from Book Rank for helping me secure advertising for the novel.
Thanks to Roxanne from Bewitching Book Tours for helping arrange a blog tour, and guiding me through the process.
Thanks to all of those authors who promoted me to their mailing lists.
And lastly, a big thank you to you, my readers. Without you, none of this would have been possible. Your Amazon reviews and messages of support have helped more than you know! Thank you for taking a chance on me, and I hope to keep you entertained for many years to come.
Love,
Silver
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