Rising Dragons Omnibus

by Ophelia Bell

  “Wow,” Erika breathed when Geva paused.

  His mind reeled at what he’d already read. He had to have her hear it all before he would believe it, however.

  “Can you re-read his name?” Erika asked.

  Geva did, pronouncing all five syllables for her, rather than the shortened version as he’d read it. Aiwarikar. He watched her brow crease the way it always did when she was reaching back into the wellspring of history she kept locked away in her mind. “Is it familiar to you? I suppose it does sound like your own name a bit. Erika.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think it’s important to the story. Just an interesting tidbit, considering the timing. He was pretty damn famous figure if he is who I believe.”

  “She skips ahead several years here,” he said, and continued reading. Erika’s fingernails began to dig into his arm before he was finished.

  “I am the example held up by the Council for the rest of the Brood to follow. I have failed in my duty but do not regret it. Warik and Bertram are beside me in this as well. When the child—your half-sister—is born, Warik and I have resolved to spend our last remaining power to bind her magic, then hide her from the Council. If they find her and take her, they will execute us and she will be forced to live as an Unbound. We will not relegate her to slavery. It is near time for the Awakening, but there is no more time for us. Please, my dearest son, find your sister and help her learn her heritage. Keep her safe and perhaps appeal to the Council to change their laws. Warik and I had no blood relations in common, and we will give her every last drop of our love and passion upon her birth. It will be with your father’s last breath that he sees her safe somewhere far from here, where the Council will not look. He hasn’t told me where that will be, but the Verdanith can find her. Just find a way to make the Council let you use it without betraying your sister’s existence. We mean to name her Rowan, a name that is as much a human name as it represents her dragon legacy, and that is all that I can tell you.”

  “Is that the end?”

  “She says she loves me and to never compromise destiny for someone else’s rules.”

  Geva’s head spun. He looked around the room but there was nowhere to sit. Then he remembered one of the last things he had read. He rushed to the glass cases, frantically looking for it.

  “Tell me what it is, I can help,” Erika said.

  Geva shot the words over his shoulder. “The Verdanith, it’s a wedge-shaped piece of a disc carved from jade, about the size of my hand. Green like those characters on the screen.”

  “Here!” Erika tapped at the latch of a case near the center of the room. “What is it?”

  “My sister’s salvation.”

  Breath of Destiny: Chapter 4

  The two of them spent the afternoon moving out of the hotel and into the living quarters at the Manor, which had taken a single trip considering the sparse belongings they carried with them.

  In spite of her nomadic tendencies, Erika wasn’t a stranger to living rich like this—she’d grown up wealthy, after all—but after roughing it in the field for her studies and then work her entire adult life, it felt indulgent to be immersed in the luxury of royalty. After six months of living like an academic, with late nights in labs and hotel rooms—a situation Erika was accustomed to—this situation was suddenly very domestic and took a lot of getting used to.

  Settling into a shared domicile that wasn’t temporary felt odd. Deciding on a bathroom. Deciding on shared closet space. Not that Geva had that much in the way of clothing aside from the single suit they’d bought for him the week before, and the odd necessities. It helped that it was all as foreign to him as it was to her, at least, in spite of it being his family home.

  He’d developed a rather odd attachment to Erika’s bath products over the last six months. To the point she had to scramble to order more. She’d been relieved to discover the obscure organic-only company was still in business. Then winced at their increased prices. But how do you keep a dragon happy? Especially if he wants expensive bath products.

  It was both irritating and comforting. She didn’t have an issue finding him bath products, and she loved his presence, particularly how eager he was to tell her everything he knew about the era he’d lived in. She’d really have loved to chat with his mother, though. The woman who’d actually lived through the last five hundred years.

  For the first few months since she’d found Geva, she and her team had lost sleep finalizing their paper, then published to outstanding response. It had earned them lucrative grants and a brief moment in the academic limelight. In the past they would have been reeling from the attention, but in light of their fresh secrets the entire team was ready to slink back into the shadows and enjoy their true accomplishment out of the public eye.

  She and the others had had to drastically alter their paper before publishing, but the Queen had allowed the collection of a handful of priceless objects to be taken and displayed.

  Now she and Geva sat at their dinner table, basking in the moonlight that came through the tall window of the Manor’s East Tower and the flickering candlelight that Ben had provided. The flames of the candles were nothing compared to the object that captured their attention now that they were done eating.

  Erika stared at the carved jade fragment they’d brought up from the vault earlier. There was something incredibly familiar about it, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She’d seen so many jade dragon artifacts over the six months since their expedition, they all bled together.

  This particular object resembled the other artifacts in some way, yet there was something different about it. When she touched it, she felt a pulse of power, the same as she’d felt at each of the doors she’d touched within the Temple—particularly the one that led her to Geva.

  The slab of green jade sparkled in the center of the table now, monolithic in its significance in spite of its wedge shape only being half the size of a dinner plate. Erika chewed on her lower lip. Geva kept pulling at the cowlick on the side of his forehead where his right horn normally appeared when he was half-shifted during sex.

  “We need to call the Queen,” he said.

  By his inflection she took his meaning: She needed to call Corey. His reluctance to show his face to the Queen was almost comical considering how imposing a man he was in general. Yet there was no denying the Queen’s distrust of him, even after her show of support. Erika wondered if it was due to his lineage or for some other reason. She definitely didn’t believe Geva’s assertion that it was because he’d acted out when he was younger.

  “And what would you like me to tell Corey?”

  Geva glared at her for a second, then sighed. “The entire Court has to agree to the assembly of the Verdanith for it to happen.”

  “So, why won’t you ask?”

  “It’s a matter of propriety. No one ever wants to be the first to ask. It makes us seem desperate. It’s just…customary for things to happen this way.”

  “Well, you need to get over your adherence to custom.”

  “It’s not that easy. The Council is very strict where custom is concerned. If we don’t observe the required process, we could fail.”

  “So, I’ll just call the others and ask…” She paused when he began shaking his head. “What?”

  “They won’t say anything. It’s like a contest. You have no idea how competitive we are, do you?”

  “But they’re my friends!”

  “What your friends believe will have no effect. What the other members of the Court believe will, and we are far from united, in the Queen’s eyes. But if we can win over the Queen, we will have a true advantage.”

  Erika found that hard to believe, considering how tight-knit she was with her team, but then she hadn’t spent much time with the other members of the Dragon Court since they’d left the Temple.

  “And we can’t outright say we need
it to help find your sister, either. So what’s our alternative?”

  His jaw clenched and he gave her a sidelong look before averting his eyes. “We have to convince her we want it to assist in conceiving. That’s the reason everyone else will likely use. Once the Queen hears from all of us—sees we are united—she will take the request to the Council.”

  She was about to ask how the hell it could help with that, but held her tongue. If it could help them locate Geva’s sister, she shouldn’t be surprised.

  “So, what works? What did your ancestors do to convince the Council?”

  “They’ve never said yes.”

  Erika couldn’t quite believe what she was about to suggest. “What if we steal the pieces? Wait, don’t answer that, it’s a dumb idea. We’d completely compromise your sister if we did that.”

  “It’s also impossible. You saw the security to get into our vault. The others would have similar measures in place. The Queen might not report us over it, but the Council would definitely know who’d stolen it. It’s really a simple request. We will sacrifice rank by making the request prematurely, but the others will follow suit quickly.”

  “So, we convince the Queen we want to have a baby. I’m a pretty decent actress when I want to be.” Even though it would be a blatant lie, she’d compromised her principles for less. “Besides, it’s Corey we’ll be talking to. I’ve known him for years, he’s got a huge soft spot for me.”

  Geva looked more optimistic at that. “Alright. Shall I join you for the picture palaver?”

  Erika stood up and bent to kiss him. “Video conference,” she corrected, pulling back and squeezing his cheeks between the thumb and fingers of one hand until his lips scrunched together. “Yes, I think it would be a good show of intent if you were with me, don’t you? Corey likes you.”

  Geva’s eyelids lowered just slightly and his expression grew thoughtful, a look Erika had grown accustomed to over the past few months, and it made her grow a little warm between the thighs every time. She resisted the temptation to climb onto his lap and take advantage of his infinite libido. It was a particular challenge tonight, too. Ever since their tryst with Benjamin that morning, she’d been aware of a subtle shift in the dynamic between Geva and herself. As if they were even more attuned to each other’s emotions. He’d been agitated to distraction about the bomb his mother’s journals had dropped, but rather than withdraw from her, he’d been more amorous to the point of desperation, like he was driven by raw need for her Nirvana.

  “Come on. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can find your sister.”

  Erika retreated to the ornate bathroom attached to what Ben had informed her were her ‘quarters,’ though she and Geva had decided to share the smaller, more intimate bedroom on the opposite side of the floor. She wasn’t oblivious to Geva’s wistful glance when she nudged him toward the other bathroom, giving the excuse of not wanting any distractions because they were on a timetable.

  The truth was they hadn’t been apart for almost six months since she and her team had completed the ritual to awaken the dragons. They had spent a brief and luxurious week in a Monastery on a remote island in the South China Sea—a place Erika had thought of as a sort of halfway house for dragons. The the human occupants of the Monastery might have been a sect of Buddhist monks, but it had soon become apparent that they were all very aware of who their new visitors were. It also became apparent that several of the long-term residents of the Monastery were a servant-class of dragons who hadn’t been part of the Brood that slept in the temple.

  These dragon monks had piqued Erika’s curiosity, but when asked, Geva had evaded the question. Even after needling him about it he finally whispered that they didn’t talk about the Unbound. She resolved to get the answers out of him one way or the other, and hearing that term again in his mother’s journal added another piece to the puzzle.

  The rest of their time before moving to London had been spent traveling back to the Temple, collecting more data and a few artifacts. When she and her team were busy preparing their paper, she had corresponded with her team remotely from a collection of hotels around the world, in cities where other experts existed who could validate the authenticity of their artifacts. It had been the Queen, Racha, who had dictated the terms of their use of the data they had collected from the Temple and she had reviewed and signed off on the final submission of the paper to the most elite journals in Erika’s field.

  The only time she and Geva had been out of sight of each other since they’d left the Temple had been during the secret meeting he and the other Court dragons had attended, high atop the mountain on that tiny island. The Council had important things to say that the human mates couldn’t be privy to, but it just made Erika wonder who this elusive Council was.

  Geva hadn’t been inclined to share the details of that meeting at first, only saying that they had accomplished more than he’d expected. All she’d figured out was that ‘dragon law’ required the Court and the Brood along with it to disperse to the four corners of the Earth. The reasoning for that was vague, but Camille had suggested their laws assigned each dragon a jurisdiction. Geva had confirmed that suggestion when they moved to London.

  He was literally royalty, in the dragon sense, and his ‘kingdom’, as it were, encompassed all of the United Kingdom and Scandinavia.

  The locales of the others began to make more sense to her after that, though there were really six corners to the Earth if their assignments were any indication. She’d begun to see the pattern with them as well. The number six kept recurring. Six dragon colors, six ultimate matings among her team, six separate fragments of the magical artifact they were trying to assemble.

  Six generations, Geva had said, since they’d been forced into these cycles. He’d only said it once, then grew broody and muttered something about how six was enough. Erika had been reminded of her father complaining about politics not long before he died.

  She stepped under the steaming water of the shower with a sense of sadness and a sudden pang of homesickness. Not for the huge, empty house she’d left behind in Boston when she started college, but for the memory of that same house when her father was alive and it still felt like home to her. She longed to share the success of her discovery with her father.

  At first it was a sense of pride and excitement over confirming what her father had always believed was the truth but had never proved. Today, however, she had the strongest wish that Geva and her father had had the chance to meet. It was absurd to think she saw aspects of her father in her lover. She was probably projecting due to having too much time on her hands now and feeling particularly sentimental.

  “My legacy is your destiny,” she remembered her father saying when she was a teenager testing her boundaries and rebelling against his need to share his life’s work with her. “You’ll understand when you have your own child. The need to pass this on will become a priority. I won’t live forever, Erika.”

  She’d of course rolled her eyes at that comment. Gabriel Rosencrans was strength personified—immortal in her own eyes. Now she realized he’d been making more frequent comments about his own mortality at the time. It wasn’t until the cancer had advanced beyond his ability to hide it that he finally told her he was dying.

  And to think if he’d found the Temple and mated a dragon he might have lived. Here she was instead, carrying on her father’s work but with no young, bright, inquisitive mind to impart any of that wisdom to. It had never occurred to her what she might have meant to her father until now. She’d filled his shoes in so many ways. Could she follow in those footsteps, too? And not just in the sense of an academic sharing her knowledge with younger peers, but that of a parent influencing the mind of her own child.

  Geva wanted it. Of course, it was instinctual for dragons. There were so few of them left in the world and so little time relative to their life spans and the schedule their laws imposed o
n them. Was she being selfish withholding that from him?

  They still had time by her own standards. Decades, even. Was it selfish for her to want to wait just a little longer? Yeah, but for how long? The next big discovery could have her in the field hunting for a decade for all she knew. She had just assumed he would come with her. Would he? Could he?

  The conception and nurturing of her work involved objects that had been hidden for centuries and were crying out to be found. What was a decade of study and searching in the scheme of ageless antiquities? Especially now that she had a seemingly infinite amount of time in which to find more lost treasures if her link to Geva really did what he said it would. She had no reason to doubt him.

  She stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around her torso. Swiping the steam away from the mirror, she scowled at her reflection. A few years for her to regain her balance after the last six months. That shouldn’t be unreasonable to ask. With that thought she forced herself to stop thinking about it.

  She had a tricky meeting in store for her and was determined to make it productive, which meant looking the part of someone who recognized not only the power she had, but the power of the person she’d be talking to. Even if Corey generally answered to her in the world of jungle treks and ancient digs, in the dragon world he was technically her superior now. The shift in hierarchy definitely wasn’t lost on her.

  Finding Geva’s sister had to be a priority now. The girl’s existence was a fresh mystery for her to solve and the prospect excited her as much as learning what this Verdanith artifact could really do once whole again. She wondered if the rest of her team even had the thing on their radar or if they were too busy enjoying the lull after submitting their paper to even think about it.

  Hair and makeup done, she donned a low-cut red blouse and gray pencil skirt. Red flattered her, she decided, looking at the whole package in the full-length mirror. It never hurt to give Corey a little visual candy either. He may be a gentleman when it came to talking to women, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a red-blooded man who appreciated beauty and sensuality. If anything, he’d been even more overt in his appreciation since becoming the Queen’s consort, as if he’d needed permission from a strong woman to let himself out of that reserved shell of his.