by Unknown
He'd come home to Mallochbirn a couple of months ago for his brother's wedding. And a fine time it had been. They'd all been there in the kirk, dressed formally in their kilts and knee-high stockings, glad for his brother and his bonnie bride Kate, the only woman who had ever been able to tame the ferocious Zrakon that was his eldest brother's other self.
The whole village had turned out for the wedding festivities, the hand fasting first as their wrists were bound together by the traditional Malloch ribbon, and then the church wedding and the feasting. It went on for three days. High spirits and the best local whiskey, Highland games and jesting and an insane amount of drinking.
People said it was the best wedding in memory, fun and good fellowship, laughter and a great deal of fucking. The whole family was there, including Ross's twin, Cameron, his younger brother Jack and their sister Penny. Their mother, Deirdre, and everybody's friends. A bloody good time had been shared by all.
He and Evie had hooked up during the first night of fun and renewed their old school fellowship in a pile of fresh cut hay. It was friends they were really, not lovers, despite the pleasure they took in each other's bodies. Evie was a wolf shifter and she'd made it clear she wouldn't be tied down to anyone except her one true mate. She and Colin both knew that this wasn't what they were to one another.
He enjoyed the occasional shag with her, though. Since they were both shifters, they could get a little wild together. You had to be strong and hardy to take the rough fucking that a Highlands wolf shifter enjoyed. Even though wolf shifter didn't exactly explain what Colin was.
He could do a wolf though, like all his family members. His wolf had been his favorite form to shift to until he had learned to summon his dragon.
After all the wedding guests had left, Colin had stayed to spend some time with Ross and Kate, who was expecting a baby, but he'd never been able to linger in one place for long. He'd traveled the world restlessly for years, from Europe to the Caribbean to China to Southeast Asia and Africa. He'd hiked the length of the Great Wall in China, ridden the trans-Siberian railway, worked on an archeological dig in central Turkey, and an AIDS non-profit in Botswana. He'd acquired friends in countries all over the world.
"So how long you gonna be around this time?" Evie asked when they were done fucking. She was still licking his chest, though, and playing lightly with his nipples...almost enough to get him hard again.
"Don't know," he admitted. "But the seaways and the skyways are always calling my ass."
Evie slapped his wayward ass. He rolled her over and returned the favor until she squealed. The truth was, he no longer had to fly halfway around the world to find unexplored territory. Now that he had mastered shifting to his zrakon, or sea dragon form, Mallochbirn was proving to be an excellent base camp for his explorations. As a Malloch of Mallochbirn in northwest Scotland, Colin knew a secret that few people alive knew—Mallochbirn guarded the Barrier. Also known as the Rift between the Worlds.
He was lying in Evie's bed, letting his mind drift, seeing images in his mind that were otherworldly. Literally. Dunya. The world on the other side of the gateway between the two worlds. That strange new world was calling to him more insistently than ever these days.
Suddenly he gave a convulsive jolt. A gong sounded in his soul, raising tiny hairs on his body and making the bottom fall out of his belly. He strained to see, to hear, to know.
"What the fuck? What's wrong, Col?"
He shook his head slowly. His brown hair, overlong and badly needing a cut, flopped over his forehead.
"You came over all cold." Evie sounded shaken. "Your aura changed, like some kind of shadow moving over you. Is it your magic?"
"I reckon so," he said, not really sure what the fuck it was. "Did you feel anything?" All shifters had some vestiges of magic, although no one else around this part of Scotland had the ancient magical power of the Malloch family, who had ruled nearby Mallochbirn as lairds for too many generations to count.
"Whatever it is, I didn't sense it, no. I'm just reacting to you."
Although he wasn't sure, Colin suspected that what he had felt was a violation of the Barrier. An incursion? He was much more attuned to the Barrier recently, probably because he had been violating it himself. Something had either gone out of this world or, more likely, come into it. And if that was the case, there would be hell to pay.
He had never felt anything so intense, though. If it had just been a random fish or something small, he didn't think it would have reverberated so strongly inside him.
"I'd better check with my brother." Although Evie protested when he rose from her bed, she didn't make too great a fuss. As a shifter, she knew the dangers. Well, some of them, at least.
Colin rose and donned his kilt—he often wore the old garment, which he found more comfortable than trousers—and his other clothing. He dug his phone out of his jacket and called Ross.
He could only assume that Ross, who was laird of Mallochbirn and official guardian of the Barrier, would have felt the quiver in the walls of reality even more intensely than he had.
"Aye," Ross said. "Felt something. You wanna check or shall I?"
"I'll go," Colin offered.
"Ta. I'll let Cam know."
Colin would have liked to ask him to leave Cam, Ross's twin, out of it. He and Cam had been butting heads again, as usual. But Cam was the head of the Council of Protectors, and if there really was an incursion, he would have to know.
"If it's a zrakon, it might be a female. Good that you're going. I don't think my wife would sanction me checking her out."
Colin grinned. He approved of Kate, who wasn't likely to feel threatened by a female sea dragon. She handled his elder brother better than anybody else ever had.
"If there is something, try to lure it back here. Maybe we can figure out a way to send it home. The Rift has been unstable lately. I hate to think what else has been coming through."
"Or going in the other direction."
"You're right. That would be bad, too."
The other world was technologically similar to the Middle Ages. Or maybe the Renaissance. Their greatest fear was that highly advanced weaponry might make it through.
"Be careful, Colin," Ross added. "Cloak yourself as well as you can. There've been all kinds of advances in underwater detection and surveillance, and it's possible some ords are heading toward the scene." Ord was shifters' parlance for ordinary people, people who didn't shape shift. In this case, Colin knew it meant cops and military types, who were always on the watch for refugees, smugglers, and even terrorists who might try to sneak ashore in the Scottish Highlands.
Even worse, although Ross might not agree, were Cam's watchdogs—elite shifters, usually wolves. Those guys seemed to think the Barrier needed more guarding than Mallochbirn had always provided. Colin loved his brother, but he didn't trust him. Lately Cam had seemed rabid about security. If such a controlled and disciplined bastard could ever be called rabid.
Ten minutes later, in the darkness of a clear but moonless Highland night, Colin stood naked on the headland half a mile from Evie's cottage. As a precaution, he kept himself cloaked as he reached inside and woke his sleeping dragon. The agony came as it always did when the change began. His entire body stiffened and screamed with it as his bones cracked and his flesh was painfully molded into another, much larger and formidable form.
It used to be difficult for him to change to a sea dragon. For years, he'd believed he would never be able to do it. Most of their kind weren't multiform shifters, anyway. Jack, his younger brother, had only one form—a wolf. Cam could do a wolf and some kind of predatory bird, although he almost never shifted to the latter; he was damn secretive about it, as a matter of fact. Ross, the head of the family, had the Zrakon as his second self. But Ross could shift to a dozen other creatures as well, which Colin envied and thought wondrous. Ross didn't use his gift often, as far as Colin could tell. He was enamored of his new wife, excited about his coming bairn, and con
tent, or so he claimed with staying as human as possible.
Colin wanted to experience everything. He'd pestered Ross to teach him how to shift to a sea dragon, and Ross, unsure himself how he did it, tried his best to impart his limited knowledge.
"He just bursts out of me," his brother had explained. "Rising up from that dark place deep inside. You know it—you must. It's where your wolf comes from."
"When I open myself to that place, it's my wolf that comes, every time."
"Then maybe you have to poke around down there until you find your zrakon. If you have one. You might not."
Colin wasn't sure why he believed he had a sea dragon, but the feeling was strong. So he poked around. If the creature was hiding in some dark corner, he figured he'd find him someday.
And he did. He was twenty-four before he felt the sea dragon's breath and nearly twenty-six before he'd been able to coax the creature out of hiding. Colin's dragon was a much shyer fellow than Ross's roaring, melodrama-loving Zrakon.
Legend claimed that there had been sea dragons in Earth's primitive past, although no such beasties had ever turned up in the fossil records. Whatever they were, they were magnificent. He stood tall, his huge haunches poised, muscles rippling, his shoulders twitching as he automatically extended the poor vestiges of bone and flesh, withered now, that had once been a set of magnificent wings. The dragons of legend who had once ruled the skies, spouting fires on their enemies, had been cursed and confined to the seas. No one knew exactly why. Or when. Or if they would ever be permitted to return from their watery exile and fly again.
The wings served now to make his form perfect as he extended them to their puny length and dived gracefully into the cold northern sea.
Chapter 3
For the first time in her life, Ariane didn't know where she was.
The sky was wrong. The night was clear and the velvet darkness of the vault arching overhead was alight with stars. But they were the wrong stars.
Not wholly wrong, just a little shifted. As if she were viewing them through wavy glass. Their configurations were recognizable, yet altered. The angles were different. Someone who didn't watch the sky as much as she did might not notice. The stars did change, after all, depending on the time of day and the season. And one's location, of course. You could see different stars when you went far enough north or far enough south. She had been Traveling northwest with Rin. But not so far from home that the stars would be significantly altered.
The last thing she remembered, she had been clasped against the comfortable form of her companion. Breathing, as always, through the appendage on his breast. Fleeing the darkling that had wounded him.
Then something had happened. Something dark and terrifying.
It had felt as though she'd been sucked in by a giant mouth, and dragged right out of the world. It had been jarring, disorienting and sick-making, as she and her companion were trapped in a whirlpool and swept away.
She had been torn away from Rin while still under the sea. That should have caused her to drown, but she didn't remember the sensations of drowning. And now she was lying on her back on a strand, soaking wet and cold, but alive.
She should get up. Stand. Walk. Try to get warm. It would not do to take sick, wherever she was. She needed to find Rin. She hoped he was safe, and that the mysterious tumult that had tossed her up out of the sea and beached her here hadn't injured him.
If she had reached land, it must surely be Arralon. One of its western isles, of which there were many.
She lay for a few more moments looking upward, trying to solve the mystery of the sky. And then she saw something that made her jolt upright. Lights in the sky, high above, moving and leaving a visible trail. Not a shooting star. The movement was steady and constant—the trajectory a distinct line moving across the sky. She wasn't completely clear about compass directions, but if that dim star was the Fixed Foot, then the moving light was traveling west.
But there was nothing to the west. Nothing except the Farthest Lands, and they were an unimaginable distance away. There was just the sea, fathomless, changeless.
She noticed something else that was strange. A dull droning sound, also coming from the sky.
Where in the name of Karth was she?
The stars were wrong and there were impossible objects in the sky.
There was a possible explanation. It seemed unlikely, and yet...everything about this experience was unlikely. It was known that the mystical vortex called the Abyss was located somewhere out in the western sea. She had been headed roughly in that direction. If the lore was true, the Abyss was the gateway to the world known as Gaia. A place that was as strange and violent as anything in her own world, but also full of wondrous and almost incomprehensible magic.
Ariane had a curious soul. From the moment she had first heard rumors about Gaia, she had haunted the libraries in every city she visited, devouring anything she could find in the scrolls that hinted about this other world.
There wasn't much. Scholars speculated that it was a world much like her own with people who looked and acted human and many of the same creatures. It was even said that the lands, people, and languages mirrored those in her own world. Twin worlds, but not identical twins.
Was she in Gaia?
And where was Rin?
She tried again to feel him in her mind. Even if he was a good distance away, their strong empathic link usually held. She was so accustomed to being able to reach him mentally that it was another shock to her system when her cry to him went unanswered.
Was he dead? Had the darkling killed him?
She attempted to open a link with Rin, but despite shooting desperate threads out in every direction, there was no response, no linkage. Rin was gone.
It's my fault. She had wanted to take Rin to Liril, instead of following the usual Traveler protocols. Now her sea dragon was suffering because she had defied her superiors. He might already be dead.
Her heart ached and her throat felt thick. She curled up in a ball and forced herself to concentrate. Let the pain go. Let the guilt go. Let fear go. Let everything go except the Bond.
The golden thread that she envisioned to link her with her companion stopped flailing around. It poised for a moment, then shot out. Rin? She felt the joining. It rocked through her, filling her mind with light.
"Rin!"
The connection wavered. Through the link, she heard a howl. It was coming from deep beneath the sea.
Rin! Rin was out there. But he didn't sound like himself. His pain thundered through her. Agony. "Oh Rin, my dear. I'm so sorry."
Ari?
She felt something she had never sensed from a sea dragon before—fear. Sea dragons had no fear. They were the largest predators of the deep. They had no rivals. They were bigger, stronger, and more intelligent than any other ocean-going creature.
Travelers weren't afraid of much either. When you could command the fiercest creatures of land, sea and sky, what was there to fear? Only humans were more dangerous than the creatures she controlled. But it was a rare human who would go up against a Traveler. Respect for her kind was almost universal. No one would venture to harm a Traveler.
She forced her brain to focus. Whatever was out there, she had to help Rin.
"Rin? Can you hear me?" She didn't call him in words. Not exactly. It was more images and feelings.
She was still having trouble reaching him. It must be because he was injured. Whatever had happened, whatever had disrupted their bond and cast her up on the shore, it must have done something to harm Rin. Magic of some sort?
Concentrate.
"Rin? I'm here. Feel me, baby. Tell me what's happening, if you can."
Bad. Something bad. Hurts. Something hurt me.
"Is it still hurting you? Still chasing you? Can you dive? Can you get away?"
It gone. Won't leave you. You asleep. You not breathe.
"I must have fallen unconscious, but I'm awake now and breathing. I am on land. Did you bri
ng me ashore?"
I try. Take you to land. Lift you. Afraid for you. Not breathing.
"I'm breathing now. I'm fine."
The bad thing wanted hurt you. Darkling. Wanted stop me find you. But I chase it away.
"Good Rin. Thank you. Thank you so much."
He groaned. Pain flashed through him. She felt her body curl up as the agony reverberated in her. She began to tremble. She didn't understand this. What could hurt a sea dragon? They were the kings of the deep.
She felt their bond begin to fade. She was losing him. "Rin!"
Love you, Ari. Love. You.
"No! Rin, please! Stay strong. Stay strong for me."
I try.
"Rin. Listen to me. Go back thru the Abyss and continue on the way we were headed. If you can get to Liril, she will tend to you. It's not far from where we were, baby. Liril will make you better."
Her heart was breaking as she ordered him to do this, because without Rin how would she manage? A Traveler and her animal companion should not be separated. Without Rin, how would she get home?
"Baby?"
She felt him still, but he wasn't able to form coherent thoughts. He was hurt. Was he dying? What if he couldn't make it to Liril?
"Rin?" Her cheeks felt cold, and she realized it must be because she was crying. The wind was chilling her warm tears to cold streams as they rolled incessantly down her cheeks.
Ari, I no leave you.
"You must! Go, please! Go and get better. When you're well, you can come find me again."
No, Ari. No.
"My dear, we were about to be separated anyway. You have your own life to live now. You have served me so well for so long. Now you must be with others of your kind."
You come too, Ari. We find way back.
But she sensed he was too badly injured to carry her weight as he swam. It took a sea dragon a great deal of energy to breathe for two, which was one reason why they had to be young and strong. Besides, another attempt to traverse the maelstrom of the Abyss would probably tear them apart anyway.
No. It was hard, but she had to do it. Rin would die if he did not find help quickly.