by Zoe Chant
Liev shook his head. “You seem to have mistaken me for someone else. A Drakos never gives in, so long as he can still fight.”
The fourth man – the one he had felled with a blow to the neck – was beginning to get to his feet. The odds weren’t good, but they would be significantly improved if he could just get to the door...
The dark-haired man sighed, rolling his eyes. “All right, fine. But don’t say we didn’t try to be nice.”
Liev tensed his muscles, readying himself for their attack. But the men didn’t move. Instead, from behind him, he heard a single, ominous sound: the cocking of a gun.
“Liev.”
Darklis’s voice was soft, but he could immediately hear the urgency in it. Cold panic surged through his veins as he turned, his heart pounding.
The receptionist – a large, heavy-set woman – had her arm wrapped around Darklis’s shoulders, in exactly the same way the man had been holding her when they had arrived. But in her other hand she held a pistol – and she was pressing it to Darklis’s head.
“Darklis!” he cried out before he could stop himself. Every nerve in his body screamed, urging him to leap forward, to bury his dragon’s fangs in the neck of the one who would dare to threaten his mate.
Except I can’t. I couldn’t even tell that woman was a shifter...
Because surely only another shifter could hold Darklis tightly enough that she couldn’t escape, her arms pinned to her side, her eyes wide with fear. And only another shifter could have caught her off-guard like this, after having taken advantage of her natural kindness. Darklis had been trying to get the woman to safety.
She was in on it all along, Liev thought, grinding his teeth as he forced himself to stay still. The receptionist. They set this up. They knew we’d come running to help.
And dragons might have vastly accelerated healing compared to a human, but not even they could survive a bullet to the head.
“Let her go,” he snarled. He could sense the men moving behind him, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Darklis. “I’ll come quietly if you let her free.”
“Liev, no,” Darklis said, her eyes going even wider. “This was my mistake. I should have been paying more attention.”
“Well, this is touching,” the dark-haired man said ironically. “But I’m afraid it’s useless. One of you would be good, but if we can get both, well... that’s much, much better.”
“Let her go,” Liev repeated, his voice rising to a furious growl. Within him, he could feel something struggling, something attempting to unfurl and rise fully into his consciousness.
Something he knew, and immediately recognized.
My dragon!
Snarling, Liev whipped around as the men advanced, forcing himself to tear his gaze from Darklis. With all his soul, he tried to focus on the stirring within him, to reach deep inside himself and bring his dragon to the surface. With its instincts and strength, he knew he could beat down a hundred men – manticores or not. There was nothing a dragon could not do when fighting for his mate.
But the men didn’t give him a chance. They surged forward, attacking in unison. They clearly had experience fighting together. Liev ducked their first blows, landing his own on two of the men as they stumbled past him.
But in his weakened state, without his dragon, the best he could do was temporarily stun them, and they were back on their feet in an instant.
“Liev!”
He heard Darklis call out a warning, but he was a moment too late to act – the dark-haired man’s fist slammed into the side of his head, making light flash in front his eyes.
Gritting his teeth, Liev used all his willpower to stay upright, but even the momentary stunning had been enough to give the others an opening. Strong hands grabbed his arms, twisting them around behind his back, while a foot slammed into his knee. He staggered, held fast, unable to fight back.
“Darklis!”
Roaring in pure fury, Liev kicked out with one foot, managing to knock one man’s legs out from under him. He struggled, almost getting one of his arms free, before the dark-haired man appeared before him again, his powerful fist smashing into his temple, making him see stars.
Liev tasted blood in his mouth as he shook his head, trying to clear it.
“Let her go,” he said again, as his head reeled. “I’m the one you want. Leave her out of this.”
Hands tightened on his arms, pulling his muscles painfully. He struggled, but like this, he couldn’t resist the strength of the shifters who held him.
“I feel like I’ve already explained this,” the dark-haired man muttered as he massaged his knuckles. “One is good, but two is better. And now – time to shut you up.”
Liev roared again in fury, struggling against the hands that held him – and then pain shot through the back of his head, and everything went dark.
Chapter Ten
Darklis
Darkness... darkness...
Darklis could feel her heartbeat pounding in her ears. Everywhere around her was in total darkness. Her mouth felt dry, her head aching.
Where am I?
She tried to move, and found she couldn’t. Something was constraining her arms and legs. Blinking, Darklis cautiously moved her head, the one part of herself that didn’t seem to be utterly immobile.
Not that it did any good – she still couldn’t see anything.
Licking her lips, Darklis took a deep breath, fighting down her own rising panic. What had happened? How had she gotten here?
Memories surged up within her: memories from her childhood, memories from the first time she had realized that perhaps her family was not coming to rescue her after all; that perhaps they really were all dead, just like her captors had told her.
It had taken her a long time to piece together what had happened, who had taken her, and what they wanted. The Lukich Clan had kept her as a hostage, hoping to use her to track down any remaining members of her clan.
It hadn’t worked, only because her mother had been foresighted enough to make sure that Darklis’s connection to the other Novak dragons was severed. It had probably saved her brother Stefan’s life, but it had also meant he’d had no way of finding her for all those years.
I can’t... I can’t do that again... I can’t be alone again for so long...
Panic broke in her chest as she struggled.
Someone... please!
Even as she struggled, Darklis felt a spark of hope within her. Even after all her years as a prisoner of the Lukich Clan, she had never given up hope that one day, somehow, someone in her family would find her.
But this time...
Liev!
The name rang out in her head, strong and clear.
Liev – her mate, Liev.
She knew he would stop at nothing to find her.
Just as she would stop at nothing to find him.
The memory of what had happened at the hotel came back to her in a sudden rush.
Liev had been fighting off the men who had ambushed them, his powerful body struggling against the men who were trying to hold him down.
She remembered calling out his name as finally, the largest of the men had brought his elbow down sharply on the back of Liev’s neck – and he had gone still, clearly unconscious, his struggles stopped.
If she had had her dragon she would have shifted on the spot, regardless of the fact they’d been in a room that could not possibly have accommodated her dragon’s size and wingspan, and without care for the fact they were in the middle of a human city. Whoever hurt her mate would feel her dragon’s fire – her dragon’s rage.
Her fury had churned inside her, but it had not been enough to draw her dragon to the surface. She didn’t remember what happened next at all – perhaps they had drugged her somehow, or perhaps the woman with the gun had hit her on the back of the head. Either way, in the next moment everything had suddenly been shrouded in darkness.
And now, she was here.
But where, exactly
, is here?
Taking a deep breath, Darklis attempted to rein in the terrible fear that had spread throughout her body like wildfire.
Terror wouldn’t help her now. She had to keep a clear head if she was going to get out of this.
You’ve been in worse situations, she told herself. Think. Think!
“Ah, so you’re awake.”
She stiffened at the sound of the unfamiliar male voice. She still couldn’t see anything at all – everything was black as pitch.
Darklis tried to move again, and now, fully lucid, realized that her hands were bound behind her, rope cutting into her skin. The all-encompassing darkness was due not to a lack of light, but because she was blindfolded. If she had had her dragon form there was no way these bonds could have held her – but she didn’t, so it was useless to think about it. She would simply have to work with what she had: her wits.
But first, I need to know more about what I’m dealing with.
“Who are you?” she asked, her voice rasping, though she forced it not to shake.
The man laughed. “You wouldn’t know even if I told you.”
Darklis swallowed. “So why do this? If I don’t even know you, then why –”
“Ha. You may not know me, but I know you. Or rather, I know your kind.”
The bitterness of the man’s tone made Darklis pause. At a guess, she supposed that when he said ‘kind’, he meant dragons.
Well, that wasn’t unusual. Manticores and dragons had been at each other’s throats for centuries. As the two last main groups of mystical shifters left in the world, they had at one time constantly been at odds over power, land, treasure, and anything else they could find to fight about as well.
“I understand that manticores and dragons have never been friends,” she said cautiously. “But I –”
“I’m not a manticore. I’m a dragon. Like you.”
Now that made Darklis gasp in surprise.
She hadn’t been able to sense it – but then, she hadn’t been able to sense that the receptionist at the hotel was a manticore either. Clearly, her ability to sense other shifters was related entirely to her dragon.
Despite the direness of her situation, the part of her mind that was always hungry for more information about dragons and how their magic worked filed that piece of information away – she never knew when something she had learned was going to come in handy.
“A... a dragon,” she finally managed to stammer out, once she felt she could speak again. “Then...”
“Oh, I wasn’t raised by dragons.” The man’s voice was vicious. “I was abandoned by my clan when I was just a child. The manticores found me, and they raised me instead.”
Darklis was silent, honestly uncertain of what to say. How could she argue with that? How could she tell a man who had been abandoned that he should turn against the ones who had raised him, even if manticores and dragons were natural enemies?
“I... I understand why you’d be loyal to them, then,” Darklis finally managed to get out. “Why you must prefer them to –”
“Preference has nothing to do with it,” the man snapped. “I don’t have a choice. Do you think they let me forget for a moment what I am? How lucky I am that they didn’t strangle me when they found me as a baby? How fortunate I am to be alive?” He let out a low, bitter laugh. “I’m not doing this because I want to, though I admit the idea of getting revenge on dragons has its appeal. But even if it didn’t, it’s not like I could say no.”
Darklis’s head was in a whirl as she tried to absorb everything the man had said. So the manticores had raised him – but clearly, he didn’t think of them as his family, nor they as his.
Maybe they just see him as something... useful, Darklis thought, though her head was pounding too much to understand just what that use was at the moment. Even if she had been able to sense that he was a dragon, the last thing she would’ve suspected was that he was helping the manticores who had stolen from the Drakos Clan’s hoard.
“Then all of this has just been a setup?” she asked, trying to sound as calm as possible. “The manticores stole from the Drakos hoard in the hope that someone would follow you, and you could take them hostage?”
The man snorted. “No, of course not. That would have been ridiculously far-fetched. We wanted to steal the scepter. You and Prince Liev were just... welcome extras.”
All right, all right. Keep him talking, Darklis thought to herself. As long as he was talking, he wasn’t doing... anything else. And the longer he talked, the greater the chance he might reveal something she could use.
She bit her lip. The scepter.
Apart from opening up a portal through which it was clear someone could travel, was there something else it could do? Something that the manticores might want?
Well, obviously, it had taken her and Liev’s power to shift away from them. That was clearly useful. But had that been intended, or was it just an unfortunate side effect?
“I could help you,” Darklis said impulsively, before she could give herself time to second-guess. “Liev and I both could. You say you don’t have any choice but to help the manticores. But it doesn’t have to be like that. You already know Liev is a Drakos prince, so you know how powerful his clan is. They could protect you. We could –”
“Stop talking!”
Darklis cut herself off at the sound of the man’s harsh, whispered words. His voice had not been loud, but it had been vehement.
She swallowed, wondering if she should try again – after all, what else could she do? And she had spoken the truth: if this dragon would free them, she knew that Liev would protect him, from both the manticores and his own parents’ anger. And she knew Stefan, her brother, the leader of the Novak Clan, would do what he could for him as well.
Nonetheless, there had been something else in the way he had hissed out the words that gave her pause. He hadn’t just been telling her to shut up, Darklis realized suddenly. He had been warning her as well.
The question of what he had been warning her against was answered in the next moment, as she heard the sound of a door opening somewhere to her left, followed by the sound of footsteps.
The man must have been able to sense this newcomer as they approached, in the way she, deprived of her dragon, could not.
She froze. Had the newcomer heard what she’d said? If he was a shifter – and of course, he would be – then almost certainly. Resisting the urge to bite her lip, she swallowed, hoping her fear wasn’t obvious.
But then, in the next moment, all thought of trying to pretend she wasn’t frightened left her head completely.
“Now, now, Dante. I hope you haven’t been talking out of turn.”
Darklis’s breath stopped in her throat, her heart constricting within her chest. A feeling of horror crawled up her spine one vertebra at a time. If her hands had been free, they would have started shaking.
No, it can’t be... it can’t...
But even as her own brain tried to convince her it wasn’t possible, she knew it was. She would have known that voice anywhere. She’d heard it every day of her life before her brother had rescued her – and then far too many days after that, in her nightmares.
Erik Lukich.
The man who had ordered her family to be killed, and had held her prisoner for years.
The man who had made her childhood a living hell, who had taken everything from her, and made her believe that there was no one left to save her.
Darklis didn’t consider herself a very hateful person, but she hated Erik Lukich. He had wiped out her clan for no reason other than that his daughter had fallen in love with a Novak dragon, and he had not been able to deal with his fury.
He was pure evil.
And now, he was here.
But how? How can this be??
“Surprised to see me again, Darklis?” Erik said, his voice ice cold. “Well. Not see, I suppose, but I know you must recognize me nonetheless. I’d hate to think you had forgotten me, afte
r our many long years together.”
Darklis flinched away as she felt fingers against the back of her head, but managed not to make a startled cry. The blindfold that had covered her eyes fell away, and she blinked in the low light, looking frantically around her.
She froze once more as her eyes locked onto Erik’s. He looked just as she remembered him: tall, sleek and muscular, his dark blond hair neatly parted. If a human had seen him on the street, he would simply look like a neatly dressed businessman in an expensive suit – except for the fact that his eyes, even in human form, were an unsettling shade of dark red.
And as a dragon, those eyes turned the color of blood, and glowed with power and fury.
Staring, Darklis couldn’t bring herself to say a word. Her heart was still pounding, her head blank of everything except complete and utter terror.
“I thought you must have some questions for me,” Erik said as he stood before her, his arms crossed, a smirk on his lips. “After all, it’s been a while. And after I took you in, cared for you all those years! I’d have thought you’d be concerned for me.”
“Took me in?” Anger finally loosened Darklis’s tongue. “You murdered my family!”
Erik’s eyes blazed a moment as he looked down on her. “Murdered? Don’t insult me. It was a blood feud, declared and conducted under archaic dragon custom. Or do you think we dragons need to become even more similar to humans, and start adhering to their silly laws? Dragons have always fought for dominance – that is what we are. That is what has made us strong. All this stupid pandering to human morality will only make us weak.”
Darklis stared up at Erik, so furious that she couldn’t speak.
He is crazy.
She had always known that. Erik Lukich had always thought dragons should go back to being the bloodthirsty, medieval beasts they had once been. But even so...
“Even if that were true, and I could accept the idea of blood feuds,” Darklis snarled, “that’s not even what happened. You told your clan a Novak dragon had killed your daughter – when in fact the two of them had fallen in love and run away together. You lied!”