by Celeste Raye
The wind whistled around her head and ears. Her mouth opened in a scream as she hurtled downward, the gown flying up around her body and her hands beating at the air as she grabbed at the nothingness and found nothing but air. Nothing to hold onto. Nothing to save her.
She was going to die!
That scream, ripped from her mouth like someone had reached a hand into her throat and yanked it out of there, echoed through the air and she heard the wind pick up speed as her body plummeted faster and faster, and she knew it was all over. This was it. This was the end of her life.
Then he was there, his front talons grabbing at her, yanking her upward just inches from the ground. The scream reversed itself, shot out of existence then came back again, leaving her voice raw and hurting.
Max’s wing made eddies of dust swirl up, and then they were in the air and flying toward the roof. She lay there, her body curled up against his now, and tears flying down her face. Safety was not something she was used to feeling, but that was just what she felt at that moment. Safe. She felt safe.
Max stood her on the roof. He changed, and his eyes were narrowed. “You…what were you doing? You could have gotten really hurt! Did you just try to jump out of the window?”
She stared at him. Her head shook from side to side. She tottered toward him but then stopped. It was clear that he was angry and with each passing second, she felt more and more stupid for having been so caught up in watching him that she had let herself fall right out of a window. She got out, “No. I was watching you.” Her eyes itched with the need to cry. She swallowed hard. “I just leaned out too far. I wasn’t thinking, and I had never seen anything like that before either. I was interested.”
That was an understatement. The biggest one she had likely ever made.
Max looked at her and then away. His jaw worked, and a muscle jumped in there. His voice was harsh. “You could have died.”
“I know. I thought I was going to. I’m sorry if I scared you.” Her whole body felt raw and strange, like she had somehow gone too heavy or something. She didn’t know what else to say to him. “I know you’re busy and distracted and the last thing you have time to do is rescue a woman dumb enough to fall out of a window in your castle.”
His lips pursed. His eyes, shadowed and holding an expression she could not quite decipher, met hers squarely. “You saw Orcs yesterday when you arrived?”
She noticed he did not say after he had left her and the others. “Yeah. They’re really ugly. Why?”
His hands rested on his lean hips, drawing her attention there and to the bulge at the front of his trousers. She could see the firm and plump mound below the material and all her desire kicked into high gear. She looked away, fast.
He said, “Because they were not supposed to be there. They were infringing on our territory. Blake told me they were there, and I believe him…”
“Then why are you asking me?” She was honestly confused by that query of his, especially if he believed that Blake had been telling the truth.
“Because I may need you to tell those who don’t truly think Blake was being honest. Many don’t trust him, and I can’t say that they don’t have a reason not to.”
Heather wrapped her arms around her waist, wishing that it was his arms around her. “Okay.”
He looked over toward the edge of the roof. “I better get back down there. I hope you can find your own way down, presumably by stair instead of the more direct route?”
She took a hard breath at that and looked at him, sure he was insulting her. There was a grin on his face, and it was not an unkind one though, and she felt better. “Yes, and thank you for saving my life. Really.”
He turned away and then turned back. The heady aroma of his sweat and the soap he used hit her, making her nipples go taut and her core to clench. He said, “Of course I would never let you fall, not when I was near enough to catch you.”
That hit her right in the heart. No, he would never let her fall. He was not that kind of man. Of dragon. Of anything.
Sorrow hit. Why oh why did she have to meet the perfect man and have to lose him? It was obvious she would lose him. This was his world and no way would he leave it and she was not sure if she could stay there. Maybe there was a law about that too. From what she understood, the ones who came and were allowed to stay all had magical powers, and she definitely did not have anything close to that.
That she thought that he was perfect made her heart contract. She barely knew him, and she was playing a dangerous game. The truth was, Christy had been right. Hookups had never been her style, and she tended to place more of herself than she should into a man’s hands after she had slept with him. She got too emotionally invested way too fast.
It was no wonder she was getting caught up like she was. It had been too long since she had felt any kind of desire for a man or known intimacy—and what they had shared had not been just sex: it had been intimacy. At least for her. But she had no idea of what he thought about that or if that had just been some no strings attached sex with a human. For all she knew, dragons thought of sleeping with humans as sport.
He stared at her face and that thought, can he read my mind, hit again, forcing her to look away. Her arms fell away from her midsection and then went back up, that time over her chest. She wanted to kiss him, wanted to step forward and just let her mouth rest against his full and wide lips for a moment and see if he responded, but so what if he did?
He was virile, and he had a libido. He might want her in his bed but he was a dragon, and she was a human, and he had been so mean at dinner, even if he had apologized for it afterward. Not to mention that he really was a king and there was clearly something going on, something that demanded his total attention, and she was getting in the way: something he was bound to find highly unattractive.
Max lifted a hand. Those strong fingers of his tangled into her hair, fisted it, and her body immediately responded. She went toward him, her lips parting and her pupils dilating as his mouth came down on hers, fusing his lips to hers and then giving her a fast but incredibly passionate kiss that took her breath and stole all the thoughts right out of her head. Her limbs trembled. His fingernails grazed the flesh of her scalp, leaving tingling little trails there. His mouth tasted of food and mint and something else: something mysterious and delicious.
Then he broke that kiss off, leaving her blinking and dazed. He said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do this with you, Heather. I can’t.”
Then he strolled to the roof’s edge and jumped off it. She heard his wings beat the air a few times, felt the updraft from those strong and leathery wings on her face, cooling her flushed skin.
She had to resist the urge to go to the edge, to peek down and watch him do that mock battle. She had to stop lusting after him. She was distracting him, and it was a pretty good bet that she was a distraction he could not afford just then.
He was definitely a distraction she could not afford. It would be way too easy to forget how soon she would have to leave and that there was no way they could be together and to open herself up to something that would definitely end in her getting more hurt than she had been in her entire lifetime.
“My life back home isn’t perfect or awesome, but it’s mine. I don’t know that I’d want to stay here once the novelty wore off. I mean, there’s not even electricity. There are lights, but I think it’s magic that keeps them on. Talk about a blackout waiting to happen!”
She was still thinking about those things when she opened the door to the room she shared with Christy to find Christy pacing the floor, her feet moving so fast it looked like she was about to break into a run at any minute.
Heather said, “Whoa! What’s up?”
Christy spun on her heel to face her. Her eyes held both hurt and anger. “He stood me up. No, scratch that. He showed up, said he had something of real importance to deal with, and then flew off and left me alone out there in a goddamn meadow!”
“Oh no!” Heather aske
d, “Did you just stay out there then? You were gone a long time.”
Christy flopped down into a chair. She waved a hand at the ceiling. “Yeah, I did. These humans were out there hunting truffles.”
“Huh?”
“Truffles, you know, mushrooms. You should see those things. They’re huge, and they’re amazing too. At first, I was wary, like what if they have some kind of tolerance to whatever poison the truffles might have in them because they have been eating them their whole lives, but I tried one anyway. You know I have always been a sucker for the finer things. Then, because I ate a bit, I got roped into helping to hunt for them. That’s how things work here. Everyone does something to help. Or so they told me as they handed me a bag and a stick and told me to get to digging. For all I know they just wanted free labor.”
Heather hid a grin. Christy had a flair for the dramatic, but at that moment she was using that flair to offset her very real disappointment. “It’s a good thing you don’t like him.”
“I know right? If I did, it might have hurt my feelings. Not that I really have any. One cannot be in my field and have feelings.”
“You do know it’s okay to say you like him?”
Christy’s upper lip curled backward off her teeth. “I’d die before I said that.”
That meant she did like Blake. Heather knew her well enough to know that Christy got out her toughest armor when confronted with emotions she did not know how to handle. Liking a man always brought out the tough in Christy.
Christy tucked a strand of hair behind one ear. She peered at Heather’s face. “You look upset yourself.”
Heather let her fingers smooth a small wrinkle in her dress. “I fell out of the window.”
Christy’s eyes went as big and round as saucers. “You did what? How? Are you okay?”
She sighed, “Yes. Max caught me and saved my life.”
Christy stood again. “Really?”
Heather’s hands cupped her elbows. “Yeah, it was pretty…well.” It was exciting, after she had realized she was not about to die after all. It had been incredibly sweet, and it had made her feel safe and protected too. Of course it had. To her. But to him, it had likely just been a minor annoyance that had interrupted something he found more important. She swallowed back a hard lump in her throat and offered, “It was crazy.”
Christy’s eyes went to the windows. Dusk had begun, and purple and blue shadows cloaked the open window casement. “Sounds like it. Listen, I’m pretty beat. Do you mind if I just turn in?”
“No, not at all. I was just thinking the same thing.” Heather eyeballed the wide and long bed. That she would much rather share it with Max was no shocker. That he was probably done with her hurt.
Dragons. How could she possibly know what any of them were really thinking?
Chapter Sixteen
Max was torn between anger and fear. Seeing Heather go tumbling out of the sky like that had made his gut go cold, and he had reacted instantly, but what if he hadn’t? That window was dozens of feet off the ground and she would have died, and painfully at that, at the point of her impact. As fast as he had reacted, it had still been a very near thing, something that dogged him as he continued to do the fencing and other battler drills that made up so much of dragon life. It was one thing to count on their dragon bodies and abilities, but in a pitched battle with any enemy, sometimes one had to be on the ground, and so they had trained for that for centuries.
The threat of outright warfare from the Orcs was no minor thing. It was huge, and they’d nearly been wiped out of existence by the Orcs in the bad old days of that world first forming. He had to keep his mind on preventing that from happening again had to stay focused on his people and his lands and the threat that the Orcs posed to those things.
To do anything else would be dishonorable. That was why he flew out at dawn along with Blake and other dragons to do a mission to see if they could spot any Orcs hiding along the borderlands. The Orcs had gotten close enough to push through if they were on the other side of the mountain where he had left Blake, and he knew it, and that alone gave him serious pause.
They set down several miles below the mountain to be sure they were not spotted and then they began the climb upward, toiling along the rocky outcroppings and crags, always sneaking from one shelter to another in case there were Orcs pasted in places that would give those awful creatures a good line of sight up and down both sides of the mountain.
They didn’t summit until well into the afternoon and when they did Max was exhausted. He had spent a restless night tossing and turning and thinking about Heather and that near-death fall. It had not just been that fall he had thought of though. The memory of their lovemaking also kept him awake, as did the urgency his body kept putting forth every time he let his mind wander to her.
Blake said, “Look, down by the elms.”
Max let his eyes scan the terrain to where Blake had indicated. An Orc, doing its best to hide its ugly body and face with the bark and leaves of the trees, stood in a thick pool of shadows at the base of the grove. “Dammit. There’s another there, see? By the rocks.”
There was. Max, Blake, and Aura took turns cautiously lifting their heads behind the rocky piles they had taken shelter in to try to spot any others. All told there were several dozen, all of them on what looked to be high alert and in hiding. The others with them were silent. The moment called for silence. It was a moment that they could all feel held real menace.
Aura finally whispered, “I vote we go down there and snatch a few to interrogate and kill the rest.”
Max said, “I rather agree. It’s probably the most expeditious solution. However, if they are a scout troop and they come up missing we could just have overplayed our hand and let the main Orc troops know that we are aware of their infringing into our territory.”
Blake nodded. “That could actually set them off and cause them to come faster. If they have been preparing for some time and they lack only the slightest bit of preparation to be ready, that will hardly take away their edge. We’ve trained in battle for centuries, but we don’t have any preparedness ready at the moment. We still need to get our people out of the village and into the castle.”
Aura said, “That may be what they’re doing now. Attempting to go around the side of the mountain in order to spy upon the village. If they see it empty, they will know. If it seems as if everything is as it always is they will have no idea that they have been found out.”
All eyes turned to Max. His jaw clamped down so hard that it squeaked in the back of his mouth. There was only one way to do this, but it was a dangerous way, and it would ensure that he would spend the next day, at least, totally exhausted and unable to help with any effort if the Orcs did decide to swarm the castle.
He said, “That is incredibly risky. It might be better to simply have them come at night.”
Blake shook his head. “No. Look at the number of them. That many Orcs? They could absolutely destroy the village in a matter of hours, especially if we are not there to protect them. The changelings have limited ability to fight because of their limited powers. The humans are strong and brave, and they have good weapons. Still, the Orcs are much deadlier, and they are huge. It takes several humans to fill a single work. You know this cousin.”
Max did know that. He also knew that using his magic was probably the best avenue, but the idea of finding himself in a weakened state during what was probably going to be a war did not appeal to him at all.
It was, unfortunately, the best option at the moment. He said, “I think you’re right. The problem is this. If they are already inching their way around the mountain, they may have already spotted us. We did not spot any, but that does not mean that they have not somehow already invaded our borders.”
Aura said, “Order me to use my inner eye.”
Max’s hands balled into fists. “No. I will already be weakened by using so much of my own magic. For you to use so much of yours when we need more of yours
is beyond foolish.”
Aura said, “I suppose we shall both be resting in bed this evening then. I will recover. We both shall. Without the eye, we have no idea of whether or not they are in our lands. We can see them down there, but only because we can see into Orc lands. None of us have the sight to see them if they are cloaked by magic, and they can only use that magic if they breach our lands. It is not their magic, and you know it. They steal it from the offerings and the trees. The eye alone can tell us.”
Max looked at Blake. He said, “This is not solely my decision.”
It wasn’t. They shared the duties of kingship. He already knew what Blake would say, and he knew that Blake was right for saying it. What’s more, Blake had the ability to be utterly ruthless: something Max often felt lacking within himself.
Oh, he could be hard; he was very tough. He was a warrior by birth, by nature. He was descended from the blood of a man who had fought wars in both worlds and who had beaten back the black magic that had nearly taken over that world many centuries before. Max had ridden alongside his father, flown with him and the other dragon-knights in the skies, and battled on the ground right next to them as well.
He was adept with a sword, with his talons and fire, and his magic. But ruthlessness? That was not in his toolbox of skills. All too often his heart would soften, and he would have to force himself to remember that the greater good had to be put before the good of one or two of his people.
Blake said, “I agree with Aura. She must use the eye.”
Max said, “Then those of us with magic must form a circle around her to prevent that eye from being seen by the Orc troops.”
They began to scramble down the side of the cliffs. They moved as slowly and cautiously as possible, using as much cover as they could find to mask their movements and keep themselves from being seen by any of the enemy that had managed to penetrate their lands. It was a torturous and arduous climb down, just as torturous and hard as the one upward had been, and Max found himself both tired and eager to have this done.