“I cannot tell you how good it is to see you. I had begun to think we would never see each other again,” I said as we shuffled around the large piles of rubble.
“How long do you think we’ve been locked away in here, sire?” one of the guardians asked.
“We’ve been in here at least one hundred years if my calculations are correct,” I told him. “Maybe more.”
None could believe that we were able to finally be around each other, and it seemed odd that the magic would be failing now. I wondered if something had happened to those that had fated us to spend a century if not more locked away. Suddenly, there was a loud rumble and the volcano started to shake as we braced ourselves against the wall. The walls shook and sounded as if they were going to crumble around us. I hoped they would so we wouldn’t be trapped anymore, but we were not that lucky. I could hear the magma spewing out of the top of the volcano but the walls that held us in barely cracked. Our only hope would be for the magma to melt the rock that made the walls.
I stood and stared at the wall along with the others waiting and hoping for something to happen. When nothing happened, I went to the corner and sat down not wanting to look at the wall anymore. I was just going to have to resign myself to the fact that I, along with my men, were never going to leave the confines of the volcano.
“I’m sorry that I haven’t been the leader that you men needed. I hope that one day we can get out of here and I will be able to be the king that our people need,” I told them.
Before any of them could say anything, the volcano began to rumble again, and we braced ourselves against the wall. I watched as the top of the cavern we were captive in began to crumble. I watched as a large chunk of the volcano fell and almost crushed Kyal, the leader of the guardians and my best friend.
I knew if the activity kept going as it was, we would be freed from our prison very soon. I could not help but smile when I thought about what it would be like to be free again. I closed my eyes to get some much-needed rest as the volcanic activity had made it difficult to get any decent sleep and my mind remembered what the outside looked like just as if I had been outside the day before. I was excited to feel the wind and sun on my face again, that was one of my favorite things about shifting. I had shifted several times while inside the volcano, but it wasn’t easy with such limited space. Once I had been locked away for several years my anger abated, and the shifting stopped. I drifted to sleep thinking of the things I would be able to do once we were freed from our lava filled prison.
Days passed and the activity continued to crack the ceiling of the cavern that held us captive. We had become impatient as we waited for it to break the rest of the way, and when it hadn’t happened soon enough for us, I shifted and broke it more with my fist. There were so many layers to break through that I had to bust it away one layer at a time. Just as I was about to start trying to break through the last layer, I heard voices around the top of the volcano. I knew it was dangerous for the humans to be around the volcano with so much activity going on and I furiously started to bang against the last layer of dried lava so I could warn them of the dangers. By the time I got a hole big enough to get my face through the humans had started to climb down through the opening of the volcano.
There were several people but only one caught my eye. She had long, dark brown hair, her frame was small and thin, but I could tell she had fire inside her. She seemed to have an old soul and her eyes looked wise. Her aura felt warm and I wanted to know her better. I wanted to know what made her laugh, what made her cry, and what she wanted most in life. My body responded to her beauty and my cock lurched in my pants. The urge to take her had become unbearable, but I knew there was nothing I could do about it as I was still trapped in the igneous rock. I felt the dragon in me jump as I realized she was the one I needed to be my queen. I would need a queen with a fiery spirit like hers to be able to handle my many moods and my own fiery nature. I knew I should not be thinking things of that nature about someone I did not even know, but I could not help it, my soul called out for her. I knew I had to get out of this cavern and warn them before the volcano reacted again and swallowed them up.
“Kyal! I need you and the others to help me open the ceiling so that I may rescue the humans above us before they are swallowed by the magma. I feel another eruption coming soon,” I said.
“Yes sire,” Kyal replied.
“Kyal, for heaven’s sake, we have been friends since we were children. You can cut the formalities and call me by my given name,” I told him.
“Yes sire, I know, but it would not be right for me to do that in front of the others, but I will do so if that is what you wish,” he answered.
I smiled and dismissed him with a wave of my hand. “You may call me whatever you like, my friend,” I said as I patted him on the shoulder.
He nodded and we all started trying to break through the ceiling. Before we could even begin to punch through the igneous rock, one of the humans came crashing through it. I was horrified to see that it was the pretty girl I had set my sights on when I looked through the hole. She was covered in shards of rock and her eyes were closed. I had to look closely to see if she was breathing or not and it appeared her breathing was shallow. I could hear her gasping. I knew I had to get her out of the volcano and to a doctor of some sort, but I wasn’t sure how people would react to me walking out of the volcano. I was sure things had changed in the hundred years I’d been prisoner, but I knew if I didn’t do something and quickly, this girl was going to die in my arms.
“I must get her help. Gentlemen, we are free.” I said as I shifted into the shiny blue dragon that I was, shredding the only clothes I had and flew out of the volcano.
I could see the people she had arrived with on the ground below us and watched as they discovered her in my arms. I could see one of them point and scream but another comforted the other and I knew they believed in my kind. I was surprised that anyone would still know about my kind at this point, I thought my kind would have become extinct by now, especially if the war had lasted long. I landed several feet in front of them and carefully held her out to them. As they grabbed her from me, I slowly shifted back into my human form. It didn’t seem to bother them that I was standing in front of them naked.
“Thank you for saving her,” they said as they bowed to me.
I knew they weren’t bowing because they knew I was a king, but because it was their custom to do so. I had worked side by side with the people of Japan a few years before assuming the throne. I was happy to see the people and breathe the fresh air.
“You are welcome,” I said.
I knew they would get her the help she needed, but I couldn’t help thinking if I didn’t go with her, I would never see her again. My heart lurched at that thought and I scolded myself for reacting that way. How could I be feeling and thinking those things for someone I had never met? Despite my reservations I knew I needed to know if she was going to be all right or not and the only way to do that would be go with them to get her help.
“May I go with you and make sure she is all right?” I asked them.
The girls nodded and I went to put on the clothes one of the guardians had mysteriously found.
“Thank you, Naal. I appreciate the clothing very much,” I said as I returned to the friends of the unconscious girl.
I took the unconscious girl from them since it looked like they were going to drop her. I carefully cradled her head in the crook of my arm and looked at her face, memorizing every part of it. There had only been one other time a woman had affected me in the way this woman had affected me and that thought scared me. Still, I wanted to know more about this girl I carried.
“What is her name?” I asked them, curious about the girl I was carrying.
“Her name is June,” I was told.
I looked at her face and knew that June was the best name that could have been picked for her. Her face had a warmth to it like the warmth of summer. Once we left the forest that
surrounded the volcano; I put her in the car they had driven, and we sped toward a hospital in Tokyo. We pulled into the emergency bay at St. Luke’s and they rushed her inside. I sat with the other girls as we waited for the doctors to update us on her condition. I stared at the sterile white walls and the bright lights that were protruding from the ceiling.
I was going to have to catch up with the times. I could not figure out why it was taking them so long to update us on her condition and I started to become very impatient. I got up and paced the floor waiting for the doctor to come out. I started to remember the last time I felt like I did and had to stop myself from reliving those memories. I was in a different time and place and I needed to concentrate on June. I didn’t understand why I cared about a girl I didn’t know, but something told me she was going to be instrumental in my life somehow.
I felt a connection to her before she fell, and her soul spoke to mine. I knew I was going to be there until I knew whether she was okay or not. I was brought from my thoughts as the doctor emerged from the trauma room. His blue scrubs were spattered with a tiny bit of blood and my heart lurched at the sight of it. I had seen a small cut on her forehead, but there was not that much blood coming from it.
“Are you the friends of the young lady named June?” he asked.
“Yes, we are.” we said in unison. Before I added, “Is she going to be okay?”
The doctor laughed and nodded his head and motioned for us to follow him. He led us through the automatic doors that opened into the emergency room and to the cubicle where the girl named June rested. Her eyes were closed, and she was sleeping even with all the noise around us. The lights of the emergency room made her hair shine as if strands of gold were threaded in with the dark brown and her skin had an iridescent glow to it despite her injuries. There were several deep cuts and scrapes over her face and forehead. I understood then why the doctor’s scrubs were spattered with her blood.
“She has a concussion and a broken wrist but other than that she is perfectly fine. She was very lucky,” the doctor told us.
One of the girls began to get upset and I didn’t know why. It sounded like the doctor was reporting good news. As I listened to her conversation with the doctor, I realized why she was so upset.
“She is asleep! If she has a concussion, she should not be sleeping at all for at least twenty-four hours. Isn’t that right doctor?” she snapped.
The doctor acted like he was afraid of the girl as he started trying to wake June from her sleep. I knew that was going to be difficult considering I could smell the morphine in her system. After several minutes of trying to wake her, her eyes fluttered open. I could tell she was groggy and not exactly sure what had happened.
“What happened? Where am I?” She asked as she tried to sit up.
She immediately fell backward, and the doctor and her friends advised her to stay on the pillow. I watched as her eyes darted from each of her friends then settled on me. The look of panic on her face broke my heart. I stopped myself as I began to feel emotions creeping to the surface and I pushed them back down inside me.
The last time a woman had looked at me with that expression on her face, she died giving birth to our child. It had been a secret relationship that no one knew about until the birth and her death because my father didn’t approve of her. Our fathers had been locked in a bitter feud for years and refused to see how much we cared for one another. They banned us from seeing each other but that didn’t stop us. We snuck around and eventually she became pregnant. I often wondered if he was the one behind the war, but I knew I would never get that question answered. Just before the magic trapped us in the volcano, I had gotten word that her father had been killed in his sleep with a knife.
Without saying a word, I quickly turned and walked out of the emergency room. I had to get her face out of my mind, or it was going to drive me crazy. I had already spent so much time trying to get past what had happened I didn’t need to be reminded of it. I walked until I found an empty alley shrouded with shadows and removed the clothing, I had put on earlier. I hid the clothes behind a loose brick in the wall and shifted into the big blue dragon that I was, smoke billowing from my nostrils in thin tendrils. I headed for the volcano to see if the others were still there. I expected to find them gone and it would have been fine with me. I was not the type of person to have people fawn over me, but my father had insisted that I take them on because every king needed to have assistants. I remember secretly rolling my eyes as my father said that to me. Had he known what I had done, I would have had fewer teeth. I smiled to myself at the memories that were flooding my mind and I was grateful that I had them to remember my family.
I arrived at the volcano to find them building a house high in the trees around the volcano and I started to help them. I couldn’t get June out of my mind and I hoped that she was going to be okay. I knew the connection I had with her was real, but I wasn’t sure she would feel the same and after what happened at the hospital, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to feel that connection. I told myself I wasn’t going to go back to the hospital. I’d see how long it lasted.
3
June
I found myself in a hospital bed with the girls who were hosting me surrounding me. There had been a man as well but it seemed he was gone. I had stared into his eyes when I woke up and there was something different about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Except for his extremely blue eyes, he seemed normal like every other man I had ever seen. Yet, there was still something about him that struck me as odd. As I tried to think about what was different about him it hit me; he had been inside the volcano when I fell.
When I had landed, I looked up and it was his face I saw before losing consciousness. My mind was racing with a lot of questions and he wasn’t there to give me the answers I so desperately needed. I leaned up a bit to see if he had gone to a different area of the room but could not see him anywhere.
“Where did that man go?” I asked my friends.
“I do not know,” she said. “He took off right when you woke up.”
I knew I needed to find him, but I didn’t know where to look for him other than at the volcano. I told myself that was a stupid idea that he would not have gone back there, but something inside me told me I was wrong about that. I knew I was going to have to wait patiently to be released from the hospital but as soon as I was, I was going to be on the hunt.
“Do you girls know anything about that man? I asked them as I tried to sit up slowly.
They shook their heads as they helped me prop myself up in the bed.
“We had never seen him before until he brought you out to us and asked to tag along to make sure you were okay,” they told me.
It made me feel good to know that he wanted to make sure that I was okay, not many people cared enough to do that these days. I still wanted to know what he was doing inside the volcano. I had not seen him in there when I started to repel down inside. It was like he had appeared out of thin air. I was brought from my thoughts by the doctor knocking on the cubicle wall.
“You seem to be doing well so I am going to let you leave with your friends here, just take it easy for a couple days before getting on any airplanes or anything of that nature,” he said.
I nodded as I took the discharge papers from him and signed my name to them, grateful to be getting out of there. I left with the discharge instructions in hand and started looking for the strange man immediately. I checked every person I passed on the way to the car to see if they were him, and every time I was disappointed. I wondered to myself where he could have gone but that was a question, I didn’t know the answer to.
“I want you to take me back to the volcano please,” I said as we got inside the car.
Both girls began shaking their heads and I knew it was going to be hard to get them to take me back out to it.
“No June, we cannot in good conscience take you back out to the volcano. There is too much activity going on, it could turn in
to a full-on eruption any day now,” the girl named Ming said.
“I appreciate your concern for my well-being, but I need to see if the man that was with us in the emergency room is back at the volcano. Something tells me he lives in it,” I said, hoping I did not sound too crazy.
They exchanged looks and I knew then that I sounded crazy to them. I did not care though; I knew there was a reason he was in that volcano and I was going to find out what it was.
“June, the doctor said you needed rest. We are going to take you home and let you rest for a while and then we will take you to the volcano to see if your strange man lives in it,” Ming said with a laugh.
I tried not to take it personally. I told myself that they did not understand me or my reasons for wanting to check it out and let it slide without bothering me. I decided to play nice and let them take me home to rest as I could feel the weakness in my body still. I knew I did not need to do anything that could damage my body further and a nap sounded nice anyway. When we got to the house I went in and went straight to bed. I felt a bit of excitement at what awaited me when I woke up. I was going to find the strange man from the volcano if it killed me.
It had been days since I had fallen and spent several hours in the emergency room and I still had not located the man that had saved me from the volcano. I had been back to the volcano, but there was no one to be found. I carefully climbed close to the top and realized that there were claw marks along the top as if some sort of creature had clawed its way out of the volcano. I leaned over and looked down the hole and I could see the place I had fallen through. The rubble was still scattered across the floor of the air pocket. Suddenly, my mind was bombarded with memories of that day and the fact that the man had been looking over me once I landed.
My gut was right, he was already in the volcano when I fell. The question was how the hell did he get in there and why was he there? I wondered if I would ever get to hear those answers from him and hoped that one day I would. I needed the answers to make sure I was not going crazy. Ven, though my family, already thought I was.
The King 0f Fire: Dragon Shifter Romance Page 2