by Love, Dianna
“Understood. While I’m not as experienced as you, I’m okay to keep doing it.”
“You are performing just fine, Evalle.”
She scoffed. “You’re the one who showed up and broke us into groups. I’ll remember that for a future situation, though.”
Quinn could see her developing into a strong and strategic leader with just a little guidance. “That’s as much catch-up as I can give you at the moment.”
“Got it.” She put a hand on his shoulder to stop him from leaving. “While you’re here, you may want to talk to Reese.”
“I do want to speak with her, but I don’t have time to teleport back and forth to Treoir at the moment.”
Evalle stretched her neck in a move to delay speaking. “She’s at her apartment.”
“What?” Quinn ground out.
“Yep. Phoedra and Lanna are still in Treoir, according to Edward.” She referenced the Belador working as a doorman at Phoedra and Reese’s apartment. “I spoke to him when I passed by her apartment on patrol. Edward said he was surprised to see Reese back when he hadn’t heard from you. I told him I’d let you know if I saw you first.” Evalle had that I-don’t-like-being-the-messenger look.
Bloody hell. What was Reese doing here?
And who teleported her back to Atlanta without telling him?
Storm’s jaguar nudged Evalle’s leg. She said, “I know. I’m telling him.” Taking another breath, she said, “You noticed the number of demons at VIPER, right?”
“Of course. Trey mentioned an influx of them in the city. Where are they all coming from?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. I’ve never seen so many in the city and no other areas in the south are reporting anything like this. I hate to say this, Quinn, but they started showing up after Reese returned. Edward told me he widened the protective area around her apartment. We mapped sightings and killings over the past twelve hours. Those spots were in a five-to-six mile radius around her building. More are showing up every hour.”
Chapter 3
Tristan’s body dangled thousands of feet off the ground from claws the size of his head. A dark scarf wrapped around his face blocked his view. Cold air battered his body clothed in medieval furs and leathers, none of it comfortable.
All of it soaked and cold as shit.
Brynhild’s dragon would freeze Tristan’s nuts off if this flight went on for much longer.
She almost managed to do it once before.
He’d have nightmares for the rest of his life, which might not be very long.
All he did was try to talk to this damn dragon shifter to make friends while they were both stuck inside Cathbad’s cavern.
Because friends helped friends escape, right?
Not this lunatic. She took offense at his attempt to flirt and lost her ever-lovin’ mind.
One minute Brynhild was listening to him, and the next, she snapped. She started shifting into the massive iridescent-blue dragon now flying him who knew where and roared furiously. Her power had expanded and slammed across the cavern. The pond water boiled into a churning sea and huge chunks of ice shot up into the air.
When the crazy dragon fully formed, she pulled her spiked head back with jaws open to snap his head off. In that split second, Tristan had one last idea to save his ass.
He yelled, “I can teleport!”
Her dragon’s head whipped forward.
He braced for the attack.
She swung her head to the side instead and unleashed a quick blast of fire.
It burned a hole in the rock wall.
Tristan would have ended up a pile of ashes.
No regenerating from ashes.
When he’d stopped breathing like a horse run to ground and realized he’d dodged a fire bullet, he repeated, “I. Can. Teleport.”
He’d wanted to be sure she got that part.
Seeing her spew fire brought back the conversation he’d had with Daegan about a red dragon filmed burning forests in two countries.
Daegan contended that could not be a true red dragon. The fire had been confined as if shot through a tube where Daegan’s dragon fire spread out for maximum damage.
Brynhild’s fire had blasted out in a narrow stream for seconds, then fizzled.
Right after the fire, she blew a stream of frozen water across the ceiling of the cavern. Had her dragon done that to clear the smoky taste from her mouth?
When that giant dragon head swung around to face Tristan, brilliant blue eyes with elongated black irises stared at him. Her dragon had a smoother voice than Daegan’s. “What did you say about teleporting?”
Tristan finally exhaled the air from lungs filled to capacity. “I can teleport. We can get out of here.” He hadn’t wanted to give up his ace so soon, but it would have done him little good to die with that information.
“I do not believe you.”
He jumped at the chance to convince her before he faced Brynhild-the-Terminator part two. “I can prove it if you remove these manacles.”
“You think to trick me?” her dragon roared.
Damn woman.
Tristan’s hearing would never recover from that ear-crushing sound so close. “What would be the point in tricking you when I want out of here as much as you want freedom? It should be worth your time to give me a chance to show you what I can do. Don’t you want to live without a tether to Cathbad?”
Yep, he had gone all in on escaping.
Her dragon had eyed him for a bit then walked away, hopped, then took flight around the cavern.
Tristan had to close his eyes to keep flying pieces of ice that broke loose from blinding him. Her wings sent ice of all sizes airborne. He had cuts on his face, arms, upper body. Thankfully, he’d still had jeans on protecting his lower half. The air dropped twenty degrees.
As she flew in her tight little airspace, her dragon blew out long streams of ice. She circled again and again, but the constant turning and flapping clearly burned up energy. When her dragon landed, Brynhild changed back to her human form.
She did it quickly and clothed herself in the same battle armor. Walking toward his hanging body, she had the swagger of a warrior who had known victory more than once. In addition to that black armor with silver emblems, her hair wove itself into tight braids, half of which were pulled back and tied with a leather thong by an invisible hand. The rest fell loose.
Black kohl outlined her sparkling blue eyes. That and the thick lashes created a dramatic effect.
Her perfect skin and sculpted lips belonged on a runway model in New York.
Beneath all that blond hair hid a supernatural homicidal maniac.
But she had been Tristan’s only ticket out of that cave before Cathbad could begin turning him into a polymorph, one capable of destroying Treoir before Daegan’s dragon would have been forced to kill Tristan. Daegan wouldn’t have known who he was until Tristan died. Tristan had been willing to do anything to save his boss and friend from so horrible a fate.
Tristan’s body ached from too many ice wounds to count, none of which would heal until he could draw on his gryphon’s power.
A rumbling noise shook him back to the present.
Thunder?
Getting struck by lightning would cap his crappy day.
Brynhild’s dragon made a soft cawing noise as if she liked something she saw.
What had drawn her beast’s attention?
And no one could see Brynhild’s dragon while she flew brazenly in public. She had the ability to cloak her dragon, even while in the air.
Did Daegan know that little detail?
If Tristan made it through this flight and whatever she had in mind for him, he had a lot to share with Daegan.
First he had to survive.
Brynhild had broken the spelled chains holding Tristan to the stone wall and let his abused body fall to the floor. His right knee had buckled when he tried to stand. The cold initially numbing the pain in his kneecap no longer helped now th
at a blanket warmed his legs just enough to feel again. Every time her dragon dipped or banked, his knee suffered a jagged ache.
He’d been so sure he could teleport away from her the minute she freed him, but she’d proven to be more clever than he realized and stayed a jump ahead.
The minute he managed to stand on his bad leg in the cavern, she’d produced a dagger. She shoved his wrist against the stone wall and stabbed the dagger through his forearm, pinning him in place.
That had hurt like a mother.
He was lucky she hadn’t killed him right then for the curses he’d shouted at her. She’d smiled instead, evidently more at home with confirmation of her warrior ability than a compliment that almost got him killed.
Rocking the knife to pull it loose from the stone, she’d kept the blade stabbed through his arm as she half-dragged him limping beside her to the mouth of the cave. Every move jarred the sharp blade. He’d come close to passing out. With her lack of patience, she would have probably just killed him on the spot, then regretted the rash decision later.
When she reached the front entrance to the cave, she nodded at the huge boulder blocking their exit and said, “Ledge is on other side of large stone. Teleport there.”
With blood running down his arm and shivering from shock, Tristan croaked, “You can’t move that rock?”
“Yes, but druid put ward in place,” she’d yelled at him.
Having his eardrums blasted again kept him from losing consciousness. “You still have to take the other manacle off for me to teleport.”
“I will, but know this.” She leaned around to his face, leaving no chance of misunderstanding her words. “I will have my hand on this dagger and your neck the very moment I remove the manacle. Try to teleport without me and I stab you somewhere next time that will hold a man’s attention.”
His balls shriveled at that warning.
He uttered in a thin voice, “No tricks.”
Good to her word, she looped the dangling chain from his manacle around the arm holding the dagger. The second she released the manacle from his wrist, she clamped her fingers on his throat.
Tristan considered all the ways teleporting somewhere unfamiliar could go wrong and kill him. He also had a fleeting thought of trying to teleport somewhere he knew, but feared he might be too drained of energy to teleport the entire way. He was not risking his death when he still had a chance to escape.
He’d asked, “How wide is the ledge outside?”
“Four strides away from boulder. Six strides wide. Do not miss or you will fall to your death where I will shift into my dragon and fly away.”
That required teleporting up and over the ward shielding the entrance.
He hoped like hell Cathbad had not warded more than this opening.
Brynhild wouldn’t care that teleporting was not a natural gift, but an ability he’d gained by downing a witch highball out of desperation in the past. That had been back when the goddess Macha had imprisoned him in a spelled jungle location in South America just for being an Alterant.
Screwed by another female and no desire to kiss either one. “Get ready. I’m teleporting us.”
Brynhild scoffed, “I have been ready for long time.”
He called up his gryphon power, hoping for enough to teleport the short distance and that his arm would not heal around the damn dagger. Then he closed his eyes and hoped he possessed a bit of luck.
When he reappeared, snow and mountains stretched forever. His toes hung over the edge of a cliff with nothing below him for thousands of feet with him teetering forward.
His heart tried to claw its way up his throat at the vision of falling to his death.
She yanked him back on solid ground and clamped the manacle onto his bad wrist.
He shouted, “I’m fuckin’ freezin’.” She conjured up fur and leather clothing on his body.
He’d considered shifting right then and fighting his way out, but Brynhild being a dragon shifter stifled that idea. Even if they had been equal in power, she had not been tortured for hours or stabbed with a dagger.
She immediately wrapped the chain around his neck, ending all hope of shifting.
Whatever spell Cathbad had placed on the chain and manacles blocked Tristan’s gryphon power.
“You will teleport us to my homeland.”
Tristan had a pretty good idea where that was, but still asked, “Where did you grow up?”
“Are you daft? You know of dragons but not the home of the ice dragons?”
“Actually, I do know where that is, but if we teleport there you might get attacked.” Truth, but Tristan was more concerned with landing in an open area without conflict to give him a chance to find a way to escape.
“Humans are everywhere today,” she groused.
Tristan thought about the place he’d gone with Daegan with the team where Vikings had once suffocated innocent women and children in an underground cave hundreds of years ago. That’s when Tristan learned that Noirre majik, the worst of all black majik, originated from the cadavers in that cave.
He hoped to convince Brynhild of going there. “You’re right about humans being everywhere these days, but I once went to a place called County Kilkenny, which isn’t far from where I believe your king’s castle to be. It has people mostly during the day. I did a lot of hiking there and think I can land us out of view from the humans.”
“Yes, do this.” She swung her lethal gaze close to his face. “Take me to wrong place and I will cut out an eye.”
Bloodthirsty female. His body couldn’t hurt more if someone had pushed him headfirst through a woodchipper. “Got it.”
When she removed the chain and manacle, Tristan teleported, but that one trip drained his energy big time. When they landed, rain battered his body and drenched him. This fur and leather outfit she’d dressed him in weighed more than medieval metal armor.
Through the downpour, he saw land, but no idea if he’d hit his mark.
Without pausing to say a word, she wrapped his head with a dark cloth, clamped the manacle on his arm again, and pushed him to the ground. The chain jerked like she’d stomped on the section closest to his arm with her foot. Damn her.
Power had sizzled and burst around him.
Ah, shit. When she shifted into that freaking dragon, he’d shouted, “Humans have big weapons to kill dragons.” He wouldn’t care, but she had no plans to turn him loose and didn’t want to be blown to pieces with her.
“No one sees mine. I will cloak dragon.”
In the next minute, the chain attached to the manacle yanked hard, pulling him to his feet by his freaking wounded arm. He’d call her a sadist, but she didn’t seem to derive pleasure from hurting him.
That would require human emotion.
It was more that she saw her actions as a means to an end.
None of that softened the agony of her abuse.
He’d stood there in the driving rain, waiting for her next move. Then he heard the loud beating of massive wings.
The sound diminished the farther she flew away from him.
Had she left?
What the hell?
His pulse had raced with a renewed energy. He could escape? He’d gotten her to this point.
She didn’t need him anymore, right?
He’d decided to give it a minute to be sure she had been gone long enough then ...
A loud whooshing sound surrounded him, then his body was yanked up in the air, claws pinning his arms tight on both sides.
He couldn’t guess how long ago that had been. Shock continued to rack his body with cold chills, causing his teeth to rattle so hard he had to clamp them to keep from biting his tongue.
She’d been flying straight into a strong wind since then, getting his head battered. The ends of the blindfold slapped around.
Claws larger than his gryphon’s held him in an unyielding grip. If only he could shift into his gryphon, he could heal.
He couldn’t see a damn thin
g.
No idea where she headed.
Sharp pellets of rain smacked any exposed skin as she flew them straight into a storm. Thunder pounded everywhere.
Time passed at its own whim.
Blood loss had him losing consciousness then the dragon’s wild movements would jerk him awake.
His stomach flipped when the dragon dropped suddenly from the sky, a move that required Tristan’s gryphon to tuck his wings.
He now had more appreciation for Evalle who often suffered vertigo when teleporting.
Flying Bitch-hild Airline sucked.
The dragon’s movement slowed. That would be her setting her wings for landing.
Ah shit, was she going to land all that heavy-ass body on top of him?
Nope.
She dropped him what felt like ten feet off the ground. He hit, rolling hard until he flopped to a stop. It knocked the wind out of him. His chest hurt like hell and he sucked hard to get air. His head spun.
Human fingers curled around his arm, right above the wound, and lifted him to his feet. He’d never harmed a woman, but this being was no woman.
Brynhild was a monster in female skin.
She yanked the covering off his eyes.
He blinked to see against the deluge of water striking him in the face. She had his bad arm by the chain, but he lifted his free hand to wipe his face. “Where are we?”
“My favorite place when I started shifting into dragon as a young girl.” She actually smiled as she tossed his blindfold away and turned her back on him.
It took him a minute to understand why she didn’t worry about leaving him on his own as she walked to the edge of the ground they stood upon.
Tristan squinted, taking in the spectacular cliffs far out to his right and left with an ocean beyond.
Lightning sparked and fingered across the heavens like bony witches fingers.
Not a person or building in any direction.
He had no idea where he was, but he had a plan.
He’d left his gryphon alone when he had no chance of healing or breaking free, but he could feel energy seeping into his uninjured arm. Maybe the spell on the chain and manacle only worked if the chain made a complete wrap around his neck or both wrists were shackled, like an electrical circuit.