by JD Monroe
“Don’t,” she said, looking pained suddenly. “I know.” She pulled away from him, leaving him feeling cold and empty. With a soft breath, she squared her shoulders, fiddled with the hair around her face again, then looked back at him. Her expression was mild, but it was not the wide-open warmth he had seen before. It was a guarded look, one that made him feel like they were already separated.
He took a deep breath, and gestured for her to follow him into the corridor. Several servants were carrying linens and trays from the lift. He stopped one and gave her the amulet with a request to return it to the queen. When he had finished, he rejoined Gabrielle.
With dawn still on the horizon, it was quiet and peaceful for their passage down the empty corridor. Tarek stopped at the first great open balcony and stepped outside, looking out over the city. There was so much he wished she could still see, but her home was in another world. This was not where she belonged.
He took a deep breath to bolster his resolve, then slipped his trousers down over his hips. This time, he felt no shyness about his naked body in front of her. Closing his eyes, he began the transformation. It was a subtle heat at first, then a searing explosion in his chest as the dragon broke free. His bones cracked, his skin splitting as massive muscle swelled. A maddening itch rolled over him as thousands of gleaming blue scales emerged along his limbs.
It took a moment to regain his center, his sense of who he was, as the dragon took over. He was still Tarek, but he was also more. Through his enhanced eyes, Gabrielle was even lovelier than she had been. He could see the fine threads of coppery-gold in her dark hair, a faint bronze sheen to her skin. In the growing light of dawn, she glowed.
She hesitated, then put out one hand toward him as if she was going to touch him. His dragon instincts had him more tense than usual, but he controlled himself, instead leaning his head toward her. Her fingers grazed the smooth row of scales along his jaw. A pleasant warmth, a campfire on a cold night, ignited under her delicate touch. He let out an appreciative sound that rumbled in his chest. She jumped back in fright, but he remained steady.
“Is it all right?” she asked.
He rumbled a yes in Kadirai, and she tilted her head in confusion. With a little growl, he managed to say it in English for her. Speech was difficult, but she seemed to understand. She smiled in recognition and touched him again, tracing the long tapered snout, then following his neck to the row of spines on his back and to the root of the great wings. When her fingers came upon the scars of the Silverflight, where their liquid fire had nearly melted him, he winced. She recoiled and said, “I’m sorry!”
He shook himself a little. Now the sun was fully over the mountains, throwing its pink-orange veil over the sky. With the sun glowing behind her like a halo, all Tarek wanted to do was scoop Gabrielle into his arms, fly her far away, and hide her away like a treasure. But he knew what he had to do, even if it broke his heart.
He shifted his weight onto his powerful back legs and gestured with his front claws for her to approach. She approached him tentatively. The smell of her reached his powerful nose and nearly made him growl. He smelled himself on her skin, the earthy smell of their bodies pressed together.
The Kadirai were not dragons to be tamed by humans, and they certainly did not make a habit of allowing riders. They had harnesses and other contraptions to allow for carrying loads over a distance, but none of them would have been comfortable for Gabrielle.
“I’m not sure what to do,” she said.
If she had simply been a prisoner of war, he would have grabbed her around the waist and flown off with her hanging from his claws like a sack of flour. But that seemed too undignified for her. Instead, he gestured with his head in an arc, toward his back. She followed his gesture, walking around him and touching his back. Then her weight shifted onto him as she swung a leg over his spine. Her instincts were good; she positioned herself high on his back, above the strong joints where his wings joined his body. Her hands felt for purchase and finally rested without grasping on either side of his neck. “Is this all right?”
He chuffed a response and nodded. Her legs squeezed lightly on either side of him. He growled quietly, beat his wings several times to catch the air, then launched himself upward. The extra weight made him shaky at first, but he instinctively reached out for the filaments of the wind’s magic, focusing his mind on the currents and twisting them to his advantage.
Navan and the rest of the Council would certainly have something to say if they saw him, a proud Kadirai, in the sky with a human woman riding him like some pack animal. But he would not dishonor Gabrielle by carrying her like worthless cargo. To hell with their sneers.
He wheeled to the east. As he leaned into the wind, Gabrielle’s body pressed tighter to him. With a little grin to himself, he growled, a long, satisfied sound that vibrated his entire chest and throat. He felt her legs clamp down tighter on him, her hips twitching forward ever so slightly in response. Oh, what he could do to make this trip entertaining. But it occurred to him that it might be a rather cruel prank to distract her while flying high above the shattered earth.
Vakhdahl lay under him like a picturesque tapestry through the golden-orange filter of sunrise. Beyond the valley surrounding the city of Farath, the land was wild and dangerous. The Azure Peaks stretched on behind them, while the Iveron Forest spread beyond like wild grass. Slashed gray streaks broke the dense green of the forest, as if some great beast had clawed through them. Nothing dared to grow on the wide swaths of bare stone.
Only a tiny piece of the forest lay in Vakhdahl. From there, the Iveron spread like a wedge out into the other lands. Instead, the Stoneflight claimed dominion over the vast, ruined gray expanse. It had the dry, jagged landscape of the deserts in the human world, but the color was leached out of the very ground. Even the sunrise took on a harsher cast, the healthy pink-orange a glaring, washed-out orange shade.
Broken Stone Keep was barely discernible from the craggy stone around it. The camouflaging structure had been built over years, with dragons flying at all angles to ensure that it was invisible from the sky. Huge blocks of stone had been chipped away from the mountains and carried across the shattered landscape, dropped haphazardly to help the keep blend in.
With the keep in sight, Tarek began a slow spiraling descent; if it were only him, he would have plummeted like an arrow from a bow and pulled up at the last second, but he was sure Gabrielle wouldn’t appreciate it. Instead, he flew in a wide circle.
As he looked down at the well-concealed Gate, he noticed something strange. A young man stood outside, watching the sky. And despite being positioned here in Ascavar, he wore street clothes from the human world.
Dread gripped his belly. Focusing his will, Tarek pulled the air around him like a dense curtain. He would appear as no more than a mirage if the young man even looked his way. Tarek spiraled down closer to get a better look. He could not sense if he was Kadirai.
That didn’t matter, because closer to the ground, he smelled blood. He smelled death.
He growled instinctively and tensed enough that Gabrielle shifted her weight in response, her hands suddenly pressed against his neck to steady herself. He turned abruptly, flying a hundred yards or so away from the Gate to another rocky outcropping. After landing quietly, he shook his body lightly to send Gabrielle the signal to get off. There was a shift in her weight, then a gentle scrape down his side as she slid off. She looked at him quizzically. “What’s going on?”
He growled again. Her brow creased, her eyes flitting over him in worry. He prodded her as gently as he could manage with his head, leading her behind the rocky formation. He tried to form the word wait, though it came out low and growling.
“Wait?” she said.
He nodded, then wrapped his wings around himself as he knit together the illusion. He heard her gasp in surprise as he disappeared from sight. Then he took flight, barely skimming the ground.
As he landed just outside the Gate chamber,
he poured more energy into the mirage. Then he quieted, sitting still to listen. The stench of death—of metal and excrement and burnt flesh—was strong here, strong enough to make his stomach churn. Inside, there were a number of voices speaking English. There was chatter about bodies.
The voices grew louder. Someone called, “Manit!” The young man standing outside snapped to attention and ran inside. Tarek crept away from the building, watching from a few yards away as three men emerged. Between them, they dragged a body with a shock of familiar chestnut hair.
Kaliyah.
A spark of anger flared to life in him. His recognition turned quickly to rage as the men dragged her naked body out of the Gate and left it sprawled on the ground. Her dragging feet left faint grooves in the loose gravel and grit. Angular symbols had been carved into her coppery skin.
His body trembled with anger as they left her there for the world to see, her eyes wide and unseeing as they stared up at the morning sun. It took all of his control to stay still, to not run to her and tear them to pieces where they stood. One of the men fiddled with her body, adjusting one of her arms, then tilting her head, as if he was trying to get the perfect angle to be as disrespectful as possible to the dead. The other two walked inside, then came out a moment later with another body. Tarek didn’t recognize this one, but he knew it was one of the Stoneflight. He was already tensing his muscles, about to take to the sky, when they did something strange.
It was obvious that both of the Gatekeepers had been dead for some time, but two of the men took daggers from their belts and plunged them down into the bodies. Then they left them there, dark handles protruding like spines. When they had finished, they simply walked inside and did not return.
From this distance, he couldn’t see the details of the blade, but he recognized the dark metal and the curved hilt. They were similar to the one he’d recovered from Surik’s body in the human world and given to Gabrielle to protect herself.
What was he to do? He was a proud man, but he knew he could not fight all of them. As he listened, he made out at least five different voices. If they were all Vak, and all of them came out to face him, he might have a chance. But if he was to go on the attack, he would have to assume the worst case scenario: that they were all Kadirai. And he could not face five full-grown dragons and survive, not even at his best.
Instead he spun away, flicked his wings to carry him upward, and skidded to an ungraceful stop near Gabrielle. He bumped her with his head and flipped his head dramatically toward his back.
“Get back on?” she said incredulously.
“Yes,” he said, hoping the word was clear.
“Why?”
He growled impatiently.
“Fine,” she muttered. She threw her leg over his back again. As soon as she had leaned forward, settling her weight, he crouched, then shot straight upward. She let out a yelp of surprise and wrapped her arms around his neck tight enough to crunch the scales together. He desperately hoped they hadn’t heard.
He released his illusion and pulled the currents tight around him, propelling himself as quickly as he could toward the west. His wings stretched and burned with exertion. The ground zipped away below them at a dizzying rate, so he kept his eyes to the sky, searching for home. Gabrielle’s grasp on him tightened, and he felt the warm pressure and contact as she pressed the length of her upper body to him, holding on for dear life.
What did this mean? Whoever had attacked their Gate likely controlled both sides. And since the city had not heard of it yet, they had killed everyone, preventing a messenger from escaping. It could be a prelude to war, allowing the Ironflight or some unknown enemy to move their forces through the human world and into Vakhdahl via the Gate. With no warning, the city would never see it coming from the Gate.
The Ironflight was the obvious culprit, but as he’d argued to Halmerah, it was almost too obvious. Regardless of who was responsible, the attack was imminent. It didn’t matter who was behind it; he had to warn the city.
Tarek caught the wind, pressed forward, and hoped to the Skymother he would be fast enough.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The flight away from the city had been beautiful, though a bit wistful, like flying away from a dreamy vacation. Then Tarek had left her behind a rock, disappeared, and reappeared five minutes later growling. He was practically dancing in place and gesturing with his scaled head for her to climb on again. With his wings twitching and tail swishing like a perturbed cat, it was clear that something was very wrong. She climbed on as quick as she could and had barely gotten herself righted on his back when he took off. Whatever he’d seen had been enough to defy the queen’s orders to take her home, so it couldn’t have been good.
When she made the mistake of looking down at the blurring ground below, it almost made her sick. Where their initial flight had been sort of leisurely, with Tarek gliding through the air gently, this was an intense, breakneck race. Each stroke of his huge wings jolted them forward. Powerful muscle and sinew shifted under her, and she felt as if she was constantly on the verge of falling.
With the wind rushing in her ears and her heart beating painfully hard, she pressed herself close to him and clung to his neck. The hard spines dug into her cheeks, but they at least gave her something to hold onto.
The cracked gray landscape melted into forest, and soon back into the small villages dotting the landscape beyond the city. It could have been five minutes or two hours before he finally began to descend toward the edge of Farath. Over the city, the sleek outlines of dragons circled in wide, slow spirals. Along the peaks that framed the mighty citadel, the early morning light bounced off the reflective scales of dragons standing guard. There were dozens in the mountains and more still perched on the ledges and terraces of Adamantine Rise.
Tarek growled, a sound that rumbled all the way into her guts like a subwoofer. Then he hurtled downward. Her stomach crawled into her throat, and she held on so tight that she might be choking him but didn’t particularly care. A stone plaza rushed up to them, with a massive archway carved in angular dragon runes. Why was he landing here instead of going straight to the queen?
She didn’t have time to think about it. Tarek landed hard, sending a hard jolt up into her body and rattling her jaws. He grunted with effort, crouching so she could climb off. Her legs were weak and shaky, and she had to brace herself with one hand on his side to steady herself.
Flanking the archway were clusters of guards. Several wore the dark uniforms that she now recognized as the Adamant Guard, while the others wore plainer, rough-spun gray uniforms. The ones in gray were smaller than the ones in blue; they had to be the Vak City Guard.
Tarek spoke, and while it sounded to her like unintelligible growling, one of the Adamant Guards nodded in understanding. He relayed the message to the guards around him. If Gabby had known they’d be coming back to the city, she’d have held on to the queen’s amulet a little longer. Maybe he was warning them since they’d be the first line of defense against whatever Tarek had seen. Surely they would head up to the citadel to warn the queen next.
One of the guards looked up suddenly, his eyes going wide. It was the most basic human response; when someone looked shocked, it was only natural to turn and see what they were looking at. When Gabby turned and saw the huge creatures in the sky, the world fell away. The guards’ voices behind her sounded like they were far away, underwater, even.
Closing on the city in a wide triangular formation were three massive white dragons. As if they’d been waiting for someone to notice them, one of them let out a long, ear-splitting cry. It was the sound of a roar mixed with the long air horn of a barge and a freight train combined. It was so loud and low that she could hear the individual waves of the sound shaking its mighty vocal cords. That sound went into her ears and down into her guts, making her legs go rubbery and weak as she shuddered involuntarily.
“What is that?” she breathed. But she knew, didn’t she? She’d seen it before. No
t in person, but she recognized these dragons from Ashariah’s nightmare. She’d thought maybe the nightmare had exaggerated their size, but they were even bigger and more terrible to look upon in real life. As she watched them, her head swam. Their outlines shimmered like a desert mirage. Focusing her gaze on them made her head throb.
A choked sound came from behind her. She whirled around to see one of the Adamant Guards with a knife to his partner’s throat. Without warning, he drew the blade across delicate skin, spraying blood everywhere. Flinging the shuddering guard aside, he lunged for Gabby.
Tarek lashed his tail, propelling the man backward. But he was undeterred as he stumbled and hit his knees. Instead, he crossed his arms over his chest, bellowed in rage, and transformed in mere seconds into a pale green dragon. The guard uniform fell around him in dark shreds. Instead of taking to the sky, he skittered up the wall like a lizard and then did a graceful loop around to land on Tarek’s back. He clawed at Tarek’s spread wings, worrying at him as Tarek tried to shake him loose.
Tarek twisted and maneuvered his front leg around to slash at the smaller dragon. It leaped away from his swipe, leaving bleeding furrows down Tarek’s wing. The green dragon tried to fly away from him, but Tarek lunged and caught his slender tail in his powerful jaws. Whipping his head around, he smashed the smaller dragon onto the cobblestones. The green dragon said something, his voice burbling and choking. Tarek growled back and waited for a response. When the green dragon choked something back, Tarek roared and slashed his long claws across the other dragon’s throat, pinning the smaller creature’s head to the ground until it quit fighting.
Gabby gasped involuntarily as the green dragon twitched one last time and fell limp. The surviving guards were all shouting at each other, at her, and she didn’t understand a word of it. One of the white dragons roared again.
She sank to her knees, covering her ears in fright. Forget her second thoughts. With chaos erupting around her, she wanted nothing more than to wake up in her normal, boring bed. There’s no place like home, she thought crazily. Didn’t work. Damn.