6. It Came with More Questions than Answers
6. IT CAME WITH MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS
ELOWYN
The scene was becoming a regrettably familiar one: we smacked against a hard floor—a painfully uneven one this time—landing in thudding heaps in a dark space that was much too small for the rapidly expanding lot of us.
I struggled to catch my breath— What is that awful smell? —while I simultaneously hastened to gain my bearings. Just because my map had led to the queen’s remote cabins the previous two times didn’t guarantee it would continue to take us to new such locations, where we might be relatively safe until she tracked us. The map was, after all, still largely unexplained, with no fathomable reason for why it had appeared on my skin, and so suddenly.
At least Bolt hadn’t landed on top of me again, and Saffron was nestled safely in my arms. The dragonling was snuffling against my chest. I ran a hand along his legs, tail, and wings, clamped tightly to his body. Everything felt intact. Hearing several of my companions groaning, I clutched Saffron with one hand and pressed the other into the floor to push myself and my cargo to sitting—a sharp lump of something pricked my palm.
“Ow,” I moaned miserably. As if I needed any more injuries! Every part of my body, whether or not it had been shredded inside the queen’s doorway, ached with a pulsing throb. But it was possible any one of my friends might be in a worse position. Our group was so disparate in size that things could have indeed gone badly if, say, the black dragon, one of the largest I’d ever seen, had landed on hummingbird-sized Zafi.
Bending my knees so I’d touch the prickly floor as little as possible, I blinked into the darkness, hoping to make out the bodies of my fellow travelers. It wasn’t entirely dark, just much darker than the cabin where we’d last been, with its demolished roof that allowed in so much sunlight.
When more of my friends groaned, I croaked out, “Is everyone okay? Did everybody make it?”
“Can’t tell if everyone made it,” Roan rumbled from somewhere. “Still tryin’ to decide if I’ve made it.” He moaned and coughed—the air was stuffy and dank, wherever we were.
“ Elowyn? ” came a voice that was thready, delicately hopeful.
My heart began pounding as the untamed part of me that had longed so terribly for my mate, and that had been relatively quiet since I’d last seen Rush—when he’d forgotten our love for each other—thrashed inside my body as if my ribs were its cage. The scuffs and grunts and shuffles and more groans around us were suddenly faint, impossibly far away. I attempted to steady my body against the savageness within me that needed one thing and one thing only.
“Rush?” I eked out. The bond-beast raged inside me, protesting that I wasn’t running into his arms already. But my eyes had adjusted, and though it was too dim to make out fine details, I could see that there were many bodies between me and wherever he must be.
“By the Ethers,” Rush said, his voice strangled. “Elowyn!”
“Where are you?” I asked urgently.
“Not so loud. They might hear us.” I was about to ask—in a whisper this time— who exactly might hear us, when Rush continued. “Over here, on the other side of … wait, is that a … dragon?”
“Yep,” I answered softly. “Please tell me he didn’t land on anyone.”
“I … I … Elowyn, that can wait.”
I wasn’t sure it could. If someone was beneath the dragon, I was certain they’d agree.
But Rush was already saying, “I have to see you. I need … fuck, I need you .”
On wobbly legs, I stood. It sounded a whole lot like Rush remembered me now—remembered us .
“I’ll be right there,” I said. “Just give me a second to make sure everyone else is?—”
“No seconds,” he said, sounding like his own bond-beast might be jerking on his reins. “You. Now.”
“Shit, well … okay.” The bonded part of me railed as I still hesitated. As if it were rattling its cage, my chest trembled with the effort of resisting its urges. But Rush was here, sounding well enough. Any of our friends might be suffocating to death as we spoke.
My entire body vibrated as I warred against my every instinct and forced our reunion to wait. Saffron whined in my arms at my distress. My question stilted, I asked, “Zafi, you alright?”
From my right, she let loose a groan several times her size. I turned but couldn’t make out her diminutive form. I did see Reed and Edsel, however. They looked battered but unharmed otherwise.
“No, I’m not alright,” Zafi whined. “I feel like I got ripped into a million tiny pieces and then glued back together again.” She coughed. “Only I’m not sure all the parts are back the way I want ‘em. Ugh, what if they aren’t? Is that possible?” Her final questions were high-pitched and panicked.
I didn’t want to admit that I had no better idea than she did. The map might sear itself onto my skin, but it came with more questions than answers, not an instructional booklet.
I needed to touch Rush, to confirm he was actually here, that I wasn’t imagining him. If I’d learned anything in my time in the Mirror World, it was that things weren’t always as they seemed. In fact, they usually weren’t. And practically anything could be ripped away from you without warning, especially your loved ones or your very life. My need to feel Rush manifested as a swarm of what seemed like ants—but wasn’t; I checked, twice—crawling across my skin, the glowing map long extinguished. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other.
“Everyone looks fine,” Rush said in a fast clip. “And I’m so, so fucking glad, really, truly, I am. I’ll celebrate them all later, I promise. But El, right now, I need you in my arms. I can’t wait another second. Please don’t make me.”
His approaching footfalls crunched disturbingly. As he drew closer, the light of his lumoon grew brighter, enough so to reveal why exactly the floor was so uneven: bones, so many bones , scattered across the floor. Charred and rotting flesh clung to some of them. Others were bleached white by the passage of time. Some appeared to have belonged to poor sods who were roughly people-shaped but larger. Most appeared to be dragon bones. My gut roiled, and a sudden growl erupted from Xeno, somewhere to my left. More even than me, he’d been raised to revere all dragons—and to protect them at all costs, however steep.
“The queen’s a dead woman,” he swore in a grumble so deep it scarcely sounded like my best friend .
If there was any common sentiment among our mismatched group, it was our mutual desire to murder the queen— the now immortal queen . The reminder surged through my mind unbidden, leaving a sour gloom in its wake.
“El,” Rush called again, his voice nearer, suggesting he was picking his way toward me from the other end of this enormous cave.
“You don’t understand. Someone might be in life-or-death trouble.”
“No one’s badly hurt,” West said.
Licking my lips, I couldn’t help but hinge on the badly qualifier. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
West’s tremulous affirmation didn’t sound certain. But that was all the permission I needed.
I discovered myself already running, stumbling over bones and skulls, slipping on patches of moss or gore, righting myself and then stumbling again. A foreign desperation had taken control of my body; Zako wouldn’t recognize me as the agile warrior I’d trained so hard to become. I tripped, caught myself against the black dragon’s shoulder—he growled and snapped his teeth at me—I didn’t so much as pause. Rush had last sounded as far away as if he’d been on the very opposite end of the Gladius Probatio’s arena.
I kept running.
The warm glow of his lumoon seemed to illuminate only him. My friends and my concern for them faded from my awareness .
I’d frozen in place as I studied him, drawing Saffron over to one hip. Crusted blood clung to a knot on his temple. Additional thin dribbles of blood streaked his forehead, marring his silver hair. A growl tore out of me that was so vicious it took me several moments to recognize it as mine.
It was nothing, however, compared to Rush’s. Had I not been staring straight at him I might have guessed the sounds coming from him belonged to a bear, or perhaps even a dragon. Based on the volume of his fury, I guessed I looked as beaten and bruised as I felt.
He wore his usual tunic, breeches, and boots, but his weapons belt, always hanging from his hips, was glaringly absent. His tattoos, like the pale silver of moonlight, glowed as brightly as his lumoon as they crept along every inch of his exposed skin. His hands, neck, and face—oh, his beautiful face!—were covered in thorny vines that this time bloomed with prickly roses—also silver. They matched his eyes. I could get lost in his stare forever. It steadied on me, transfixed.
Rush’s chest heaved as he snarled and grumbled and growled, his eyes blazing.
I raced toward him.
He opened his arms and I crashed into them, my many tender injuries be damned.
Our embrace was awkward until I guided Saffron around to my back, where he clung to my neck, well-practiced in the move. Then I succumbed to the need to press my body along the length of my mate’s. Careful of the dragonling, Rush’s hands skimmed all across my body. His lips kissed my face ever so tenderly, cautious of each of my cuts and scabs, before moving on to do the same to my neck. When he smelled me, I stilled, finding the act strange until, emboldened, I sniffed him back. Then I understood perfectly. The bonded beast deep inside me, where my base instincts lived, began to settle.
He held me flush against him, as if even air separating us would be a travesty. “By a dragon’s essence,” he murmured against my neck, causing a shiver to descend the length of my spine. “I feared I’d never see you again. That you might have died when you went through that doorway. What Ivar said he found when he followed…” He shuddered so hard I experienced the tremble as if it were my own, making me realize that in his embrace I’d ceased my shaking.
“I worried not even you would be able to survive that,” he said.
I swallowed thickly. “I very nearly didn’t. I came really close.” To dying , I left unsaid. Almost dying was the main thing I seemed to do often since meeting the queen.
He pulled back only enough to study my face. I watched his eyes harden as they took in the extent of the damage. It probably didn’t help that a killer flower had recently attempted to devour me.
Rush’s mouth was a hard, unforgiving line. “I’m going to hurt her so badly for what she’s done to you.”
Trying to forget the queen and the looming threat she posed for just a few moments, I smiled at him. It was tenuous at first. I barely dared believe he was truly holding me. “You remember me now?” I asked, uncomfortable with how vulnerable the question sounded to my own ears.
Storm clouds shadowed his moonlit eyes. His mouth pinched; his brow furrowed. “By the Ethers, El … I am so, so, so incredibly sorry I … I…” His shoulders slumped. “…forgot you.” He frowned morosely. “And so soon after I promised I never would, too.”
He sighed heavily. “I hope you know it wasn’t me and that I would never?—”
I smiled sadly. “I know.”
“I will spend the rest of our lives together making it up to you.”
“There’s no need, Rush, really. I understand.”
His eyes searched mine, and I knew he saw what I hadn’t admitted aloud: just how much his rejection had hurt despite my rational understanding of the reason behind it.
“I love you,” Rush insisted. “So much more than I think maybe you’ll ever know.”
“Uhhhhhgh,” someone groaned far behind us, and this time it sounded like a different kind of pain, an emotional wound—Xeno, I was guessing. It served as a sharp reminder that we had an audience.
And that the queen was still in pursuit.
When Rush leaned in to kiss me, I hesitated.
Immediately he pulled back to study me some more. “Do you not forgive me? I know…” He glanced around us before lowering his volume to a whisper. “I re alize it must’ve been … difficult for you to be there with me when…” He gulped so that I could see his throat bob through the faint scruff covering his neck. “When I was … with her .”
I closed the gap he’d opened between us, ignoring Saffron’s hot puffs of breath along my nape. I placed a gentle palm against Rush’s cheek. “Of course I forgive you, if there’s even anything to forgive. It’s the queen.”
He stiffened. “What about her?”
“She probably won’t be far behind. We have to figure out what to do and where to go next before she finds us. Which pretty much means, right the hell now .”
Before I could pull my hand away, he leaned his cheek heavily into it. “The very first chance we get, I want time alone with you. I have a lot to make up to you.”
“You don’t. But yes, I want that time with you too.”
He stared into my eyes long enough for me to believe the entire cosmos might actually be contained within those moonlit irises of his. Then he said, “Larissa and I have the queen’s guards on our trail. They could show up at any moment.”
“Larissa’s here too?” I eventually spotted her standing next to what appeared to be a darkened stairwell. She seemed to be dressed in … two lopsided swaths of satin, maybe? The top was bloodstained in patches, one across each of her breasts. Despite the oddity of our situation, she waved. I waved back.
“Plus, we need to deal with the dragons,” Rush was saying. “I don’t want to have to abandon them a second time. Already the dragon Hiro and I freed seems to be”—he sighed forlornly—“dead.” He searched the cavern behind me, perhaps looking for Hiro.
“What dragons?” I asked. “You mean the ones that came with me? Of course I won’t leave them behind when we go.”
“No, I mean these dragons.” Rush spun me toward a hulking shadow. It took me a few moments to realize it was an adult dragon, smaller than the black one, hunkering in the dark recesses of this huge cave, whatever it was.
I spun back on Rush. “Wait, where are we? Is this the … dungeon beneath the palace you told me about?”
His face was grim. “Yes.”
“Which means…” I turned again, squinting in an attempt to make out the cells filled with dragons he’d told me lined the walls. I couldn’t see anything past the shapes of our friends. I faced Rush again. “There are lots of dragons here that need to be freed?”
“Yes. Lots. And if you recall, pygmy ogres live somewhere in this tunnel system.”
“Shit.”
“Yup.”
“Tell me you’ve figured a way out,” I said.
“I can’t even begin to express how very much I wish I could.”
“That’s not the only problem we have,” West said. “Rush. Lari. Brace yourselves.” A lumoon surged to life above West—revealing him with Ramana draped in his arms.
Rush’s face froze first, then the rest of his body. His arms slid lifelessly from around me to slap against his thighs.
And from the stairwell, already running toward us, Larissa screamed when we were supposed to be quiet.