Chapter 10
There was blood in Leif’s mouth. Hot-salt-copper on his tongue, down the back of his throat.
Bits of cloth were snagged on his teeth, and when he shifted back to his human form, he spat a wad of damp wool onto the ground, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
It came away smeared black in the moonlight.
Bodies lay like the marks on a sundial in a ring all around him. All Sels. Some with their throats torn out, others gutted. One was still twitching, whimpering and moaning as he tried to crawl away, his legs savaged beyond repair and unable to support his weight.
Leif stalked across the clearing, snatched a dropped Selesee sword off the ground, and ended the man’s suffering with one clean swing.
In the ringing, midnight silence that followed, Leif became aware of a sound that he’d heard in his wolf shape, but hadn’t comprehended, too caught up in the frenzy of the kill. A man was shouting, over and over again. Was calling someone.
Was calling for Amelia.
Overhead and a half-mile distant, he heard the unhappy shrieks and cries of the drakes.
“Shit,” he muttered, and set off for the walls of the chateau at a run.
He spotted the drakes first: crisp black silhouettes against the purpling sky. Alpha was larger than the females, and Leif picked him out straight away; watched him scream, and then swoop down low, out of sight behind the chateau walls.
Leif ducked a low-hanging branch and lengthened his stride. His wolves fell in around him, still four-legged, muzzles blood-stained and pink tongues lolling.
When they arrived at the gates, they found them standing open, Lord Connor’s Strangers standing guard with arrows nocked.
“What’s happening?” Leif called, slowing to a walk as he approached.
The one on the right shook his head. “I don’t know. The dragons went crazy, and Connor is trying to find Lady Amelia.”
Leif’s heart lurched. “She’s missing?”
“Ameeeeeeeliaaaaa!” the call went up beyond the gates.
That was Reggie. He sounded far from calm.
Leif jogged through the gates and onto the chateau grounds.
The gardens were overgrown, the once-tidy hedgerows heaped with last year’s uncut, dead-and-brown growth, the plantings all gone over to weeds and wild bird nests.
Weeds had grown up between the smooth brown pebbles of the gravel footpath, but it still glowed in the moonlight, and Leif followed it around the turreted corner of the chateau to arrive at a large, decorative pond studded with lily pads.
He drew to a halt and spotted Connor, and Reggie, and at least two-dozen other Southern men searching the area, hacking at overgrown vines with swords, peeking under apple trees, ducking under trellises.
Reggie cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “Ameeeeeeeliaaaaa!” again.
A breathless soldier lit out of a side door and down a wide set of stone stairs. “My lord!” he called, and Reggie turned to him. “We’ve searched the house top to bottom, and found no sign of Lady Amelia.”
Connor’s jaw tightened, grim but resigned.
Reggie breathed open-mouthed and quick; Leif could smell his fear sweat even from a distance. “You checked the cellars?”
“Yes, my lord. She’s not there.”
“Damn it,” Reggie hissed, turned, and propped his fists on his hips. “Gods damn it all.”
Alpha dove low above them again, wings buffeting them with a tugging wind that bent ornamental trees double and sent waves across the pond.
Reggie shouted something up at him that was lost in the drake’s distressed cry, and when he lowered his head, he spotted Leif, and then waved him closer.
“What’s happening?” Leif said when they were closer. “Where’s she gone?”
“She fell. She—” Reggie broke off and raked his sweat-damp hair back with both hands, fingers linking at the back of his neck afterward.
Wild-eyed, frightened, near panic. “I watched her fall from Alpha’s back.
” He lifted one hand to mime the action, a swift downward drop.
“I was too far away to see her land, but it was in this area.” He encompassed the garden and the pond with a twirl of his arm.
“I saw Alpha try to catch her, but…” He pointed up at the distressed animal, who was back to circling up high and calling for his mistress.
“We’ve scoured the area,” Connor said, and rested a hand on Reggie’s shoulder that was immediately brushed off.
He settled for scratching at his jaw instead, his gaze, when it met Leif’s, one that said not to hold out hope.
“If she was lying here somewhere in the grass, we would have found her by now.”
“Where did she go, then?” Reggie snapped, rounding on him.
Beneath Connor’s resignation, Leif could sense the pounding of his heart, the way he wanted to offer comfort to his lover.
And Reggie, beneath his panic, was fast sliding toward grief, desperate for a quiet, close place where he could accept that comfort.
“Did she disappear? Did she vanish into thin air?”
“The pond,” Leif said, and both of them glanced his way. “If she fell into the pond, and she was unconscious when she went in the water…”
Reggie swore. “It’s pitch dark down there. We’d be searching blind.”
“You would be. I can see in the dark,” Leif said, and began tugging off his boots.
“What?” Reggie said, expression going slack with surprise.
“You’re mad,” Connor said. “That water is black. Even if she’s down there, you’ll never find her.”
Leif wiggled his bare toes into the cold, dew-drenched grass and started on the laces of his tunic.
“I’m sure the lady will be touched to know what lengths you were willing to go to,” he said, harsher and angrier than the dry tone he’d aimed for.
His pulse continued to accelerate as he cast his tunic aside, and watched the two men across from him try, and fail to concoct a noble excuse.
Connor’s lips pressed together, tendons throwing shadows along his tight jaw. “Go, then,” he said, coldly. “And try not to drown.”
Leif sent him an approximation of a smile, took a running leap, and dove into the pond.
He closed his eyes before his face breached the water, his last glimpse topside that of his clasped hands arrowing down between two lily pads.
The water was cold, bitingly so, far colder than a stagnant, ornamental pond should have been.
When he opened his eyes, the bottom dropped out of his stomach, because Connor had been right.
It was black as night down here, the water thick and viscous as he swiped his hands through it; he could see his upper arms, the gold bands he wore there, but the dark swallowed everything past his elbows.
Something slick and pliable wound round his ankles, slipped between his toes: reeds of some sort.
The cold pressed at his chest, his throat.
He swept his arms, and kicked his legs, and spun in a circle.
Nothing. He could see nothing.
But he started propelling himself through the water, hands outstretched, and after a moment, his eyes began to adjust. They stung, and he blinked often, but the underwater landscape began to take shape.
Moonlight offered a pale skein of white-blue on the surface, and the reeds, thick and waist-high, wavered like silver banners as he swam.
He spied the shapes of dropped manmade things: a great stone urn that had likely once held a potted tree; a wagon wheel tilted on its side, half-sunk in the muck at the bottom; the bright glimmers of fish darting away from him.
His lungs started to burn, and still he pressed on. Because if Amelia wasn’t underwater, and she wasn’t in the garden…he had a terrible feeling that none of them knew where she was, only how she’d been taken.
~*~
Leif dove so neatly and cleanly that the water stilled within moments, as if he hadn’t gone in at all. Alpha shrieked again overhead, and Reggie wanted to clap his hands over his ears.
He also wanted to curl up into a little ball on the grass and close his eyes until he woke up from what he wished was a nightmare, but he could only submit so much to the panic that filled his veins like poison.
“She’s dead.” He thought he sounded remarkably calm, given the uneven drumming of his heart. He thought it might punch straight through his ribs and leave a gaping hole in his chest. “If she fell in the water, she’s drowned by now.”
“Maybe,” Connor said, in a way that meant yes, of course. “Or maybe her magic somehow…” He made an empty gesture toward the pond. “Protected her.”
“No, she’s dead.” He thought that if he said it enough, if he believed it, then it would get easier to move forward, as opposed to panic-spiraling into paralysis, which he could feel happening to him now. “If she was here somewhere, her bloody beast would find her.”
Alpha let out another pointed shriek overhead.
“All we can do is search, and wait for daylight,” Connor reasoned. “We might find some sign of her when we can actually see more than two feet in front of us. Speaking of.” He nodded at the black surface of the water. “He’s been down a long time. Has he drowned, you think?”
“That’ll be lovely. Not only has the only dragon-rider in our company perished, but the heir of Aeretoll drowned attempting to rescue her.”
“Reggie. Reg.” A firm hand closed on the back of his neck and squeezed. A thumb pressed at the hinge of his jaw, and Reggie ducked into the pressure, turning to face Connor. “You’re falling to pieces,” Connor said, as gently as he’d ever said anything. It was downright sweet.
But Reggie was falling to pieces. So he snapped, “The only critical advantage we have is those dragons, and the one woman who can control them has likely plunged to her death, so yes, Connor, I’m going to fall to all the pieces if that’s bloody all right with you!”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You’ve made friends with that one drake. The female one. Valerie.”
“Valencia.”
Connor waved, uncaring of the distinction. “Why can’t you ride her? Control the drakes. Be our eyes in the sky.”
A wild, humorless laugh burst out of Reggie’s mouth before he saw that Connor wasn’t smiling; that he was in fact quite serious. “Are you insane?”
“I’m pragmatic, and it would be wonderful if you’d be pragmatic, too. Pull yourself together. You’re a sight prettier than me, and I’ll need you to be the one to tell the king of Aeretoll his nephew’s drowned.”
“Fuck off.”
“If he thinks Oliver’s lovely to look at, wait until he sees you.”
“Fuck off,” Reggie snarled, and shoved him.
Connor’s brows flew up as he staggered backward, like he was surprised by the force of Reggie’s shove. It stirred a petty, furious part of Reggie that left him wanting to shove him again. Call me pretty all you like, he thought, but I’m still a soldier. A better one that you.
A splash and a gasp redirected them back toward the pond. Leif had breached the surface, a drowned lion propelling himself to shore with wide sweeps of his arms.
“Well?” Connor asked.
Leif didn’t answer right away. He reached the decorative flagstones that lined the edge of the pond and hauled himself up.
The sky was lightening, that first rosy blush of approaching dawn, and Reggie’s panic was momentarily stymied by the sight of water sluicing down Leif’s sculpted shoulders, arms, chest, stomach.
Gods.
Not the time.
“Did you see anything?” Reggie demanded, as Leif wiped wet hair off his face and cleared his eyes.
“Could you see anything?” Connor added. “Wolves aren’t exactly aquatic.”
Leif shook his head, a vigorous, dog-like (wolf-like) shake that sprayed them with cold droplets and splatted his hair in waterlogged ribbons against his biceps.
“I could see. Nothing but fish, and reeds, and garden relics that fell in over the years.” He sucked in deep, open-mouthed breaths, chest heaving.
Reggie had never known anyone to stay under for so long.
Connor sighed. “She’s on the ground somewhere, then.” He tilted his head back to scan the facade. “Or caught in a parapet, maybe.” To Reggie: “You’re sure she was on this side of the chateau when you saw her fall?”
“She’s neither of those places,” Leif said.
“Those Sels we fought came through portals, like the troops on the road the day you found us.” A first, pale shaft of sunlight pierced the tree line, offering a glimpse of the hard brightness of his eyes, the tension in his jaw.
“I think the emperor sent soldiers through…and then took Amelia.”