Chapter 2
The first thing to penetrate Demetri’s consciousness was the swaying motion. He didn’t want to open his eyes. Everything hurt. He was broken. Still bleeding—although the worst of the gashes had somehow slowed enough that he was still alive. Odd. He didn’t remember closing the wounds.
He smelled smoke. Something was on fire.
Confused, he dragged in a lungful of air through his nose.
Smoke. Burning oil. Death.
Demetri bolted upright, instantly alert. He was on the yacht. Naked. Something—someone— had pulled him out of the sea.
Benedikte.
But why?
Demetri had spent thirty years apprenticed to a healer.
He knew his own form, dragon and man. Every broken bone, every torn muscle and tendon.
Knew the taste of his own blood. He pressed both palms flat to his wounds and focused on healing his internal injuries first. Broken bones he couldn't fully mend, so he wrapped them in heat and bound them with magic to hold the line.
Flesh knit under his hands — not all of it, but enough.
Then, for the first time since he opened his eyes, he drew a breath that didn't whistle.
He stood, drawing on his magic to clothe himself.
If Benedikte had pulled him from the ocean just to toy with him before a second attack, he needed to be ready.
He manifested traditional hunter attire.
There was no need to blend with the humans here.
Black leather boots formed first, soft enough to move without a sound.
Charcoal trousers followed, reinforced at the knees, then a fitted black coat cut to allow complete freedom through the shoulders.
A high-collared shirt buttoned itself beneath it, disappearing beneath a leather harness that settled across his chest and back.
Twin short swords appeared beneath the harness, balanced for close quarters and razor sharp.
A vampire-forged hunting knife settled into its sheath at the small of his back.
It couldn’t kill a dragon, but it was bloodthirsty and could do a lot of damage.
Next, half a dozen throwing knives hidden so naturally within his coat that only another hunter would know where to look.
Last came his signet ring—the only ornament he ever wore.
Originally an enchanted chain worn around the neck, he’d asked a highly skilled elf to remake it into a silver signet ring with a ruby at the center.
It was always present, if not always visible.
He flexed his fingers, settling into the familiar weight.
He mentally reached for his dragon. He knew the answers, but felt he had to ask, just to be sure. Old one, do you know how Benedikte got us here? Are you well enough to fight?
The dragon took his time answering. He dragged us from the water.
Closed the worst of our wounds. Restarted our heart.
We can fight, but we will not win. We are still weak.
He is fully healed. I have never seen a recovery this fast. Be careful.
He is on this hunk of floating death. He is destroying it piece by piece, feeding a fire the way a human would instead of using dragon fire. Clearly he is deranged.
Clearly. Demetri’s lips twitched at the dragon’s affronted tone. No dragon old enough to breathe fire would ever choose the human method. It was beneath them. But could there be another reason?
That I do not know. But I think he waits for us.
Demetri gave a mental nod. So, the blue dragon was waiting for them.
Given the circumstances, it was no surprise.
He didn’t know why the crazy dragon had saved him, but questions were starting to pile up.
He took a few minutes to look around. At nearly two hundred feet in length, there was no word for the “hunk of floating death” but luxury yacht.
Or superyacht. And standing at the bow was a man of maybe thirty-five, with dark blond hair plastered to his skull, wearing the face Demetri remembered from a wedding long ago in Brussels, his eyes the color of a winter sky over the North Sea, and nothing of the happy man Demetri remembered was left in them.
Benedikte.
He'd used the elements to clothe himself in navy trousers slung low on his hips.
His bare chest was powerfully built and badly scarred — and dragons didn't scar easily.
Several of those old wounds looked as though they should have killed him.
Demetri found himself wondering what in the world Benedikte had been doing for eight years, and why, holding every advantage, he was hesitating now.
A truly crazed dragon would have torn his throat out the second he had the chance.
Instead, he was calmly feeding papers, charts and logbooks into a bonfire on the deck.
Like dry kindling, the paper burst into flame almost immediately. A broken chair came next. Not far from the fire, covered in blood, were the same bodies he’d glimpsed before the attack. Human. All dead.
Demetri spat blood onto the deck. He was healing. Too slowly. "You killed these humans." He jerked his chin at the four bodies. "Civilians. Out for an evening. Did you even see them, Benedikte, or did you just come down through the cloud and bite, to find out if your teeth still worked?"
"I saw them. They crowed with glee, thinking they’d caught me in their trap. Thinking they could kill me. As soon as the tables were turned, they squealed for mercy. Unfortunately, I had none to give."
Demetri approached cautiously. Dragons were dangerous.
Rogue dragons were unpredictable at best. Benedikte was in a class of his own.
"You used to be a king." Scratchy from the smoke and disuse, his voice came easier with each spoken work.
"A ruler your people loved. There are children in Antwerp named for you — do you remember that?
Look at the humans, Benedikte. Tell me you see what you've done. "
Benedikte turned and looked, moving his gaze across each body in turn — a woman, a man at the door, two crew — the silence stretched, filled only by the crackle of fire and the slap of water against the hull.
When he brought his eyes back, he stated matter of factly, "You see four dead people on a boat. "
"Innocent humans. Dead at your hands."
"You see what you were programmed to see. You were told I was crazy, a rogue dragon that must be put down before I could hurt innocent humans. You do not see the truth because that would interfere with your view of the world."
Demetri laughed. It hurt less than it had a minute ago.
He coughed blood into his palm, looked at it, watched the next breath come up clearer.
He pushed another thread of magic into the collarbone, and the bone re-seated with a click he heard through his teeth.
He breathed through it. "I am nearly as old as you, dragon.
You speak in riddles, like a man who's been alone too long and mistaken his own voice for wisdom.
There are bodies on this deck. There is blood on your hands.
Speak plainly or finish what you started, because I am tired, I am healing as fast as I can, and I have no patience for prophecy tonight. "
Benedikte's mouth moved, not quite into a smile. "Had my intention been to kill you, you would never have seen me coming."
"Then why am I here?” Demetri set his other palm to the wound on his flank and poured more heat in. The gash closed another inch. “You’re practically sending up smoke signals. If not to lure me here, why bother?”
Demetri’s dragon rumbled, Why do you question him? If he wants us dead, let’s get on with it.
Patience, old one.
I have had centuries of patience. I am out.
Benedikte stepped closer, his dragon rising through his flesh — blue scales blooming and receding across his brow, his eyes kindling to a glowing blue — and closed the distance until their faces drew level.
He smelled of salt and storm and old smoke, and under all of it something colder: the long iron tang of a grief that had outlived its first wound and hardened into something far more dangerous.
“I have no desire to kill you. I never did. You are not the one I came for.”
“You hunted the humans.”
“I did not know they were human until I got here.”
Demetri held very still. "Then who did you come for, if not these people? Why are you here?"
You will know. Sooner than you would like. Later than you should have. Then Benedikte spoke aloud, his voice dropping, softer, closer to the man Demetri had watched laugh eighty years ago. "I am sorry to bring you into this war. But I must."
"Benedikte —"
"Look at the blade over there." Benedikte gave the order with dragon fire rising in his human throat — a thing Demetri had never seen another shifter do.
He had already seen the dagger and dismissed it as a feeble human weapon, but he looked again — not at the blade— the pommel.
Firelight slid across polished steel, revealing a spiral branching into three elegant lines.
Demetri could almost believe himself alone inside his own mind, his dragon had gone so quiet. Still.
Then—
That mark is elven. The dragon warned.
Demetri couldn't pull his eyes away. An Executioner's blade.
The elves guard those blades more fiercely than we guard our young.
The image landed like a blow.
Every executioner's blade was known.
Counted.
Tracked.
Held in a secure location. Guarded by elves and layers of magic.
Not because they were priceless.
Because they held immense power.
One did not simply appear in human hands.
He looked again at the snapped hilt near the dead man's boot, the grain of the metal, the sigil pressed into the pommel — and this time he understood with sickening clarity.
A blade forged to kill his kind. To kill any of the species in the Secret Kingdoms. Made by elven hands.
Carried by a human who had no business knowing about it, let alone owning it.
A weapon like that did not come into the world by accident. It was forged. Enchanted. Protected.