16. He Wasn’t the Best of Men, but neither Was He the Worst
16. HE WASN’T THE BEST OF MEN, BUT NEITHER WAS HE THE WORST
~ ELOWYN ~
Disoriented, I woke with a jolt and a snort, quickly remembered I was surely in danger even if I hadn’t yet recalled exactly from which source, and bolted upright.
“Oh, by blazing dragonfire,” I groaned, eyes pinching shut against the brutal crick in my neck while I got my bearings. Discreetly wiping at the trail of drool along my cheek and rubbing at my neck, catching on several scabs, I wondered if I’d slept on a damn rock.
My eyes widened. “Xeno!” My friend sat on a log slightly behind me, his dragon gone for the moment. His legs outstretched in front of him, he appeared ... okay.
Still bruised and sliced up all over, but after the night before, okay was excellent.
It was daylight, which meant I’d fallen asleep sometime during the night with vicious predators circling us. That wasn’t at all like me. When I was safe, I slept as soundly as a baby dragon. But when I wasn’t? I’d hear a branch fall across the forest—normally. Maybe it had been a lingering effect of the umbrac poison?
“Are you all right?” I asked him while scanning the clearing I found myself in. Finnian and Roan were deep in animated conversation, as far away as they could be while still remaining close enough to intervene should we be attacked again. Pru sat cross-legged on a log with Saffron beside her, on the other side of the extinguished fire. The goblin was playing peekaboo with the dragonling, who appeared to be considering a giggle. A weight I didn’t realize I’d been carrying dissipated.
“I’m much better,” Xeno said just as I realized I didn’t see Reed.
Eyes stretching again in premature panic, I opened my mouth to ask.
“Reed’s up in the trees, keeping watch,” offered Xeno, the friend who knew me better than anyone else alive.
Another stress lifted, and I allowed myself to smile tentatively, finally turning fully toward him.
I sat on a cloak spread out on top of the umbrac muck, which in the light of day was worse than it had been in the dark. Now I could make out the individual membranes and pieces of the monsters—a few tentacles here, a bit of an eyeball there, a lump of sludge I didn’t care to identify…
“I wouldn’t look too closely if I were you,” Xeno said.
I scrunched up my nose. “Or breathe too deeply either. It’s rank .”
“I think some of that’s us.”
Lifting a forearm, which was slathered in what looked like tar, to my nose, I inhaled ... and gagged, then swiftly lowered my arm while Xeno chuckled. “Guess I won’t be doing that again,” I said.
“Not till we get someplace where we can strip and scrub this gunk off us.”
“When will that be?” I asked with a bit of an indulgent whine. “If it’s not soon, we’ll end up as gross as those umbracs.”
“Doubtful.” Xeno’s brow furrowed, none of his usual playfulness present.
I sobered and inched closer across the cloak, really taking in my friend now that I knew everyone else here was safe. I placed a hand on his knee before realizing it was bare beneath the gunk, but then I didn’t want to remove it when there’d be no other reason for it than remembering how, for many years now, he’d wanted more than friendship.
Forcing myself to hold my hand steady, I gazed up at him. “Seriously, how are you?”
He wore his boots and what looked like shorts he’d borrowed—based on how tightly they clung to his muscles—and nothing else. He’d likely shredded his clothes when he’d shifted the night before up in the treetops.
One of his cheekbones was badly bruised, a mottled array of blue, purple, and yellow peeking out behind flecks of grime. Another, a dark slash the width of a whipping tentacle, echoed the line of his collarbone. The depressions of dozens—perhaps hundreds—of cuts beneath the sludge peppered his arms, hands, chest, abdomen, and thighs.
Similar in age, we’d been companions all our lives. Even so, Nightguard cycled through only two settings: freezing , and holy-shit-it’s-fucking freezing , and even for the dragon shifters who withstood the cold so much better than I, we didn’t often frolic around with scant clothing. In fact, we didn’t frolic at all. And when I’d craved the feel of running water and convinced myself to dip under the waterfall for a shower, the only possible consideration had been to get in and out as quickly as possible before I froze into an icicle.
After the heat of an intense bout of exercises, I’d seen Xeno without his shirt on before, but never up close like this. Even the few times we’d kissed, our clothes had remained on, too concerned we’d be discovered first by Zako and later by Malessa, who’d so vocally disapproved of our mingling beyond what my chores required.
Up close, he was one ripple of solid muscle after another, and tight all over. Brawny as all dragon shifters were, his muscles were bulkier than the fae’s.
Than Rush’s .
The comparison arrived unbidden, but then I couldn’t stop comparing the two men. Objectively, with his perfect strong body, chiseled fierce features, lush full lips, and piercing blue-green eyes, Xeno was a striking specimen by any reasonable standards.
Rush, however ... was somehow even more beautiful, more mesmerizing, wholly captivating. I craved him in a way I didn’t think I could ever crave the man at my side.
I felt my nostrils flare in annoyance at how easily Rush’s face and body coalesced in my memory, an unwelcome intrusion that still somehow bewitched me.
Xeno squeezed my hand, still atop his knee, and I discovered myself staring blankly at the general expanse of his chest, no longer seeing the man right before me.
“You didn’t hear a thing I said, did you?” he asked.
Ferociously, I huffed. Fucking Rush . “No, I didn’t, and I’m so sorry, Xeno. I really want to know how you’re doing— need to know, truly.” The fact that he was still cut up when his healing was so advanced indicated how badly he’d been injured.
Shoving Rush from my thoughts so hard the imaginary version of him stumbled on his way out, I patted Xeno’s hand atop mine, easing myself onto the log next to him and rubbing my neck some more, gazing toward Pru and Saffron, who continued to play together. No doubt, soon enough the dragonling would realize I was awake and whine to join me.
“I’m fine,” Xeno said.
I snorted. “You’re not fine or you wouldn’t have a scratch on you.”
“You’ve got scratches and cuts all over you,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, but I’m not the shifter with the miraculous freaking healing here, now am I?”
“I don’t know what you are, Wyn.”
Snapping my head around to face him, I glared, but his comment hadn’t been mocking. If anything, he’d sounded ... amazed.
The tension that had so quickly ratcheted through my body relaxed, and I sighed, running my hand across my face before realizing all I was doing was smearing gunk across it. Sticking out my tongue in disgust, I pulled it back in when I tasted umbrac.
“Will your wings be okay? Have they healed already?”
“I don’t know yet.” Xeno pulled his legs in and leaned his elbows on his knees, staring at the sodden ground.
“Oh my sunshine.” I slid closer to him so that our thighs touched. I lifted an arm to embrace him, couldn’t figure out where to place it that wouldn’t irritate either of our wounds, and eventually let it fall to the log behind me. “Did they heal at all before you shifted back?”
“Yeah, quite a bit. What Finn did helped. But...” His eyes refused to meet mine.
“But?”
“But they were cut up pretty badly.” He shrugged as if he didn’t much care, but every dragon shifter guarded their wings like they were the most precious thing about them. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen.” Again, he shrugged.
I leaned my head on his shoulder, discovered the side of my skull ached as if someone had slammed a large rock against it, and straightened. At least we were all alive.
I’d so often longed to fly like everyone else at Nightguard but me and Zako that I couldn’t fathom what it would feel like to possess that marvelous gift and then fear losing it, to worry I’d never feel the wind on my face again as I whipped through the skies.
“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” I offered, though immediately after I worried the platitude sounded as hollow to him as it had to me. “You’ve healed from worse.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“The arrow to the heart you took for me was worse.”
“It wasn’t to the heart.”
I gaped until I eked out, “What? I thought...”
“No. It missed my heart by a whisper, but it missed it.”
“Thank sunshine. I worried so much about you. I thought you were dead for a while there. Saffron too.”
“Why would you think that?”
My lips pressed into a line of ragged hatred. “The queen told me you were dead, and when she didn’t flat-out say it, she implied it plenty. Confirmed you’d gotten shot in the heart.”
He rubbed my thigh, and my thoughts immediately jumped back to Rush. Once more, I ordered him out. If he’d ever earned his place in my daydreams in the first place, he surely had since lost that privilege.
“From what I saw of the queen,” Xeno said, “you can’t trust a single thing she says.”
I chortled. “Learned that lesson the hard way. Pretty sure the only thing I can trust about her is that she’s out to get me.”
Xeno swallowed so that his throat bobbed. “I thought you were dead, Wyn. I thought you were gone.”
He gulped, and I waited for more.
“I came to when we were already outside in the stables. The queen wasn’t there, or I would’ve killed her right then and there. I wouldn’t’ve cared what anyone said.”
“Who was there?”
He gestured with his chin, his usually silken dark hair barely moving, clumped with tar-like black. “Just all of us here.” He exhaled heavily. “And Rush. I almost did kill him.”
My heart began racing even though I knew Rush to be alive. “What happened? What stopped you?” I’d seen enough dragon shifter brawls to understand how brutally violent they could be when sufficiently provoked. Rush was an amazing warrior—I’d witnessed his skill in the ring—but Xeno could be ferocious when he wanted.
“The others?” I prodded when my friend didn’t immediately answer.
He turned to face me. “No. Roan, Reed, and Pru looked angry enough to kill him themselves at first, but then I guess they saw what I did.”
My heart thumped some more. “Which was?”
He stretched his legs out again and appeared to be studying the sky, clear blue with fluffy clouds that didn’t match the danger that hid in the Sorumbra. “Rush was broken by what he did to you.”
“Then he shouldn’t’ve done it,” I quipped automatically.
“The way Rush told it, he didn’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” I insisted, an echo of what I’d said earlier.
“Yeah…” But he trailed off, still not meeting my expectant stare. “I thought the same.”
A full minute passed, and Saffron finally spotted me. Free of Pru’s hold, he half scrambled, half flew to get to me, cutting a path straight across the embers of the fire, spattering muck and ash all over himself and everyone around him—though we could hardly get much filthier. When I finally got to take a bath, I was betting it might feel better even than an ethercrest, even one instigated by Rush.
Saffron hopped onto my lap, dug his claws in so that I winced, then launched himself into my open arms. He thudded against my chest.
“Oomph.” I wheezed.
Xeno chuckled. “He’s sure grown attached to you.”
“I’m the one who fed him in Nightguard.”
“It’s more than that. He loves you.”
I shrugged, though I extricated an arm from around Saffron’s back to bop him on the nose. He immediately tried to snag my finger, which I yanked out of his reach. He was playing, but he was still a dragon with teeth already sharp enough to be wary of.
“I’m fucking lovable, X.”
He laughed as Pru padded over, her dragon feet squelching with every step.
“Sorry, Mistress.” She wasn’t clasping her hands in front of her nor lowering her head submissively—progress. “I tried to distract him.”
Saffron licked my neck with his sandpaper tongue, and I nudged him away. “Don’t eat that, Saff. It’s gross.” Granted, the dragonling was a fan of raw meat of all sorts, so this might be a treat to him. “It’s okay, Pru. I feel well enough to hold him.”
“I didn’t want him close to Mistress when she was still glowing.”
I gasped. “Shit! I forgot about that. When did I stop glowing?”
“When the umbracs went away with the sunrise,” Xeno said.
“In my sleep?”
“Yup.”
“So I kept glowing even while I slept?”
“Un-huh.”
I scoffed. “How’s that even possible? Wait. I guess I should back up to the main question. How’s it even possible that I’d glow in the first place?”
“I don’t know,” Xeno said, “but there’s no denying it happened. You’ve got powers, Wyn, something strong, big.” He canted his head to one side. “Hey, have your ears gotten pointier?”
I balanced Saffron on my lap and whipped both hands to my ears, running along their edges. When I reached the peak of each, I froze for several beats.
“They’re definitely pointier.”
I recognized an edge of panic in my voice—too much was happening too fast—and cleared my throat, forcing a nonchalance I didn’t feel as I explored my changed ears. They felt as pointy at the crests as those of any fae I’d seen. “What in the dragonfire...?”
Roan and Finnian, as grimy as the rest of us save Pru, who was several degrees cleaner, stalked over. “What’s going on?” Finnian asked, but at the sight of Roan, I dropped a hand to my mouth.
“I totally forgot while I slept,” I said. “What happened to the horses? To Rompa-Romp?”
At the immediate stormy tempest that swirled across Roan’s sparkling green eyes, I gasped. “Oh no.”
Eventually, Roan nodded, his eyes glistening. “My good boy saw his last ride,” he croaked. “Had I known it was ‘is last, I woulda let him gorge himself on apples before he went.”
“I’m so sorry, Roan,” I said. Everyone else was just as somber. “He must have already been… dead when I asked the land to protect the horses.”
Roan nodded and cleared his throat, fussing with the ax he clutched despite the apparent current pocket of relative safety we occupied. He sniffed and waggled his mouth.
“What ... what happened to him?” I asked.
“The fuckin’ umbracs, that’s what,” Roan snarled.
I’d never seen him so murderous.
“Well, yeah, I figured. I mean, how’d he die? Wait, you know what? Never mind. I really don’t think I want to know.”
But it was too late. Roan growled, “They sliced ‘im up into tiny bits and ripped out his insides. By the time I got to ‘im, there wasn’t all that much left.”
My chest seized with his obvious pain, and I pulled Saffron to my heart, holding him tightly until he squirmed to be released. When a whole minute passed and no one said anything, I finally asked, “And the rest of the horses?”
“All dead,” Finnian said, his tone cold where the dwarf’s had been blistering. “Except for Rush’s.”
I glanced up at the tall fae. His caramel eyes, usually a perfect match for his now dirty skin, were hard but perhaps just as furious as Roan’s.
“Bolt,” the dwarf clarified. “Lightning Bolt. He was the only one to make it, though he looked like ‘e put up a damn good fight. Fine horse, that one. Rush’s favorite for a reason.”
“So then why’d he send the horse with us?” I asked before I was certain I wanted to.
“Not us , lassie. With you . To protect you.”
My lips parted with the usual rebuttal along the lines of, If he cares about me so much, surely he would’ve found an alternative to stabbing me in the fucking heart . But in the end I didn’t say a word, until, “Where is Bolt now?”
“With Reed on patrol,” Xeno said. “He’s helping keep watch.”
I couldn’t help but add, “You’re all absolutely sure Rush didn’t betray me?”
I stared them each in the eye, holding longest on Xeno, who answered, “I don’t know Rush. But I know men, especially the warrior type. And much as I might wanna tell you otherwise for selfish reasons, that man was hurting over what he had to do.”
“I’ve never seen him like that before,” Roan said, sounding lost in thought. “Not even when Ramana died. Then he just wanted to murder the shit out of everyone in his path on his way to the queen.”
I wasn’t sure what to think anymore when Finnian asked, “What were you talking about when we got here? What was surprising you, Elowyn?”
“And you really didn’t want to let Sandor die?” I asked him instead.
“I didn’t. I would have rather set him free.” That truth shone in his warm, intelligent eyes. “He wasn’t the best of men, but neither was he the worst. He did what he had to, just as the rest of us do, to survive.”
Finally, Finnian sighed, his strong shoulders rising and lowering. “I’d known him for centuries. Perhaps one day we might have become friends.”
“But the evil cunt won’t let anythin’ good happen under her nose,” Roan rumbled.
Finnian nudged my boot with his own. “So? What were you talking about?”
“Oh,” I said. “My ears got pointier. Not sure exactly why.”
Finnian and Roan exchanged a look that was as loaded as the umbracs had apparently been with poison.
“What?” I pushed.
“We’re not certain,” Finnian replied a bit too quickly.
I arched my brows at him, Roan, and even Pru, who eventually offered, “It’s the mate bond, Mistress ... Elowyn. We think it’s the mate bond that’s unlocking your power.”
I smiled, but only at hearing her speak about herself as important as anyone else.
The expression quickly fell when she added, “That’s why Pru was worried about Her Majesty discovering that Drake Rush Vega and Mistress are bonded.”
“And she didn’t?” I asked, as if it weren’t absolutely absurd to consider that the man who’d essentially killed me was my bonded pairing.
“If she had, I doubt she would have allowed him to make the deal he did with her,” Finnian said. “She wouldn’t have trusted even him, not then. The mate bond between two fae is rare, so rare that its magic isn’t wholly understood.”
“It seems to change too, dependin’ on the couple,” Roan offered. “Plus, fae’ve been keepin’ secrets from the royals for as long as there’ve been royals. With the mate bond, even more so. Mates can become ferally protective of each other.”
“With what we’ve seen lately,” Finnian said, “I’m thinking Elowyn had a binding cast on her before the king sent her away to live with the dragons.”
“And that the mate bond activating broke the spell,” Roan filled in.
“Exactly. Hence her fae nature fully revealing itself in the physical form of her ears. Maybe in other ways too.”
“Like what?” I asked Finnian.
“You tell me.”
Well before I was finished getting the information I needed or the complete understanding I craved, and before I could turn the issue over in my mind even a little bit, I found the declaration spilling from my lips.
“We can’t hide out at the coast. We’ve got to go back.”
“Yes,” Finnian agreed right away. “Now that we see your power, we have no choice.”
“There’s always another choice.” Xeno slid forward to perch at the edge of the log as if he were about to propel himself on top of me to shield me. “Isn’t that what you were just saying?” Xeno asked me, accusingly.
Then to the others, “She’s not going back there, not ever. It’s way too dangerous. That queen won’t stop till she’s dead, for real this time.”
I recognized what should have been my reasoning when I heard it aloud, but it wouldn’t make a difference. I already knew it. Deep in my gut where I wouldn’t fight the realization, I knew what I had to do.
What I didn’t know was how I’d survive it.