13. Drakken
Drakken
I’d been a mess since Max left.
I wasn’t born into a peaceful world. War, rage, concentrated hate—those were the waters I’d swum my whole life, and I was the shark in them. Yet none of it prepared me for what Max brought down on me.
Every trap, every bad stretch of water, I’d come through by holding to one rule.
Stay detached. Never let it in.
Max broke that.
I’d thought I hated her from the day my dragon first caught her bloodline. I’d tried to expose the warlock boy and break whatever spell he had on my brothers. Came close to finishing him, too. I loathed myself for being drawn to her even then, before I knew she was a woman.
Then it was all laid out in front of me.
Max’s true name was Trivia Morningstar. The lost heir of two Zodiac Houses. The blood of the fucking White Witch, my worst enemy.
Then Aelindor mated her.
Then Xander unrolled his parchment. Doomed her. Chained her. The bloody contract sold her into sex slavery.
That was the first time I saw her panic, and it nearly put me on the floor in front of three kingdoms.
The moment she was gone, all we wanted was to follow. My dragon was an asshole on his best day. He was also the last thing on this earth you’d want standing between you and his mate.
Xander had slipped out in the night. We couldn’t stop him and his people from leaving. The Accord bound us. So we did everything else, and the whole Covenant coiled to move on a second’s notice.
If a border war broke out, the force we kept on the New Mexico line wouldn’t be enough. I’d redrawn its reinforcement routes three times in two days.
I was bent over the map table when the vision took me, knocking the breath out of me and folding me over the parchment. The war room went out.
A long bridge over black water. Xander’s bridge, at his castle in Houston. The castle burning behind it.
Bodies littered the span.
Caspian first. Down on the stones in his warrior form, not moving, a child’s shoe near his open hand. Nikolai pinned through with lances of light, his ax broken, crimson eyes gone dull. The Nightingale crew scattered across the length of the bridge like storm wrack, not one standing.
And Max.
On her knees amid corpses, screaming. A magical collar closing at her throat. Bloody hands dragging her backward. That white strand of her hair the last bright thing in all that dark.
Cold sweat dampened my palms.
I’d had a premonition once. The night before my parents were executed. Every second of it came true.
I was moving before the vision let go of me. Soldiers, officers, and attendants flattened against the wall as I tore past and out into open ground.
My dragon burst out of me and took the sky, cutting across the base to the eastern yard.
New Columbia had asked to see the mutant wyverns. Aelindor was down showing President Whitmore and his scientist the bodies we kept in the cold vault under the eastern yard.
My beast got there in minutes. I shifted back the second he hit the ground. The soldiers snapped to attention and two of them ran for spare clothes. I got the trousers on and didn’t bother with the shirt.
The stairs came up at me, as did the smell. Rot laced with the burnt-hide reek of wyvern ichor. Our witch’s spell held the decay off. It did nothing for the smell.
Low voices carried up to me. My dragon’s ears made it easy. Whitmore was asking to take one or two of the corpses home for study, and Aelindor gave them to him without a pause.
Good. Let them take the horror north. Fear made fine mortar for an alliance.
“The White Witch could’ve wiped us out, and yet she’s still waiting,” Whitmore drawled. “I’ve been asking myself why. Have you, Aelindor?”
“Constantly,” Aelindor said. “But I’d rather hear your theory first, Whitmore. Mine rests on the prophecy.”
“The prophecy.” Whitmore seemed to let the word sit. “About the lost heir who just surfaced—”
I cleared the stairs and strode into the vault room.
The sight was worse than the smell.
Five carcasses, each the size of a truck and wrong in every way. Wing-membranes grafted to plated hide. Rows of teeth that had never grown in any natural jaw.
A New Columbia scientist leaned over the nearest slab and prodded a corpse with a measuring rod. The dead thing jerked. Its flank spasmed, wing-claw scraping the table, and the whole party leapt back, cursing.
“Aelindor!” I bellowed.
He was in the far corner with the president, heads close. Both of them turned.
“Drakken?” Aelindor came at me fast, and the calm didn’t quite hold.
“I have to go. Now!” I got it out in pieces. “Bridge. Houston. Caspian and Nikolai… Everyone dead…and Max…”
“Breathe, brother.” Aelindor gripped my shoulder, steadying me, as he’d done every time I lost my shit.
“What’s going on?” the president demanded, striding toward us.
“Premonition.” My voice came out scorched. “Second one since—”
Aelindor knew exactly what I meant. I watched it go through him.
His hand tightened on my shoulder. “Tell me, soldier.”
“Our brothers dead on the bridge. Max chained.”
The blood drained from Aelindor’s face.
I’d watched that face while he carried dying men off battlefields and took wounds that should have finished him. Now it held pure fear. He’d never shown anyone that. Not once. Not until Max.
“I’ve had a bad feeling since last night.” He swallowed. He didn’t ask me for more. “I told myself it was nerves.”
“Now you know.” I turned. “I gotta go.”
“Go! Get her out. Get all of them out. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Yes, sir!”
I tore through the room, then the stairs, and my dragon erupted out of me, bones cracking into wings, fire flooding up my throat.
The fortress dropped away beneath us.
South. To her. To our brothers.
To her and our brothers! my dragon roared.