Chapter 14 Her Irish Dragons
Her Irish Dragon+s
There were three of them.
The generous and accommodating Aengus. One.
The infuriating(ly sexy) drill sergeant Diarmuid. Two.
Orpheus. The guy I had to order not to kill me every night. Three.
Not one dragon. Three.
Three.
Three!
At first there was shock.
And then there was only rage.
Three! Why hadn’t they told me?
Three! I’d been duped again. Just like before Sadie pushed me into the lake.
Three! A crashing sea appeared inside my ears.
No more thoughts. No fear of the midnight-blue dragon.
The knife I’d pocketed was suddenly in my hand as I stepped toward Aengus, the dragon who’d acted like a friend but had been lying to me this entire time.
DORIE, NO! A voice boomed inside my head. You will go through the cavern door we have made you. At once!
My body locked.
Then animated with a jerk.
I placed the knife back into my pocket, my actions calm, even as my mind screamed. After that, I headed toward the glowing door.
But I wasn’t doing this. I wasn’t walking of my own accord. No neurons were firing to give these commands.
The voice had taken control of my body. And no matter how much I fought it, I couldn’t stop it from puppeting me through the glowing green door.
Suddenly, I was in another cavern. Cool, crisp air enveloped me along with the scents of stone, aged wood, and animal fur.
These quarters looked nothing like my bare room or Diarmuid’s workspace.
It was two times the size of my cavern and appointed in a way that brought to mind words like “duke” and “chamber.”
A path of various animal furs created a little pathway from a glowing doorway to a set of wooden double doors—so far away the distance, it felt like a journey.
An enormous four-poster sat on one side of the path, and a round stone table on the other side. Four chairs stood around it. Three stone ones as huge as thrones, and one smaller one made of wood with a seat much closer to the floor.
I barely had time to register the room before the force that had taken over my body propelled me forward and sat me down in the smallest chair, pinning my forearms to the table and planting my feet on the ground.
I couldn’t move! Couldn’t speak! Couldn’t so much as open my mouth to scream.
What is happening? What. Is. Happening?!?!
We are sorry, Reverence, the voice answered inside my head, as if it could hear my question. We are aware this is an invasion, but you have lost your temper again and left us no other choice. This is the only way we can protect you from the Royal Huntmaster.
I tried to answer the voice, but my jaw remained clamped shut, teeth gripped tight like a dentist had wired it closed. I couldn’t even move my lips. They might as well have been sealed.
You may speak to us through your mind, the voice told me. You have only to project the words as an intentional thought. Right now, your thoughts are a jumble. We could only understand your panicked, “What is happening?”
Okay… Okay… I lassoed that panic and tried to calm down.
Wolves could only communicate with each other after going into heat and mating. Before Da’s death, Senair Hamish used to grouse at his son and Maem for “having such obvious thoughts at the dinner table.”
But I’d never gone into heat and didn’t have a mate to communicate with mentally back and forth.
I did my best, fumbling inside my head to create a question.
Which one of you am I speaking to?
We are Diarmuid.
Diarmuid. The voice sounded like his commanding version, only more resonant and slightly echoey, like the entertainment industry’s version of God.
How are you doing this to me? Why can’t I move?
We are compelling you with our will. It is a power our kind has over yours and the other anthrohominids.
Other anthrohominids?
What you call humans.
Now came the big question: Why are you doing this?
We are showing you the power our kind has over yours so you do not do something rash that alerts the Royal Huntmaster to your presence.
The Royal Huntmaster… Is that the dark-blue dragon?
A long silence. I wondered if I needed to try again to form a more intentional thought.
But then the voice answered. Yes.
One word. No further explanation. I found out then that I could roll my eyes—maybe because I needed to blink for lubrication.
Oh, sigh emoji, he was going to make me grill him for every bit of information.
A Royal Huntmaster means your kind has royals. Someone in charge?
Yes.
So is that guy your king or some kind of prince? Is that why you bowed to him?
No. He is a… we do not have an equivalent word in your language. He is the nephew of our former king and the cousin of the current king. His family line commands formal respect, as he is fourth in line for the throne behind his father.
And you think he will hurt me?
We know he will hurt you, for you are proof.
Proof of what?
Another long silence. The answers to these questions are ones you will not like.
You sound like Aengus.
Yes, because we both remain uncertain of how you will receive such information.
Well, I certainly won’t be able to physically lose it on you again, so now is as good a time as any to just spill.
This time the silence lasted so long, I really didn’t think he would answer.
But for once, I won the waiting game when Diarmuid gave in.
Your hybrid kind serve as our assistants in our hunts of hominids, which are a Drakkon delicacy.
We have come to your planet on a one-thousand year mission to prove whether your kind and the anthrohominids are merely sub-sapient fauna without the ability to form complex thought or an evolving species with a viable chance of creating civilization.
I blinked. Hard.
Excuse me? Are you trying to say that Drakkon eat people, like as a special snack? And you’re here to figure out whether humans and werewolves deserve to be more than your meat and your hunting dogs?
We warned you might not like the answers to your questions.
Actually, I hated the answers. But for the sake of getting the full story, I pressed on. We are a sapient species capable of creating civilization. I’m proof of that.
You are, and if the Royal Huntmaster were to find out about you, he would more likely erase the proof of your existence than celebrate it.
My stomach rolled with a familiar dread. The kind that washes over you when you realize a system or corporation is corrupt from the inside out.
So, he’d kill me to disprove what you’re trying to prove?
Yes.
I wanted to follow that story string, but my main question still hadn’t been answered.
Why did the three of you trick me into thinking you were one drakkon?
We were not aware that you thought us three one. You made an assumption.
You look exactly alike!
Yes, and you made an assumption that we were the same being. We would have told you we were three separate beings if you had asked us if we were three separate beings.
How was I supposed to know to ask that?
We are not assigning blame, Dorie. We are stating your faulty assumption, and correcting it.
He had a point, but I continued to bristle.
My assumption might have been faulty, but your logic is circular.
I assumed wrongly, but I couldn’t have known to ask if you guys were three separate aliens under a trench coat.
I mean, the we/ours stuff didn’t help. And all the times when I talked about something “you” did and you didn’t correct me.
We have trouble with the word “you” especially.
We think in the collective, therefore, when you used “you” to refer to something Aengus had done, we did not register that it was due to a false premise.
The difficulty is, we still have trouble translating “you” as you mean it because we do not think as individuals, per se, only as we have been programmed.
Programmed? That first-day theory about them being intelligent machines came roaring back. Are you three robots with the ability to control our minds?
No, we are not industrial automatons. And we do not seek to control your mind.
Yet here you are.
Looking back on my unprecedented run of daily, intense exercise, I had to ask, Have you been in my brain this entire time? Reading it? Controlling me?
Long silence. We have used a light form of godspeak to encourage you in your training.
It is important that you become strong and learn to defend yourself, so it is only when you are tired and we sense you can go further.
We have not pried, as you would call it.
We have encouraged, but we have not read your mind.
We cannot do that. Our interspecies communication does not work the same as wolves.
You have to intentionally project your thoughts for us to hear them.
That explained why he didn’t know about the big key in my pocket. But a new fear took hold. How about Aengus and the knifey one. Can they mind control me, too?
Aengus refuses to godspeak you under any condition, Diarmuid answered.
Something loosened in my chest at that. Just slightly.
But then Diarmuid added, And if Orpheus could control your mind, we would not be having this conversation. You would already be dead.
A chill ran up my back. I did not love the way he used “already” in that sentence. As if my death was inevitable.
Suddenly, I just really had to know: If you’re not triplets, and you’re not brothers, what are you?
Aengus and the drakkon you call Diarmuid are variants of the Royal Geneticist.
Who is the Royal Geneticist?
The drakkon who bioengineered your hybrid race.
My brain was filling up like a glass placed underneath a waterfall. I needed it to slow down. It would not slow down.
I blinked hard with the only part of my body I could move. Wait… what?! One of you created us?
Reverence, the Royal Huntmaster has asked us to accompany him to our wolf facility. We must take to the air and will soon be out of mental communication range.
Wolf facility? My brain felt like it was about to fold in on itself. Wait, there are other wolves here?
No answer.
And in the next moment, I was abruptly released from the force keeping me pinned to the seat.
I jumped to my feet and immediately stumbled, legs tingling with pins and needles from being held frozen. I grabbed the edge of the stone table to steady myself, trying to formulate a plan in my head.
Diarmuid had just proved he could make me do whatever he wanted, and he’d already confirmed that Orpheus wanted to kill me.
But there was a range to his powers. Assuming I wasn’t locked into this luxurious suite, I should probably find the cavern where I was staying, get all those camping things Sadie packed for me, and take my chances in the Pleistocene forest.
But how would I even get into my room and get out again?
I stood up on steadier legs and started following the path of furs toward the doors, but my hands shook as the adrenaline that had nowhere to go during the godspeaking finally flooded my system.
Where could I hide from beings that could read my heat signature pattern and apparently loved to hunt and eat humans?
How was I going to get out of—
I stopped when I spotted something on the wall between the table I’d been forcibly sat down at and the exit I was trying to reach.
A door.
A giant door.
It stood at least twenty-five feet tall. Plenty of room for a dragon. About a foot above my head, there was a keyhole.
My heart sped up, even though this door was in a wall, not the ceiling where I’d expected it after my tour of the modern version of this fortress.
But directly above the keyhole gleamed a symbol I recognized.
A sort of dragon crown with an emerald embedded into it. The same as the head on my key.
The one that said finnt mei tür.
Find my door.
Chest thrumming, I craned my neck to look up at the larger-than-life slab of wood, knowing in my gut…
I’d just found what the key was looking for.