Chapter 31
MINE TO TAKE
Arioch
The dense brush and dragon blood trees of the canyon’s rim offered concealment, allowing us to approach the gorge that yawned below us. I peered over the edge, and the force that rose from its depths seized me by the spine.
I had known we would end up here. The moment my treasure’s pull turned inland, something deeper than instinct told me where it was heading.
I could feel this place long before I saw it.
The power pressed against my awareness with the weight of mountains, ancient enough to make my bloodline feel young.
Then I saw its source, and my breath abandoned me.
The Ancient dwarfed everything in my experience. Even Catori’s great oak was little more than a seedling compared to it.
Tyrin settled beside me, half concealed behind a gnarled trunk. For a long moment, neither of us spoke. There were no words in any language I knew that could adequately address what stood before us.
“It calls to me,” Tyrin finally said, his voice strained.
It was doing far worse to me. Calling did not begin to describe the summons reverberating through my marrow.
It did not whisper; it insisted. Come closer.
Descend. Press your palm to my bark and find everything you have ever wanted.
The compulsion flooded my senses with warmth and sweetness, promising answers to questions I had carried my entire life.
I did not trust a single note of it.
The song on the pier had been a lullaby, gentle enough to walk me to my death in my sleep. The Ancient’s call dispensed with subtlety entirely. It battered against my skull with the relentless force of a ram against a gate, and every repetition found new cracks to exploit.
I forced my attention past the summons and onto the canyon floor, where four wolves climbed the Ancient’s roots.
Ziara’s plaited crimson hair marked her like a banner, even from this height.
She walked directly behind the alpha, and the artifact pulsed steadily from her direction, confirming my stolen treasure was still on her person.
Good. I tracked her movements, calculating the approach that would separate her from the pack with the least resistance.
A confrontation at the base of the roots, perhaps.
Or an ambush as they descended. The alpha would fight.
The older soldier would be disciplined and dangerous. The younger male would be reckless.
But Ziara… Ziara would surrender.
A presence materialized on the ledge beside us.
One moment, the space was empty; the next, a small creature crouched between Tyrin and me, close enough to touch.
She was barely knee-height, with moss-tangled hair, filthy bare feet, and obsidian eyes that held the sharp cunning of something far older than her appearance suggested.
“You will not enter the canyon,” she announced, as if two armed fighters, one of whom, a dragon, were of no greater consequence than a change in the weather. “The Ancient is not to be disturbed by those who have not paid tribute.”
Tyrin shifted his weight, and she moved before either of us could react. Her jaw unhinged, revealing disturbing conical teeth, and she lunged for his forearm.
Her bite cracked against stone-hardened flesh. She recoiled, clutching her mouth, dark eyes watering. Tyrin regarded her with the flat expression of a man who felt no pity or pain.
Spitting fragments of teeth, she turned to me. Her lips peeled back, revealing the remaining points, and she leaned forward with clear intent.
I met her gaze.
Whatever she found in my eyes drained the ambition from her posture. She straightened slowly, obsidian eyes wide, the predatory confidence evaporating like frost in direct sunlight. For a long moment, she simply stared, her nostrils flaring as if scenting something she had not expected.
“You…” she started, then thought better of it. She took a deliberate step backward. “Be respectful of the Ancient. She does not belong to you.”
She vanished before I could inform her that I would decide what belonged to me and what did not.
In the canyon, the canopy shuddered, recapturing my attention.
Every leaf on the Ancient turned toward the wolves.
Not with the wind. Against it. A rippling wave that spread outward from the trunk as if the tree had drawn a single, enormous breath.
Then came the whisper. Thousands of voices layered into two words that crossed the distance and drove themselves into my skull like nails.
She’s here.
The wolves froze. The younger male recoiled. The older soldier raised his rifle. The alpha did not flinch. He pressed forward, Ziara at his side. Fear shortened her stride and stiffened her shoulders, yet she followed anyway.
They reached the trunk, and the alpha turned to face her, one hand clasping her shoulder.
I strained to hear his words, but the distance and the canyon walls swallowed them.
Whatever he said was brief. Then she stumbled, as if he had pushed her forward.
From my angle, I did not see the blow, but it was the only explanation.
The bark opened like a mouth and swallowed her whole.
The younger male lunged. The alpha’s arm shot out, stopping him mid-stride. The older soldier lowered his rifle at the alpha’s signal, though his grip remained white-knuckled.
I barely registered their reactions because the thread connecting me to my treasure pulled so tight it screamed.
Then it snapped.
The reverberation hit me like a war hammer to the sternum. My knee buckled. I caught myself against a boulder as the place inside me where the artifact had lived for decades ripped open, hollow and howling. The bloodstone was gone. Not distant. Not muffled. Not concealed behind wards or walls.
Gone.
“M’lord!” Tyrin seized my arm.
I could not answer him. My vision blurred as I scanned the canyon. The younger male’s expression was stricken, but he kept his place behind the alpha. The older soldier stood rigid, rifle trained on the trunk. The alpha watched the tree with an expression I could not read.
Crimson sap wept down the silver bark in thick rivulets, adding to older stains. It pooled on the roots and dripped from the branches, painting the Ancient in streaks of red that looked nothing like sap and everything like blood.
My blood thundered in my ears.
Had he sacrificed her?
Had that calculating, cold-eyed wolf fed his faithful thief to this ancient thing? Did he relinquish her blood, her body, and my treasure with it? Was I too late?
Ziara.
Something fractured behind my ribs. Not bone. The slow, grinding crack of a foundation that had held for a quarter century finally giving way. The void where the artifact should have been, filled with a cold so absolute it burned.
Mine.
The artifact was mine. The thief was mine. And that calculating wolf had brutally discarded both.
“M’lord.” Tyrin’s voice came from leagues away. “M’lord, we must think before—”
Ice I had not intended to summon erupted across the ridge, sheathing the brush and cracking the stone beneath my feet.
I shifted.
The transformation was not voluntary. It was detonation.
Bone cracked and reformed, scales tore through skin, and my wings unfurled with a force that splintered the trees concealing our position and cast the ridge in shadow.
Silentium vanished into my hoard as talons replaced fingers, each one longer than the daggers the little thief had pressed to my chest, and infinitely less merciful.
Tyrin launched himself clear of my expansion and shifted without hesitation, his gargoyle form erupting in a burst of stone-gray wings and ancient armor. Clawed hands drew his axe, and he did not try to stop me again.
I dove.
Nearly vertical, the wind shrieking across my scales as the clearing rushed up to meet me, I released a roar that had been building since the moment the little thief had disappeared.
No longer.
Twenty-five years of isolation, of patience, of careful restraint, compressed into a sound that cracked stone and sent the canyon walls weeping rubble.
Rifles rose. Muzzles flashed. The staccato crack of shots fired preceded the thud of bullets sparking against my scales like struck matches before ricocheting into the canyon walls. They were mere raindrops against a mountain.
I did not slow.
Tyrin swept in behind me, banking low over the roots.
The alpha tracked him, firing twice. Both rounds deflected off the gargoyle’s stone-hardened hide, only serving to annoy him.
Tyrin roared and dove, driving the two older wolves apart, scattering them behind the massive roots like prey fleeing into the undergrowth.
My attention locked onto the young male.
He stood his ground. I would grant him that. Feet planted, spear readied, jaw set with the determination of a man who knew he was outmatched and had chosen to die on the battlefield. Under different circumstances, I might have respected him.
But I had watched him at the porthole. The way his eyes had tracked Ziara with the quiet confidence of ownership.
The way his body had possessively angled toward hers.
Familiar. He touched her often. Held her.
Knew the architecture of her body in ways that ignited something in my chest I refused to name.
And he had stood by while his alpha pushed her into that tree.
I tucked my wings and plummeted.
He hurled the spear. It struck my shoulder and skipped off scales that could turn aside cannon fire. The impact barely registered. What was a spear to a dragon?
What was a wolf?
The alpha screamed a warning. Too late. My foreclaw was already extended.
Talons punched through the young wolf’s chest with the wet, splintering crack of ribs surrendering to a force they were never designed to withstand.
His mouth opened, but the gasp that escaped held no air.
His lungs had nowhere left to expand. Hands seized my claw, fingers slick with his own blood, scrabbling uselessly to free himself.