Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
How could I not have recognized that the change in Nessie hadn’t come about naturally? Then again, possession? Not something that would have ever occurred to me. I’d assumed Nessie had simply tired of being a prisoner of her loch. That the sweet dragon I once knew had finally succumbed to despair.
Guilt filled me, torturing me with the fact I’d walked away after our last argument and not done more to help my oldest friend.
I could make up excuses, like the fact that she’d told me to go, screamed it actually, and that I’d thought giving her space would help.
And to be honest, a decade for a dragon of our age was merely a drop in the bucket of time.
It must have felt an eternity, though, to Nessie, trapped inside her body, a victim once more of her wretched twin. Could I find a way to separate the two?
“Alistair, what are we going to do?” Davina whispered.
“Escape, of course.” A blasé answer that those watching and listening would expect. I took note of them. Blue Men stationed at each of the four arches that led out of the chamber. Another quad of Red Caps a few yards away, huddled playing bone dice—made of literal bones.
A stirring of the water had me bracing for Tiamat’s reappearance, but instead, a sleek seal popped into view, not Astaria but her sister, Fiona. She humped onto the floor before changing shapes. Her long, wet hair draped her naked body as she stood.
“Hi, Ali. Sorry about everything that’s happened.” She wrung her hands in agitation.
“You should be, considering you’re the reason I’m in this situation. Care to tell me why you’re working for Tiamat?” Because if anyone knew of the dual souls in one body, it would be the seer.
“I didn’t have a choice. She sent a message saying if I didn’t come serve her at Loch Ness she’d exterminate everyone I knew.” Her lips turned down.
“If you’d come to me, I would have provided protection.” A bit of a rebuke, but softly delivered.
“I could have; however, that path didn’t have the best outcome,” she countered. “Hence why I chose a different branch to the future.”
A chain rattled as Davina joined the conversation. “You decided to help the split-personality water dragon? Gotta say, it’s an odd choice.”
“Not when you’ve seen what I have.” A stricken-faced Fiona paced. “I wish I could tell you more but—” A glance at those listening pressed her lips tight.
But I’d learned enough. Enough to know Fiona had chosen to help Tiamat because she’d seen something that terrified her enough she’d abandoned her home and family, as well as betrayed me.
“Tiamat knows about the hatchlings.” I couldn’t help a chiding note.
“Of course she does. She’s the one who encouraged the doctor to find and hatch them.”
“But you told her you saw me meeting them. She thinks I’m going to help her trap them.”
“You won’t,” Fiona reassured. “I didn’t reveal the entirety of that vision, but at the time, I had to give her something to distract.”
“Distract from what?” Davina asked.
Again, Fiona glanced at those guarding. Her voice lowered as she whispered, “Tiamat isn’t the threat you need to worry most about.”
“Not from my perspective, locked in a cage,” my dry reply.
“That situation is about to resolve itself shortly.” Fiona took a few mincing steps closer and lowered her voice. “Whatever happens, Malone has to be stopped.”
“The human doctor?”
Fiona nodded. “He’s about to do something monumentally stupid.”
“More stupid than igniting volcanoes to hatch dragons?”
“Very.” A grunt and smack of something hard on rock had her head turning to look over her shoulder. The Red Caps had abandoned their game to focus on her. “I have to go.”
“Before you swim off, can you at least tell us if we’ll survive our captivity?” Davina asked with a quaver.
“Yes, but you might later wish you’d died here, given what is to come.”
Ominous, but I couldn’t ask Fiona about her claim, as she turned back into a seal and dove into the mini lake of water.
Davina sighed. “Well, that wasn’t exactly reassuring.”
“You should always take what seers say with a grain of salt. Keep in mind they see possibilities, and those can change based on our choices.”
“Or the choices of others, I imagine,” Davina murmured.
“Not really. After all, as a dragon, I am the main character in this story, and as such, only my actions and that of my closest companions make a difference.”
Davina blinked before snorting. “That statement just took arrogance to another level.”
I couldn’t help but grin. “I prefer to think of it as self-confidence and a stubbornness that won’t allow me, or you for that matter, to die quite yet.”
“While I admire your conviction, I don’t see how we’re supposed to escape.
I mean, even if you could get out of that cage or I could get rid of this collar, there’s eight monsters in the room with us, and who knows what else might come running and slavering if an alarm is raised?
Then there’s a mad doctor who seems to think he can put your big dragon butt to sleep—”
“Fat shaming again!”
She ignored me and kept going. “A split-personality ex-girlfriend with designs to eat your heart and then, even if we managed to get past all that, we’re hundreds of feet under water, which might be easy for you to navigate, but me?
I don’t have a scuba tank, and even if I did, the lack of decompression chamber on shore would lead to me dying quite horribly. ”
“That’s not going to happen. I promise we are getting out of here, alive, the two of us.”
“Tiamat won’t just let us go. Even if we did manage to somehow get away from here, she’s still going to cause trouble.”
“Not if she’s dead.”
“I know Tiamat’s the one in charge right now, but you’d also be killing Nessie.”
A reminder that had me thinking of the friend I used to have, the gentle soul locked in a body with an evil one. I knew what Nessie would tell me to do. “I will do what I must for the sake of the world.”
“Enough talking.” The largest of the Red Caps sauntered close, the reek of it enough to turn my more delicate human stomach.
“Or what?” I riposted.
“Mistress says if you don’t behave, we get to play with the woman.” The Red Cap turned a leer on Davina. Its thin, cracked lips, stretched taut over yellow and black teeth. I could see why she shuddered. While its threat roused my protective side, I’d not reached my ripe old age by acting rashly.
“You know, I’m surprised you’re taking orders from a female. I didn’t expect the Red Caps to be so progressive.”
“Mistress is as evil and cunning as us. Mistress has promised we won’t have to hide in the shadows much longer. Soon we will hunt again.”
“And you believed that?” I snickered.
“Why you laugh?”
“Because it’s obvious what will happen once she has no use for you. She’s going to set you loose amongst the humans, who will mow you down with their guns. That is, if they don’t capture you for dissection in a lab. Scientists would love to get their hands on you for experiments.”
“The humans are cowards who hide at the sight of us.” The big Red Cap thumped its chest.
“I’m sure some will, but here’s the thing about humans. If you threaten one, they might cower, but go after their family or those they love and they become rabid. Brave. Merciless. All things your mistress is aware of. It is quite smart of her, actually, to use your own stupidity against you.”
“Not stupid,” huffed Big Red. “You’re stupid thinking you can have us betray mistress. I see what you’re doing. You are causing trouble, and that means I get to teach you a lesson by punishing the woman.”
The Red Cap turned his back to me and focused on Davina, who hugged her upper body as her head swiveled, taking in the other Red Caps approaching to box her in.
As planned. A plan she didn’t know about, nor did I have time to tell her.
With the Red Caps focused on her, no one paid attention to me.
And by the time they realized I’d escaped my cage, it was too late.