Chapter 36
Gunter paced like a caged animal, back and forth, and he couldn’t seem to make himself stop.
It was odd, as he wasn’t the one caged, of course.
The Jaeggi town was the one under a restrictive ward.
He’d shifted back into his human form the moment he landed with Nikki so he could hold them one last time before they slipped away on their mission.
He’d remained human so he could pace without tripping over one of the many dragons who filled the forest around the Jaeggi town.
Well, maybe it was the secondary ward the Sodalicium’s mages had set up that made him feel this way, but he doubted it.
Gunter glanced overhead. There was a faint shimmer there, just visible against the night sky, but you had to really look to see it.
They’d done their magic well. This might well be the first large-scale magical working Europe had seen in centuries.
Restless, he looked the other way, checking everyone’s readiness.
The vans to take the rescued Jaeggi were all waiting, drivers standing at the open doors, ready to load people in.
Everyone taken from the Jaeggi tonight would go straight to the Sodalicium in India.
With their magic so broken, that was the best place for them.
The Abe would be able to heal them, put them back on the right path again.
And who better to keep an eye on them?
Gunter couldn’t focus on that, though. That was for after. What he wanted to know was where his mate was. His eyes stared at the Jaeggi town as if he could suddenly see through walls.
Even in the darkness, he could feel Alric and Baldewin’s eyes following his every step like he was the ticking time bomb. No one spoke to him, which was for the best. All he could do was pace and hold on to the tattered shreds of his patience.
Nikki, Nikki, Nikki.
It had been too long. Far too long. Nikki had said fifteen minutes, tops.
A quick in and out, plant the timer, hoof it back to Gunter.
Nikki had no intention of lingering inside and getting caught.
It wasn’t like they had to go into the interior of the town, just the outskirts.
They didn’t want to be there when the ward went down.
Even now, the entire town was surrounded with dragons and mages, ready to blaze the Jaeggi town to the ground. Nikki absolutely shouldn’t be caught in the crossfire.
Come on, Nikki. Come on. Where are you?
The itch pricking along his flesh was growing worse. At first, he’d thought it was his own anxiety, or his dragon’s relentless rage and frustration. But this was different. Outside of him.
No! This was coming from Nikki. The faint twangs of pain, of panic, didn’t make sense because they weren’t coming from his own body. They were coming from his mate through the bond.
Nikki was in trouble. Someone was hurting his Nikki.
Alric was right at his side, and his head turned sharply, snapping at Gunter in warning. “Be quiet, why are you growling like that?”
“Nikki’s in pain,” Gunter said, not even trying to keep his voice down. “They’ve been caught.”
As he spoke, his dragon clawed at the inside of his brain and body, leaving him feeling like talons were slicing through his organs in its desperation to break free.
Claws were sprouting from his fingertips and scales were popping out across his flesh already.
He couldn’t hold his dragon in for much longer.
Cold logic and control were needed, but neither he nor his dragon gave a damn about either when it came to Nikki.
“You sure?”
“Panic, fear, determination—I’m feeling all of that from them. They’ve been caught.”
“Shit.” Alric stayed hunkered in dragon form a little longer, taking advantage of the trees. Then he shook himself from head to toe. “I have a feeling the game is up. If they caught Nikki, odds are they know the rest of us are here.”
“Or at least that some of us are here,” Baldewin corrected on his other side. “I wouldn’t barge out into view just yet, Hoheit. I doubt they’ve figured out they’re surrounded on all sides. We can’t tip our hand just yet.”
Alric grunted in agreement, but Gunter was barely keeping himself standing in place when all he wanted was to throw himself at the barrier.
Baldewin growled. “Did Nikki get the timer planted before they were found?”
That was the question. And Gunter prayed, as he’d never prayed before, that Nikki had been successful. Otherwise, Gunter had no way of reaching them. And that thought terrified him as nothing else could.
Losing Nikki when he’d only just found them—inconceivable. Gunter’s mind flinched from the possibility, unable to even consider it without shying violently away.
Gunter was out of sight, yes, but with a clear vantage point of the main road leading into the town.
He’d positioned himself here for a reason, because he could both track Nikki’s approach into the town and also monitor the activity of people going in and out.
He kept staring in the direction Nikki had disappeared, willing his mate to somehow burst through the ward, even if for a second.
To escape for one moment, so Gunter could swoop in and cover them.
Come on, Nikki. Please, Liebling, come on.
Alric uttered a particularly foul curse. “They’ve caught on, alright.”
Cameron, sitting on Alric’s back, leaned forward in a creak of leather. “I can’t see like your dragon eyes can. Is that Nikki?”
Gunter’s head snapped around, back toward the main road, and he felt his heart seize up in his chest. For once he was not happy about having cat-like night vision.
No. God, no.
There was Nikki, alright, and held very strongly between two beefy men, Thomas right behind them.
It seemed less a restraint and more a support, as Nikki was hunched over like their ribs were hurting, blood visibly trailing from a split cheek.
Their eye was already blackening. Gunter’s eyes swept Nikki over from head to foot and back again, rage coursing through his system like quicksilver.
He didn’t think. Rational thought was past him by this point.
The shift from human to dragon was over in a flash, and he bounded out of cover, his larger body eating up the distance in a blink.
His dragon’s roar of rage and pain shook the earth and rent the air.
He was a blur of crimson red streaking toward the town, claws and teeth bared.
The ward separating them didn’t matter, the possibility of injury didn’t matter, all that mattered was reaching Nikki.
Naturally, the ward had different ideas.
It stopped Gunter dead in his tracks with a solid pushback of power.
Gunter snarled in frustration and threw himself bodily at the ward again, ignoring the sting of protesting skin and muscles.
It didn’t do any good. The ward doubled down in return, pushing back harder.
He clawed at it with his long, hooked black talons, and a shower of gold sparks burst into the air, and he made no progress.
Gunter whipped around, teeth bared, not sure what else to do, how to get to Nikki, his desperation starting to override his common sense.
Backing up a step, he opened his mouth and roared his pain, shooting a molten blast of dragon fire at the barrier.
Dragon fire, in the purest form, didn’t just burn red and orange.
It was white and blue and gold with the different temperatures.
Even his thick dragon hide felt the heat of it.
But the barrier held, spreading the fire in a bright wave of white and blue across the town and then down into the surrounding woods.
Nothing worked. He couldn’t reach his mate. Thomas could kill Nikki right before his eyes and there was nothing he could do to stop him. Gunter and his dragon roared again, helplessness swamping his soul. Anything. At that second, he would give Thomas anything he wanted just to have his Nikki safe.
“Tsk, tsk, so hasty,” Thomas Jaeggi said with a wide smile. Truly, the man couldn’t look more overjoyed. But of course he would feel that way, as he thought he had the upper hand. “Nikki, do tell your dragon to calm down.”
Gunter could smell the blood and pain on Nikki, and it only lit the fire in him again. He went nose to nose with Thomas, as much as he could through the ward, and snarled, “Your clan already made the mistake once of messing with a dragon’s mate. Surely you can learn your lesson. Release them, now.”
“See?” Nikki said, challenging the ones holding their arms. “Gunter has no problem using my correct pronouns! It’s just a word, come on, you can do it.”
Hearing snark out of Nikki’s mouth was such a relief Gunter almost bowled over with it. Hurting, yes, Nikki was clearly that. But not down, not by a longshot. Their eyes met, Nikki grinning at Gunter as if this wasn’t even something to be worried about.
And Gunter wanted to do nothing more than catch his mate up and out of there. His mate was made of stronger stuff than he was.
“That’s not how the war started,” Thomas corrected stiffly. “It started because you dragons were too full of yourselves—”
“Do not preach to me of the war,” Gunter snapped. “I was there. You were not.”
Thomas went abruptly still. “You’re that old? In the histories we have, the dragons could live very long lives, but…that long? You don’t even look ancient. Your scales are still strongly crimson.”
“Looks about thirty-five or so in human form,” Nikki informed him, with a hint of a leer on their face. “And damn fine, too. And he does this thing, where he half-shifts, and the things this man does to me in bed, I’m telling you, it’s probably illegal in quite a few countries.”
The man on the right landed a punch into Nikki’s stomach to shut them up. Nikki doubled over, making a sound half keen, half cough.
Gunter’s rage doubled all over again and, despite knowing it wouldn’t do any good, he threw himself at the ward again, harder this time, perfectly willing to shatter bones if it could get him through and to Nikki.