Chapter 6
Left in the dragon’s room with her bottom stinging and her pride even more so, Kate was in no mood for surrender.
She would not allow them to destroy her portal.
It was more than a gateway between worlds.
It was her work. Her proof of concept. If they broke it, nobody would ever know what she had achieved—and that would be the tragedy.
There was only one way to protect her portal.
She had to get to it before they could break it, get through and shut it down from the Earth side.
That wasn’t going to be easy. They had a head start and the ability to fly, but she couldn’t just sit there with a sore bottom and let the dragons destroy her work. She had to at least try to defend it.
“And I’m not doing it naked either,” she muttered to herself. She had no clothing of her own left, but clothing was merely the fashioning of cloth. She could walk between worlds; making something to wear should not be beyond her abilities.
In quick order, the silken sheet became a robe about her body, a comfortable and light garment that she enjoyed all the more for knowing how subversive it was to be wearing something in this realm of the ever nude.
Thankfully the dragon had left her bag in the room with her.
He had no idea what a mistake that had been, probably because he was too busy being distracted by taking her virginity and spanking her shamelessly.
Kate’s face took on a pink hue as the memories of his body against hers, surging inside her, threatened to derail her thought processes.
“I knew sex would be a distraction,” she lectured herself as she went through her bag to find the materials she was going to need. Getting out of the room was her first priority, and she was pretty sure she could do that.
The door did not pose as much of an obstacle as Vilka probably thought it did.
It was bolted on the outside, which would have been enough to keep most people contained, but Kate’s bag held a strong magnet capable of getting traction on the bolt through the wood panel.
She held it to the door, heard it catch and then slide, and grinned to herself as it fell into the open position and the doors swung free.
She shut the doors behind her as she left and re-bolted the lock.
If anyone came to check, they’d think she was still in there.
Stepping into the fortress proper, Kate knew she had her work cut out for her.
The dragon’s flight had taken a little over five minutes.
If they had traveled about a hundred miles per hour, then the portal was probably twelve miles away.
That would take at least three hours to walk—but she didn’t intend on walking.
Sneaking around the campus and getting let into places she wasn’t technically supposed to be had made Kate a practiced liar. It wasn’t something she was overtly proud of, but it was a useful skill and she tried to use it for good.
“Excuse me, sir?” She addressed the first naked dragon man she found, carefully keeping eye contact.
The fortress was full of muscular males with their rears and everything else on display, a playground for a promiscuous girl, probably, but Kate was not that kind of girl and she had more on her mind than sex, though she couldn’t help but blush and avert her gaze every time some nude male strolled by.
“You’re Vilka’s mate,” the dragon man said. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m just helping him shut the portal,” she said, lying through her teeth with casual alacrity. “I have some extra notes that I need to get to him. They don’t realize it, but if they do what they’re planning on doing, they will create a much bigger portal, so we have to get a message to him.”
“I’ll tell him,” the dragon nodded.
“No, you’ll have to take me,” Kate insisted.
“See, there are some fine equations involved. Essentially, the tangential quantum hypotenuse needs to be in line with the various cofactors, not including the enzymatic processes which are, of course, native to this realm. And then you have to account for wind speed, momentum, and the first four laws of trigonometry…”
“Alright!” The dragon held up his hands in surrender. “I’ll take you to Vilka. Come out to the landing.”
Kate tried not to grin as she followed the man she had managed to baffle with her bullshit. It was amazing how a serious face and a bunch of big words could get you almost anything you wanted. She was not looking forward to another flight, but what had to be done, had to be done.
“Make sure to drop me right next to the portal,” she said. “There’s not a moment to spare, you understand?”
The dragon shifted, taking his flight form, a brilliant jet black tipped with yellow scaling.
Not for the first time, Kate noted that this dragon was quite different from Vilka.
In fact, all the others seemed to be. There were quite a number of small physical variations that made her wonder if Vilka’s form was different due to his dominance—like a Silverback gorilla, or if, perhaps, there were some other reason for it.
The thoughts were driven entirely out of her head as the dragon wrapped its claws around her and took to the air.
This time, Kate managed to keep her eyes open as she was buffeted by the winds and swept over the foreign realm for perhaps the last time.
If she was going to open another portal, it would have to be somewhere other than her apartment.
It would have to be somewhere private and discreet, and hopefully outside Vilka’s territory.
He had taken her virginity, but she would not allow him to claim the rest of her existence as well.
The portal soon came into view, a small circle of dragons standing around it in their human forms. She couldn’t make out what they were doing, exactly, but the sight made her stomach clench all the tighter with fear.
They were truly going to try to close it, and if they did, she did not know how long it would take her to generate another one on this side of the divide.
The dragons didn’t seem to use any kind of persistent electrical circuitry, which meant there was no generator or grid to draw from.
If she had to make her own portal, she’d have to create a power station first. It would be a technical nightmare.
“Okay!” she shouted to the dragon carrying her, not knowing if it could hear her or not. “Right next to the portal! Right next to Vilka!”
The dragon began to circle down low, and Kate felt her heart thundering in her chest. The portal was still open. She could see the inside of her dingy little kitchen already as the ground came rushing toward them.
“Pull!”
She realized too late how they had decided to turn the portal off.
They were using a mechanism much like a very small trebuchet that hurled rocks through the portal and into her kitchen.
It was a stupid, brutish method to close the portal, but if they managed to hit the generators, or the power, it would probably work.
“Down! Let me down!” She started to squirm furiously in the dragon’s claws, though she was still twenty feet from the ground and would have mostly been squished if she’d actually fallen from that height.
The dragon dropped the last few feet, wings out to slow their descent and deposited her right next to Vilka, just in time to see a rock fly through the air into her kitchen and knock the left-side generator over.
She was less than an inch away from the portal when it disappeared, a howl of disappointment and anguish escaping her as she clutched as what was now nothing but grass in an empty field, falling to her knees with tears streaming down her face.
“No! Dammit! You assholes! You absolute bastards! You’ve… No!” She cursed and wailed, rolling about on the ground, grass staining her sheet dress as anger and despair washed over her in twin waves.
She was hauled up from the ground and given a swift shake by Vilka.
She looked into his face with tears welling in her eyes and the expression she saw there would have been priceless if Kate had not just watched the doorway to her world, her only exit, be closed seconds earlier.
Under less miserable circumstances she would have laughed out loud at the sheer disbelief written on his masculine features.
“What the blazes are you doing here?” He growled the words at her, then turned his ire on the dragon who had brought her. “Why did you take her from my chamber?”
“I did not take her from your chamber, m’lord,” the unfortunate dragon stammered.
“She came to me in the grand hall and asked for my assistance to bring you important news regarding the portal. She said it was important that she got to you urgently. She had a lot to say on the matter and I believed her.”
“She had a lot to say…” Vilka growled softly, glaring at Kate with his gleaming golden gaze. “Oh, I can believe that. This one always has a great deal to say.”
“Like you’re an idiot for closing that portal,” Kate scowled at him. “You’ve just destroyed my life’s work, you’ve imprisoned me here for a simple mistake. I hate you!”
She did not care that there were a half dozen other dragon men standing around looking at her with various expressions ranging from disdain to pity. She didn’t care that she was melting down in a way that did not allow for much in the way of dignity.
“You don’t even know what you’ve broken! And by throwing rocks! Like some kind of Neanderthal. Is that how stupid you creatures are? You see something amazing and beyond your comprehension, and all you can think to do is break it?”
Vilka’s arms were folded over his chest as she issued her tirade, stamping back and forth over crushed grass stems.
“Are you quite finished, human?”
“No. I am not quite finished,” she sneered. “I don’t think I will ever be finished telling you how goddamn stupid you are. Go to fucking hell, asshole.”