Chapter 37 #2
As soldiers rushed by, Azriel attempted to weave his way across the flow to reach the dragons. It was no use. Try as he might to push through the horde of dhemons, the force of them rushing through the gates shoved him right along with them.
“Razer!” It was all he could do as he struggled against those who sought blood and violence inside the walls of the Hub.
At first, Razer didn’t say anything. His consciousness flickered in and out as he grappled to stay awake after slamming his head into the ground. “I’m alive.”
“How?” Jakhov demanded. “That ballista was aimed straight for you.”
The flash of memory came and went all too quickly. Razer poised before the gates, exhaling his dragonfire in as concentrated a force as he could muster. He looked up at the sound of the ballista releasing—the next thing he saw was a flash of dark red, then he woke up beneath the huge dragon.
“Kill them,” Razer snarled with the same fiery hate that usually plagued Azriel. He stretched his wings and launched back into the sky with his newly-tattered wing, putting distance between himself and the ballistae that still fired at him. “Fucking kill them all.”
Azriel hefted the sword still in his hand and gripped the bolt in his shoulder with the other. He snapped off the fletched end, rolled his injured shoulder, and followed the flow of his army into the Hub.
Oh, he would do as Razer asked. He would kill them all for taking Mhorn from him.
The gates of the Hub rumbled to a close behind a groggy Ariadne.
The soldiers’ grips on her arms tightened, and she winced in response.
Images of snow and faces, weapons and vampires, she did not know flickered in and out of her sight.
How far had they gotten? No more than a handful of steps, certainly, before the ground shuddered beneath their feet, making them all stumble forward.
Shouts from the wall had her head swimming.
She peeled her eyes open just in time to see Razer whipping out of the way of a ballista.
Ariadne’s weakened mental fingers dug for her vinculum and once again, found only the meager thread keeping her and Almandine connected. Where her bondheart had gone, she could not fathom. Why had she left without saying anything?
“Where is the King?” The soldier who carried her over his shoulder directed the question to a figure in a crimson cape.
“He just went inside with Miss Dodd,” the man said, then flickered out of sight amongst the chaos while her eyes shuttered again.
Gods. Loren was sick. There was no reason to have brought Camilla into a battle unless he had a use for her, and even through the haze of a concussion, Ariadne knew precisely what Loren planned to do. It was the same as he always did: leverage her loved ones against her.
When she spoke, her words were broken and raspy as she grappled for any control possible. “Camilla? Camilla is here?”
To their credit, neither soldier replied. Since they likely had had no idea her friend was in residence at the Hub, they could neither confirm nor deny without lying. Instead, the one carrying her merely took her words for consciousness and set her on her feet before hauling her forward.
Ariadne did not need to feign the trip that followed.
The world spun around her, destroying any hope of grasping anything she could remember from training.
The soldiers grunted as they caught her before she landed in the muddy snow, though she let her weight drop a little more than was necessary to slow their pace.
Light flared from the battlements at their backs, casting their long shadows well ahead of them. Screams followed. Shouts to bring down the dragon were thrown about from all angles, every officer in charge wanting to be the one who ordered Razer’s death.
Panic gripped Ariadne’s throat. She twisted in the soldiers’ holds to look back at the wall where bodies flailed, alight with dragonfire.
A shame for them—the flames would not burn out until everything it touched was consumed.
They were already dead, even as they tried to strip off their burning clothes.
The snow stopped suddenly, dragging Ariadne’s wavering attention forward.
They had entered the tower without her even realizing how close they were.
Snow on her loose curls began to melt against her hot cheeks, and she swiveled her unfocused gaze to the familiar room ahead of her as the doors to the tower closed.
“The King,” the soldier on her right demanded of another at the base of the stairs where a half-dozen stood on guard.
One of the Caersan men pointed up the steps. “Dressing for battle.” His brows lowered as he stared at Ariadne. “Is that—”
“The Queen,” the soldier on her left confirmed. “We must bring her to him immediately.”
But the soldier at the stairs shook his head. “Check her for weapons. She could still be under the dhemon’s enchantment.”
Even in her dimming haze, Ariadne could not help herself.
She scoffed at the very idea that dhemons were capable of enchantments.
They were not mages, after all. Fae did not cast such magic—at least not to her knowledge.
What they did have, however, was the new powers allotted to the dhemons from Keon.
The new power that Ariadne called on at the same moment a loud crash sounded in the distance. Fresh screams and shouted orders, muffled by the walls of the tower, told her precisely what she needed to know: the gates were breached. Perhaps she would not need to face Loren alone after all.
“I do not think it is necessary to take my weapons,” Ariadne said with as much strength as she could muster, harnessing Azriel’s dhemonic power of desire and pushing it out to the soldiers.
Almost immediately, the grips on her arms loosened.
Excitement spiking, the magic slipped out of her grasp, and she fumbled to grab hold once more before it was too late.
The Caersans before her gaped as though coming out of a brief trance, then their faces relaxed again as she shoved the lust out again.
“Let me go,” she insisted, leaning toward one soldier and batting her lashes in much the same fashion she once had to Azriel in the Bistro. Though she had been drunk then, now it was due to her lack of coordination that she likely appeared quite foolish.
Confusion twisted his expression as he struggled with the complex mix of feelings and the orders he knew he needed to carry out. Bring her to Loren, yet there was a heady shadow in his gaze that told her the magic was unraveling his will to listen to that part of his brain.
But the grip on the other side tightened. The soldier grunted, then hissed through his teeth, “She is playing with our minds.”
Ariadne widened her eyes, which she knew were ethereal and white, turning to the one who spoke. “No! But you cannot hold your Queen like this, can you? What would His Majesty think of you?”
“What the fuck?” The soldier jerked back, releasing her as though she were hot to the touch. “Her eyes!”
The other Caersans did not seem to care. None of those at the foot of the stairs so much as flinched as she looked at them.
A long time ago, Ariadne recalled her father demanding a gelding for battle rather than using the larger, more sturdy stallion he usually rode around town.
When she had asked why he could not bring his typical horse with him, he hesitated to explain.
In the end, he told her a story of a soldier who insisted on bringing his stallion to the front lines.
The soldier died when the male horse took off after a mare in heat.
The concept had been foreign to Ariadne at the time. Battle and the mating of horses were the farthest things from her mind at that age.
Now, however, she saw the very real reason stallions were not made for a fray. Caersan men, when given even a drop of desire, acted in much the same way: they could not contain themselves. Their erections only underscored their inability to truly do anything—at least for the time being.
Ariadne used that to her advantage.
Before the soldier not under her thrall could react, she yanked a poisoned dagger from her thigh and slashed it across the Caersan man’s neck with sloppy precision.
Holding onto the dhemon power was difficult while she wielded the short blade, but she clutched it as best she could.
Any semblance of control over the rest of the soldiers would keep her safer than nothing.
Though the soldier she cut did not die, Ariadne turned to the other who still held her arm.
She slid the sharp blade dipped in liquid sunshine across his exposed artery before lunging forward and doing the same with the first of the six at the foot of the steps.
Bit by bit, her bodily control returned, and the idea she had previously abandoned reemerged as her only option.
She had to get to Loren. Fast.
The thrall she had on the Caersans vanished in an instant.
Ariadne grabbed the nearest soldier’s sword and ripped it from its sheath, cutting down the owner before he could realize what was happening.
The next moved with discomfort as he grappled with the remnants of his desire while simultaneously attempting to fend off her strike.
It did not work. She swung the blade down on the man’s outstretched arm, removing his hand in one swift motion.
“Get her weapons!” a soldier cried, coming to his senses and remembering where they were: in the middle of a battle.
As though on cue, the doors behind Ariadne swung open, letting in the chaos from the fight outside.
Soldiers from both armies flooded the tower as the Caersans searched for an escape from the inevitable death that followed them.
Magic ripped through the space as an Algorathian mage all but cut a Caersan man in half with a slash of her hand.
Blood sprayed in all directions, and she cracked the next soldier’s armor as she lashed her magic through the air.
With the vampires distracted by the sudden appearance of a woman capable of tearing them to pieces with her mind, Ariadne slipped between a pair and took the stairs two at a time. The air burned in her lungs as she hurtled toward her father’s old office—the Valenul General’s office.
Sliding the poisoned dagger back into its sheath, Ariadne adjusted her grip on the stolen sword that was much too large for her and paused outside the doors.
No one had followed. No one had cared enough to see what she was doing.
Or, perhaps, no one believed a Caersan woman capable of killing the King of Valenul.
Whatever the reason, she did not care. Ariadne shouldered open the doors and froze.
On the far side of the room, Loren stood beside the dying fire in gold dragonscale armor. Rhun’s scales. Though the thought of those monsters skinning the dragon repulsed her, it was not Loren’s latest gaudy fashion choices that made her pull up short.
It was the dagger he held to Camilla’s throat.