He gathered his energies, all his thoughts of her and the history between them, and summoned a view of her.
The mirror in front of him erupted into a multifaceted gaze like he was seeing through a kaleidoscope of eyes, and overlapping pieces of her came into view. He was catching her reflections from fallen candlesticks, polished marble columns, the metal legs of chairs, anything nearby her that was even remotely reflective. She was face down on the ground, her face covered by her hair, her wings bent and torn behind her, with no mirrors big enough for transport nearby, and smoke making it harder to see her by the minute.
Grimalkin howled in worry while at the same time his dragon lunged up. Who hurt her? it bellowed inside him
“Ryana! Where the fuck are you!” Damian opened up the connections he could to shout at her, even though he couldn’t fit through them. “Wake up!”
If he couldn’t figure out where she was, he’d never find a nearby mirror big enough in time. The palace was so big it could take days to search. Lyka hovered in midair beside him—bleeding freely—then soared up to dive into a mirror high on the wall, before returning carrying a leather bladder. The bird then wedged itself into one of the facets Damian was shown, pulling itself through to appear in the scene on the other side, to beat about Ryana’s face with its wings.
What’s she doing? his dragon asked, pushing forward again.
I don’t know, Damian admitted, feeling pained.
Lyka soared up and out of view with the bladder, then returned, hovering low enough that Damian could tell Ryana’s guardian had changed, up to the size of a much larger bird now, perhaps an eagle, and he saw it tear the side of the bladder open. A metallic substance spilled to the ground, pouring out in a broad puddle not far from Ryana’s quiet form, and he saw even more massive claws grab hold of Ryana’s body and pull her forward to it. Just as he began to be able to see through the new reflective substance on her side with his magic-sight, he reached through the spreading reflection, feeling the cold and the hands of the void grab at him, as he made contact with Ryana on the far side. He heard Lyka shriek and Grim growl, and he pulled back as hard as he could, yanking Ryana through the between-space to fall through the mirror into his bedroom, into his arms. Lyka passed through the mirror just a second behind her, instantly transitioning from a bird the size of a vulture down to a tiny blood-red starling, to collapse atop Ryana’s chest.
Damian carefully spun away from the glass and took her to his bed, laying her down as carefully as he could, considering the condition of her wings. The bag she clung to thumped down beside her. He stroked a lock of burned hair away from her neck to feel for a pulse. It thrummed beneath his fingers—slow and thready—and he looked over to Grim. “Get everybody here. Now.” Grim disappeared to obey, and Damian took in the destruction of his sister’s form.
The pine-needle green wings his sister had were the only trait of their shared father Ryana had, much to her stepmother’s chagrin. She’d always wanted to fly, even as a little girl, but they were just for show, not muscular enough to pull her aloft without using egregious amounts of magic.
As contenders for the same throne, they should’ve been enemies, but the shared trauma of being raised royal in the Realms bonded them instead. When Damian left for earth, it seemed like the best of both possible worlds: he got to escape his past, and it cleared the path for Ryana to ascend safely. But what had happened?
“Ryana, wake up,” he said, cupping her face in his hand. Her eyes were swelling now, bruises mottling her pale skin, all of her smelling of smoke. One of her legs had swung freely when he carried her in a way Damian knew was bad, one of her wings was shredded, and the other bent at a cruel angle.
Austin was the first to burst in. “Damian!” he shouted, surely scenting smoke, running for the bed as Damian looked back at him.
“Help her,” he commanded his friend in a strangled voice.
Austin paused a second to take both of them in, his eyes widening as he surveyed the broken-winged woman before him, then said, “Of course.”
It didn’t take long for two more of his crew to crowd into his bedroom. Mills ran for the bed first, her floor-length hair streaming behind her, while Max intuited what was going on in all his open mirrors the quickest and stood still before them as if struck by lightning.
“What the fuck is happening over there, Damian?” he growled, transfixed by the images reflected in the goggles that covered his eyes.
“I don’t know yet,” Damian admitted, as the bear-shifter shook himself free to rush up and peer out the nearest mirror. It showed the library, all of it on fire, clouds of ash twisting in whatever wind blew them—thousands of years of knowledge gone in the blink of an eye.
Grimalkin ran from mirror to mirror, like if he just kept looking, eventually, everything would go back the way it was, and Damian understood the inclination. As much as once upon a time he’d wanted to destroy everything of his former life—all the more so after meeting Andi—actually seeing it happen was like a knife twisting in his gut. He knew he should close all of them and not leave any trace of a magical connection between Earth and the Realms, but he felt like closing them would be turning his back on his home, a home he’d never get to see again—not like it was—and he found he couldn’t look away.
“Is she okay?” He dragged his attention from the mirror back to the bed where Ryana lay, breathing shallowly.
“Hard to say,” Austin said. The shaggy, brown-haired werewolf scooped up Lyka and handed her to Mills. “We need to move her to someplace with no mirrors for safekeeping and plenty of room for supplies. Can you have Grim change the library downstairs back to the way it was when Zach was hurt?”
Damian grunted. “Grim,” he commanded.
“I heard!” The little cat stopped its pacing, yowled, and disappeared.
“It’ll be done. What else?” Damian asked. Over in the Realms, a tower of rubble fell, shattering the mirror on the far side of one of his, so now it showed them only nothingness, like a jack-o’-lantern’s empty eye. Max started making a keening sound.
“I know,” Damian said. It was affecting him too. Mills came to his side.
“Damian, is this what I think it is?” she asked, proffering the bird she held up.
Mills was the most powerful witch he’d ever met. Of course, she knew. He nodded. “Her name’s Lyka. And, yes, she’s a guardian like Grimalkin.”
“Then,” Mills began, twisting back to the bed.
“That’s Princess Ryana. Damian’s sister,” Max said, naming the comatose woman at last. He looked back at her. “What happened to her wings, Damian? Who could—how…” he began, and the goggles that hid the magically replaced eyes Mills had given him from the rest of the world weren’t tight enough to hold back the tears Damian could see streaking down his face. His questions faded into an incoherent shout, and he swung back toward the mirrored wall to punch it to dust between two frames.
“I know,” Damian repeated, putting a restraining hand on the bear-shifter’s shoulder, watching another tower fall and another glass go black.
Inside of himself, his dragon seethed uncomfortably, full of the need to act but with nothing to actually do. Everything in him wanted to vow vengeance—but on whom, and for what? And…why? This was what he’d always wanted. To never be constrained by the machination of the Realms again—or any promises he’d made to his stepmother. To be free to fully be with Andi.
So, this—the echoing images of destruction in each of his mirrors—looked like freedom.
Was it?
“I’m sorry, Damian, but you need to close them,” Mills said from beside him. “It’s not good to have so many mirrors open at once. The energies in here are unsettling.”
Grimalkin rematerialized at his feet and said, “Finished!” as Damian looked to Mills.
“If I close them, I may not be able to open them again,” he said, voicing his deepest fear.
Mills gave him a sad smile. “That is true,” sh
e agreed. “And yet, it must be done.”
Damian knew his witch wouldn’t lie to him, both because she cared for him as a friend, and because she couldn’t—she was cursed to always tell the truth. He took several steps back, so that he could see all the mirrors at once, and tried to memorize what was happening in each of them, taking one long, last look at the world that had stolen his mother and his father from him, where he’d been tormented and tortured, where he had killed others as they had tried to kill him.
His home.
Then he slammed his hands together in a clap and said, “All eyes closed,” and one by one, each image of the Realms in his mirror frames winked out, replaced by darkness.
Chapter 2
Damian carried Ryana carefully downstairs to his library, closely followed by Max, Mills, and Grim, and tried to answer Austin’s questions on the way.
“So, what kind of healing factor does she have?” The well-tanned werewolf was holding onto her lower leg so it wouldn’t disconcertingly dangle as he walked backward down the stairs.
Damian thought back to their childhood. “I don’t know.”
Austin made a thoughtful noise. “What about vasculature? Or heart? Hearts?”
“Austin,” Damian growled as they reached the landing.
“I’m just wondering! Like, am I supposed to pretend to be a vet here or what? She has freaking wings, Damian.”
“Just…do what you always do.”
“But I’ve never gotten to treat a dragon,” Austin pointed out. “You’re always fine—or too pissed off to touch.”
Damian grunted, feeling rather pissed off now, as they turned into the room Grimalkin had appointed for his sister. His guardian cat had shifted the spatial layout of the castle so that his old library was now a bright and airy stone-floored room with long tall windows, one of which Max walked over to look through pensively, surely thinking of other recent views.
Grim had even put sheer green and pink silks on the wall, just like Ryana’s had had back home—which was now covered under fifty feet of rubble. Damian tried not to think about that as he set Ryana carefully down on her new bed. The same medical equipment Grim had created for Zach, he’d replicated for Ryana, only this time in room complimenting shades. Austin fussed with her leg, hissing on her behalf as he brought it down even though she hadn’t woken, and arranging her wings in the way that made the most sense so that none of the bones nor leather were working at odds. Then he tugged down her dress to start putting stickers on her for one of the many electronic things Damian didn’t understand, and Damian fought down a warning growl. It pained him to see Austin be so familiar with Ryana, but he was comforted by the way the werewolf moved, with a mixture of clinical distance and awe, treating her with the utmost respect.
“Oh, nicely done, Grim,” Mills complimented the cat on the room. “Now, what to do with her friend?” She knelt down and showed the little bird to Grim.
Grim looked over to Damian. “She needs cheese.”
Damian squinted. “Does she, Grim?” He was in no mood for jokes.
Grimalkin swiped a nervous paw over his whiskers. “I don’t know. I need cheese. This is awful. Cheese will help.” Damian had never known his guardian to panic before. He knelt down, and Grim ran over to him to wind against him as Grim went on. “I just always thought we’d go back someday. I knew you didn’t want to, but that didn’t mean I wanted everything to be like that.”
“I know,” Damian said, rubbing underneath Grim’s chin and smoothing his whiskers back into place. The cat let him, closing his eyes and leaning into Damian’s fingers for several settling breaths before walking over to Lyka, still held in Mills’s palms.
“Feather-butt,” he said. “Feather-butt, wake up.”
Damian bit his lips not to laugh because his cat seemed entirely earnest. Grim looked back at him. “Tell Mills to put her on the bed for me? Up in a corner?”
Damian did so, and Mills gently transported the bird to the bed’s upper corner, as per his request. Grim jumped onto the bed, sniffed along Ryana’s length, and let his hackles raise and settle at least three times, before kneading the sheets right in front of Lyka’s face. “Feather-butt,” Damian heard him whisper, before making a tiny sad sound as he wound himself around her, encircling the red bird nose to tail. “I’ll keep an eye on both of them,” Grim promised Damian, placing his head flat on his front paws.
“Thank you,” Damian told him, then looked to Austin. “Anything you need, ask the cat.”
“Can I get a half-dragon-half-human medical text?” Austin snarked, watching the numbers on the monitor nervously. “I don’t even know what your normal blood pressure is, D—”
Damian grabbed his shoulder. “Just keep her in human ranges. She’s not like me.”
Austin looked down at her before meeting his gaze again. “Okay.”
“You two,” Damian said, turning to Max and Mills, “come with me.”
Damian paced one wall of his narrow conference room, matched by Max, pacing the other side. Mills sat down at the head of the table, out of both of their ways, plaiting her hair back quickly.
“I’m sorry; I was at a board meeting, and I couldn’t leave,” Zach said, practically running in. Magic made him look like an older version of Damian so that he could pretend to be Damian Blackwood the Elder, billionaire industrialist, in lieu of Damian’s younger ‘Damian Blackwood the Third’, who was also a dragon, who didn’t age as fast as humans and who needed to be more available to fight Unearthly. Seeing Zach with magic on always shocked Damian a little because the older version of himself looked so much like his father, which felt especially poignant now as somewhere in the Realms, his father’s legacy was burning. Then Zach slid his hands up his face and out, ripping Mills’s magic off himself, showing himself to be a younger werewolf underneath, wintery where Austin was warm, with his own pale skin, black hair, and blue eyes, instead of Damian’s golden ones. “What’d I miss?”
Max made a pained sound, and Damian inhaled but couldn’t quite speak.
“Damian’s sister is here now,” Mills said, saving them both. “Injured, in the library, under Austin’s care, just like you were not that long ago. And the Realms seem to be in chaos currently, although all mirrors are closed, and I think they need to stay like that,” she said, looking pointedly at Damian.
“Agreed,” he said. Looking at the Realms again would only be like pouring salt in a wound.
“But,” Zach said, hesitating before sitting down, “does her visit count as interference?”
“Technically, her guardian brought her over here, not me,” Damian said.
“Does your stepmother traffic in technicalities?” Zach asked, tilting his head, knowing the terms of Damian’s arrangement.
“For all I know, she’s dead.” Damian stopped pacing and dropped himself into a leather chair.
“Is that good or bad?” Zach asked.
“I don’t fucking know,” Damian grunted.
“We just saw our home obliterated as far as the eye could see,” Max growled at the wolf.
“Sorry, sorry,” Zach said, holding up his hands. “Although…this does explain why they were trying to kill you, D.”
Damian glanced in his direction.
“It’s probably a coup,” he went on.
Damian inhaled and exhaled. Zach not only pretended to be an older version of him for convenience’s sake so that Damian himself could fly under the radar as a distant cousin, but he’d managed to learn a thing or two sitting in on all the cutthroat business meetings Damian got to dodge. “Probably,” Damian granted. “Because the same silver stuff Stella knifed you with…that’s how Ryana made it here. Her bird went and got a bladder full of it and poured it on the ground to make a reflection big enough to push her through so that I could catch her.”
“And you still didn’t get me a sample?” Jamison said, coming in last. He sat by Mills, catching one of her hands for a quick squeeze before releasing it. “I was running
an experiment in the lab; I couldn’t shut it off until it was through.”
“What’d you hear?” Mills asked him.
“Enough,” Jamison told her. “What do you think’s going to happen?” he asked Damian.
Damian spread his hands on the table in front of him. “I’m not entirely sure. If The Snake is dead, the throne’s up for anyone to take. Everyone in the Realms knows I’ve said I’ll die before I go back, but that doesn’t mean they all believe me. And they probably won’t rest until they find Ryana’s corpse, to prove the end of my father’s line—which they won’t because she’s here.”
“Hmmm,” Mills said and pouted thoughtfully.
Jamison looked at her and beamed. “You’re going to say something genius aren’t you, baby?”
“I am,” she agreed, eyes narrowing thoughtfully before turning to Damian. “I don’t think it’ll be all that hard to fake a corpse. Especially one that’s all damaged. Burned, even?”
“Ooh, heavy, I like it,” Jamison encouraged her.
“You can do that?” Zach asked.
“I can sure as fuck try,” Mills said. “Jamison, can you buy me some tissue culture equipment and growth media? And,” she turned to Damian, “I will need an actual sample from your sister so that it passes muster. But between my magic and a thin veneer of her own tissue, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.”
“And then when you’re done, we’ll just shove it through a mirror, eh?” Max said, hands clenched over a leather chair’s back.
“Underneath some rocks. Looked like there were plenty of them falling. Why not?” Mills turned to Damian for permission.
“Yes. Absolutely. As fast as you can…money is no object.” Not when it came to possibly curating Ryana’s freedom.
“I know,” Mills said, looking pleased. She stood and left the room to begin.
“And the rest of us?” Max asked, finally sitting down.
Damian looked around the room one by one. “Keep your guard up.”
Dragon Fated: A Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 3
