by Riley Storm
Rane still didn’t quite understand. He knew that Natasha had fallen in with Loiner’s camp, that the Master had forced her to do this, but why couldn’t she go to someone else, tell them what was going on? Why was she so scared of speaking out?
She was going to tell him that, he decided. At a minimum, he would figure out what was driving the witch.
For now, that was all he was going to do. Keep her here and prevent her from leaving, until he decided the proper course of action.
He walked back into his quarters, shutting the door behind him and freeing her to breathe easily. He waited for her to recover slightly. She looked at him warily, with newfound fear in her eyes.
“So, you’ve realized then,” he said quietly. “That nobody else is going to come for you. That you’re trapped here at my whim.”
She nodded.
“Good. Maybe this will teach you that you shouldn’t be someone else’s lackey. That you should live your own life.”
Natasha glanced down.
He approached her intent on asking her some more questions, but as he neared, Natasha tried her best to recoil away from him, squirming against the wall, fear writ across her face.
Rane frowned. “Now what the hell is that all about,” he asked, confused. “Why are you suddenly afraid of me, Natasha?”
“You aren’t welcome to me,” she whispered, her voice trembling.
Welcome to her? His frown deepened as he tried to interpret her words. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
Natasha laughed, a shrill, fearful sound. “Yes, you do. You absolutely know what I’m talking about. You cannot have me.”
“Have you?” Rane repeated, then jerked in surprise. “What do you think I’m going to do to you? What kind of man do you think I am?” he shouted, insulted by her assumption that he would take her body. “We’ve already shared our bodies with one another. I had you on the only terms I wanted to have you…” he faltered. “Unless that was an act too.”
“It wasn’t,” Natasha said, hanging her head. “I don’t know what I was thinking, Rane. I know you aren’t that type of man. I know that you’ve been genuine. It’s me who hasn’t.”
“I need to know,” he said, in the silence that followed. “Why didn’t you go tell someone? Reveal what Loiner was up to? Why would you go through with this and hurt us?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Natasha
“Because, Rane,” she said softly. “Winterspell is my everything. It’s all I have.”
He scoffed. “Oh please. You have your family, I’m sure. You could go back to them. Friends outside of school, from back home. There are plenty of places you could go.”
Natasha stared at him. “You’re wrong.”
“What?”
“I have no family. No friends. Don’t you understand? You give that all up when you come to Winterspell. The people I knew before, they all think I’m dead, Rane. My parents quite literally have a spell cast over them to prevent them from talking about me to anyone but each other. The human world believes me to have died twelve years ago.”
He frowned. “What? Why would anyone force you to do such a thing at age fourteen?”
“Because,” she explained. “We are not accepted by most of society. They don’t know about us, about what we do. Humans as a whole fear that which they do not understand, and trust me, they do not understand magic.” She bit her lip. “It’s not the same as what you’ve been through, because I got to make the choice to come here. But I gave up everything I had for this chance, this opportunity. It wasn’t exactly easy.”
Rane took a deep breath as he processed what she was saying.
“That doesn’t mean that what I did to you was right,” she said. “It wasn’t. But Loiner has threatened to have me thrown out of Winterspell and declared ‘Rogue’. Every witch in the world would come after me, trying to hunt me down. I would have nowhere to go, nobody. Basically, it’s a death sentence.”
“What do you think this is?” Rane said furiously, pointing at the papers on the floor in between them. “Do you think this is anything less than that?”
“I don’t think Loiner would try to attack you. We would probably win, if it did come to that, but it would be far from bloodless. Instead, I think they would have just evicted you.” She sniffed. “Not that it matters anymore. You’re safe now.”
“Until this Loiner woman tries again, you mean,” he said. “Remember, you aren’t the first witch I’ve chased from here. There was the one with the green eyes.”
Natasha nodded, wondering if Sara being so tired before her patrol the week before was sheer coincidence, or indicated something deeper.
“We can agree there,” she said. “That’s why I couldn’t go anywhere. Loiner would have planned for that. She’d have some sort of measure in place that would ensure I would be the one to take the fall. She didn’t get to where she is now by being stupid.”
Rane sighed heavily. “Well, what do I do with you now?” he asked, speaking more to himself.
“I’m sorry, Rane. Really, I truly am,” she said from where he still had her pinned to the wall.
“Shut up,” he said quietly, the pain in his voice robbing her of any further words. “Just shut up. I don’t want your apologies. If you hadn’t held a certain distaste for us dragons at the start, you never would have agreed to help Loiner by pretending to befriend me. You need to ask yourself why.”
“It was wrong,” she said. “I know that. But what I felt after, that wasn’t. That was real, Rane.”
He sneered. “Do you actually expect me to believe that? To think that anything about you is real?”
Before she could respond, he jerked his arm and she flung from the wall. Rane grabbed her by both arms and thrust her forward, out of his quarters. She yelped, his grip pinching her skin, but the dragon didn’t relent.
He pushed her down the stairs and straight to the doorway of the entire building. Then he unceremoniously picked her up by her robes and tossed her outside.
Natasha winced and cried out as she hit the ground, but the pain was welcome, a physical hurt to mirror the agony she felt on the inside for her actions. She deserved this, she told herself. It was all her fault.
“I never want to see you again,” Rane said, choking back his emotions. “Go do whatever you have to do. Maybe while you’re worrying about Loiner, you’ll find your morals and decide what, or who, you really care about. But I doubt it.”
Then he was gone, just like that.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Rane
The days passed in a blur. Two, three, he didn’t know. Nor did he really care about the passage of time, his fellow dragons, or anything else for that matter.
Natasha’s confession had broken him.
Rane lay in his bed, staring aimlessly at the ceiling, trying to understand why he’d been selected to suffer, to be hurt so deeply by someone he thought he cared for. Where had he gone wrong? Over and over he replayed every moment, every scenario with Natasha, trying to figure out what he could have done differently, what he could have changed to fix things.
Over and over, he came up short, the answer eluding him. Perhaps, he began to think, there was nothing he could have done. This was his suffering, the pain he was destined to go through, because his fellows had already done the hurting in the war. This was to be his torment, to put them all on equal footing.
That was, of course, preposterous, but Rane wasn’t exactly in his right mind after the revelations of her betrayal. Natasha had been using him, faking everything just to get closer to him, so that she could set him and the dragons up. All because Loiner demanded more power.
Maybe I should ask Loiner about it all, go to her and say that I knew the truth, knew what she was up to.
But he shied away from that course of action. If he did that, then the Master would know that Natasha had come to him, had spilled the truth. Then not only would Rane suffer, but Natasha would too, and try as he migh
t, he couldn’t bring himself to exact vindictive justice.
That’s because it wouldn’t be justice. It would be revenge, and as hurt as you are, you don’t want to stoop that low.
He thought about it though. Many times, he played the scenario out in his mind, watching as Natasha was turned on by her fellows, cast out, treated the way he felt she’d treated him. It brought him no joy though, no relief from the pain that was infecting his heart, his mind and his soul, wrapping around his being like barbed wire, tightening slowly with every thought.
There was a knock on the door, but he ignored it.
“Rane.”
It was Rokh. Still, the storm dragon lay in his bed, eyes unfocused, pointed straight up. He didn’t care about the fire dragon. About the party he was supposed to be planning. He didn’t care about anything anymore.
Caring was what hurt people. What made them vulnerable and open to being used, to having their feelings and emotions twisted and turned upon them. A party would cause more people to care. If he foiled Rokh’s plans to bring people closer, then he would be sparing them the hurt, the pain, that could only follow such an occasion.
Happiness was a lie.
“Rane, open the damn door.” Rokh was growing irate.
Stirring at last, the storm dragon rolled over. “Coming,” he said, voice devoid of anything.
On his way to the door, his foot kicked something. Glancing down, he saw the papers, the forged documents that Natasha had been trying to plant. Something else stabbed at his being.
It hurt enough that Natasha had wanted to frame the dragons, making it look like they were planning to wipe out the Coven and then the rest of the witches, taking Winterspell as their own. But she’d tried to plant the documents in his quarters.
She’d wanted to make him out to be the worst of the bad guys.
The door pounded again. “Open it, or I’ll open it.”
“Re-fucking-lax,” Rane said, loud enough he knew the fire dragon would hear him. The tone would piss Rokh off, but frankly he didn’t give a shit right then.
What could Rokh do to him that could possibly be worse than Natasha’s betrayal? The answer, of course, was absolutely nothing.
He scooped up the papers and shoved them back into the envelope. For a second, he contemplated burning them, turning them to cinders with his powers. But for some reason, he decided against it.
Maybe they would come in handy at some later point where he could use them against Natasha, as proof that she wasn’t the person everyone thought her to be. Somehow, he could use them to make her hurt, to pay for all the lies she’d told him, for pretending to care about him.
Tucking them away, he flicked his hand at the door. The lock flew open, followed by the door a second later as Rokh entered.
“There you are—what the fuck is that smell?” Rokh growled, lifting a hand to his nose.
“What do you want?” Rane replied. He didn’t smell anything.
“When was the last time you left your quarters, Rokh? Nobody has seen you in three days. People are starting to worry.”
“Whatever,” he said, sitting heavily on the edge of the bed. “It’s not like I’m useful for anything anyway. They won’t miss me if I’m gone.”
Rokh frowned. “What happened, Rane? What aren’t you telling any of us?”
Rane shook his head. He wasn’t about to tell Rokh, or anyone really, about what had happened. The last thing he needed was his fellow dragons making fun of him like the witches probably were.
“How is the party planning going?” Rokh asked, switching topics when it became clear he wasn’t going to get an answer.
“It’s coming,” he lied, just wanting to get rid of Rokh. “Couple of snags, but I’ve worked through them. We’ll be good to go.”
“You’d better be,” Rokh said. “The others are counting on you. We’re all looking forward to it.”
“Yeah. Good to go,” Rane said leveling, flashing the fire dragon a thumbs up.
Rokh was silent, breathing slowly. “Talk to someone, Rane. It doesn’t have to be me, that’s fine. But find Damien, or Altair.”
“Altair has his own demons right now,” Rane interjected, coming close to admitting out loud that he wasn’t in a good place.
“Just talk to someone.”
“About what?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant and innocent.
“Don’t patronize me. You know full well what I’m talking about,” Rokh said, glaring at him.
Then, to Rane’s utter surprise, his expression softened. For a moment, he wasn’t the fierce, driven leader of the dragons, but just another person. “Please.”
Then he was gone, leaving Rane alone with his thoughts. He frowned at the door. Did Rokh not know about the fight in the hallway, about Altair’s waking dream? Rane had been certain that Damien would tell the fire dragon about it.
Was Damien covering for their storm dragon kin, hoping that he would find a way to recover on his own, without having to involve the others?
That was respectful of Damien.
Maybe I could go to him, maybe he could help me then, without it getting out to everyone else?
To go to anyone, though, would be admitting that he’d screwed up, that he was a failure.
Rane didn’t know if he was strong enough.
Chapter Thirty
Natasha
She sat upright, eyes snapping open as the last vestiges of her scream echoed around the room.
Izzy was standing next to her, arm on her shoulder.
“Furies,” Natasha said, sagging, feeling the sweat on her body. “Again?” she asked weakly.
Izzy nodded, her roommate stepping back and sitting on the edge of her own bed. “Yes, again.”
“I’m sorry, Izzy, I really am. I’ve never had this problem before. I think it’s just because I’m tired, lately. My mind isn’t where I need it to be, and—”
“Just figure it out,” Izzy said quietly, laying back onto her own bed. “I’m tired of getting woken up in the middle of the night by you crying out and thrashing in bed. It’s affecting my studies.”
Natasha sagged back into her own bed. She should be stunned by the treatment that Izzy was giving her. The two of them had been friends for several years now, hence why they’d become roommates. It had just made sense for them. At the time. Now Natasha was wondering if it had been a mistake.
This was the third night in a row she’d woken up from the nightmare. Even from the start, Izzy had been colder, more distant than Natasha had expected. As soon as she’d found out that the nightmares were about Rane, Izzy had withdrawn, seemed uncaring about her supposed friend’s predicament.
It was just another reminder that the two of them had met through one of Master Loiner’s meetings.
Was everyone in her life more concerned with staying in the Master’s good graces than they were with being Natasha’s friend? It certainly was seeming that way with Izzy at least.
It hadn’t taken long for it to become evident that she was out of favor. Loiner had come to Natasha the morning after, expecting to hear good news. So, when she’d been told that it hadn’t happened, that Natasha had been nearly caught, and that she’d had to destroy the papers, her mood had soured. Quickly.
Natasha didn’t know if Loiner had believed her story or not. Frankly, she didn’t care. Listening to the woman had done more damage to Natasha’s soul than two-and-a-half years of political patronage had ever done to help her. She hated Loiner and would gladly break contact.
Only now, she thought—looking over at Izzy, who had swiftly turned her back to Natasha—now it seemed she was going to lose more than just a political patron. She was going to lose her friends as well.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence.
Maybe.
She didn’t fall back asleep after that. There was no point, as her alarm would be going off soon enough anyway. What was another hour of lost sleep at this point?
Getting up, she got ready quietly,
doing her best not to disturb Izzy. It seemed unlikely that the two of them would be able to continue rooming together, but maybe it could still be saved…
Grabbing her books and bag, she pulled her robes tight and headed out into the hallway, deciding that an hour at the library might just be what the doctor ordered for her. Put her time and effort into her studies, into learning a new spell, perhaps, something that would help distract her from the pain that had been her constant companion.
“Initiate Celland!”
Natasha slowed as a short, portly woman approached. “May I help you?” she asked politely, recognizing the woman as a Master, though she didn’t know her name.
“Get your things ready,” the Master said politely. “You’re going out on patrol.”
“What?” Natasha shook her head. “There must be a mistake. I’m not tapped to go out on patrol for another three days. It’s on the schedule. If I go now, I’ll be doing back-to-back patrols…That’s not supposed to happen.”
“I know, but someone called in sick. You’re up next.”
Natasha tried to protest, to tell the Master that this wasn’t the way it was done, but the woman just stood her ground. “You’re going on patrol, Initiate. Stop fighting it.”
“Of course, Master,” she said, bowing her head, deciding to stop fighting the inevitable. Her name had come up. That was that.
“Patrol leaves in an hour, be down—”
“I know how a patrol works,” she snapped, forgetting for a moment that she was talking to a Master. “Sorry,” she added belatedly.
“I should certainly hope so,” the Master said snippily, turning on her heel and walking off.
Natasha’s glare hit the woman in the back, but it faded quickly. There was no sense in being mad at the messenger.
“Great. More patrol.”
Which meant that she was going to be gone for the next four days. An entire week would pass before she could talk to Rane again, try to apologize. She’d been hoping to find a way to do that before she left on her scheduled patrol. Now she had less than an hour.
