by Angel Black
Valonis
The Ancient Blood Awakens
Angel Black
Falonia Cox
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Memories of Dragons
Chapter 2: Of Freedom
Chapter 3: Of Slavery
Chapter 4: Genius Strikes Where it Pleases
Chapter 5: The Worse That Could Happen
Chapter 6: The Sweetness of Surrender
Chapter 7: What Are You Going to Do To Me?
Chapter 8: Before I Took You
Chapter 9: Little did she know, she would be helping all females of her kind.
Chapter 10: A Certain Nakedness of Vulnerability Called Love
Chapter 11: It Was Fate Itself
Chapter 12: There Was Still Time
Chapter 13: Falon & Alexandra
Chapter 14: Make Me Yours
Chapter 15: Heart of My Heart
Chapter 16: Brothers Past Death
Chapter 17: Bid You Well, To Remember the Fate of Falon’s Traitors
Chapter 18: The In-Law
Chapter 19: The Breathlessness of Consummation
Chapter 20: Alive In his Arms
Chapter 21: Hatchets & Politics
Chapter 22: Come Fly With Me
Chapter 23: I accept those terms
Chapter 24: Tears for My Father and My World
Chapter 25: A New Home
Chapter 26: Tomorrow Too Soon?
Chapter 27: New and Old Lives Rejoined
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© Copyright 2018 by Angel Black - All rights reserved.
Produced in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Valonis: The Ancient Blood Awakens is a work of fiction and characters, events and dialogue found within are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, either living or deceased, is purely coincidental.
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Chapter 1: Memories of Dragons
19 Years Ago
There was dust everywhere. Little, sandy brown flecks of it were whirling around in the air like tiny dirt devils. Rachel loved it. She loved how it danced over her curly brown hair and cherubic cheeks. Her tiny little hands reached up and she whirled her arms about her as if it were snowing at Christmas time.
“Rachel, honey! Where are you?”
The four year old giggled softly, and looked up once more at the carvings on the cave’s ceiling. Four intricately sculpted dragons were carved all throughout the chamber. Their tails, long and elaborate, brushed the cavern’s floor while the rest of their bodies reached up the walls and high into the vaulted ceiling, where their intricate wings and vicious heads were etched in an impossibly realistic fashion. Rachel knew the moment she had found them that her father was going to be ecstatic about her discovery. But first, she wanted to enjoy the carvings themselves. Alone in the chamber, with nothing but the dragons and dust, she felt completely unafraid.
Something about the room calmed her, beckoned to her. She could feel tiny pulses of electricity coming from the walls, and it made her feel warm and welcome.
“Honey please!” Her father called again, this time with more urgency.
“In here daddy!” Rachel yelled. She didn’t want her father to worry too much or else he wouldn’t bring her on any more excavations. “Come see what I found!”
Walter Kirk came through the tiny space his four year old squeezed through, though Rachel was not sure how he did it without dislocating both shoulders. He was a tall, lanky man with a brown mustache and brown, curly, shoulder length hair. By his paleontology degree, he was a digger of dinosaur bones. But by his passion, he was something different; something a little bit more estranged. He was a dragon hunter.
“Let me tell you something young lady,” he began to rant, dusting off his clothes. “If you think you can run off on dig sites like this now that you’re a whole year older you’ve got a- oh my god,” he stopped mid-sentence, his eyes traveling up the great walls of the vaulted cavern ceiling.
“Holy shit,” he whispered, taking another step closer to the closest wall. “This is what you found?”
Rachel giggled and took her father’s hand. “I did daddy! Do you think it’s pretty?”
With his eyes still glued to the four carvings surrounding them, Walter reached down and picked up his daughter, giving her a tight hug before she climbed her way up to sit on his shoulders.
“Oh yeah, princess. These are very, very pretty.”
Present Time
“Rachel. Rachel! Come on, we’re falling asleep here. It’s time to go home and get some rest. I think we’ve studied all there is to study on this chapter.”
Rachel Kirk picked up her head of brown curls, though her eyes showed sleep deprivation. Above her was Edmund, friend and study partner, staring down at her half in fatigue, half in amusement. He must have fallen asleep too because his silver horn rimmed glasses were cocked sideways and his short black hair had a huge cow lick on his left side. Looking down, she touched the mouse on her laptop. The screen illuminated at her touch and told her it was 2:45 in the morning. The last time she had checked the time it was barely midnight. Whoops.
“Ugh, no,” Rachel groaned, holding her hand to her head. “How did this happen?” Annoyance shot through her as she tried to mentally trace her steps back to what she was doing before she fell into an exhausted sleep.
Being a pre-med student was hard; there was no way around it. Lots of long nights with a ton of reading and little to no sleep were a way of life that Rachel was desperately trying to get used to. No matter how hard she tried to normalize it though, her body still needed basic fundamentals of food, water, sleep, occasionally sex, but in her three years at the college she’d found no one worth sharing that with.
“That’s what happens when you study so much you forget to do other things like eat and sleep,” Edmund teased, cleaning up his books.
“Come on, you’re exhausted. I’m exhausted. Let’s go get a few hours of sleep and then if you want we could meet back here at seven, do a quick brush up before the test. We can grab some breakfast sandwiches from the cart out front. Remember food? Remember how good it is?” He finished packing his books into his satchel and began to pack hers up, but she stopped him.
Rachel attempted to laugh at his joke, but she found that she was too tired. Humor was meant for the well-rested.
“No,” she sighed, pulling her notebook out of her friend’s hands. “Thanks Edmund, but I’m fine. I’ll just go get another coffee and finish here. There are a few more things I want to be sure of before I call it a night. Besides, our 9:05 Ventricular Study is our only class tomorrow, so I can crash when I’m done.” After a brief moment she added, “And she will be home for the weekend by then, so I won’t have to worry about getting yet another migraine.”
Now it was Edmund’s turn to sigh.
“I kn
ow you always say no, Rachel, but you can always stay at my place. I’ll sleep on the couch I promise. I won’t even try to put the moves on you.” He gave her a flirtatious smile and a wink. “Okay, I’ll try to put the moves on you but I’ll just limit it to one time. Just say no once and I won’t bother you again,” he swore.
Rachel knew she should at least laugh at that, but not even a smile came to her face. She was so not in the right state of mind to deal properly with Edmund’s little crush, or her roommate’s deepening fascination into painting everything in their apartment black. But, that’s what she got for forgetting to sign up for student housing at the end of last year.
“Thanks for the offer Ed,” she said dryly, wanting for the conversation to just be done. “But really, I’m fine. I’m gonna stay here, finish this work, and I’ll see you in class for the test tomorrow, okay?”
Edmund looked at her in defeat, but nodded his head respectfully.
“Okay fine, do it your way.”
He pulled on his heavy winter jacket and grabbed his bag. For a second he looked as if he was going to try and ask Rachel for a goodbye hug, but to her relief he decided against it. She was not in the mood to be touched at the moment.
Rachel went to the window that looked over the quad, and waited until she saw Edmund go down the outside steps and disappear into the night before she exhaled a sigh of relief and took the short walk to the coffee machine. She liked Edmund. He was a nice enough guy and like her, he took becoming a doctor very seriously. She just wasn’t, couldn’t be attracted to him the way he was to her. He had been respectful of her position at first, but the more they got to know one another, the pushier he was becoming.
More asleep than awake, Rachel pulled a crumpled dollar out of the back pocket of her dark, denim skinny jeans and smoothed it into the coffee machine. As the thick, black brew began to pour into her fresh cardboard cup, she took out her phone to check the time again. Behind the icons of her apps was a picture of her late father. He was young when it was taken, right about the time when they found the first Dragon’s Den together. She had the picture, and every picture ever taken of him, she digitalized them when he passed, so that she could take him everywhere she went without the fear of losing him again.
It had been over a year since his sudden death, but it still felt fresh. She could still hear his frantic voice in her ears when she would answer his calls.
“I figured it out, pumpkin,” he would say, excited. “I finally figured it out. It’s not about a single one but about all of them! They’re a map, a puzzle. We are part of the puzzle!” But she didn’t want to be part of a puzzle. She wanted her father back.
The coffee machine let out a warning chirp and Rachel snapped herself back to reality. Picking up the cup, she walked softly back to her table, where she once more spread out all of her books and her computer. She liked working at the library late. There were less people, which meant fewer distractions. Plus, she preferred to be among the books more than any other place.
Except of course, the first Dragon’s Den. It was her dragon’s den. No matter how many times she visited it, or how many other places her father had taken her to, it was always a place she couldn’t wait to get back to. Now that her father was gone though, she wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to visit again. He had kept things secretive, even with her. As an adult, she had no idea how to find her way back to it.
“Stop it,” Rachel told herself, pulling her computer closer to her. “Think about this later, when you’re not on a countdown to an important test.”
The problem was now it was the only thing she could think about. Whether it was from curiosity or just fatigue, Rachel let herself slip away from studying and back into her memories. Though she had found the first one, her father and his crew had found several other Dragon’s Dens located all over the world. All the dragons in the caves had been different, as if the artists who were responsible for the carvings were aware of not just one species of dragons, but a dozen. It had made evidence for the existence of the mythical creatures more substantial and had fueled her father’s obsession even more so.
Of course, the brain tumor the size of a golf ball growing inside of him could have been part of the reason that his research was only making sense to him. His entire team; the one that had traveled the world with him for over twenty years, had turned their backs on his research and dropped any work with it once his autopsy came back. Not knowing how long it had been there, they gave up faith and their research, leaving Rachel all alone.
When he was alive, they thought that his research had only grown harder to understand because he had reached a new level of brilliance, not mad ramblings based off a giant ball of mass that slowly ate away at Walter’s perception of reality. Still, even though the team hadn’t been able to follow it, Rachel had. Not all of it, but she was always able to at least grasp the bare points of his theories. Except his last one. The one he tried to share with her before he abruptly died. She didn’t understand that one at all.
Feeling more alone and nostalgic than ever, Rachel logged in to her email and pulled up the last correspondence her father had sent her. It was sent barely a day before he had died. It had been the last time she would have ever heard from her father.
Hello Pumpkin,
I hope you’re studying hard for your winter finals. You’re going to be an excellent doctor someday! When you have a moment though, I need your help. You’re the only one that understands my research anymore and I’m rapidly losing funding--and faith. I found these old scrolls, and I really think they could fund our next four years of research, but my brain has turned to mush when it comes to writing to ask for grants. Could you be a darling and put an outline together for me so that I can at least begin to explain to the team what they are (for some reason) not understanding.
They’ve been acting strange lately. They talk in circles without me, and ask me if I’m okay all the time. At first it was endearing, but now I feel like they think I’ve gone mad or deranged. I’m sure though that if you can help me make them understand my new finding that I could get them back on my side again.
Thanks in advance pumpkin, you’re the best daughter a father could ask for.
Love,
Dad.
P.S. I think we need to visit the original Dragon’s Den again. Maybe in May after your summer vacation starts. I think we missed something.
Rachel wiped the tears out of her long lashes as she read the email. He’d had so much faith in her ability to help him. She had spent all that night looking at the pictures of the scrolls, trying to find meaning in any of them. Despite her best efforts she came up empty handed. She had planned on emailing her father back after one more day of trying, but the next morning she awoke to the call from the police, informing her that her father had been found dead in the street. From what they could gather, he had been walking home from the 24 hour market at around 5 am when his body just decided to stop working. He spilled his canvas bag full of oranges, coffee grounds, and eggs, and he lay on the side walk with them until a neighbor came out to get his paper almost two hours later.
As a child, Rachel had taken that walk with her father hundreds of times. They would take a shortcut through their back yard and then through Mrs. Early’s place who was always playing bingo. Then once they got to the street it was a mere three blocks away straight down. She couldn’t remember how many times she’d made that trip with him, always holding his hand. Except, she remembered that she hadn’t been there that final time.
“I’m sorry daddy,” Rachel whispered. Glancing up to the top right corner of her computer screen, she saw the clock read 3:30. Geez, she thought, closing her e-mail. How long did I spend on that e-mail?
Shaking her head as if to clear it, Rachel grabbed her book and notebook, and forced her mind back to studying. Her father’s degree had meant nearly everything to him, so she knew he would be devastated if she didn’t succeed in obtaining one that she was passionate about. After the
test, perhaps, she could start thinking once again about dragons.
I wonder what a dragon would do with me upon meeting him? Drifting off, instead of a dragon, Rachel saw the corded muscles of strong arms grabbing her, holding her by her shoulders in place, as full soft lips with an evil smile came closer, the dangerous male’s hot breath igniting something inside of her as he leaned in to take his kiss from her.
She jolted awake, unsettled by the dream. Where did that come from?
Chapter 2: Of Freedom
The royal son of the ancient Earl Vilhelm stretched languorously in his bed. Still ruminating in the throes of passion, his muscled form lay relaxed between human and dragon. Along his well-chiseled chest and over his arms and legs still splayed splashes of his black, blue, and green scales, blending in with the darkly tanned human flesh. His eyes, amber in his human form, still shone a brilliant gold with slit pupils. Between his cupid bow lips he could feel the sharpness of his dragon’s teeth smooth back down into his much less intimidating human ones.
There were times during his sexual play that scenes got a little rough, feral even. It wasn’t unusual at all for both him and his female counterparts to slightly start to shift as they ravaged each other. He liked it. If he went too far, he could always blame it on the inner beast. Then again, the women he took as partners didn’t really believe there was such a thing as ‘too far.’ It was why he enjoyed sampling so many of them.
