Dragon Void (Immortal Dragons Book 2)

by Ophelia Bell

  Finally she gave up and shifted back, falling to her knees on the small platform that her ankles were still tethered to.

  “I’m sorry Marcus. It’s my fault we’re even here. My fault they’re keeping us.” To the doctor, she said, “Please, let him go—he is just a human man. You have no use for him.”

  Dr. St. George stepped over to her and crouched to meet her eyes. He touched her chin and the acrid scent of industrial hand cleanser hit her nostrils. It wasn’t the scent that caused Evie to pull away in disgust, though.

  “Quite the contrary, young lady. You were instrumental in bringing him to us. He is Blessed. But he is still missing the secret ingredient to make him an Elite.”

  With that, the doctor turned in a graceful circle, sweeping his arm around. At the end of the arc, his wrist moved in a little sweep, slicing the scalpel deep into Marcus’s thigh. A torrent of blood gushed out from Marcus’s femoral artery and his life’s blood flooded over his leg and onto the floor beneath him.

  Evie screamed and lunged for Marcus, but her ankle restraints kept her too far beyond reach of him. Still, she scrabbled at the blood-covered floor, struggling to reach him to stanch the flow of blood.

  She yanked at her feet and shifted again, beating her wings frantically and hoping that the restraints would slip off her talons somehow. They only grew tighter around her ankles with each tug, like Chinese finger traps shrinking around her the more she sought to escape. Feathers floated around the room, stirred by her struggle until she finally fell to the floor again, exhausted and panting in her human form.

  “No. Marcus, please don’t die,” she said and buried her head in her blood-covered hands.

  A pair of feet came into view, clad in blue surgical booties, tracking through the blood.

  Evie looked up to see the doctor again, moving a wheeled IV stand to Marcus’s side and prepping his upraised arm with a swab. Another figure passed before her eyes, clad similarly in blue scrubs.

  A huge man knelt down in front of Marcus and let out a soft curse before wrapping a tourniquet swiftly around Marcus’s upper thigh and pulling it taut. The most astounding thing happened then.

  Evie couldn’t quite believe her eyes, and even ceased struggling against her bonds when the man took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, blowing out against the wound that still seeped blood from Marcus’s thigh. Before her eyes, the wound sealed shut.

  “It’s done,” the man said in a deep voice devoid of any emotion. “Shall I do the other wounds? What about hers?”

  The doctor answered with a curt nod. “Get it done. Take her down and put her in a fresh cell, then come back and monitor him. I’ve already been here too long.”

  “When will you return to oversee the first round of tests?” A new voice asked the question from somewhere behind Evie.

  The doctor let out a sigh, and Evie closed her eyes, hoping to catch some nuance of the truth about him from the breath he’d expelled.

  “Not until autumn. It’s too risky in the summertime. You know where to find me.”

  Evie caught the breath, her powers working over it to wheedle out any little nuance she could.

  All she could discover was that he wasn’t lying, and that he implicitly trusted the man he spoke to.

  “We should transfer them to the Mexico facility, if you’re so worried,” the man behind her said.

  “No. They’re too valuable to move. Any time they leave the facility, we offer an invitation for a breach. I’ll simply have to adjust my schedule. We can only attempt the most crucial tests once a year, anyway.” He checked Marcus’s bindings, double-checked the tube that attached to Marcus’s arm. Evie could only watch ineffectually from the floor, tugging at her bindings. The doctor stared down at her in disgust. “Sterlyn, control her, please, and clean up this mess when you’re done. I will see you in six months.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said as the doctor left the room.

  The man in front of her followed, and in their absence, Evie pulled as hard as she could against her bindings. She didn’t need her feet. If she shifted they’d heal, anyway. The pain nearly made her pass out, but she clawed at the bloody floor, trying to reach Marcus’s limp form anyway.

  “Stop, please,” a soft voice said. “Even if you get out of your bindings, there’s no way out of the facility. Trust me, I have tried.”

  Evie stilled her struggling and turned to look at the unseen man who had stayed behind.

  She stared up into the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, and a spark of recognition seemed to flare for a moment. It ignited a tiny flame inside her that she didn’t realize even existed.

  But then he blinked. His blue eyes were hidden for a split second, and the connection she thought they had disappeared entirely, replaced by a cold gaze.

  Evie studied the man’s beautiful face, wishing like hell that feeling would return, but it didn’t.

  “I need to take you to your room,” he said.

  Evie was too flummoxed to object.

  That was the spark her mother had told her about. She knew it instinctively. But it had fizzled with this man. She kept looking up at him now, willing it to return, but it didn’t happen again.

  He carried her down a dark hallway, then fumbled to unlock another door.

  Just before he carried her inside, he lifted a hand to her chin and made her look at him. His brows furrowed and his lips pressed together. He had the most anguished look in his eyes for a split second before the look cleared. Then he met her gaze.

  “He has us all at a disadvantage. He eventually kills most of the females who come here, but you’re too precious. Please don’t piss him off. We can’t protect you. I need you as much as the others do. The happier he is with his test subjects, the easier it is on the rest of us. I’m so sorry, Evie.”

  With that, he laid her down on the bed and left silently through the door.

  Her tears began to flow at the sound of the heavy bolt locking behind him.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Evie

  Dragon Monastery, Sunda Islands

  Present Day

  “Six months—he was gone for that long? And the man who helped you…” Ked trailed off.

  Evie closed her eyes, remembering the kindness granted to her by Sterlyn that first night. Yet how cold he was to her after that. Dr. St. George would be away for months and only there for a day or two at a stretch, and she saw no one but Sterlyn and his counterpart, Naaz. The two men were the antithesis of each other, yet somehow seemed to have the same trapped look in their eyes when they talked to her.

  “I know you’re thinking how in the world I didn’t manage to escape if the king was away from the castle, and the soldiers left in charge were so deferential to me. I did try, but they just looked so sad every time I asked. It was Sterlyn who finally told me why.”

  * * *

  Ultiori Compound

  1967

  “He’s gone for months, yet you two still just do his bidding. Why?”

  Evie had made the argument so many times and received no answer. If they were all prisoners here and the warden was absent, why the hell couldn’t they just leave? Especially if the men who commanded the place in their master’s absence had the keys and wanted to escape just as badly.

  Sterlyn was the one who broke first. After hearing her needling him and calling him a fucking coward for a week straight, he finally threw her empty dinner tray against the wall so hard it bent.

  “Don’t you think I want to be free of him? I can’t. He’s too smart for all of us, and too careful. The second you get free, the woman I love dies. He employs magic not even I can unravel to track our activity. As far as I know, he’s learned to do it all himself, too. He has a thousand years of experience on all of us. He gets into our heads when he’s here. He stays in the heads of the other hunters—the ones who aren’t like m
e and Naaz. He doesn’t need to coerce them into following him the way he does to us. They just do.”

  Evie sank down on her cot. She normally enjoyed the moments when Sterlyn would come and sit with her while she ate. Tonight she regretted haranguing him about helping her escape. But she’d grown weary of asking about Marcus every time and receiving vague replies. She’d been there nearly a year already, but Sterlyn still refused to answer those questions aside from telling her that Marcus was alive.

  “I’m sorry,” Evie said. “You have no idea how he does it? How he controls you?”

  “It must be the blood he transfused us with at the beginning. It made me crazy for the first few weeks after it happened. I’d have sucked the man’s cock if he’d asked then. All I wanted was more. The power was incredible. I felt like I was whole for the first time in my life. Like I’d been missing a piece of myself that he’d managed to give me. Life had new meaning, until I met Zamirah.”

  Evie stared down at his dejected form where he slumped against the wall beside the door to her cell. Sterlyn had already told her the story of meeting and falling for the female dragon he and Naaz had hunted and captured more than a decade ago. He’d been a loyal Elite until that moment, and from his words, Evie could tell it was his Blessing bleeding through that had attracted him to Zamirah.

  He had rejected his orders to bring her in, but Naaz had made him do it anyway. “We fail and he’ll know. He always knows,” Naaz had told him.

  Ever since, he’d tried and failed to find a way for them both to escape.

  Evie would have hoped Marcus might feel the same about her, but since that horrible day when she’d been forced to watch him bleed almost to death, she hadn’t seen him. She would do anything to see him, but neither Naaz nor Sterlyn were susceptible to bribery. They both had loved ones locked away in the bowels of this place and could do nothing but continue to follow orders to keep them safe.

  “Please help me,” she said. “I just need to know he’s all right.”

  Sterlyn turned his tortured blue gaze to meet hers. “He isn’t okay,” he said bitterly. “Because you’re locked up down here, he will never be okay. Not until we find a way to get away from that bastard and burn this place to the ground.” He let out a harsh sigh and shook his head. “Sayid doesn’t permit us to see them—to see our lovers. But even if Marcus were allowed to visit you, or willing to break the rules to, he doesn’t want you to see what he’s become, which is understandable.”

  Evie’s eyes widened. “What do you mean? What has he become?”

  Sterlyn closed his eyes and whispered the words. “He’s an Elite Hunter, like me. A monster. And more ruthless than either I or Naaz ever was. At least, he’s afraid that’s how you’ll see him.”

  Evie closed her eyes, holding back tears. She only wanted to see him to make sure he was safe. But this… this was more than she’d anticipated.

  “You made him like you. Why?”

  “He’s special. I think you knew that already, being a turul. Why do you think you tolerate talking to me so much? I’m like him, so is Naaz. It took Naaz and me awhile to learn why Sayid wanted us, in particular. Why we were the ones who were cursed with the right physiology to accept the blood he gave us. The dragon blood in our veins would kill a normal human. But us, it simply makes stronger.”

  To illustrate, he held up his hands, palms facing up. Glimmering white smoke rose from them, like fog from the river outside. Before her eyes, he gestured, crafting the cloud of smoke into the form of a dragon that expelled a tiny, white flame before taking wing and flying straight to her.

  The little dragon flitted around her head silently, spouting flames at her intermittently. Evie giggled and swatted at it, but it evaded her, finally hovering before her face, its tiny legs curled up under its belly and its wings flapping slowly. The details of it were uncannily realistic. When she reached out a finger to tap the center of its belly, it disappeared in a puff of smoke. She was oddly sad to see it go.

  “That’s my essence,” Sterlyn said. “I could use that power to control your mind, if I wanted to. I could use it for so many things. That’s what we do, though. We hunt your kind, and the other races… dragons especially. We use our nature to seduce you—because your kind are always attracted to a Blessed—then use our dragon power to keep you docile while we lock you up for his experiments. This combination is deadly to the rest of you. It makes us crave your blood enough to hunt you, and makes us powerful enough to subdue you. Luring you and Marcus here was the highest profile catch we’ve ever had—a Blessed and a turul princess. The only thing that could have topped it is if both of you had been dragons.”

  “What experiments?” Evie asked. For the past year, she’d only been held captive. Trapped, but nothing more.

  Sterlyn closed his eyes. “If I could protect you from them, I would, but I can’t even protect Zamirah from them. Stay strong, Evie.”

  She let out a harsh breath. “Fine, I can deal with whatever that fucker throws at me. Just please try to convince Marcus to come see me? If I’m going to be trapped here, I want to know he’s safe.”

  He stood and knocked at the door, signaling Naaz to let him out.

  “I’ll try,” he said. “Forgive me if he’s not what you expect when he comes to you.”

  * * *

  Two days later, the sound of the bolt sliding open in her door roused Evie from half-sleep. She sat up abruptly as the door swung open. Before the interior fluorescent lights flickered on, all she saw was a large, decidedly male, and very familiar silhouette in the doorway, which disappeared when Marcus turned wordlessly and shut the door behind him.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he said. “I didn’t know how to face you, after what they did to me.”

  Evie barely even heard the words. Her eyes welled with tears. It was him. She knew it without even seeing his face. It was crystal clear when the lights in her room finally flickered on and she could see all of him.

  Her entire body ached as though she’d been beaten. Her soul thrummed with need to connect with him.

  She shook her head. It couldn’t be him. Sure, it was Marcus, without a doubt, but something about him had changed. She’d always been attracted to him—he was one of the most beautiful men she’d ever met, after all. Yet, she’d never had such an all-encompassing craving to be with him before. Like she might just die if he didn’t hold her in his arms.

  He was the One. The singular person who could fill the void in her soul that she didn’t even recognize needed filling until this moment. She closed her eyes, trying to gather herself. As she pulled in a breath, she marveled at the fact that her race’s laws weren’t based on a myth. This draw to him was too real to deny.

  “Are you all right, Evie?” he asked.

  When she opened her tear-moistened eyes, she saw him take a hesitant step forward, then pause as though he wasn’t sure he should go to her. But she needed to feel him so much.

  “Marcus… By the Winds, you’re all right.” She stood and rushed to him, desperate for his embrace. Just as she got to him, his hands shot up and gripped her shoulders, holding her back.

  “No, Evie. I’m only here because Sterlyn was worried about you. I can’t…” His face twisted into an anguished knot. “I can’t keep you safe unless I do what Sayid asks. The second we cross that line, we’re both dead.”

  “No! I need you, Marcus. You don’t know what it’s like being locked up in here.”

  Marcus closed his eyes. A bead of moisture seeped out of one corner. “I know, Evie. I’ve seen every corner of this place. I’ve been locked up for months, too. But I’m going out now.”

  He reached up and cupped her cheek. “I promise you, if I can find a way to get us out, I will. Even if I die trying.”

  Then he left, and Evie fell back onto her bed feeling even more lost than before. She shouldn’t have been drawn to
him that way. A man didn’t just start being her true mate halfway through knowing him, did he?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Evie

  Ultiori Compound

  1967

  The experiments started a few weeks later.

  At first, she went willingly. Two anonymous hunters in lab coats escorted her across the hall and urged her to lie down on a medical table. They undressed her and put her feet into stirrups. One of them injected her in the arm with something before she could object, and a few moments later, the world went fuzzy.

  Then he was there. Sayid’s dark eyes peered up at her from between her legs as his latex-covered hands gripped her thighs. He held an instrument in his hands which he inserted into her, his alien fingers unwanted on her tenderest parts. At least he wasn’t overly familiar with those parts. He treated her like a scientific specimen—analytical and disengaged, even as he shoved something deep into her to the point of causing her pain.

  Evie gasped at the invasion, at the sudden tight cramp that overtook her abdomen. But then it was gone and he’d retreated, whispering orders to the orderly who stood at his side.

  She was taken back to her room and told nothing more.

  A month later, she had the worst period of her life, spending nearly a week doubled over in pain from the cramps and bleeding heavily.

  Six months later, he repeated the process.

  A month after that, she broke down in tears when she understood what was happening.

  That afternoon, Sterlyn found her bleeding and crying beside her toilet after she’d spent half the day alternately puking and bleeding from a pregnancy that should never have happened.

  “I want to fucking kill him,” she said.