by Ava Benton
“I can’t understand you. You’re talking gibberish.”
Of course.
I wasn’t speaking English. He expected me to. And just like that, it all became clear. Every bit of it.
I hadn’t imagined the flight on the dragon’s back. He was the dragon, and he had dragged me to his cave or lair or whatever it was. And he thought his magical blood could heal my wounds.
It would have, if I were human.
All this went through my fevered brain in a flash before I made the deliberate switch to English.
“Please, make it stop,” I whispered, staring up at him through the tears filling my eyes.
I couldn’t stop them any more than I could stop the sizzling of my flesh where his blood had touched me.
“What’s happening?” he asked, grimacing in horror as he watched the effect his blood had on me. “I’ve never seen this before! I thought it would help you. I thought you might die if you became infected.”
“I wouldn’t have died if you hadn’t done this,” I gasped, turning my head back and forth as a fresh wave of pain tore my brain to pieces.
I would go insane before his toxic blood killed me. How could I hope to keep sane while being tortured?
“What do you mean?”
I barely managed to gasp out my answer. “I’m fae, you stupid jackass!”
His eyes flew open wide. “You’re what?”
“Fae. Not human.” I writhed in pain, which sent a fresh, stronger wave of fire running through me. “Your blood… it’s going to kill me. It’s poison to me.”
Sweat broke out on my forehead, along the back of my neck. I felt it soaking into my hair along with the tears which ran freely down my face.
“How can I save you?”
I shook my head, unable to think through the haze surrounding me.
The burning was starting to spread from my shoulder down to my elbow.
It would eventually spread throughout my body as the effect of his blood had time to work its way through me. It would rot my flesh and shut down my organs.
The thought of waiting to die while I rotted from the inside out was enough to make me consider asking him to kill me straight out. I would beg him to kill me before I’d let death take its time.
Alina.
Alina could save me.
Only I didn’t know where I was. I would have to go to her.
“Please, help me get home. I have to get home to my kind. We have a healer. She’ll know what to do.”
“That’s not possible.”
I was sure I must’ve heard him wrong.
There was no way he would do what he’d done to me, then deny me the chance to live.
“What do you mean, not possible? They live right outside Roanoke. It’s easy to get there—I think, anyway. I don’t know where we are exactly.”
“And there’s a reason for that,” he replied with a scowl. “You’re not supposed to know where we are, and nobody else can know we’re here.”
Because he was a dragon.
“Look. I understand. You’re who you are, and I’m who I am. Neither of us lives in a safe world. We have to watch out for humans who would put an end to us. I get it.”
I would’ve said anything to get him to let me go. I would’ve promised anything in the world. So long as the pain ended.
“You don’t understand. There’s much more to it than that for me, for my family.”
“Family?”
“Yes. My brothers and cousins. They all live here with me, and none of them will let you go, either.”
It was a nightmare.
I was here, and they wouldn’t let me go, and I was living in a nightmare. It was the only reason. Or I died in the car, and I was in hell. Was there such a place? There had to be, because that’s where I was just then.
Staring up at a gorgeous, but evil, dragon shifter.
“But… I won’t tell!” I whispered.
I felt myself slipping over the edge of sanity into sheer panic as I reached for him with my good hand, the one whose arm didn’t yet feel like it was I flames.
My hand closed around his wrist, clamping down hard when another wave of pain burned through me. “I swear it. When one of us makes a promise, it’s a solemn oath. It means our very lives. I’m bound to my word. You must believe me.”
His eyes were hard, but there was a spark of something behind them.
Sympathy?
That had to be it. He had gone so far as to share his blood with me in the hopes that he’d save my life. There had to be goodness inside him. I had to play on that, plain and simple.
“I’m dying,” I whispered, and a tear rolled down my cheek and collected in my hair along with the others.
“I want to help you,” he admitted.
It sounded like saying the words out loud gave him pain—but that pain was nothing compared to what I was going through, so it meant little to me.
“So, please, do. I’ll die here. I’m dying now. I can feel it. The burning… it’s already spreading through my arm.”
His handsome features contorted in a grimace as he fought with himself. Something was still holding him back.
“What do I have to say to convince you?” I asked.
The candle didn’t provide much light, so most of his face was cast in shadow when he looked away.
“There’s nothing you can say,” he muttered. “You have no idea what’s at stake for me.”
“More than my life?” I asked before I winced, grinding my teeth.
I had to control my breathing. I just had to. The more panicked I became, the faster my heart raced and the faster the toxic blood would spread through me.
“That might be how they see it, yes.”
“But it’s not how you see it?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you worked hard to get me out of that car—and you could’ve died, too. The last thing I remember was the mud sweeping the car up and pushing it toward the edge of the road. I was close to the edge. And I bet the car’s somewhere on the forest floor, huh?”
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t hang around long enough to find out.”
“No. You flew me here. I remember a little bit of that, too.”
“What’s the point of reminding me of these things?”
I would’ve shrugged if I could’ve moved without screaming. As it was, I needed to stay perfectly still if I wanted to speak clearly. I couldn’t move and speak at the same time.
“Because you’ve tried so hard to keep me alive. You can’t let me die like this.”
“There’s nothing I can do. I can’t run the risk of somebody finding out where you are.”
“And I just told you I wouldn’t tell.”
“And I’m telling you if it means nothing to me that you’ve promised this, it’ll mean even less to my family. They already hate me for bringing you here, or they will.”
I couldn’t leave. Asking to leave was a waste of time. If he was tough, the rest of the would be tougher.
I wondered how many there were. With my luck, a hundred. All dragons.
His eyes lit up. “I could bring your healer here. Just tell me where to find her, and I can use a blindfold. She won’t ever have to see where we’re going.”
I wanted to jump at the suggestion—but it was no use. I could see why he didn’t want to let me leave when it put it that way.
I wasn’t about to let any strangers, especially a bunch of dragons, know where my kind lived. We kept ourselves secret for a reason. My heart sank.
“It’s useless,” I whispered before squeezing my eyes shut.
Two more tears trickled out when I did. At the rate I was crying, I’d die of dehydration before I rotted.
“That’s no good, either?” he asked.
I could hear the disappointment and frustration in his voice.
“No. I can’t tell you where they live.”
“But you would lie there and heap guilt on me for not wanting y
ou to leave. What if I make all the same promises you did? I’ll never tell anybody where your people live. I’ll never breathe a word.”
“You don’t have to be nasty. Not now. Not after what you did to me.” I turned my head away with a groan. “You should’ve let me die.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if you might be right, after all.” He shot up suddenly and walked out of what I realized was a cell, complete with iron bars.
I would’ve called out to him, begged him not to leave me alone there, scared and in pain and worried that things would get a lot worse, if I could’ve called out to him without the pain only getting worse.
I stared up at the ceiling, which looked like it had been carved from solid rock. I needed to distract myself. If I thought about the poison, I’d start to panic again. Panic meant pain.
Who created the cell?
The tunnel I heard the dragon’s footsteps fading down was a long one.
How much more were there?
Did he say that was where they lived?
I couldn’t remember—everything was a blur.
I was going to die there.
That much was clear.
7
Pierce
For the first time in a thousand years, I punched one of the cave’s interior walls. Nothing in all that time had ever taken me to the point of blinding, searing rage.
Nothing until her.
You cannot let her die! The dragon roared in no uncertain terms. He would make sure I heard him—and listened.
Only nothing he said made the first damned bit of difference if she refused to go along.
“She’s the one who wants to die,” I snarled before tightening my hand into a fist and slamming it into the rock again.
It did little to ease my anger and certainly did nothing to harm the wall.
I heard Miles and Fence talking as they came back from salvaging the truck.
“We could use a little help here,” Miles grunted as he carried two boxes full of meat to the kitchen.
I followed, along with Smoke and Gate.
“You sure that’s still safe?” Smoke asked.
“Oh, yeah. It’s cold. But I guess we could always have Pierce go back for more once the road’s clear,” he joked. His smile faded when he saw the obvious tension between Gate and me. “What did I miss?”
“I’ll leave this in the walk-in for now.” Gate carried the meat to the walk-in refrigerator.We needed something that big to contain the amount of meat the six of us went through.
“Coming through!” Fence dropped two boxes of various supplies on the floor. “Whew. That mudslide was no joke. I’m sorry, buddy, but your truck’s a total loss. It was up to the windows and starting to seep inside.”
“There’s a bigger issue right now.” Smoke threw a glance my way.
“You could say that.” Gate came in rubbing his hands together to warm them.
“I wish you would keep your opinion to yourself until everybody has a chance to hear the story,” I growled.
“What story?” Fence looked around the room. “I swear, you go out to salvage what you can after a mudslide, then come back to something like this.”
“I’ll cut right to the chase. A girl was trapped in the mudslide. I saved her before her car went over the edge and brought her back here.”
“You what?” Miles’s jaw dropped.
“Yeah, yeah, it was a no-no. You don’t have to tell me.”
“But you did it anyway?” Fence looked around like he was trying to make sense and hoping one of them could help him. None of them could.
“I hope you don’t think you’ll keep her here like some sort of pet,” Miles said, eyes narrowing dangerously.
“It’s worse than that,” Gate chimed in. “He wants to heal her, rather than just letting her die.”
“What if she lives and she reveals us?” Miles moaned, slapping his forehead with the heel of his hand.
“It’s worse than that,” I confessed. “She won’t try to reveal us—at least, I don’t believe she would—because she has secrets of her own which she’s trying to keep.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the fact that she’s fae.”
The kitchen erupted. “You rescued one of them?” From Miles’s voice, he might as well have been talking about a rodent.
“You know as well as I do that there’s no way to tell just by looking, and vice versa. I didn’t know she was fae until…” I realized I’d just incriminated myself, but it was too late.
“Until when?” Gate’s whisper was cold, menacing.
I squared my shoulders and looked each of them in the eye as the dragon in me roared in defiance.
Let them try to punish us, he growled, straining for a good fight.
We hadn’t been in a good fight in far too long, and it didn’t matter that we were facing our family. He wanted to draw blood over the girl.
“Until I tried to heal her, just now. When we were alone again.”
It was as if I’d just dropped a bomb. The four of them stared at me, slack-jawed.
Smoke was the first to recover. “Why would you do that?”
I could see how hard he worked to keep himself under control. His dragon wanted justice just like mine wanted blood.
Gate exploded before I had the chance to reply, hurling himself across the room.
Miles barely caught him in time to prevent a brawl.
“Let him come!” I shouted over the chaos.
Smoke reached my side in an instant.
“Calm yourself,” he warned.
I shook off the arm he threw in front of me.
“No! He’s the one who needs to be calm!” I looked across the room to where Miles and Fence had Gate cornered. “What is it with you?”
“With me? You’re the one putting our lives at risk, and you’re asking me what my problem is?”
“Gate, come on,” Smoke called out. “It’s not that serious. Not yet. We have to cool ourselves off if we want to move past this.”
“There is no moving past this!” he exclaimed with a laugh.
“That’s up to you.”
“Come on,” Fence said, glancing my way. “This isn’t the end of the world. Pierce was doing what he thought was right.”
“You’re on his side now?”
“I didn’t know there were sides. I thought we were all in this together.”
“I thought we were, too,” Gate sneered. “Until one of us started making major decisions without asking any of the others what they thought. Bringing outsiders in here after all this time. What have we been working to protect, then, if this is possible? Why have we held ourselves back from the rest of the world all this time if things were always going to come to this in the end?”
For the first time, I heard the desperation in his voice.
It never occurred to me that some of us might’ve taken our solitude better than others. Would I have rather been with others every so often?
Yes, but not enough for it to get under my skin and stay there.
Gate clearly didn’t feel the same.
I nodded to Smoke in reassurance that I wouldn’t start a fight.
He backed away to give me room to move.
“Listen,” I said, holding my hands up in a defensive gesture but also to show him I meant no harm, “all I know is that the girl needed help. You know how it is with us. You wouldn’t have been able to let her go over the cliff any more than I would. None of us would’ve stood idly by and allowed another person to die that way. There wasn’t any time to think.”
I sighed, letting my hands drop. “But it’s more than that. There’s something… something about her. I don’t know what. My dragon seems to know, or at least have an idea.”
“You mean…” Fence’s eyes lit up. “Your mate?”
“Impossible,” Miles shook his head. “It’s been too long for that. We’re all too old.”
“We’re still breathing. We’re not too old. And hey, I
don’t know that I believe it any more than you. Truly. But the dragon wanted this. For us to save her. To heal her. In the moment…” I shook my head, looking at the floor rather than looking any of them in the eye.
We didn’t exactly hang around, discussing feelings all the time. It was new for me to share with them how I felt on a deeper level. I had to search for the right words to explain something I didn’t fully understand.
“In the moment, there was nothing else to do. I felt desperate. Like everything hinged on her living.”
“And now?” Gate didn’t sound any less furious, but at least he wasn’t challenging me to a brawl.
“Now? I still feel the same way.” My mind went back to her in the cell, suffering. “Only there may not be anything else I can do for her. Did any of you know that our blood is toxic to the fae?”
“You mean, you’ve poisoned her?” Smoke asked.
“Something like that. I’m not sure. She says I did, and her shoulder looked worse than it had when I left her. Not that it matters,” I added with a growl. “She wants a healer. I’ve already told her there’s no way for her to leave, but when I offered to bring somebody here, blindfolded even, she refused that as well. She won’t tell us where they live.”
“Just like we can’t let anyone know where we are,” Miles mused. He looked sorry for me. I wished he wouldn’t.
“If she won’t allow you to help her, there’s nothing you can do.” Gate shrugged. “I’m sorry. I am. But maybe this is the way things are meant to be.”
“Can’t you see it’s impossible for me to accept that?”
“You may not have a choice,” Smoke pointed out, clapping a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, but you can’t force her. If the prospect of death isn’t enough, what is?”
“I wish I knew.” I looked around, desperate for them to understand. “I wish you knew what it means to go through something like this. I’m powerless, but the dragon won’t let her go. He keeps telling me there’s got to be some way to save her, because she’s ours.”
“It means that much to you?” Fence asked.
“You would know if you’d ever been through it. I can’t shut him up. It’s never been like this before.” I held my head in my hands, as if that would block out the incessant demands of the beast within me.
