by Loki Renard
He moved quietly and with the assurance of one who knows precisely where he is, and precisely where he is going. Slipping into the royal bedchamber, he walked past the sleeping form of the princess, reached into the royal crib standing next to the great bed.
With a soft chuckle, he picked up the sleeping prince and dropped something into the crib. The baby stirred for a moment, but settled back into sleep as the old man rocked him, carrying him back through the rooms and into the little gleaming portal standing just inside the main doors. It closed behind him smoothly and silently, leaving a false peace in its wake.
Chapter Seventeen
When Lilly and Vitomir landed at the royal palace, the entire place was in an uproar. The sky was full of guardsmen and the halls of the palace itself were likewise packed with armed guards. She and Vitomir were met by some who provided their naked forms with courtesy robes and conducted them directly to an audience with King Casimer.
At first Lilly did not know what was happening, but it soon became apparent. The words were everywhere, flying between lips, it was impossible not to catch the gist of events. As they entered Casimer’s chamber, Vitomir drew Lilly close to his body. She was fairly certain that it wasn’t because he was worried that she was going to run. There was hostility in the room and the moment they walked in, it was focused on her.
Lilly recognized Valkimer and Chak immediately. She did not recognize the others. It didn’t matter. There were no introductions. There was only the fact that the crown prince had been taken by an enemy of the realm. There was no doubt as to who had committed the evil act, for a note had been left in the cradle. A small card with one word upon it: Lazarus.
“He signed his final treachery,” Casimer growled. “We have sent multiple units through, to every place we know he frequents. It is as if he has disappeared entirely, and Vadim with him. Nobody has seen a thing. Our scrying portals have become clouded and useless…” The tension, frustration, and rage in his voice were palpable. The handsome dragon king was practically shaking with fury. It was a fearsome sight, to see a beast as powerful as he work so hard to keep himself from simply exploding with every dark impulse a dragon could have.
“I can only begin to imagine your rage, sire, but if you bring an army, you will spark another war with the human realm. Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter what you do, if you respond at all, he will win! We must keep doing what we’re doing. Eventually the scouts will pick up a trail,” Chak pleaded with the king in calm, deep tones.
“I will not let him keep my son,” Casimer thundered. “I will destroy the entire human realm if I need to! It has been an hour since he was taken. That is ten human hours. Almost half a day. He could be many thousands of miles away from where he was last seen. I will take my armies and I will search those lands inch by ashen inch…”
“That’s what he wants,” Lilly murmured softly. Somehow her feminine tones cut through the rage and the fury—then focused it on her. She gasped and took a step back into Vitomir’s arms as Casimer glared at her with such anger she felt it in the very core of her being.
“You would know, she of his blood. What is it? Has he killed my son?”
“I don’t know,” she said, unable to answer the king’s question. “But I think if he’d wanted to do that, he would have left him here. I, uhm… think he’s being used as bait. That’s more his style. He doesn’t like to get his hands dirty. He doesn’t spill blood himself. If he did, he would have confronted you directly years ago. Lazarus wants you to come for him. He wants the dragon king to set foot on human soil—and he will kill you there.”
“I will kill him there, a hundred times over!” Casimer thundered furiously.
“Sir… er, King,” she stammered. “He will have made plans for your arrival. I can guarantee it. The tanks that attacked Vitomir’s estate… they were organized.”
“Then what do you suggest, Lilly of Lazarus?”
She flinched, hating hearing her father’s name so intimately connected with her own.
“I’ll go and get the prince,” she said. “I can do it. I know Lazarus. I even think I know where he has gone. He always knew you were watching him, but he had a second home…”
“Tell me where it is!”
She pressed back against Vitomir all the more, cowering from the king’s rage.
“I’ll tell you!” She held her hands up in surrender. “But I think… maybe… instead of going yourself, or sending an army, I should go. I can get in and take the prince without arousing as much of my father’s suspicions. If fighting breaks out, Vadim could be hurt, unintentionally. You don’t want to bring a war down your son’s head. I’ll go in. I can do this.”
“No, you can’t.”
The objection came not from in front of her, but from behind her. She turned to look at Vitomir and saw that his expression was thunderous. He shook his head curtly, but she put her hand on his arm and looked up into his golden gaze.
“You know I have to do this,” she said softly. “You know there’s no other way.”
“You don’t have to do this,” he murmured to her. “Just tell us where the location is. Let us send agents…”
“Lazarus is paranoid,” she said. “It’s booby trapped all over. He will know within seconds that you’re there, and if he’s trapped, he could do something really bad. I have to go. I am the only one who can.”
“You will go,” Casimer said, the king’s word final.
Lilly kept looking at Vitomir, waiting for his approval. A slight nod was all she got.
Preparations went into full swing almost immediately. She was dressed casually, in remnants of human clothing. Black jeans, a black hooded sweatshirt. Hardly the attire of a hero, but she wasn’t trying to look like a hero. Her feet were in dragon-made leather boots, incredibly comfortable, hard wearing, and apparently fireproof too.
When she was dressed, Valkimer lifted a chain over her head. This was no collar. It was like a necklace with a little trinket hanging on the front, a black jewel set against a silver backing. “When you turn this, it will open a small portal to predetermined coordinates,” he explained, his pale blue eyes fixed on hers with something like suspicion.
They didn’t trust her fully, or probably even partially. But they had no choice now.
“And this,” Casimer said. He handed her a belt upon which a scabbard was threaded. In that scabbard was a very familiar blade—the one she had been sent to the dragon realm with. The one designed to kill the king himself.
In minutes, Valkimer opened a portal to the location she’d given him and she looked out onto a landscape she never thought she’d see again.
“Stay safe,” Vitomir said, embracing her close. “Please, pet. Stay safe.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, taking a deep breath before spinning on her heel and walking through the world.
The next thing she knew, she was standing in a small alley behind a row of houses in a little desert town. The portal closed behind her in an instant, sealing the world anew but for a few panicked seconds she looked around, wondering if anyone had seen her strange arrival. It did not appear to be so.
The house she was standing outside looked sort of normal, but she knew it was anything but. Three square stories rose into the sky, red rock comprising the exterior. It was as close a building to a fortress as it was possible to get without going full medieval, as she suspected Lazarus had always wanted to do. The need to fit in with the human aesthetic had always galled him.
She slipped up over the tall stone wall, past the ‘Absolutely no trespassing’ sign and into the house, avoiding the triggers and traps, the little lines that would send a thousand volts through her body, the pieces of ground that were not solid at all, but that would give way underfoot and send unfortunates plunging into deep wells from which they would not emerge. Someone had once said that if anyone was injured on Lazarus’ property, they could sue him. His answer to that had been to insure that nobody was injured. If a trap was trigg
ered, that was the end of the intruder. Over the years, the place had acted like a Venus flytrap for the criminally inclined. She shuddered to think of the bones that lay in the depths around this place.
It would have been easier to open a portal inside the building, but she had been afraid that Lazarus would have something rigged to detect such a portal and he might slay her before he knew who she was. It was best not to sneak up on the criminally insane.
It took a pass code to open the door. Lazarus was in the habit of changing them often and without warning. If the code entered was still valid, there would be no problem. If not… she tapped the numbers in and slid back against the wall, bracing herself for some evil machination designed to sweep down and end her life, but evidently her code was still active. The door swung open as innocently as any other door might.
“Lazarus?” She called his name as she stepped carefully through the small hallway that led to the large open plan ground floor. The windows were perpetually shuttered here, barred against intruders and the sun alike. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim room, but it was all as she had last seen it. Little in the way of furniture, but many maps and telephones and computers. It was a madman’s lair, not a home.
“Lilly? Is that you, Lilly?”
She saw him rise from an armchair and fought back the bile that rose in her throat at the sight of him. It was not his appearance. Even as an old man he had always been handsome and noble looking—part of the reason her mother had never quite been able to admit what a terrible person he was. It was his very being. Now she looked at him through the eyes of her ordeal, she saw his evil and it made her want to retch.
He seemed to have aged years in the time she was away. Of course, she remembered, he had. Time in the human realm moved so much more swiftly. Every day she was away, over a week passed here. It was a miracle that he was still drawing breath. He was frail, but animated with the kind of pure malevolence that would not allow him to pass.
She was not sure how he would take her return. She had the dragonsbane sword strapped at her hip in case she needed it, but she wasn’t going to simply run up and cut him down, though that would have been somewhat simpler for all concerned. Knowing Lazarus, his death would probably trigger some catastrophic meltdown of some kind.
“Hi,” she said, the word anticlimactic.
His jaw dropped and his eyes lit with some emotion she could not possibly read.
“Lilly!” He opened his arms to her. “You have escaped!”
“Yes,” she said, rolling with his assumption. “I escaped.”
She let him come forward and hug her, trying not to betray her loathing.
“Good. Good. What news do you bring? Tell me how much panic has set in.” He grinned unpleasantly. “I only wish I could be there to see the look on Casimer’s face.”
Some of the adrenaline began to fade. She had told Vitomir that she would not be in any danger, but of course privately she had known that there was every chance Lazarus would regard her as one of the enemy and simply dispatch her on return. She had at least expected him to be suspicious of her coincidental reappearance. Looking into his malevolent gaze, Lilly realized that Lazarus did not suspect her at all—and she understood just as swiftly why.
He did not suspect her because he did not think of her as anything besides one of his tools. He was not worried about her betraying him, because he did not think she had any kind of personal will. And why not? She had never resisted him before, she had even allowed herself to be used as a weapon. From his perspective, she had escaped the realm and returned to his side.
“Panic?” She feigned ignorance.
“You don’t know?” He let out a laugh. “I have taken the crown prince. See him here!”
To her relief, the baby was sleeping soundly in a drawer that had hastily been transformed into a cot of sorts with a few towels and an old blanket. He did not appear to have been harmed, a fact that brought her immense relief.
“That’s the crown prince?”
“I know, doesn’t look like much, does he,” Lazarus practically giggled. “That is the crux of this plan. I am going to hand him off to a human adoption agency in a few hours and from there he will be lost to the dragon realm forever. There are millions of people on this continent alone, tens of thousands of babies. If they wish to find him, they will have to search every house and hospital, every trailer park and tent. I intend to make Casimer waste as much of his life here as I have. I intend to force him to endure these stinking shores, this mad society which has no respect for anything… I will take his near immortality and break it with this human realm.”
She looked at Lazarus, stunned at the brilliant and subtle malevolence of the plan. He did not need to start a war. He did not need to lay a finger on Casimer. He had already wounded him as deeply as he could and he intended to make the dragon king eke his life force across the continent by exposing him to the human realm that stripped dragons of their longevity and made them weak and old long before their time. It was an incredible plan, a horrible, terrible, amazingly twisted plan.
“This is the revenge we have deserved to have for a long time,” Lazarus smiled. “Finally, I have taken something that strikes at the heart of Casimer the way he struck at mine.”
“Casimer won’t allow this.”
“He has no choice!” Lazarus laughed. “As I once had no choice. Now he knows what it is to be powerless, to see everything he loved being taken from him. He knows my pain now, Lilly.”
She started to get angry. Started to say unwise things. “What about this child’s pain? Do you not care how many are hurt so you will be satisfied?”
“The child will be raised by a family desperate for one of their own. He will not suffer one bit. I have done him a favor.”
“How, by tearing him from his family? By turning him into a scavenger hunt prize?” She could not contain her anger anymore. Her fingers gripped the pommel of the sword as she blazed at Lazarus. “Do you have any idea the agony you spread around yourself? How much you have hurt me?”
“You have not been hurt,” Lazarus snorted. “Look at you, utterly unharmed.”
“I have not been hurt? It was pure chance that I was not torn apart on my entrance to their realm. There were a hundred guards…”
“I trained you not to be torn apart. I had confidence you would survive, if not succeed, and you have. Look at you, standing before me. You have done well, my daughter.” He spoke with pride, but she knew it was not pride in her. It was as though he was looking into a mirror, seeing only the parts of himself reflected there. He was so dazzled by that he could not hear what she was saying.
“I was captured. Do you think they were kind to me? You did not lift a finger to save me. You had the resources to take Casimer’s son, but not the resources to help your own child?”
“I knew you could take care of yourself,” he said. “As is evidenced by the fact that you are standing before me now.”
Their quarrel woke the baby, who began to howl at the top of his lungs. No argument could be made over the piercing cries, which were enough to irritate Lazarus into picking him up and handing the squalling lump to Lilly.
“Infernally annoying things,” he growled. “Never could stand them.”
The baby was no doubt hungry and needed changing, but of course Lazarus had not considered that. Lazarus considered nothing other than himself.
“I’ll take him and calm him,” she said. “I’ll take him for a little walk around the house.”
“Put the whelp in a bucket for all I care, just make it shut up.”
She turned and walked upstairs, amazed at how easily he had given her what she came for. Of course, he did not credit her with the intelligence or the will to double cross him. In spite of her anger, he still trusted her. Not because he knew her, but because she was nothing but a puppet to him. He could not anticipate what was going to happen next, any more than he could have anticipated one of his own legs getting up and h
opping away.
She soothed the baby as best she could and went to the room that had once been hers. It was on the very top floor, a small room with limited furnishings, a bed and a desk and nothing more. For a moment, she looked around, seeing her books, her music. It was like looking back in time at who she had been. Just as twisted as he was. Just as angry. Just as ready to vent it on the world beyond.
There was no time for maudlin self-reflection. Lilly grasped the pendant hanging around her neck and a small portal opened in front of her. It led directly to the chamber where Vitomir, Casimer, and the Crown Princess Mika had been holding vigil. For a brief moment, she saw them sort of frozen in time, a trick of the portal. Mika was crying against Casimer’s chest, and Vitomir was standing against the wall, his arms crossed, his eyes fixed on the point through which she’d come. It was a little tableau of misery and mourning, which changed the instant she stepped through and handed the baby to his beautiful young mother. Mika let out a cry of pure joy and clasped him close.
“Come through quickly,” Vitomir beckoned as Lilly took a step back through the portal. “We must close this.”
“No. Not yet.”
“Lazarus will know you’ve betrayed him and his plan…”
A smile spread across her face. “Good.”
Vitomir’s expression grew stern as he caught her thought. In that instant, they both knew what she intended to do. He tried to prevent her by sheer force of personality, dominance of will.
“Lilly… come here. Now. Don’t you dare close that portal… don’t you dare!”
She stepped back into the human realm and closed it with a twist of the trinket. She would face Vitomir’s anger later. For now, she had revenge to exact.
Putting her hand back on the hilt of her sword, she walked downstairs and found Lazarus pacing back and forth across the living room floor. Apparently he had not detected the portal. Funny how the same trick that had been used to take the prince in the first place had worked in his very own home. He had not considered he would need protection here, in his sanctuary. He was arrogant enough to think he was safe. He was so very wrong.
