Panic seized her as she watched in helpless horror. “No.”
Then, she heard the call of the white woman inside her. Mina. It was the white witch of legend who spoke to her from within. It is time. Awaken the white queen from her long, long slumber.
Morgrid laughed behind her, a sinister chill filling the air. “What’s wrong, Princess? Not what you had planned with your little army?”
Mina swiveled to face her.
Morgrid flinched at something she saw in Mina’s eyes. Yet her haughty demeanor remained unchanged. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m speaking to a queen, aren’t I?”
Morgrid narrowed her menacing gaze as the ice daggers she summoned from the black sky continued to rain down upon Mina’s friends. Upon her own love. Hart wolves yelped and howled on the field as they were stabbed through.
“Yes,” said Mina, crawling up onto the parapet and then standing slowly as the wind threatened to tip her over. “I am a queen.”
The burning fire of Dominik’s blood coursed through her veins with savage fury, lighting her up with palpable energy that crackled in the air around her. Magic sizzled along her skin.
“I am the white queen of legend.”
Mina’s voice deepened. Darkened. A beast speaking the words. Her body pumping hot and hard, no longer with blood, but with pure powerful magic. Pouring lavalike through her body as her senses intensified, amplified well beyond a vampire. All she could think and feel and yearn for was fire. She smelled it come from her lungs as she breathed deep, smoldering to life inside her own body, the furnace buried at the core of her being.
When she spoke again to Morgrid—now stupefied in place, staring with blatant shock at Mina—her words were barely audible through the earth-deep growl resonating with peril and doom.
“And I am going to kill you.”
…
Dominik smiled, his throat dripping blood where Mina had bit him, easing in a circle. Mikhail didn’t move, his stance straight, his fist clenched on the hilt of his double sword, the gold-tipped blades winking under the moonlight.
“So you’re the one who stole what was mine. Some untitled nobody who couldn’t even make the Legionnaires. Had to start your own little guard.”
“She was never yours.” Mikhail bent his wrist, twirling the blades menacingly. “She never will be.” The moonlight cut the butcher king into harsh angles and lines, but all Mikhail saw was the perfect point and angle he’d slice to remove the bastard’s head. “There are many reasons I want to kill you.” His words were smooth as silk, low and sonorous like a poison that slid into one’s veins without one ever knowing. “The innocents you’ve butchered over the years. The villages you’ve raided and destroyed, including my own mother’s. The countless number of people you’ve terrorized for your own pleasure. But you’ll die tonight for one reason alone.” He took a threatening step forward, his gaze sharp on his opponent’s movements. “Because you dared to touch one hair on her head.”
He scoffed, puffing up his barrel chest. “I touched a lot more than that.”
Red dominated his vision. Mikhail dove onto his enemy. They met in a violent clamor of steel on steel.
Bleeding from the icy shards that had pierced his body in at least seven places, Mikhail crawled up the parapet wall to reach for Mina’s dagger, sheathed in his boot. Pain lacerated his body. Dominik drew closer with certain intent to make the killing blow. Another needle-thin shard of ice hit Mikhail directly in the chest, piercing deep. The shock of the sharp pain distracted him long enough for Dominik to slice across the wrist of his one good hand. The severing of his tendons forced the dagger from his fingers, clattering to the stone.
An ice dagger had cut his other wrist, leaving him literally helpless to even hold a weapon. He bared his sharpened fangs, nevertheless, as the butcher king drew closer.
“Know this, Captain Whoever You Are, before you die.” He inhaled and exhaled a great puff of white air. “I will enjoy Vilhelmina’s sweet body and sweet blood day and night till she gives me an heir.” He tossed Mikhail a haughty smile, swinging his sword up to lay flat against his shoulder in a too-casual manner. “Then I’ll let my Legionnaires have a go at her. None of them have bedded a queen. That will be entertaining. And in all that time, you’ll be rotting in a cold, dark grave.”
Mikhail charged the animal and brought him to the ground, burying a knee on his throat. Dominik leveraged up and launched him off. Cries erupted on the parapet, not cries of pain and death, but of exclamation and surprise. The clanging of swords ceased. Both Mikhail and Dominik looked up to the upper parapet wall, where all eyes had swiveled.
Mina stood atop the banister, her arms outstretched, her unbound hair whipping in the glacial wind, and a haunting vibrant green aura rippling in flames around her body.
“Magic,” whispered Mikhail. “The legend.”
Her body rippled with power, then she roared, letting loose a sound that no human could produce. Her arms extended, stretching outward, long black claws like a bear’s growing from the ends. Then her legs lengthened and widened, as did her torso and her neck.
“Heaven save us,” whispered one of the Legionnaires standing nearby.
Her neck continued to stretch and stretch, her skin changing, shimmering like scales. No, not like scales. They were scales. Her face extended, jaws opening wide. Wider. Her long blond hair stiffening into a jagged spiky spine extending along the back of her lengthening neck until she wasn’t a woman any longer at all.
“My God,” he whispered as she grew taller, until the parapet wall crumbled beneath one of her mighty back claws, her body filling up the entire battlement. And the force of the promise, the vision given to her at her birth when Morgrid had cursed her launched upward in the behemoth form that towered on top of Izeling Tower and roared to the stars. A great white dragon.
She was fixed on something, someone beyond Mikhail’s vision from below. Her neck coiled back like a cobra, then snapped at the unseen object. A piercing woman’s scream echoed into the night as Mina, the dragon, lifted Queen Morgrid in her jaws, clamped around her torso.
“No! Guards! Help me!” screamed the queen who’d murdered and brutalized hundreds, thousands of her own people, just like her son now staring up in stupefied horror. “Nooooo!”
Mina’s eyes glittered bright emerald green with a shocking spark right before she snapped her jaws closed and severed the queen in half. The black storm of ice shards evaporated in a blink, the evil mass of clouds dissolving into the ether. Ice shards falling without force from the sky.
The white dragon queen reared up her head toward the night sky and released a deafening roar. Her head then snaked around and snapped down to the parapet where Mikhail stood, her serpentine green eyes focused on Dominik.
“Oh, no, she doesn’t.”
The wrist where the ice dagger had cut through him had knitted together and healed enough for him to bend over and pick up his double sword. While Dominik stared up in shocked horror at the dragon queen, Mikhail grabbed a fistful of his hair and jerked back.
“I am not a nobody. Know this, before you die. I am Mikhail Romanov, great-grandson to Rodin Varis, the first king of the land before your bloodthirsty mother slayed him on his throne. And I will restore his world of peace while you lie rotting in a cold, dark grave.”
Mikhail then tore through Dominik’s throat with his blade in one slice, jerking his head loose of his spine and slinging it up and over the parapet wall.
Mina’s dragon snorted a satisfactory huff of smoke. While Legionnaires scrambled to get away, she unfurled her white wings and flapped. The gusting wind was now caused by the storm of Vilhelmina Dragomir as she lifted off the battlement into the air, her body glittering like diamonds under the moonlight. She was horrifyingly beautiful. Mikhail smiled.
“My queen,” he whispered to himself as she circled down toward the battlefield.
With a hissing intake of breath, swooping down toward the retreating vampire army, she blew out a
stream of electric-green flame, incinerating the screaming vampires in a flash. Dmitri and Katya, still mounted, led the charge against the retreating enemy.
“Yah!” bellowed Dmitri, letting fall from his hand a gold-tipped grappling hook on a chain, one of the many weapons forged in Cutters Cove for this day.
The Bloodguard and Arkadian equestrians still standing launched toward their enemy and let fly their grappling hooks, winding them above their heads as their cavalry pounded down the fleeing Legionnaires. A dozen hart wolves lay in pursuit with them, careening toward the woods.
The rabid vampires with sanguine furorem, and especially those pumped with Dominik’s elixir, didn’t retreat but fought like the maddened beasts they were. Marius, bleeding and roaring with rage, battled three at a time. Arabelle, not far away, engaged two more with Allora swooping in to take down a vampire coming at her back.
The pounding of boots reverberated on the battlement below as Legionnaires stormed upward to defend their queen and the king of Izeling. They circled Yuri, Gregory, and Dane. Dane tossed down his weapon and with a growling howl, ripped open his shirt the second before electricity snapped in the air and a flash of light blinded them all. In his place stood a towering, fierce hart wolf. A low growl rumbling from his throat, his tail whipping. The soldiers took a step back and raised their swords.
With a satisfied grunt, Mikhail heaved his weight off the wall, gripped his double-edged sword tight and leaped the parapet wall to land directly in the center with his men and Dane. The landing jolted his leg injuries. He winced but shook it off.
“Good of you to drop in, Captain,” said Gregory, grinning and wielding a battle ax with a head nearly the size of his own.
Mikhail smiled at the man’s humor at a time like this. He scanned the numbers. “Looks like ten to one.”
Yuri shrugged, blood dripping down his temple from a gash on his head. “We’ve had worse.”
“Indeed, my brothers. Let’s kill the bastards.”
With Dane’s agreeing growl, they lay into the enemy. The fight was far from over.
But above them, the roaring white dragon, the white queen of legend, burned away the enemy of the people, of the good and righteous. Creating a new world, ending the old in green flame. The night wasn’t won yet, but it assuredly would be.
He smiled, remembering the prophecy at her birth. “And she will be the savior of them all.”
Mikhail sliced through one attacker on his left then his right, taking a quick panting breath to glance up into the sky where she soared. The strength and power of beauty and beast in one body.
“Mina mine.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Propped against a tree amid the other wounded, Mikhail watched Izeling Tower burning in green flames, the eerie aura rising high into the heavens. Mina’s dragon flame had caught the castle on fire when she returned from tracking down those who’d tried to flee back to Dragon’s Eye. Mikhail had already been down on the battlefield with the rest of his men when she flew over in a roaring rage, burning the north battlement.
Next to him, Brennalyn wept over the prostrate Duke of Winter Hill, with Izzy wrapped tightly in her arms, now asleep after her ordeal. Friedrich bled from numerous battle wounds, but one had made a definitive mark. Brennalyn had stayed behind in Izeling, waiting for the fighting to end. And now she lay her head to Friedrich’s chest, her black hair sprawling over him as she wept and wept.
“Kitten, you’ll have to stop crying like that.” Friedrich pulled himself up against a tree trunk. “I’ve still got one good arm to hold you with.” To exemplify, he tugged her close and caressed her back, the stump of his left arm now stitched and mending since he’d fed from one of Vietka’s girls. Then he placed a hand atop Izzy’s golden head with a smile.
Strangely enough, Vietka and her women had traipsed back to the battlefield to help those holding onto life, knowing the vampires would need blood to self-heal and the humans would need tending. The people of Izeling had swarmed out in droves to help, carting many back to the church, which had become a hospital for the wounded victors of the Battle of Dragon Fire, a name one of the locals had already dubbed it.
Brennalyn shot up off his chest, fury pinching her brow. “I want to kill the one who did this to you.”
“No need, darling,” crooned Friedrich, playing with a lock of her black hair. “Riker took care of that for me.” He nodded appreciatively at the man, standing with his arms crossed and leaning against a tree.
“You’re quite welcome, Your Grace.”
“I want to kill him again,” muttered Brennalyn, seething.
Friedrich smiled up at her. “Now, kitten. We’ve had enough death for one night. And look at Riker. He does quite well with only one eye. I’ll do well enough with one arm.” He glanced to Riker. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
Arabelle strode up with Marius at her side, a severe cut on her forehead already mending itself. Marius, a gash torn through his armor and shirt below the ribs, knelt beside Friedrich.
“Are you all right, cousin?”
“Good God. I’m fine. Everyone, stop fretting over me.” His severe tone shifted when he looked at Brennalyn and cupped her face. “I’m alive. And that’s what matters.”
Arabelle blew out a heavy breath. “Quite right, Friedrich. Many lost their lives.”
Marius glanced back at the burning tower, an otherworldly flame consuming the evil dwelling brick by brick. “But many more would have had it not been for Vilhelmina.”
“How is Sienna?” asked Arabelle. “Someone told me—”
“She’ll be fine,” said Mikhail. He had bitten her right after he killed Dominik to ensure healing began at once. Her injury wasn’t as bad as it had appeared at first, though she wouldn’t be out of bed for a long while if Nikolai had anything to say about it.
Arabelle crossed her arms. “You know, Marius? I hated Mina for being betrothed to you when I first met her. It seems I should’ve befriended her from the start. We might’ve ended this war before it had ever begun.”
“Kind of hard to befriend your kidnapping victim.” Marius smirked.
Arabelle rounded on him. “She was a bloody royal vampire. My enemy.”
“And now you’re a bloody vampire. And a royal one as my wife.”
“Has anyone seen my damned brother?” asked Friedrich.
Grant marched up at that very moment with Katya and Dmitri. “Miss me already?”
“Thank the stars.” Friedrich scowled. “I hadn’t seen you since that damned queen plagued us with ice-pick hail.”
Grant glanced down at his brother’s missing arm, a severe frown pinching his brow with anger and concern.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” snapped Friedrich. “Don’t you start, too. I’m all right.”
Grant cleared his throat, seeming to swallow his anger. “I only want to know one thing.”
Friedrich rolled his eyes. “What’s that? If I killed the bastard who did this?”
“No.” He shook his head lightly. “How the devil all you vampires look like you’ve been beaten to shit and I’m rosy as a day in spring?”
Friedrich grinned. Marius laughed, then grabbed his injured side with a wince. Grant knew what his brother needed.
Mikhail glanced at his own brother, Dmitri, who knelt beside him. “Do you need a bleeder? They’re kind of on short demand at the moment.”
Mikhail shook his head. “I’ll be fine. Let those worse off get tended to first.”
Dmitri glanced at his blood-soaked stain, scenting the extent of his injuries even though Mikhail’s black attire didn’t show how badly he’d been hurt. The truth was, he was weak. But he’d certainly heal.
“Oh, my dear Katya. Seems you’ve sustained a few injuries as well.” Grant arched a devilish eyebrow at her as he sidled intimately closer. “Brennalyn says I taste awfully good. I’d be more than willing to sacrifice my blood for you.”
Mikhail and Dmitri exchanged a knowing g
lance. She didn’t enjoy the flirting kind of man.
She tilted her head and whispered softly, “If you and I were the last two on Earth, I’d fall into a bloodless sleep before I drank your blood.”
He grinned wider, pulling at a loose leather strap on the harness crossing her chest. “The lady doth protest too much.”
She slapped his hand, vampire swift. “I’m not a lady.” She stormed past him and marched off.
“Perhaps not.” Grant watched her walk away with ardent admiration shining in his expression. “But you are a very fine woman,” he whispered mostly to himself.
“Mikhail!”
He swiveled to the sound of Mina’s sweet voice. She’d donned someone’s heavy cloak, her bare legs and arms exposed as she ran toward him, her eyes still glittering green with the residue of magic. A line of Bloodguard marched behind her, including Gregoravich and Yuri.
She knelt and crushed herself to him. “I was so scared you didn’t make it.”
He buried his head in her hair, inhaling the wondrous scent of sunshine and white jasmine. The scent of joy and passion. And love.
“You’re shaking.” He slipped a hand beneath the cloak, gripping her waist to determine that she was indeed naked beneath. He hauled her onto his lap, snuggling her closer.
She pulled back enough to look in his eyes, her emotions bright on her face. He smiled and wrapped her nape gently, stroking a thumb along her jaw and whispered, “So the white queen wasn’t exactly what we thought, was it?”
She laughed, cupping his face. “No. It was more.”
Without a care for propriety, he melded his mouth to hers, slipping his tongue inside to taste his woman, to remind her she was his and he was hers. He quickly learned that not all parts of him were so injured.
“Ahem.” Marius.
They broke apart and looked at their staring audience.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he continued. “But we couldn’t see everything that happened on the battlements. The ice storm was thick. I need to know…is my mother dead?”
The Emerald Lily Page 28
