by Viola Grace
“Then, we will have to use the training method that we all learn with.” He stepped away from her and walked across the courtyard. When he was fifty yards away, he turned and nodded briskly as if steeling himself for what he was about to do.
He held his palms together at a right angle and a ball of energy formed. Solar’s eyes widened as she realized what he was going to do, and when the ball came toward her, her reflexes kicked in.
Solar raised her hands to catch the ball, and when she did, the shock sent her tumbling backward to skid to a halt ten feet back.
“Ow.” Grunting, she got to her feet, and she was no sooner facing Denhar than he fired again.
This time, her hands covered themselves in power a moment before the orb struck. She stumbled, and when he fired again, she was ready for him. This time, the orb skittered across her energy shield and ploughed into the ground next to her.
Her power built around her, and when the next six orbs struck her, they shattered on impact.
Haringk appeared at Denhar’s side and handed him a crossbow.
Solar gasped in shock when he calmly aimed at her and pulled the trigger. Time slowed as the bolt came toward her and struck the shield a foot from her body. Her energy field crackled and swirled around her, visible to her for the first time in her life.
Haringk gave Denhar another object, and this time, a bullet came at her, aimed at her thigh. With a reflex entirely new to her, power wrapped around and held the bullet away from her. When she was sure it wasn’t moving, it dropped to the ground. She sat down suddenly with shock zipping through every vein in her body.
“I didn’t know I could do that.” Denhar lowered the gun, returning it to Haringk before walking toward her. “How do you feel?”
She crafted a light orb and shot it at him, striking him in the knee. “You could have warned me.”
He winced and continued to limp toward her.
“Attackers don’t warn you.”
She nodded. “Fair enough. Help me up?” He extended his hand and helped her to her feet. She stood under her own power and slammed into him. He grunted and grabbed her around her hips. “What happened?” She clutched at his shoulders. “I wanted to see if my field would retract when I touched you. Oddly enough, it did.”
His body flared with heat, and some fascinating reactions were occurring in those darkly snug trousers. He cleared his throat and gripped her shoulders, pushing her back. “Are you willing to field test your new skills?”
She blinked as cool air rushed between them.
Something had started to spark between them, and it left her confused when it was stopped before it could get any momentum.
“Of course. My skills are useless if they don’t get a workout. It has been a few days since I chased a human through a portal.” She smiled brightly, but her mind was focussed on the feel of his hands on her hips and his body against hers.
Chapter Eight
She stood next to him as he opened a portal.
“You know where we are going?”
“Oh yes. The queen’s Guards are in charge of monitoring the fabric of space. We noticed the dimensional rifts immediately but were under the assumption that they would close naturally. They did not, and the humans kept coming, so we kept watch.”
“So, we are going in on foot?”
“You can’t fly, and I am rather obvious when I do, so yes, we are going in on foot until we know what we are dealing with.” He looked at her and frowned. “You should wear the armour.”
“What? The portal is open, why should we waste it?”
He snapped the portal shut. “Because we need to take your safety into account. You might not need the armour, but I want you to wear it. Your reflexes might not catch up to the situation in time.”
She grudgingly agreed and stomped back into Denhar’s home. Her leathers were scorched in a few places but generally intact. She folded them neatly and set them aside before slipping into the two-paneled skirt and strapping the armour into place with the buckles on the sides. The collar made wearing her hair loose awkward, so she pinned it up with loose ringlets tumbling in an orderly manner.
Solar turned from side to side, admiring her reflection and the dark glyphs on her skin that signified her lineage. With the knee-high boots and the glow of her own skin, she was perfectly comfortable.
She joined Denhar, and he had changed into his own armour. It wasn’t as striking as hers was, but it made him look dangerous, deadly and devastatingly attractive.
“Before we leave, I want your promise that until I announce you are fully trained, you will remain with me at all times. No punching through rifts and disappearing. I won’t be happy when I find you.” He crossed his arms and scowled at her while he waited for her promise.
She crossed her arms and scowled back. “You will tell me when I am fully trained?”
“I will.”
“Then, yes, I promise not to punch a rift and make a run for it.” She gave him the bright smile that she and her sisters had practiced until it was perfect.
“Good enough.” He waved his arm and opened a rift, taking her hand and leading her through to another world.
The world they stepped into was dark. Night insects were singing in rhythmic harmonies and a glow of light in the shadows pinpointed the human settlement.
“There are over ninety humans here. If we can wake them, shock them, we may be able to make them run.” Denhar began to move slowly through the cover of the scrub and trees.
Solar followed and worked the logistics in her mind. “That will have to be one big rift.”
“It will be. I will reopen their existing hole in the dimensional fabric and hold it wide as we shove them through.”
She chuckled. “It sounds like a plan. Let’s just find out where they are and what the situation is before we do anything to start a stampede.” They crept forward, taking in the arrangement of the tents, the forming houses and the members of the colony on watch. That was definitely a new twist and something she had not run into in the D.A.R.E Project. The men looked military in origin and had peculiar insignias on their suits. They were also more alert than the average colonist, Solar grabbed Denhar’s arm and whispered to him, “This isn’t right.”
“Right or not, they need to go.” He got to his feet, extended his hands and started a fire at their edge of the colony. At the same time, he opened a rift at the other end.
Solar took the hint and used her own growing talent to start the wood on fire, furthest from the exit. With the blaze under their control, they herded the humans into the rift. Two-thirds of the people grabbed their families and ran. Ten men tried to fight the blaze, and in their fight, Solar was able to grab them one by one and carry them bodily to the rift in the cover of billowing smoke.
The military men were on the lookout for the attackers and occasionally fired a little too close for comfort.
Solar kept control of her radiation as she snuck up on one male after another, held their heads back and shoved them into the rift back to Earth.
The military men were still looking for their attackers, but the moment that Denhar shifted into his dragon form, they had a target.
Bullets, blasts of light and balls of fire lit the night.
Solar took a safe vantage point and used weak power orbs to knock the men through the open rift. When less than a handful remained and most of the ammunition had been used up, she stepped forward with her shield up and kept firing the power orbs.
Keep back, Solar. They are dangerous.
I know that better than you do. I lived with them—
She didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence. A scream broke from her throat as she was pierced by a bolt. She looked down in shock, and a chain was attached to the glowing metal protruding from her arm. The man on the other end of the chain gave her a harsh yank, and she stumbled forward with another scream.
By this method, she was pulled through the rift along with the retreating military men. Her pain was pushed asi
de by her shock when she didn’t recognize the place she had been hauled to.
The platform she was on was the centre of a buzzing, gathering of lab workers, more men in uniform and several scowling administrators in addition to the shocked colonists.
“General, we have one of the Project clones.”
“Blow the rift.” A man with dark eyes and a darker expression looked down at her. “My, my. I have heard of your kind but never seen one. Mr. Winthrop will enjoy seeing you.” Solar made a show of trying to stand, but she remained slouched on the floor. Two men lifted her with no consideration for her shoulder and carried her to a holding room where her hands were cuffed to the table. She could break the cuffs, heck, she could melt the cuffs, but first, she wanted to meet this Mr. Winthrop.
She wasn’t kept waiting long.
“Well, well. One of the Project clones. I never thought to see one of you in person, but here you are. Now, why are you here?” Mr. Winthrop was a tall, thin man, but his suit fit him perfectly. In human society, his aspect said he had money and power.
“Your men shot me and dragged me through the rift.” She jerked her head toward the bolt still in her shoulder.
“But why were you at our little colony? There is no file for you to chase, no coordinates for you to follow, and I heard that one of you actually blew up the underground lab where they had been keeping you. That wasn’t nice.” He made a tsking noise with his mouth.
She didn’t speak.
“Answer me. You will answer or you will learn how it feels to have that bolt removed millimeter by millimeter.”
“The Dimensional Arrest Retrieval and Extraction assignment did not disappear when the lab did. It was what we are and what we must do.”
“Well, you don’t work for me. We don’t care if the world shatters into bits, we just want to get to safety, and my clients are willing to pay for the privilege. I am running a business here, clone, and you and yours are not going to get in the way.”
“We will do what we must do to save Earth and the connected dimensions. When one fails, the rest will soon follow.”
He smiled, and it was not a pleasant smile. “I don’t care. I will be moving to a pleasant little island dimension soon, and when I do, I will live out my life before the cascade catches up to it. Once I am dead, why would I care what happens to the rest of the universe?”
Her shock was palpable, but a feeling behind her was familiar.
She melted her cuffs and the bolt in her shoulder. “Thank you, you have told me enough. Goodbye, Mr. Winthrop.”
A dragon’s hand appeared in the reflection she could see ahead of her, and she stepped back and into Denhar’s grasp. He closed his claw carefully and pulled her back to the smoke-filled world now devoid of humanity.
What happened? They pulled you through and the rift closed.
They have tech to blow the rifts shut. They just don’t use it much, I am guessing.
I smell blood.
There is still a hole in my shoulder. I think I need a medic.
I will get us home and take care of it.
She nodded, but he was already flying to get a good angle on a sky-born rift. Great beats of his wings echoed the slow pounding of her heart as they went from night on an alien world to the bright sun of Denhar’s home.
Solar pulled in all the power she could, but while it kept her awake, it could not heal the wound slowly seeping blood.
Denhar shifted and held her in his arms, rushing up the stairs to the room. He unbuckled her breastplate and removed her collar. She lay bare from the waist up in his arms and he wasn’t even looking at her naked skin. His gaze was on the jagged wound in her back. “I have heard that this hurts.”
It was all the warning that she got as he applied his mouth to her wound and fire cascaded into her blood. Instead of pain, there was a sharp intensity to the contact that caused an involuntary moan to break from her lips. His breath was hot, and his tongue licked at her skin until the pain disappeared. To her shock, he flipped her to her back and repeated the same treatment.
Her skin was sensitive, the marks on her body pounded with a pulse of power, and her hips shifted restlessly. When he lifted his mouth from her, she sighed and slumped into the bedding. She had been so close to something, and she didn’t even know what it was. All she knew was that she was so frustrated, she wanted to cry.
“Does it feel better?”
She wanted to scream no, but instead, she nodded her head. “Thank you.”
“Good. You are now under house arrest. There is a rift restrictor on the walls, so you are not going anywhere again until I am sure that your shields will be up at all times. You could have been killed.”
She nodded. “There was something about that bolt. They were ready for me, and that is more distressing than what I learned while they introduced me to their organizer.”
“What was that?” He may have been oblivious before, but his reaction to her naked torso was starting to make itself obvious.
“The humans are no longer content to explore or to return for the safety of their species. There is a new type of human out here, and they are living for themselves alone. They buy their place on a new world and live content in the knowledge that the dimensional collapse will not happen on that world in their lifetime.”
Denhar sat back and rubbed his forehead.
“Bastards.”
To make sure he understood, she summed it up. “They are aware of us, they are heavily armed and they don’t ever want to go home.”
Chapter Nine
Two days. She was left thinking about what she had learned for two days. Solar was beyond frustrated when her arm was able to move without any pain, and Denhar still kept her locked in her room with only Haringk bringing in one meal at a time and removing traces of the previous one.
Denhar came to her at night so that she wouldn’t have to sleep alone, but it was beyond frustrating that he disappeared before she woke every morning. The heat of his body was still in the sheets, but he was gone.
Frankly, she was lonely.
Haringk brought her books and a history of dragons, but the words on the page reluctantly yielded their secrets as she struggled to teach herself a language she had never been exposed to before.
She saw her mother’s name and stared at the page until the words made sense.
And the lovely Eiwyn came to court and hid from the Dragon King in plain sight. Eventually, her power called to his, and he summoned the great seer to his chamber for a private reading of his future. He laughed for two weeks straight after that consultation, but even when he took other ladies to his bed, his thoughts always returned to the sombre seer.
Eventually, he cursed a vivid streak and demanded Eiwyn’s body as mate.
To everyone’s surprise, she agreed on one condition, that he forgive her once and completely if she should ask it of him. The condition was bound by blood and sealed with power.
The Dragon King had his bride, and she had her promise.
After their union, a courtier asked what had made the Dragon King laugh for so long. He smiled and said,
“The seer promised me a clutch of daughters. Twenty of them born on the same day. How could any male not be amused by such a prediction?” It ceased to be funny the day the Queen disappeared and the King began to descend into madness in his eagerness to retrieve his wife.
--Raykiss, court recorder
Solar knew what happened next. Her mother had slipped away from her father and deliberately fallen into the clutches of the humans. They had taken her four eggs and split them in an experiment, shocked when each one split into five viable embryos that grew in synthetic chambers until they were decanted. Naturally conceived clones. Twenty daughters for the dragon king in one day, just as the seer predicted.
Solar rubbed at her forehead and wished that she had spent more time letting Mother install a knowledge of dragon script. Once they had learned what they were and they had left the confinement of the lab,
there was no reason to embrace the knowledge of the dragons. Solar had just left very little time for her to commune with Mother.
She set the leather-bound book back on the pile, and she stared at the door. It was fine for Denhar to try to keep her safe, but this confinement was over. She went to the door and placed her hand on the lowest hinge, melting it into a puddle on the stone floor. She went up, and in few minutes, the hinges were gone and she was free.
Solar heard voices, and she crept out of her room on bare feet, wearing only a simple wrap in black and gold. She followed the sound and came to the door of Denhar’s private study. It was open a crack, and she peered inside, blinking as she saw four other men standing on low platforms. Their bodies were almost transparent, so she recognized them as projections. Denhar was on his own platform, and he ran a hand through his hair. “She is adjusting to the power, but I am not sure what else to do if she insists on rushing into battle.” A lean, elegant male smiled. “The answer is simple, either join her in battle or get her pregnant.”
Solar decided that she didn’t like that man.
One of the others sighed. “Their mother chose us for them, but I think rushing them into a pregnancy is not the answer. They need their freedom. They have not had it until now, and the worlds are still new to them. They need to feel life and know that they can blend with it.” Denhar nodded. “Solar has said as much. I still have trouble imagining her family line and what the queen went through to get them here.” The solemn male said, “She did as she foresaw. It was her destiny, and soon, she will be returned to us. We will have our duty once again as the Star Guard. When we take on that charge, the princesses will need to be able to manage on their own while we are called, whether or not they accompany us.”
The male she didn’t like smirked, “Well, it is good that we have almost concluded our discussion. We have an audience.” Denhar turned casually and nodded to her.
“Good afternoon, Solar. I was wondering what was taking you so long.”
She pushed the door open and walked into the study. “I was reluctant to damage the door. Who are they?”
