Ice Dragon's Caress (High House Draconis Book 3)

by Riley Storm

  “They’re going to be expecting us,” Valla pointed out as the dark of yet another forest passed by far below them. “All their defenses will be up, and they will be at their strongest.”

  “So will we,” Victor countered, speaking at last.

  “I just hope it will be enough,” Valla said. “These new vampires, the ones that can shift, they are powerful. And fast. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “They will pay for what they’ve done,” Victor promised.

  You aren’t the only one with a grudge against them, Valla reminded himself. Both of his brothers and their mates had suffered at the hands of the vampires. They would be eager to rid Plymouth Falls, and eventually the world, of this new menace.

  When he’d arrived back at Drakon Keep, bearing the location of the vampire lair and also the news that they had captured Liz, Valla hadn’t been sure what to expect. The flight back had been short, but he’d begun to formulate a plan, one he hoped the vampires wouldn’t be ready for.

  And one I hope we can pull off.

  “Are you ready brothers?” he asked as the hill appeared on the horizon. Lights lit the site and as Valla focused his eyes on the distant rise, he could see figures working on their house.

  “You told me they were, but I didn’t believe it,” Aaric said. “They’re building a house. Like they intend to hang out here. Do they not realize we will just burn it down around them? I will turn it into a raging inferno.”

  “You can’t,” Valla said. “Though I wish you could. But they have others in there. Human Thralls, including Liz’s two guards. If we attack indiscriminately, then innocents will die. That’s not our way.”

  The fire dragon grumbled angrily, but Valla knew he was just expressing a desire, not his course of action. Frankly, a dark part of Valla wondered if it wouldn’t be worth it. Eliminating the vampires would likely save more human lives in the long run than it would kill if they were to do it Aaric’s way.

  They were almost at the house now, their wings easily covering the distance, tirelessly powering the dragons forward at a pace most humans would find astonishing.

  Victor’s snout twisted on the end of his long neck, slowly regarding Valla before his left eye focused on Aaric.

  “We are ready, brother,” Aaric said. “Go deep. Go fast. We will hold them off for as long as we can.”

  “Thank you,” Valla said, and the trio of them swirled upward as they came close, climbing and climbing.

  The other two leveled off, but Valla kept rising, his wings working harder as the air thinned. His dragon lips pulled back as the temperature began to drop, and the moisture on his body began to chill.

  “Come to me,” he rumbled.

  The night sky seemed to shudder around him as he reached out to it. To the cold. His friend.

  “Come to me!” he roared, unleashing a torrent of ice into the sky.

  The air screamed back at him as water froze instantly in an expanding sphere around him. The tiny icicles hung motionless for a split second, turning the area around him into a snowglobe that would have been beautiful if it weren’t for the deadly glint in his eye.

  Then Valla folded his wings in to his sides and plunged from the sky, a vortex of icicles whipping around him as he fell, the living embodiment of the ice storm. Air screamed past, forcing his eyes to close until they were little more than slits.

  Still he fell.

  The scream grew louder and he poured power into his storm as the friction of the fall slowly heated the ice around him. Pulsing waves of absolute cold rushed out from him, refreezing it, dissipating the accumulating heat.

  By now, he was fast approaching the ground, and the people working the site could be seen looking up, many running for cover.

  A mighty roar echoed on his left and right. Valla couldn’t see them, but he knew then that his brothers were out there, ready to strike the instant the enemy revealed themselves.

  The ground rushed up at him. He picked an empty spot, aiming for it.

  At the last second, his wings snapped out wide. Muscles shrieked in protest as his speed abruptly dropped, the air wrenching at tendons and sending pain lancing into his brain.

  Valla simply shunted the pain into his anger and redirected it into the storm around him. Then, as he slowed, he pushed his mind to new limits and started his change midair.

  With a hundred feet to go, he resumed his human form. The ice-vortex whirled mightily as he focused on it, stirring up the air, resisting his fall, slowing him even more. Then he hit the ground, dropping to one knee, fist sinking six inches into the ground.

  The ice storm blasted into the earth around him and blanketed everything. Enthralled men and women screamed as their skin tried to freeze, and the sheer impact of the storm blew everything from its feet.

  Valla didn’t wait around; he was up and running, heading for the underground ramp he’d seen during his approach. It was a wild guess, but it was his only guess.

  Vampires needed protection during the day. They’d adopted a new tactic of wearing protective suits that shielded them from the UV rays, but he was banking on them still relying on their tried and true tactics in some ways.

  They would have their lair underground, at least until the castle-like building on the hill was completed.

  Or so he hoped.

  He charged down the ramp, as above him he heard the shrieks of vampires and the battle roars of his brothers.

  A wave of heat reached him, and he knew he had to hurry. Aaric was a powerful fire dragon, and Victor was no slouch either, but they would be outnumbered, of that he was certain.

  A black fabric tore away from its rod as he plunged into the underground. A vampire rose up to stop him, but Valla didn’t even slow. He picked up the creature and embraced it. A roar tore from his throat, and foot-long spikes of ice erupted from his body, riddling the foe with holes.

  He tossed the wounded thing to the side. None of them would have been fatal to the vampire, but it would need time to recover. More time than it would have this night. Speed was of the essence now, more important even than ensuring the vampire died.

  The only focus for Valla was Liz and getting to her. His child was in danger, as was his mate, and the ice dragon would level the entire lair if needed, to find her, but he hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. In a fight between vampires and dragons, he would need his full powers. A human could easily die if they were caught up in that.

  Another vampire appeared as he ran down a long hallway. This one was ready for him, and as Valla tried to spear it with a spike of ice, it waved a hand in front of it. Shadows caught the ice and shredded it, the white particles a sharp contrast to the darkness that swirled around the creature as if alive.

  In the hands of an old enough vampire though, it very much was.

  “I don’t have time for this,” he said angrily, and charged straight ahead, hoping the reckless move would throw the vampire off-balance.

  The creature backed up as he came on, proving Valla right. He’d had a sneaking suspicion that, though the vampires had been growing in numbers, they would not have much in the way of combat experience. They had been so secretive to the world, that they’d had no chance to hone their skills.

  Valla, on the other hand, had spent the first seven decades of his life fighting in the midst of the last throws of the shifter-mage war, raging since nearly the end of the shifter-vampire war.

  He’d learned a thing or two, and one of them was that in war, your goal is to kill the opponent before he kills you. It didn’t matter how, or what tactics you used. Dead is dead.

  “I challenge you to a duel!” he shouted, skidding to a halt.

  The vampire too came to a stop. He nodded. “Very well. I accept!”

  Duels were a large thing in the paranormal world. They were official, governed, and happened with relative frequency. The loser was often hurt but rarely killed.

  Valla held out his right hand, and a blue-white blade three feet long grew from his
palm, the blade so sharp it practically glinted, even in the dim light of the underground passage.

  Darkness swirled and did the same for the vampire as he summoned the darkness into a tangible weapon.

  The ice dragon closed, and Valla silently apologized to his honor. He looked beyond the vampire where the hallway ended in a T-intersection less than ten feet away. A quick focus of his powers, then Valla went on the offensive.

  His blade clanged as it was stopped by the shadow-sword, the two blades moving so swiftly it would have been but a blur to the human eye.

  The vampire stepped back, and back, until he was right where Valla wanted him.

  “Sorry,” he said, and abruptly thrust both hands out in front of him.

  A wall of ice formed in the blink of an eye and swept down the hallway. The vampire snarled in anger at the use of powers—strictly prohibited during a duel—and hacked at the wall. He would have survived too, if it weren’t for the wall full of icicles sticking straight out that Valla had called into being earlier in the fight.

  The wall hit the vampire and slammed into the earthen wall behind it. The vampire was crushed to a bloody mess in a split second.

  “That’s what you get for touching my mate!” he shouted, rushing to the intersection and stopping. He didn’t know what way to go, and time was growing short.

  “Liz!” he called at the top of his lungs.

  There was silence for a moment, and his hopes fell.

  Then, from the tunnel to his right, it came…

  “Valla? Valla down here!”

  He was off, the ice disappearing behind him, leaving nothing but the flattened corpse to slide to the floor in a pool of mostly dried blood.

  Whatever it takes.

  36

  Skidding to a halt in front of a trio of barred cells, Valla grinned as he saw Liz behind the middle pair, alive, hale and looking nearly untouched.

  “Valla!” she cried, reaching her arms out between the bars.

  “Hi,” he said, coming up, grabbing her arms and sticking his face through to kiss her as best he could. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Better late than never,” she whispered, giving him a half-smile.

  “You know me,” he grinned. “I like to make an entrance.”

  “Yes, yes you do. Though if it’s okay with you, I’d take an exit right about now. I’m ready to be done with this place forever, if you don’t mind,” Liz said.

  He saw some of her fear peeking through then, piercing the façade she was holding over her exterior in an attempt to keep herself together. But she was hovering on the edge. Valla needed to get her out of here, and fast.

  “I should never have let you go,” he said. “I…shit, Liz, there’s so much I need to tell you. That I want to tell you.”

  His mate looked back at him, her eyes like a fine Cognac, the gold barely visible in the low candlelight that flickered everywhere in the lair. Valla was certain he’d never seen a sight quite so beautiful before in his entire life.

  “Breathtaking,” he whispered, more to himself than to anyone.

  “What about the bars?” Liz asked.

  Valla nodded. “Right. Stand back.”

  Liz retreated to the back of her cell as Valla put both his hands on the bars, his eyes closing to half-open as he called upon his powers, summoning them yet again.

  “I’m so sorry you got involved in all this,” he muttered as he worked. “It’s all my fault. I should have sent you away, kept you safe from all this. Instead, I sent you right into their arms, without even realizing it.”

  Liz crossed her arms. “I was just doing my job, Valla. You aren’t going to take responsibility for this one. If anything, I am. I should have just found their address and sent the cops to take a look. But instead, I wanted to find out more, to go glory hunting, to prove to people I’m capable, that I’m able to do things on my own.”

  “Nobody doubts that about you, Liz,” he whispered, the bars frosting over. “Nobody but yourself. But you shouldn’t. Not now, not ever. You’re stronger than you know, and I would be honored, I am honored, to have you around. If only you knew how much.”

  She smiled and started to continue, but Valla wasn’t done.

  “There’s something you need to know. Something I only discovered recently and came to accept even after that.” The bars were growing cooler and cooler to the touch as he poured energy into them. The room’s temperature was dropping, and it plummeted faster as his voice grew stronger. “I didn’t think it possible, but you have proved it at every point, at every turn. You have shown you are better than me, that you are someone I cannot be without.”

  The metal was starting to shake as it struggled to accept more cold, but still, Valla pushed more ice energy into them. They were thick, too thick for him to wrap his fingers all the way around. They needed to be completely and thoroughly frozen to the core beyond anything they had been designed to accept.

  “What are you saying, Valla?” Liz asked, rubbing her hands on her chest to keep warm.

  “I’m saying,” he resumed, his voice growing louder, more confident as he spoke from the heart. “That you are the one for me. The only one, Liz. You are my mate. My everything, the other half to my dragon soul, and the only partner I intend to have for the rest of my life!”

  He finished with a roar and flexed his mighty arms against the bars. The metal groaned and shrieked, and then he ripped the entire cell door from its mooring, sending it crashing down the hallway, taking out a vampire in the process, the cold metal freezing the flesh down to the bone in an instant and snapping one of the creature’s legs off as it fell to the floor.

  “If you’ll have me,” he added in a much quieter voice.

  “Get me out of here, and you can have me in any way you want,” Liz said throatily, rushing to his side where he swept her up in a brief but breath-stealing kiss.

  “I will take much better care of you from here on forward,” he promised, lifting her into his arms and taking off down the corridor at a run, heading back the way he’d come.

  There was a shout from behind him.

  “Stop him!” a youthful voice called.

  “Oh no,” Liz said, shrinking down into his grip. “Run, Valla. Run as fast as you can. Faster than the wind.”

  “Who was that?” he asked, the power of the voice washing over him. “What was that?”

  “That, was an eight-hundred-year-old vampire in the body of an eleven-year-old boy.”

  Valla could feel the shudders from his mate’s body, despite the uneven jolting as they ran. That was how powerful it had been. Whoever the vampire was, he had left Liz scared.

  Part of him wanted to stop and fight, but he didn’t. He ran on. A vampire that old would be too powerful for him to fight. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t risk Liz’s life. Not again.

  “A vampire that old wouldn’t be here without a very, very good reason,” he surmised, talking as he raced back past the crushed vampire and closed in on the exit.

  “He said a lot of things,” Liz said. “I couldn’t make sense of all of them, but maybe you could.”

  “Later,” Valla said. “We’re not out of this yet. We need to link up with the others and get out of here.”

  “Others?” she asked, but the question was rendered moot a moment later as he came to the little chamber right at the entry, to find both Aaric and Victor inside, breathing hard.

  “Brothers,” he said, surprised to find them there. “Is everything okay?”

  Aaric turned to face him, looking troubled.

  “We have a problem.”

  37

  “We have a problem.”

  Her stomach sank. If the dragon shifter was saying that, looking as uncertain as he was, Liz knew it could not be a good thing at all. In fact, she suspected it was bad.

  Very, very bad.

  “Those bat-like things,” Victor said, pausing to take several breaths. “Most bloody powerful vampires I’ve ever come across. And there’s a l
ot of them. Maybe too many. Though with the three of us, we may be able to break out.”

  Liz looked back down the hallway nervously. She wasn’t sure what Victor was talking about, but she knew for certain that if the vampire-child reached them, they were all dead.

  “Whatever is out there,” she said, interrupting the trio, “trust me when I say that you would much rather fight it than the vampire back there.”

  Two heads looked past her down the hallway, then met her eyes. To her surprise, neither of them offered up any sort of protest or question about her words. Liz didn’t know if they could sense the child monster that was approaching, or just see the horror written in her eyes, but they believed her.

  There was a sound near the entrance and Aaric whirled, a blast of fire so hot she had to shield her face rushing up the ramp. Something shrieked at a level so high it made her clap her hands over her ears instead.

  “What do we do, Aaric?” Valla asked, deferring to the older, more experienced dragon.

  “Buy us some time,” the fire dragon responded.

  Valla nodded, took her by the shoulders and kissed her. It was rough, hard, and shook her to her core with a knowledge she hadn’t known before.

  “I love you,” he said, his voice catching.

  Liz wanted to reply, to tell him the same, that she was crazy about him despite everything that had happened, despite her own internal fears and despite her past. She longed to throw herself in his arms, to hear him say everything would be alright.

  Instead, she just nodded. The words caught in her throat. They wouldn’t come out.

  “Kick his ass,” she growled. At least that worked.

  “Oh, I’m not going to fight him,” Valla said, and to her delight, his eyes twinkled. “I’m just going to make him really, really annoyed.”

  She watched, confused by what he meant as Valla stalked over to where the room narrowed to the corridor. He knelt to the ground and ice covered it where he touched it, then rushed down the hallway. She moved closer to watch as he used his powers.

  “I wish I were a dragon,” she heard herself say as the floor rose up, closing the gap between it and the ceiling as the ice grew thicker.