Fire Heart: A Dragon Fantasy Romance (The Dragon of Umbra Book 1)

by Emma Hamm

  So she tilted her head and peered up at him through eyes already swollen.

  Zander, the Umbral King, watched her with his head tilted to the side. He’d already pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hands clean of her blood. The stains bloomed like roses underneath his touch. “When I first took the throne, I thought maybe I could talk to your people. Listen to your concerns. And when I did, I realized all your troubles were petty and small. Your lands were gone. No one listened to your opinions. You were here first.”

  He pulled one hand free from the white fabric and pinched his fingers together like a duck’s bill, mouthing words in a mocking gesture. “We want our ancestral lands back. You can’t build there. The fairies believe that site is sacred. Blah, blah, blah. Your vision is so limited that you would stop progress simply because you want to preserve history when history is still being written.”

  A wall of Umbral Knights appeared behind him. More than the original ten that had been sent to drag her to the dungeon.

  The King ground his foot against her back one more time before lifting his weight off her. Lore heaved in a lungful of air, fighting to stay conscious.

  “Anyway,” he continued, as though he hadn’t just beaten her within an inch of her life. “I realized then and there that my father was right about you lot. All you want is to stay in the same place forever, and I want to move forward. You’re standing in my way.”

  The Umbral Knights pulled her up by the shoulders, forcing her to stand in front of the King.

  Even limp as she was, Lore still spat a mouthful of blood at his feet. “History makes us who we are. If you forget the past, then you become the past.”

  “Fancy words for a dead woman.” He waved a hand, and the Umbral Knights dragged her back down the hall. Toward the dungeon.

  Toward her doom.

  Lorelei didn’t drag her feet this time. She had tried her best to escape, as any honorable warrior would do, and she had failed. Namely because she’d underestimated her opponent, and she was surprised.

  The King was supposed to be a figurehead of luxury and sloth. He’d given none of the rebellion the impression that he also knew how to fight, or that there was a single drop of strength in the man.

  They’d all been wrong. They had all been fooled into thinking their jobs would be easy to kill this man.

  Perhaps Margaret had known. The elven warrior couldn’t have not seen the hard edge in the King’s eye. The edge that Lorelei had taken as a man who was spoiled and unkind, but not a man who knew how to battle. Margaret should have known. She had seen more warriors and battle than any other elf Lore knew.

  And if Margaret had known the King could fight, then she had sent Lore into battle without the proper tools. Without the knowledge she needed to stay safe and alive.

  The King had beaten her so easily. The Umbral Knights brought her to those darkened doors, but she hardly noticed that they’d arrived. Instead, she lingered in the dark recesses of her own mind. She’d been beaten.

  Her feet dragged on the stone floor as they shoved her toward the same cell they’d placed her in before. Belatedly, she realized that someone had occupied the cell since she’d been there. Blood stained the floor in the corner and no one had attempted to clean it up.

  The Umbral Knights threw her into the cell and locked the door quickly, as if even the magic inside them was terrified she’d try another escape.

  If she wasn’t in so much pain, she might have warned them that she was finished with her escape attempts. Finished with her theatrics as well.

  Lore knew when she’d lost. She knew when there was nothing more for her to do but sit and wait.

  Elves were good at that. Her mother had trained her long ago to sit in the middle of a meadow and watch a flower unfurl until the very end of the night. As though the waiting was part of them.

  Lore never understood what she was waiting for, but the older she got, the more she thought it wasn’t that she was waiting for something to happen or someone to come. She was merely waiting for the next heartbeat to pass. In essence, she was waiting for herself.

  She folded her body in the center of the cell, tucking her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on the bony parts of them. No one would come for her here. No one had come for the others, so why would she think she was any different?

  A gnarled hand slid through the bars. His nails had grown longer since she’d last been in this dungeon. But the soft smile on his face, the one that said he still believed in her, that hadn’t budged.

  “It’s all right,” he murmured, his deep voice echoing through the dungeon. “You aren’t the first to try, lass.”

  “I’m the first to have been sent by the rebellion,” she replied. “I’m the first to get so close and to fail so spectacularly, all because a stupid girl heard something that she shouldn’t. Careless, all of it. I was so careless, and I was so close.”

  “It’s not about the completion of the job, but the message you sent. Your story will travel throughout Umbra. To the far reaches of Lux Brumalis to the southern shore of Solis Occasum. The heroic attempt of a single elf to kill the King will soar over the Stygian Peaks and sink into the Fields of Somber. You did what no one else has attempted for years.”

  A few other prisoners shuffled to the front of their cages. They grasped the bars in their fingers and she saw a hunger in their eyes that hadn’t been there before. They wanted to be released. They wanted to fight, and they hadn’t wanted that in a very long time.

  She met their gazes, one by one. “But none of that story will leave this place. No one will ever know what I did because the King will never speak a word of it. He’ll kill anyone who tries.”

  The prisoner directly across from her moved out of the shadows. He had once been a leshy like Borovoi, one of the last of his kind. She’d thought they were all gone, but apparently, she’d been wrong about a lot of things.

  The pale wraith stretched his closed fist forward and, in what could be the last of his magic, he uncurled his fingers in a flourish. A single moth opened and closed its wings. Words decorated the pale, velvet soft appendages. Lore saw her own name written on them before it took flight. She watched as it floated up toward the ceiling, clung to a crack in the stone, and wiggled free.

  “Let the sun rise,” the leshy said, then disappeared into the darkness once more.

  Lore wished she felt the power of the phrase still. She wished she could believe in the message that it held.

  But she still stared into the shadows and whispered, “Let the sun rise.”

  Chapter 31

  Abraxas

  Abraxas had never tried to sneak through the castle before. The realization baffled him, considering how little he trusted the King and all the people who served him. But Abraxas had never been in a situation where it was dangerous for him to be seen.

  He was the King’s dragon. Who would dare attack him?

  Now, he didn’t want to find out. The Umbral Knights were an extension of the King. The power that animated them would likely report to Zander that the dragon was no longer in his cave. And though he was a powerful being and very large, the Umbral Knights were many. They knew how to attack a dragon; he was certain of that. They’d been made to keep their king safe, after all.

  Zander’s father hadn’t been foolish. He’d seen the writing on the wall that eventually Abraxas might decide this journey wasn’t worth the pain and suffering. The King could die. Abraxas would die with him, but not immediately.

  So he pressed his back against the shadows in the corridors and watched the Umbral Knights pass. He tried his very best to not capture their attention and shockingly, he managed.

  A quiet thrum in his chest urged him to tell Lorelei how he’d learned from her. She was more suited to this kind of work. Sneaking throughout the castle and hiding in every nook and cranny. His body was built for heavier stuff. While she was a dagger in the night, he was a blunt hammer ready to bash skulls.

&n
bsp; Apparently, she’d taught him how to be more than that. And it showed.

  The dungeon was so close he could smell the rank air billowing out of the door. As he watched from his hiding place, the King exited the black doors. Zander wiped his hands on a bloody cloth and muttered something to an Umbral Knight who trailed after him.

  The doors were still open. The creaking hinges would give him away if he tried to open it, so now was his only chance. He needed to distract the Knights guarding it, however, or the doors would close and then his plan would get very messy very quickly.

  He glanced around, but the only object at hand was a candlestick a maid must have left on the windowsill. But, as he reached for it, his hand paused. A bright light glimmered on the other side of the window. A sparkling, tiny woman who tapped on the glass to get his attention.

  He frowned, narrowing his eyes and trying to understand what he was looking at. Was that a pixie? They were supposed to be far away from the castle, or the King would put them in a tiny bottle.

  Then it dawned on him that a long while ago, Lore had let out one of those pixies. And apparently, the little creature had stuck around.

  Abraxas opened the latch of the window and cracked it open just enough for the pixie to enter the room. She landed on his hand, her entire body still burning with light. He’d never seen someone so delicate. Her wings had the tiniest hint of veins where the light darkened at the edges.

  She frantically pointed at the Knights and then herself.

  “Are you going to help me, little one?” He stared down at the brave creature in his hand. “I need to get to her, even if she’s in the dungeons.”

  Again, the pixie pointed to the Knights.

  “Distract them, and I’ll sneak into the dungeons.” Abraxas gave her a quick nod, but then held his opposite hand above her head to prevent her from flying off. “But I haven’t thought about how to get out of the dungeon yet. Any guesses?”

  If he saw through the glow correctly, she gave him a look that said how unimpressed she was. Darting around his hand, the pixie headed off toward the Knights.

  It didn’t take much. They saw a free flying pixie in the castle and they knew what to do. Both of the Knights in front of the dungeon took off after her, their armor clanking noisily as they tried their best to snap their metal gloves around her like a cage.

  He lurched out of the shadows and tried to run to the dungeon. Quietly, he reminded himself. But he was a big man and quiet wasn’t his specialty. He was lucky the pixie had showed up when she did, or he’d never have slid into the dungeon without being caught.

  Abraxas made his way down the coiling stairwell, hand on the wall, heart thundering in his chest. What would he find in the darkness here? Obviously plenty of the other prisoners, but he hoped that she was still alive. That he wasn’t too late.

  His soul screamed at the mere idea that he might find her dead on the dirty stone floor. She was too precious to him already. Abraxas wasn’t all that sure he’d survive finding her like that.

  The other prisoners shifted, some of them staring at him with hatred in their eyes. He couldn’t blame them. He’d been the one to put many of these creatures into those cells, and no begging or kind words would ever make them forgive him.

  Abraxas didn’t search for their forgiveness, though. He was only here for one reason, and one alone.

  The last cell held the elf that made his heart skip a beat and then resume its ragged thumping. She sat cross legged in the center of the cell, her face already swollen and bruised, but alive. She was alive.

  He stopped in front of her cell, completely and utterly undone. The sight of her like this?

  He wanted to destroy this entire castle. He would rip it down stone by stone if that’s what he had to do to find whatever bastard had dared lay a finger on her. To touch her. Already fire burned in his chest and his nails elongated into wicked claws. He wanted to burst into his dragon form and raze this entire building to the ground.

  But first... First, he had to make sure she was okay.

  “Lore?” he breathed, wrapping his fingers around the bars of her cell. “Lore, please tell me you’re alive.”

  She opened a single swollen eyelid. The other had stuck together with dried blood. The whites of her eye were red and bloodshot. Her fingernails were dirty with earth and what he suspected was someone else’s blood. But she still smiled when she saw him, and that nearly sent him to his knees.

  “Abraxas. Didn’t I tell you not to get involved with all this? The King will kill you too if he sees you in here.”

  “Fuck the King,” he snarled. “Did he do this to you?”

  The laugh that spilled from her lips was dark and horrible. “In a way. Yes, he was the one to lay his hands on me, but it was the rebellion who sent me here. It was a lifetime of hatred from mortals that locked me in this cell. It was a decade of pain and solitude that put me on Margaret’s list to begin with. How many people hurt me, Abraxas? A hundred? A thousand? So many mortals who hate us, and want to see us dead.”

  He slid down, sitting on the floor outside her cell with his face pressed against the bars. “You can’t think like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Your decisions didn’t lead you to this place. Countless innocents didn’t send you to your doom. This is all from the machinations of one evil man who passed that poisonous hate down to his son.” Abraxas truly believed that. He couldn’t allow himself to think for even a moment that the people of this kingdom were the real problem. They were honest and true. He had seen it before.

  Or at least, he thought he had. Long ago, when the dragons had still flown through the skies.

  “You’ve never lived in the city, Abraxas. You’ve never seen what I have.” She shifted, working hard to pull her legs from the cross legged position, though she had to pull her legs free with her hands. “Listen to me. The rebellion is not what it once was. Why else would they send me here? Alone? And then to attack the castle while I was still in it...”

  “There’s more here than either of us know.” He reached his arm through the bars, keeping his hand outstretched for her to take. “I wish I could tell you everything, and maybe you could help me piece it together. I wish you had seen what I did. But Lore... Lore, please. Just stay with me.”

  For a second, he thought she would give up. Her lost expression was one he’d seen before on the faces of prisoners who remained in this place. It was the face of a woman who had forgotten why she had come here. She didn’t care about the meaning anymore. All she felt was the pain.

  Abraxas gestured with his hand, hoping she would trust him. “Lore. You’re letting him get inside your head. This is exactly what he wants. He wants you to feel weak and to think that no one else in this world is going to want you or listen to you. But I’m telling you now, Lady of Starlight, that is not true.”

  The King was a master at mincing his words so that people would believe whatever he said. Was that what had happened in this cell? Though she was still alive, his gut twisted with the fear that it might be too late.

  But Lore sighed and dragged herself across the floor. Inch by inch, until she tucked her tiny fingers against the wide strength of his palm. “You’re just as good at getting in my head, dragon.”

  “Good,” he replied. Relief tinged his words with too much emotion, but he didn’t care. “Good, I think we both need that.”

  She looked up at him with those blue sea eyes and his heart shattered into a million pieces. Lore watched him as though he had the answers, and could fix all the broken things in her life, but he didn’t know how. He didn’t know how to be that hero who broke her out of this cell and carried her away to a far off land. To a place where no one would hunt her or her people.

  That place no longer existed.

  “I don’t know where the keys are,” he whispered.

  “The King keeps them on his person, right next to his heart.” She shook her head, but he saw the tears in her eyes. “He said he did
n’t trust anyone with them. Not even an Umbral Knight.”

  “And his plan for you?” Abraxas had a sick guess at what the King wanted to do. But he had to hear her say the words. He needed to know the man he’d served had really fallen so far.

  Lore’s throat bobbed in a thick swallow. “He plans to sacrifice me at the wedding. He’s going to announce his new bride, and then he’s going to show the entire kingdom what happens when a creature tries to rise against him. The idea of a martyr in his kingdom is not one he’s willing to entertain, so he wants to be sure the message is truly sent out. He claims that message will be crystal clear when my head hits the ground.”

  His stomach dropped. Of course, that was Zander’s plan. The boy didn’t know how to end any fight other than with anger and pain. Zander’s father had always wanted to hurt people, and thus, the boy had become the spitting image of that evil man.

  He searched for the words that would make this right. He tried his damnedest to think of something that would ease her torment and fear. But he couldn’t. He only knew that she shivered like a leaf, her hand clutching his as though it were her lifeline.

  Abraxas put his shoulder against hers through the bars, holding her up with their hands intertwined between them. “Has anyone ever told you about the Castle of the Lost?”

  The question was so strange, so unusual and unexpected, that it knocked her right out of the fear. Lore stirred, her brows drawn down in a deep frown. “Are you going to tell me a children’s story?”

  “So you have heard of it.” Abraxas felt his chest squeeze with deep pleasure. “It’s not a children’s story. It was the home of the dragons years ago, long before you were born. I have only seen it once, but it was the great nesting grounds where all dragons were born. Long, long ago.”

  He didn’t know if this would help distract her, but he had to do something.

  Abraxas looked at her, at the lost expression on her face, and he felt as though he had failed somehow. As though he would never be the same if he couldn’t put back the broken pieces she desperately needed mended.