by Cara Bristol
I love. But what’s to prevent others from claiming it?
I am a prince; you are a princess. No one will dare invade our space. What else can I fix for you?
Nothing. You’re the best. I love you.
I love you, mate.
The dragon landed at the base of the temple steps. After releasing Rhianna from its claws, it lowered its head and whuffed, stirring her hair with a puff of smokey cinnamon-scented breath. She gazed into familiar, loving yellow eyes, reached up, and scratched the dragon behind a horn. Its thumping tail could have taken out a pillar if they’d been close enough.
“That’s a good boy,” she said.
It purred and then shifted into K’ev. “How about me?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.
“You’re a good boy, too.” She kissed him and then handed him his clothes.
“Do you want me to go in with you?” he asked as he dressed.
“No, I’ll be fine. Besides, I think I’m supposed to go alone.”
Rhianna often visited the temple. This morning, she’d awakened with Helena’s impending arrival weighing on her mind. She couldn’t forget the betrayal by the woman she’d once considered her best friend. As the day wore on, the urgency to visit the temple continued to grow until she realized she was being summoned by the priestess herself.
The guardians let her pass, and she headed into the sanctuary. The first time she’d seen the Eternal Fyre, she’d wondered how an unfueled flame could hover in midair. She could go insane trying to figure it out, so she’d come to accept it as one of the mysteries of life. The sacred fyre was life.
“I am a part of the sacred fyre,” Rhianna murmured.
“Yes, you are, my daughter,” said the priestess.
Another mystery—how the priestess could appear and disappear. Poof! She was here. Poof! She was gone.
Though technically her great, great, many times great-grandmother, the priestess called Rhianna daughter. However, unlike the Draconians, whom she also referred to as her children, Rhianna was her fyre descendant.
The priestess resembled a beautiful human woman, but she was all dragon—temper and vengeance cloaked by civility. Rhianna had seen her spit a fireball at the king while in woman form. As usual, she appeared in a white gown with a long train, most of its length being her thick, snow-white hair. “What brings you to the temple?” the priestess asked.
“You, I suspect,” Rhianna answered with a smile.
“You are happy with Prince K’ev?”
“Of course I’m happy with K’ev! Why would you ask?”
“And you are content living on Draco?”
“Yes. And I will be happy on Elementa, too. Wherever K’ev is, I will be ecstatic.”
“Then perhaps you will be able to forgive.”
“Forg—oh. Is this about Helena?”
The priestess said nothing. Rarely did she deign to answer questions, although she often indulged Rhianna. Not today.
“She lied to me. I trusted her, and she betrayed me.” You could understand when an enemy struck at you, but when a friend did it, the offense was that much greater. Although the same age, Helena had adopted a big sister, protector role. Tears pricked at Rhianna’s eyes. The betrayal still hurt.
“Does not the outcome mitigate the means? You are here. You are happy.”
“No, the end does not justify the means,” Rhianna retorted. “Did you forgive those who forced you to leave your daughter?” Inside, she quaked at her audacity, but she lifted her chin. I am part dragon. She would not back down or show fear. Nor would she forgive.
“I killed them,” the priestess admitted.
The sacred flame flared in a spray of sparks, and Rhianna jumped back.
“Their acts were unforgiveable. But who is to say what might have been different if I had allowed them to live? They were explorers, scientists curious about the galaxy.” Her hair swept the marble as the priestess circled the Eternal Fyre. “Would Draco have waited 10,000 years to contact Earth again? Would we be engaged in this standoff now? Would my children have returned to me sooner? Those are questions even I cannot know the answers to.”
“So you’re saying you killed your shipmates, and maybe you shouldn’t have, but I should be more forgiving?” Do as I say, not as I do?
The priestess stopped on the other side of the flame. “I feel you, Rhianna. I feel the flickers of the fyres of all my children. Dragons aren’t perfect. We are temperamental, hotheaded, aggressive, and domineering. But we love passionately and eternally. Think of those whom you love and what they mean to you.”
The sacred fyre flashed bright, and then the priestess was gone.
* * * *
“You were in there a long time. I started to worry. What happened?” K’ev said.
“She wants me to forgive Helena.”
“That’s that, then.”
“It wasn’t an order. More like a suggestion,” Rhianna said.
“The priestess rarely interferes in non-temple matters, but when she does, she couches her edicts as recommendations. Make no mistake—it’s still an edict,” he warned.
“She doesn’t recommend to King K’rah. She tells him outright what to do.”
“Because my father is too hard headed to recognize anything but a direct order.”
“So you think I should forgive her, too? She set me up. Tricked me. Her father almost killed you.”
“I would hate to be judged by the acts of my father,” he said. “Whether you forgive her is up to you. All I’m saying is the priestess knows things others do not.”
“Maybe she wasn’t referring to Helena. I assumed she was, but she never mentioned her by name. I asked, but she didn’t answer.”
When King K’rah had demanded Earth send the president’s daughter to become T’mar’s consort, she never expected the president to agree and had pegged Helena as too much of a coward to come on her own. But if she’d found some courage, perhaps she’d discovered some ethics, too.
“Maybe we need to wait for a sign—or another summons,” K’ev said.
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all morning.”
“I have a better one.” In demiforma, he didn’t have eyebrows, but he managed to waggle where they might have been. Cinnamon musk wafted off him, and, in her mind’s eye, she got a vision of them wrestling in bed. The bite mark and her pussy throbbed.
“Are you ready to return to the palace?” he asked.
She smiled. “Take me.”
* * * *
The priestess permitted herself a small, prideful smile. Her daughter was willful and stubborn as she had been many millennia ago. She had tried to guide her, but now she had to let Rhianna find her way. You will make mistakes, daughter mine, but you will learn. Her daughter had intelligence, compassion, and courage.
Enough courage to challenge me. Some would call it foolhardiness. No one, not even King K’rah, who, unlike Rhianna, required a lot of guidance—would dare to question her.
Rhianna had the facts but not the context of what happened after O’ne returned to Draco.
The priestess didn’t regret her role in the demise of those who had taken her daughter. But killing O’ne? She wept for what she had been. What she might have become. A dragoness with the freedom to fly, to explore the galaxy, to love…
Draconians looked down upon humans and their primitive ways, but the fleeting time she’d spent on the planet had been the best time of her life. A novice, not yet a priestess, she’d been just another dragon to her fellow passengers, and they’d treated her as such. Of course, their lack of foresight had led them to repudiate her daughter as an abomination.
Until then, she’d been undecided whether to accept the responsibility of protecting the Eternal Fyre. Once they’d torn her daughter from her arms, the decision had been easy. She’d severed all connection to O’ne, transformed into the priestess, and extinguished the fyres of every single dragon responsible for the loss of her child. Instead of protecting the sacred flame, she’d
desecrated it.
She gazed into the Eternal Fyre, feeling the flicker of every individual. They were all her children, these proud, fierce, vengeful dragons. Was it wrong to love one more than another? To favor the ones from Earth? The flickers of O’ne’s own fyre?
Not if I do my duty.
O’ne and all her wants and desires were supposed to be dead. The priestess had no right to seek comfort for herself, to desire, to crave. Her sole purpose, the reason for her existence, was to protect the Eternal Fyre, and by doing so, the lives of every single Draconian. Even if it meant she had to kill one of her children.
Chapter Eighteen
Biggs firmly believed in delegation, enabling him to pull strings while keeping his hands clean. Some critical matters, however, had to be dealt with personally because you couldn’t trust anyone. Not 100 percent anyway.
Which his contact had proven by failing to check in, necessitating a surprise visit to Elementa.
He slipped into a hazmat suit, settled the hood over his head, and then switched on the respirator. After the pump hissed reassuring it was working, he tapped his chest comm. “Ready to disembark,” he signaled the bridge.
“Roger,” the captain replied. “The colonists are sending a team to meet you outside the habitat.”
The inner airlock sealed to keep the toxic air from flooding the ship, the gangway lowered, and he stepped onto alien soil. Starlight filtered through a hazy sky ablaze with swashes of scarlet, orange, and yellow, the brilliant background transforming the towers of rock into dark silhouettes. The planet presented a stark landscape as dangerous as it was beautiful. The air was toxic to humans, the native fauna venomous, and the ground unstable. Volcanic eruptions occurred daily. Fissures could crack open at any time.
If it wasn’t for the metals and other compounds that would afford the country military superiority over every other nation, he’d say, let the fucking space lizards have the goddamn planet.
No, he wouldn’t.
He stepped away from the spacecraft and headed for the human habitat about a half mile away. He would never relinquish the planet to the space lizards because they desired it.
If he had the power to do so, he’d wipe the galaxy clean of every single dragon. That wasn’t feasible—at least not yet—but eliminating their leader was possible. Cut off the head of the snake, and the organism died, right? Take out King K’rah and his royal court, and their society would crash into chaos. Aggressive, temperamental beasts, the dragons would turn on each other.
He didn’t know why the lizards wanted Elementa so much, only that for them, the hostile, dangerous planet was a line in the sand. Of course, its volcanic geology suited the fire-breathing space reptiles, but the burning in his gut hinted there was more to it.
With an automatic, deep revulsion, he loathed Draconians as much or more than people hated snakes or spiders. If venomous alien serpents came to Earth, would you befriend them? Invite them into your home? Take them to meet schoolchildren? Hell, no! Yet, that was how officials had acted when the space lizards arrived. He couldn’t believe it when scores of nations had enacted treaties with Draco.
In horror, he’d watched on television with the rest of the world as Prince K’ev had toured Earth, feted by fawning leaders and common citizens alike. Before the world went completely insane, he had to prevent further incursion.
In an incredible, almost fated—not that he believed in fate—fortuitous happenstance, his nation’s space exploration arm had discovered Elementa and its wealth of noble metals. Biggs’ company bought the mining rights. The nation staked a flag, established a small colony, and began extracting metals.
And shit hit the fan. Draco broke off the alliances and threatened to attack if the settlers didn’t vacate. He knew then they had something the dragons desperately needed. Earth had leverage. Biggs had leverage. With a state of emergency declared, normal government operations and procedures had been suspended, and he’d been able to solidify his power. He played on another hunch, albeit a risky one, that the two planets would not come to war.
He’d been proven right when King K’rah blinked first by asking for the president’s daughter to become his son’s concubine. The idea of a filthy space lizard, touching, let alone copulating with any human repulsed him, but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to cut the head off the lizard. He’d planned to send a doppelgänger implanted with a bomb, and at the right moment—boom! Except the president’s stupid bimbo daughter warned Rhianna. He didn’t know how, but again, his gut told him she had.
He’d salvaged the plan. Helena was on her way to Draco, giving him a second shot at the king.
Seismic rumbles vibrated through his heavy boots, but encountering a dragon worried him more than earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. The protective hood cut off his peripheral vision, so he swiveled his head to keep watch. Lately, colonists had reported an increase of Draconian ships to and from Elementa.
He patted his holstered weapon. The laser scythe could take the head off a dragon in a single swipe, according to the manufacturer. It had been tested on models but not real live dragons. Still, it was the best weapon available. Bullets bounced off their thorny hides. Bombs worked, but he had no intention of blowing himself up to kill one of them.
Normally he never would have set foot on Elementa, but when his contact failed to check in, he’d decided a surprise visit might be in order. Only the operations manager had been informed he’d be arriving. Besides putting a little fear into his contact, it wouldn’t hurt to see Elementa for himself, maybe figure out why Draco wanted it, meet face-to-face with the colonists, and visit the site where his brother had died.
The ground shook, and he picked up the pace. A fissure. A goddamn fissure. He pictured his brother jumping into the gap then falling, falling… Why, Bobby, why? Where did the self-hate come from? Why couldn’t you embrace what you were?
The biodomes came into view. Nearly five hundred people lived and worked there.
The weekly reports included at least one death a week from a toxic bite, a torn hazmat suit, a cave-in. A few colonists had been killed in spontaneous volcanic eruptions. Stepping outside the habitat was akin to playing Russian roulette. Given enough time, something on the planet would get you. Staying inside didn’t guarantee safety, either. The glass resisted heat and fire, but it couldn’t withstand a protracted barrage if dragons decided to torch it.
Thus far, only three fatalities could be attributed to a dragon attack, and those had occurred when Rhianna had dropped in unexpectedly. Mistaking her for a dragon, the jumpy colonists had shot at her. Prince K’ev had retaliated, killing two colonists outright. A third later died from his burns.
Biggs’ mining company paid colonists an astronomical salary, but attrition was still a revolving door. A new group no sooner got installed and trained, and another exodus occurred.
He thumped his chest and swallowed the acid lighting a fire in his throat. Damn reflux. He should see a doctor. He couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t suffered some heartburn, but lately it had gotten worse.
He’d drawn close enough to the habitat to spy workers scurrying about their business. The reports always included colonists’ complaints of feeling exposed in the transparent structure, but the glass, made from Elementa sand, resisted heat better than anything they had. Manufacturers tried darkening it by adding metals and dyes, but it always cooled clear. So he turned a deaf ear to the complaints because, in the end, what was more important? Feeling safe or being safe?
A lone person in a hazmat suit exited the compound.
Idiot! You can’t fix stupid. This man had just gotten his ass fired. He hoped the approaching stranger wasn’t his operations manager because, other than this stupid stunt, the guy had done a competent job. But rule number one: no one leaves the habitat alone. No exceptions. It didn’t matter who you were, how brief the time, or how short the distance. Minimum requirement was a group of three. If you went outside to take a piss, you still had to b
ring two people with you. Not that anyone did that. Of course, being in a group of three hadn’t saved the men who’d shot at Rhianna, but at least one of them had lived long enough to tell them what had happened.
“Who are you, and what the hell are you doing out here alone?” he snapped.
“Is that any way to say hello, Jackie?”
The voice! Nobody called him Jackie, or Jack or Jackson, except for…no, it couldn’t be… “Bobby?” No. Impossible.
“The one and only.”
The flame in his gut surged up into his throat. “My brother is dead! Who the fuck are you?”
The man unhooked the latches and pulled off the hood.
“Jesus Christ! Bobby! They told me you were dead!”
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” his brother joked.
Biggs stumbled forward and grabbed his brother in a bear hug. With the thick protective suits, he could hardly get his arms around him. Bobby was alive! A weight of a thousand pounds lifted from his shoulders. He could float away on the elation he felt. And, just as quickly, anger ignited. Somebody, most likely multiple somebodies, had fucked up by reporting his brother had committed suicide. Did they have any idea of the hell they’d put him through? Heads would roll.
But for now, he had Bobby. He slapped his brother on the back and froze. Where was the breathing apparatus? Oh, fuck, the hood! Biggs shoved him away.
“Your hood! Put it on!” Shit, where was it? The protective head-and-face covering had vanished. Bobby had had it in his hand after removing it. Biggs scanned the ground.
“I don’t need a hood,” his brother said.
“Are you crazy? The air will kill you!” Before he finished the sentence, Bobby began to bleed. A single red drop slid from the corner of his eye. Then another. And another.
“We have to get you inside. Now!” They were fifty yards from the habitat, a ten-second sprint. He could hold his breath that long. “Take my hood.” He started to unlatch it.
“I’m sorry, Jackie. I’m so very sorry.” Scarlet tears rained from his brother’s eyes, sizzling on his face, burning into his flesh.
