CHAPTER 17
Loke slowly became aware that he was no longer in his cave. The brightness of the room surrounding him was blinding even through his closed eyelids. He squinted to shut the white light out and covered his eyes with his forearm as he waited for his senses to gradually come back. The darkness was a relief, immediate and sweet, but it didn’t soothe his heart.
It ached in his chest, burning fiercely for some reason unknown to him. He struggled to remember what had happened. He recalled bathing and pondering how to approach Anais about her being his fated one.
He remembered sensing that she was in danger.
He groaned. He remembered the demon brute using his weakness against him and knocking him out.
He needed to see that she was safe. His every instinct roared at him to protect her.
He peeled his arm away from his closed eyes and grimaced as the brightness assaulted them again. Long minutes passed, strained seconds in which he forced himself to wait for his eyes to become more accustomed to the high light level before he dared to open them. The last thing he needed was to blind himself when he was in an unfamiliar location.
What place in Hell was this?
He had never seen so much light, not even in the elf kingdom. He had dared to fly close to their borders once to see their paradise. The light that had bathed the green land had been bright, but not blinding. Not like this.
He drew in a deep breath of air that tasted strange and risked opening his eyes.
White surrounded him. Piercing and painful.
He grunted and squinted again, narrowing his eyes to the point that he could just about see out of them. The pain lessened and he muttered a ripe curse when he swung his gaze around his surroundings.
Three white walls and one open side. A cube barely twenty feet across. He rolled off the bench against the back wall where he lay and staggered onto his feet. His knees gave out and he almost hit the floor, stopping himself by shooting his hand out to his right and grasping the smooth wall there. He used it as a support as he stumbled forwards, towards the open side of the cell. There was a corridor and another cell across it from his. Empty.
He needed to investigate.
Loke reached the open side and walked straight into an invisible obstruction, cracking his head on it. He grimaced and growled, and rubbed his forehead. What strange power was this?
He carefully reached out, his heart hammering against his chest as his hand neared the point where a barrier had stopped him. He gasped as his palm touched it. It felt solid and cold beneath his fingers, but gave him no pain.
He stepped closer to it and angled his head, looking along the length of it. It shone, reflecting the light filling the room, and distorted the corridor. He dropped his gaze to his bare feet and raised an eyebrow. There was a gully in the floor where the barrier was, around five inches wide. In the ceiling, there was another gully, this one dark but light enough that he could make out metal attached to the barrier.
“What is this magic?” he muttered to himself in the dragon tongue.
“It’s called glass, Dumbass.” Came a male voice from Loke’s right.
It was muffled by the barriers between them but he could make out the words, and the fact the male had spoken Loke’s language. Well, everything apart from the final word. Loke wasn’t sure what a dumbass was, but he presumed it was rude and meant to be derogatory.
“Are you dragon?” He couldn’t scent the male through the walls and the object the male had called glass.
Loke had heard of glass, but he had never seen it.
Apparently, it was difficult to see.
He rapped his knuckles against it and it sounded as solid as it had felt when he had walked into it.
“Nope.” The male voice was louder now. Had he moved closer? “Not a dragon… but it helps in my line of business if you know your languages.”
He wanted to know more about the male, sure that he would be able to help him understand where he was and what was happening.
“Where am I?” Loke leaned his back against the wall, using it for support as his head turned again and his legs trembled beneath him.
Something was wrong.
He should have been growing stronger and recovering from the blows the demon had dealt, but he felt as if he was growing weaker.
“A complex filled with bastards. From the twittering I’ve heard during the past day, they’re quite excited about you.”
Excited about him? A complex?
“Where is Anais?” Because he needed to see her and know she was alright.
He tried to peer along the corridor to his right and see into the other cells, but the glass made it impossible. The only cell he could see was the empty one opposite him. Was she in one of the other cells, waiting for him to help her?
“She a dragon too?”
Loke shook his head and then remembered the male couldn’t see him. “She is mortal.”
The male didn’t answer him and an unsettling feeling went through Loke, a sensation that she had done something terrible to him.
She had betrayed him.
She had allowed Sable and the king of demons to capture him and she had placed him into this cell. Why? He sank down the wall, landing on his backside with his leather-clad knees against his bare chest, all hope and warmth fading from him and leaving him cold inside. He stared at the wall opposite, struggling to comprehend what she had done.
She had feelings for him. Didn’t she?
Had it all been a lie?
She was a hunter of immortals.
Had she been playing him the whole time?
She had used her feminine wiles to grow close to him and he had told her about his kin. He had given her information that she could use against them. What had he done?
A more resilient fragment of his heart told him to believe that this hadn’t all been a game to her and it had been real for both of them. It told him that she was in one of the other cells, waiting for him to save her and take her home to his cave.
It was difficult to cling to that belief when anger began to burn within him, devouring the chilling cold with white-hot fire that demanded he find her and hear the truth from her. He would escape this cell, track her down and make her confess what she had done and why.
Loke pressed his right hand to the glass again. It was strong, but fragile. If he shifted, the pressure of his larger form trying to fit into the small space would fracture or shatter it, allowing him to escape. Being so confined during a shift would hurt him too, but it was his only option.
He called on his other form.
Nothing happened.
Loke rose onto his feet and tried again, and met with the same result. Failure. He couldn’t shift. Was it some form of magic inside the cell that was stopping him?
He focused on it, detecting no magic in the air or in the walls and glass. There was no barrier preventing him from shifting. He turned his focus inwards, seeking the source of the restriction, fearing it was something they had done to him.
His eyes slowly widened.
The restriction came from within, but it was nothing Anais had done.
Only one place could bind his powers in this way.
One realm.
The forbidden land.
She had taken him to the mortal realm.
He shook his head and staggered backwards, breathing hard as the white walls closed in on him and he fought for air. He couldn’t be here. No dragon could survive in the mortal realm since they had been banished long before he had been born. Dread filled him, sucking the air from his lungs and leaving him shaking as he realised the weakness he was experiencing was because the laws of the banishment were already in effect.
It had stripped the power to shift from him and now it was stripping his strength.
He threw his head back and roared, the ferocity of it rattling the glass.
He had to escape.
He ran at the barrier and slammed his right shoulder into it, intent on still breaking it by force. Pain splintered across his shoulder and down his arm. It didn’t stop him. He drove into it again, battering it and himself at the same time. Agony ripped through him and he snarled as he hit it a third time. He stumbled back a step and pressed his hand to where he had struck. Blood smeared across the glass but beneath it was perfect. Not even a scratch.
He unleashed another roar of fury and clawed at the glass, trying to dig his way through. His nails ached, threatening to rip away from their soft beds as he desperately fought the vile glass holding him in his cell.
“Loke!” Her soft voice didn’t soothe him as it travelled down the corridor.
Neither did the sight of her as she stopped in front of his cell, dressed in a fresh black t-shirt and trousers, her blonde hair tied in a long ponytail.
He bared his fangs at her and hammered his fists against the glass, growling the whole time. He would get to her, and when he did, she would pay for what she had done to him.
The pain in his heart burned fiercely, tearing him apart. She had told him of her sister and how she protected her niece and her brother-in-law from Archangel. It hurt that she fought so hard to protect her family, but had handed him over to the fiends she worked for. He had thought he meant something to her.
He battled the part of him that screamed that she had betrayed him and had played him, and everything had been a lie. He didn’t want to believe it, because it hurt too much, more than anything he had been through before.
He had never experienced such pain.
It felt as if he was dying.
“Stop!” She pressed her hands to the glass, her blue eyes imploring him, and for a heartbeat he swore she was hurting and he could feel it.
She quickly looked off to her right and snatched her hands away from the glass as she backed off. The emotions drained from her face and her eyes, leaving them blank.
He snarled at the two males dressed in white who appeared in view and stopped near her. Too close to her. His mate. She feared these males. Every instinct he possessed told him that.
He would eliminate them for her.
No.
He dragged his hands from the bloodied glass and shook his head as he backed off, his eyes locked on her. She had betrayed him. She was with her people now. Her fear was another lie. A fabrication designed to make him lower his guard for some nefarious reason. He couldn’t allow himself to be duped by her again. He needed to remain distant from her and clearheaded, and focus on his escape.
“Loke… you know where you are?” She stepped forwards and he backed off another one. The hurt returned to her eyes, briefly flickering amidst the blue before she schooled her expression again.
“I am where I cannot be. Your world.” He shifted his gaze to the two males. Scientists. Both wore a look that told him of their intentions. There was too much fascination in it. Too much pleasure and desire. They wanted to study him. He lowered his gaze and fought a crippling wave of nausea as it crashed over him. When it receded, he felt weaker. He could feel his life draining from him. He whispered to his bare feet, “I cannot be here.”
“We just need information so we can help our friends.”
“I gave you information,” he snarled, pinning her with a black look, and she averted her gaze. “I gave you all I could… I took you from that battle to save you… to stop the death that awaited you… and in doing so I have condemned myself.”
Her eyes shot up to meet his and she frowned. “What do you mean?”
The fear returned to her expression and she didn’t attempt to hide it from her comrades this time. She approached the glass and pressed her hands to it.
“Loke… what do you mean?” Her eyes pleaded him to answer.
So he did, because he wanted to see her hurt. He needed to see it so he could begin to believe again that what they had shared had been real. He ached to know that she felt something for him and seeing him caged upset her.
“This place is killing me. It will be my death. I cannot be in this realm.”
“No.” Her hands flattened against the glass as she leaned into it, as if bracing herself against a terrible blow. A blow her eyes confirmed as tears lined them. She swallowed hard and her voice was strained as she spoke. “They just want to see.”
“See what?” He tossed a glare at the two males. If it was his insides they wanted to see, they would pay for the pleasure of attempting it with their lives.
“Your dragon. They will release you if you let them see you in your dragon form.” She believed that. He could see it in her eyes.
She was fooling herself.
The males in the white coats had a different look in their eyes, a glint that warned they wanted to do more than just see.
“Show them, Loke.” She pressed closer to the glass. “They’ll release you if you show them.”
Her feelings ran through him, her fear a driving force that demanded he do as she asked to relieve her and steal her pain away. Dread slithered through his veins and icy claws sank deep into his heart as he realised that he had lived for six thousand years dreaming of the mortal realm and his life was going to end because he had been brought to it. He wasn’t even going to get to see it. All he would know of it was a cell and the torture chamber of two scientists.
He had always imagined the mortal realm to be a sort of paradise.
He had been wrong.
It was Hell.
A Hell far worse than the one he lived in and called home.
The two males looked as if they were losing patience and Anais seemed to sense it because the tears in her eyes trembled on the brink of falling from her lashes.
“I cannot.” Those two words leaving his lips seemed to deal another terrible blow to her and she paled, her eyes growing enormous as she shook her head and sent tears tumbling down her cheeks.
“You can,” she said and her expression shifted, turning resolute, even when he could feel the hope draining from her. “Change or they will make you. Please, Loke. Just change and then they will let you go.”
It touched him that she clearly didn’t want them to hurt him and rekindled his faith in her, adding fuel to it so it grew stronger and could finally stand against the part of his heart that insisted she had betrayed him.
He walked on unsteady legs to the glass.
To her.
He pressed his hands to the barrier where hers were on the other side, wishing he could touch her and could feel the soft warmth of her skin against his again. He ached with a need to dash away her tears for her and reassure her somehow, but he wouldn’t lie to her.
Loke looked down into her eyes. “I would shift if I could… but I cannot.”
She shook her head.
He smiled faintly.
“No dragon can shift in this realm.”