Chapter Two
The man barreled into her with all the power of his large, rangy body. Chains smacked her torso as he wrestled to get his hands around her neck.
His stench hit her even harder, and she almost got distracted by the bile that rose in her throat. Instead she crouched, yanking his arm and shoulder and throwing him over her back so his momentum would carry him along.
The chains halted his tumble with a metallic screech. He cursed as his arms were wrenched painfully backward. Alliah, still halfway under his hulking body, found herself trapped between his weight and the limit of his bonds.
She catapulted herself deeper into the cell, closer to his bunk and waste bucket. He slid off of her arched back. She wriggled free. But he was still behind her, and once he regained enough slack in his chain, he’d be difficult to dislodge.
And then they were in more trouble than this horse’s ass realized. If captured, she would be punished, a thrall crystal reinserted. Painfully. Her rebelliousness, the murder of her wizard, noted on her files.
But he would be put down.
“Give me the key,” he bellowed. He slammed into her from behind, taking them both to the ground.
“Gods dammit!” She hit the stone floor, pain lashing her hands and knees, her head far too close to somewhere she never wanted to be.
She wasn’t a weak person, physically, but she did have a weak stomach.
Alliah couldn’t control the heave as she gagged next to the waste bucket. When he realized she was vulnerable, he rolled her to the center of the cell, pinning her against him in a parody of a loving embrace. Her arse landed squarely between his thighs.
His arms wrapped around her. His chains wrapped around her. A leg wrapped around her. Even his beard wrapped around her. His fingers pried at the fist she’d clenched around the iron key. “Give it. To me. And I might let you live.”
The ominous whisper in her ear sent a shiver of fear through her the likes of which she rarely experienced. This man was malnourished, imprisoned, and she, warrior dragon, had been neutralized by him and his waste bucket in under a minute.
Humiliated, she smashed her skull against his face, and his teeth cut into her scalp. He grunted, pulling her tighter. “Stop struggling and give me the key, woman.”
“Torren is dead, you hairy buffoon,” she cursed. The hard muscles and ridges of his body dug into her through her leathers. “Why did you attack me? I was about to unlock your manacles.”
“I know why you’re really here. To seduce me. Admit it.”
He was mad. Truly mad. “You can have the fecking key. I’m done with you.”
She flipped it out of her hand before he could grab it, and it fell into her lap.
“Where did it go?” He leaned against to her cheek, his wretched breath insulting her nasal passages and his beard abrading her skin.
She forced her thighs apart just enough for the key to fall between them. “Let me up and it’s yours. I’ll leave you to it.”
“I don’t think so.” He dragged her hands down and groped for the key without releasing her. He fumbled between her legs, prodding her intimately, and she clamped her thighs together.
His insolent touch scorched her through the leathers. She jerked against his hold, but he sank his teeth into the side of her neck before she could bash her skull into him again.
“Are you fecking kidding me?” she exclaimed. “You’re biting me. I came here to free you, and you’re actually fecking… Hey!”
His teeth dug in, not quite breaking the surface but on the verge of it. If she pulled too hard, too fast, it might rip off some much-needed skin—the area that protected her artery, for example.
To add insult to injury, he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to unlock his manacles. He kept rubbing between her legs, scraping his fingers past her folds, as if he intended to coax her to give him the key another way.
“Stop touching me like that,” she ground out. “Immediately.”
He couldn’t speak with a mouthful of her skin, but she felt him grin. His tongue licked the trapped flesh. She should have thrown the key at him and fled for Earth the minute she’d set eyes on his massive, grimy self lurking in his cell like a troll.
She dug her heels into the dirty stone floor and pushed against him, but she only succeeded in tightening the chains around them both. The metal dug into her, into him, molding them together.
The rat bastard had an erection. Fecking hell.
His low growl echoed through her bones. Furious, she spread her legs to give him better access—to the key. “Take the key right now, and I might let you live.”
His bite on her neck turned into a harsh suckle, as if he were gaining sustenance from her skin. Her blood. She gasped when his fingers pressed…exactly…into her most sensitive place.
It wasn’t as if she’d never taken a lover. Infrequently, it was true, but wizards couldn’t control their dragons at all times. They came together to share their misery and their bodies, to grasp what small pleasure they could during a life of servitude.
She’d always assumed her body would only respond if her affection was somewhat engaged.
Her libido had other ideas.
Her body heated and softened under the dragon’s rude touch, and desire awoke with a sensuous ache. The one that begged for fulfillment.
“Mmmm,” he mumbled against her skin. His beard tickled, itched.
She let out an involuntary moan when he curled his fingertips into her, pushing hard against the leather that separated them. Wriggling her ass against his erection, she spread her legs further apart. If she couldn’t outfight him, she’d handle him another way.
The dragon who’d captured her, who was now caressing her as if she were indeed sent to him as a bribe, inhaled against her neck as if he could smell her need. He released her skin with a sharp pop. “I knew you were sent here to fuck me. It’s a fake key, isn’t it?”
“No,” she whispered as his fingers sought the fastening of her pants. He unbuttoned one button, then another. She wondered desperately how much of a response he could entice from her once he could access her bare skin, but this was not the right time to find out.
The right time was never.
She might feel an unbidden excitement at this man’s touch, but he truly believed her to be a bribe from their dead master. Torren had tortured him mentally, physically, emotionally. Alliah knew this. The other dragon had no real desire for her, nor she for him, and she was no more a slave to her body than she was to a wizard.
Not anymore.
So when he delved deeper between her thighs, his long, thick fingers undoing another button, she clamped tight around his hand and twisted her whole body to the side.
Crack!
The sound of his breaking fingers preceded his startled howl of pain. He released her, in shock and hugging his hand.
“The key is real and you’re a damned fool,” Alliah cursed at him. “Get your arse out of here while you still can.”
For good measure, she kicked him hard in his naked, dirty back before hightailing it up the stairs. The wizards were coming, and she planned to be halfway to Valiant City when they arrived. The shithead in the dungeon could fend for himself.
# # #
Sexually frustrated and in pain, Leo lay on his back a moment and breathed through the throbbing in his broken fingers. He wasn’t sure which part of the situation he’d misread, but having Alliah brutalize him was a new low for Torren. The wizard, to his credit, had not stooped to much physical torture. That hadn’t been the case with other wizards, so Leo had learned to function through the pain.
Nothing stopped him from resisting. To his delight, he could cause the wizards pain when they tried to suck his magic despite the thrall crystal, and he was happy to deliver.
No longer dizzy—or horny—he sat up and eyed the iron key on the floor. His chains dragged across the ground, nearly dislodging the waste bucket. He flipped them out of the way with a grunt.
Could the key be real? Surely not.
But the rapid tattoo of Alliah’s boots up the stairs, never slowing pace, was real enough. She hadn’t wasted a moment escaping his presence once the damage was done. So much for Maurene’s claim Alliah was some kind of guardian, her and Katia, struggling to protect their fellow dragons from Torren. He knew a thing or two about manipulating wizards, and there was no way that cold-faced, implacable soldier of a woman was capable of it.
Had she run all the way back to the wizard like a nice little pet to tell him it hadn’t worked?
With a shrug, Leo rolled over and grabbed the key with his good hand, inserting it into a manacle, because why not?
The band clicked open effortlessly.
Stunned, he eyed the raw skin at his wrist for a long moment before transferring the key to his broken fingers. Pain stabbed him like the tip of Alliah’s boot driving into his back. Hissing, he tightened on it anyway and fumbled at the lock on the other manacle. Not all of the fingers were broken, but enough to be a problem.
But only for dragons who hadn’t learned to handle pain.
The second manacle popped open with a cheery snick.
Leo leapt to his feet, steadied himself against another bout of dizziness, and strode, unhindered, through door of the cell.
Into the hallway outside the cellblock, which was unoccupied aside from him.
Up the first twenty stairs, alert and tense, waiting for Torren and his stolen magic to bear down on him like a bad case of divine wrath.
Fifty more stairs brought him no clues. Nor did fifty more. He tramped through the murky darkness as the rough cylinder Torren had carved with Maurene circled ever upward. Occasional air holes delivered a cold, icy freshness he hadn’t enjoyed in a year, the last time Torren had allowed him aboveground.
Shaky and sweating, he reached the penultimate landing in a fugue of disbelief. His broken fingers throbbed with his heavy heartbeat. His head swam with hunger and thirst. The magical lattice beneath his skin gleamed like a prism as he devoted his energies into climbing instead of hiding it. How close to freedom was Torren going to allow him to come?
Perhaps Torren had learned from Leo about mocking and manipulating during their three years of psychological warfare.
Grimly, he hauled himself up the last segment of stairs, gathered his strength, and burst into the chilly daylight as if he owned this manor house. As if he were the wizard here, not Torren, ready to face whatever games Torren had planned next.
Ready to resist.
The wizard would not be forming a portal with his magic today. Who knew what the psycho would do with it?
Instead he found himself ducking a lightning bolt as a swift white dragon ridden by a wizard who wasn’t Torren rattled overhead.
The lightning struck the hidden access to the dungeon behind him, splintering the river stone foundation of the manor as if it were made of glass. Leo darted out of the way as stones and pieces of wood flew in every direction.
Three more wizards, one without a dragon but draped with talismans like a magic seller, battled in the courtyard, yelling profanities at each other as if curses mattered when they had thunder and lightning at their disposal.
Grey clouds loomed overhead, the snow falling steadily. It did little to muffle the mayhem around the manor house. Wizards had converged on Torren’s property and appeared to be engaged in all-out combat.
“Whatever dragons are left in the manor are mine!” screeched an old man in grey robes. “I am Torren’s closest ally. It is so willed to me.”
“That’s hogwash,” a stout female wizard responded in a booming voice. She was sensibly clad in parka and fur trousers, and her companion was an anxious red dragon in bipedal form, identifiable by the glowing tracery on her peaked face. “Torren had no allies. First to come, first to choose, and I mean to have that little gold for myself.”
The third wizard whipped her hands in a circle. No insults necessary. A tornado of snow and air surged into being, channeling across the ground toward her opponents.
They scattered.
Leo hid behind the small shed that hummed with machinery powered by the magic of the gold dragon. Wires led from it to the manor. As he assessed the situation, he ate some cold, fresh snow, slowly, not allowing himself to gobble it down like he wished. He’d been tortured enough to know what would happen if he did. Lights flickered inside the house, on and off, and a lightning bolt crashed out of a window on the third floor.
Had Alliah been telling the truth?
He risked a glance at the courtyard, where the tornado grew in strength as it churned across the grounds. It sucked up the snow and debris and uncovered dead grass and wreckage. Snow whooshed off a mid-sized mound close to the manor’s entryway, revealing it to be a body.
Torren’s body.
Torren’s headless body.
Leo pressed against the frigid wall and let the coldness of the stone sear some clarity into his shocked brain. His skin stuck to the stone and burned. The new pain steadied him as the truth swept over him without mercy.
Alliah.
Whom he had abused most vilely.
Had been telling the truth.
And now she was gone. Or was she? Was all this happening because she and the others had failed to escape?
Leo’s whole world upended like a cart of manure. Were the other things she’d told him also true? Portals to other worlds? Wizards who would kill him rather than try to compel his cooperation?
He had to get out of here. Fast.
Unsticking himself from the frozen stone with a hiss, he edged around the corner of the power shed and used the twisting, angry tornado of snow to block him from the view of the combatants in the courtyard. A lava ball, hotter and more deadly than mere fire, emerged from somewhere, melting the tornado and blackening the ground where it had been.
Across the now empty space, the three wizards stared at him, shirtless, grungy, hairy, and wild-eyed. He stared back.
And then he ran. His bare feet scarcely felt the ground beneath the snow as he used his long legs to his advantage. He vaguely remembered the layout of Torren’s estate and that a forest loomed behind it. He would hide in the trees. Give the others a chance to escape, and maybe himself, too.
“Come back here, you!” the old man screeched. “Tell us where the dragons are hiding.”
“Where did he come from?” someone exclaimed. “Is that a human or a troll?”
The white dragon from before whizzed overhead. A lightning bolt split the ground where he’d just been. Did the bloody fools want to kill him or get information from him?
“It could be a dragon,” a new voice insisted. “A very bad one.”
“Then we should teach it a lesson,” the white dragon’s rider jeered. Lightning hit a shrubbery near him, and he jinked to the side. Snow threatened to blind him. He leapt over a bench, closing in on the fishpond.
His feet hit the ice, and he skidded, slipping and sliding.
Lava blasted the frozen surface. A giant plume of mist and water jetted into the air, along with Leo’s flailing body. He hit the ground on the other side of the pond with a thud, and something else snapped, something in one of his legs.
No more running.
The white dragon landed, blocking the other three who were hoofing it from the courtyard. Ignoring their threats and shouts, the wizard dismounted and lumbered forward, clutching a bright red talisman in his hand. His saggy face regarded Leo with disgust. “You’re that crystal dragon. The useless one.”
“No,” Leo said. Only years and years of opposition kept his magical tracery from flaring bright and confirming the man’s guess.
The wizard allowed a ball of fire to form around his hand. Leo flung up his arms, blocking what little of himself he could.
“Are you a dragon?” the wizard demanded. His straw-yellow hair draped his skull in a strange sort of helmet, despite the falling snow.
“No!” Leo shouted. “I’m a human. Just a human. I’m nobody.”
The fireball didn’t come—yet. He squinted at the wizard standing halfway around the small pond and leering at him.
“I’m not a dragon, I sweeear.” The wizard lurched his arms in a mockery of Leo’s defensive posture. Fire sputtered around him. “Oh, I’m just a nobody human. Then nobody will miss you when I turn you into steak for my dragons.”
The fireball grew in size, enormous. It coalesced into lava, roiling and terminal. It was so hot Leo could feel it from twenty feet away. The man taunted him—tilted back as if to throw the lava but then didn’t. When Leo tried to scramble away, the wizard barked out a laugh.
There were worse wizards in the world than Torren.
The shouting of the other three was drowned out as Leo realized this man’s laugh would be the last thing he heard before he died.
“Dragons…don’t…eat…sentient creatures,” he snarled, and closed his eyes in defeat as the lava ball arced straight for his face.
Only to splatter against a large, maroon body that swooped down from overhead.
The huge dragon squealed in pain, but reds could endure fire damage better than most anything on Tarakona. Black, scythe-like claws locked around Leo’s battered form, too sharp for comfort, and the dragon thrust itself into the air. Wings beat urgently. Everything was white chaos for a moment before they soared above the manor.
Lightning speared past them. The red dragon dodged. Had yet another wizard sent this dragon in to steal the prize? Something definitely seemed to be afoot as the others launched into pursuit. His eyes streaming with tears, Leo could barely make out several dragons flapping through the falling snow behind them as they arrowed higher, and higher, and higher.
“That bitch is mine!” shouted the nasty wizard on the white.
But the red who’d been in the service of the sensibly-clad lady wizard surged past the white dragon in her own dragon form, using her bulk to smash the smaller beast aside.
The white dragon plummeted, flailing, and lightning bolts blasted from the furious wizard at wild angles. One, two, three…
Number four glanced off the other red dragon, and she, too, hurtled toward the ground with a keening screech.
Now only a blue dragon and a brown flapped gamely behind them. His kidnapper soon outdistanced them. Though the red dragon seemed to be attempting to hold him delicately, the deadly claws cut his flesh. Fortunately, he was too cold and numb to feel the new pain.
Clouds and snow surrounded them, with flashes of red wings. Leo realized he was losing blood in an arc of droplets, like scarlet paint on snow. Whatever wizard had sent this dragon should have instructed it to transport him another way—red dragon claws were razor sharp without sheathing.
On the plus side, it appeared he would be dead before another wizard had a crack at him. That was Leo’s last thought before the whites and greys of the sky faded to black.