Chapter Two
Aiden stepped out of the portal and checked his surroundings, making certain he hadn’t been spotted. Not that he had to worry about the townsfolk. They might not know exactly what he was and where he came from, but they had secrets of their own and tended to respect the privacy of others. He didn’t see anyone, but the scent of a human put him on high alert.
He’d worry about that in a moment. First, he needed to make sure no one from Tarakona had followed. The portal was located in some forgotten ruins beneath Valiant City, and it was conceivable that what was forgotten could be remembered.
The governing wizard of Valiant Province had, in fact, recently discovered it, and so had some of her cronies. Too many people from Tarakona already knew about the portal for his comfort. Discovery by others could prove disastrous.
Few in his home dimension knew that Earth existed, let alone how to get here. If any of the blasted, power hungry wizards from his dimension discovered this planet, they’d be keen on enslaving its population and stealing its resources—much as they had enslaved his kind back home and relegated humans to second-class citizens. Not that he’d been enslaved, or indentured as they called it. He’d escaped before he could be tagged, stumbling upon the portal by accident and dumb luck.
His sister Nadia hadn’t been so fortunate, and his gut clenched thinking about the horrors she’d endured for over twenty years.
Luckily, his life goal of freeing her had recently been fulfilled. After he’d tracked down the wizard who’d installed her thrall crystal and sent her its location in a secret message, she’d been able to remove it and become untraceable. She’d escaped to Earth, at least temporarily, but had proceeded to fall in love with another damned wizard and join the Dragon Liberation Front. Now she and Prince Dandy Pants thought they could free all the dragons in Tarakona.
He’d tried to convince her she didn’t owe anyone in Tarakona anything, but he’d failed. He’d never been one for crusades, or heroism, or touchy-feely shit. He’d been more of a keep-to-himself survivor type.
Only now he was a keep-to-himself survivor with a sister who was probably going to get herself killed type, and he didn’t like it one bit. He inspected the swirl of the portal, squinting, but nothing happened. He didn’t sense any other presence coming through the portal. It seemed the coast was clear, and he breathed a long sigh of relief. There was little to fear in this world. The witches, sorcerers, and mages on Earth didn’t need to exploit dragons in order to work their magic. No one wanted a piece of him here. He kept to himself and led what passed for a quiet existence. Nobody realized how rare he was.
But if he were pursued from the other side, where the power he could provide a wizard would mean more than fabulous riches?
A shiver ran down his spine at the thought.
He had to find a way to secure the portal—had been trying ever since he’d freed Nadia, but without success. Sure, he held a vast reservoir of magic within him, but Fate, stone cold bitch that she was, hadn’t given him the means to access it. Only a wizard could do that, and on Tarakona there were almost no wizards a silver dragon could trust.
No matter. He’d find a way. Now that Nadia was safe, it was time to reach out to the good people of Magic for help. It wouldn’t be easy for him. Asking for help never had been. But it was the right thing to do, and he resolved to swallow his pride and see it done.
He took a deep breath, willing his body to calm and the magical tracery coursing through his body to cease flaring. There was no need for anxiety. He was safe.
The blast of light hit him out of nowhere and caged him in a mesh of illuminated metal before he could blink. Panic surged through him as he pushed against his prison to no avail. The glowing net sent jolts of pain surging through his body at each point of contact. He’d never encountered such an ingenious—or cruel—snare, not even in Tarakona.
Which meant this insidious trap was the work of someone from the Earth dimension.
Even worse, it was enchanted.
A female voice cut through his haze of pain, rage, and confusion. “Stop! The more you struggle the more it will hurt.”
Fighting agony, he faced his captor.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded. “And what do you think you’re doing?”
The dark-haired woman adjusted her strange glasses. “I’m the one asking questions here, mister.”
She was not what he expected. Unlike most witches and wizards of this dimension—and she had to be a powerful witch to construct the device that had captured him—she wore cargo pants, a white lab coat, and the weirdest pair of glasses he’d ever seen. Her unruly mop of dark hair rested in a messy bun on top of her head, but several strands stuck out at odd angles and made her look like the mad scientists made famous in classic monster movies.
Only she was shorter and had tits. Great ones, actually.
Wait, why was he ogling his captor? Pretty face and great figure aside, he needed to get the hell out of this trap and find out who and what she was. The woman fiddled with dials and buttons on a handheld box, presumably the control for his cage.
Which didn’t add up. Why would she have mechanical controls for a magical prison? That wasn’t how magic worked.
“Take this thing off me,” he said, struggling against the jolts of agony flowing through his body, “It fucking hurts.”
“I’m working on it, and I told you to stop struggling, idiot!”
Man, she was a cruel little witch! Then again, given the way she was squinting and frantically fiddling with the control, it could be that she wasn’t entirely certain how to work the damned thing. Surely not—such a powerful witch couldn’t be that incompetent.
And just because she was a witch didn’t mean she was one of the benevolent citizens of Magic. No one under the protection of Topper, the town’s head witch, would dare torture a fellow magical creature and risk the sanctity of the city. Humans didn’t know about magic—or Magic—here, and that was to everyone’s benefit.
But if a rogue witch were to discover the town and report her findings to the government or military? Or an opposing magical organization that didn’t seek the overall good? Those entities would be all too eager to exploit magic and those who wielded it.
No, he couldn’t allow it. His kind in Tarakona were all slaves. He’d be damned if he let the magical beings of his adopted city fall victim to this traitor of a witch. And if he couldn’t escape, he’d be damned if he let this witch exploit his magic. He didn’t want to use the Elixir of Death, the enchanted poison that would end his life, but he’d carried it with him ever since his first trip back to his dimension. He’d acquired it from the Dragon Liberation Front. It was his insurance in case of capture, much like the cyanide capsules spies and soldiers from this dimension had used when traveling through enemy territory.
Only this poison would also end the life of any wizard who tried to use his magic.
“Did you hear me?” the witch yelled. “Stop struggling while I figure out how to de-electrify the matrix!”
“You mean—damn—” Mental note: do not put a death grip on the electrified grid. When he let go and caught his breath again, he gasped, “You mean you don’t know how to control this thing?”
“Give me a minute, okay?” she said, sounding irritated. “This is my first human trial.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Fuck, that hurts!” Damn it, he hadn’t even touched the cage. The spell she’d cast must respond to aggression.
She looked up then and met his gaze. Her creased brow softened as her eyes went wide and her mouth rounded to form an “o” of surprise, apparent concern, and awe. Before he could read too much into it, she glanced back down and pressed a series of buttons that finally stopped the flow of electricity through his cage. He fell on his ass and breathed in gulps of air as he wiped the sweat from his brow. When he risked another glance at the witch, she’d gone back to staring at him with wide-eyed wonder.
“I am so, so, sorry,” she blurted. “I had no idea the voltage would go that high. I mean, naturally I knew it could, but those aren’t the default settings I put in place, I swear. At least, I don’t think I left it at the maximum setting. I—”
“Let me go,” he said, cutting her off. He hated the desperation in his voice, but she’d put him in a difficult position. He pulled himself off the ground, pressed against the metal lattice, and gave her his most menacing glare. “This is abuse of power and you know it.”
She stopped babbling and scowled. “Abuse of power? You’re one to talk, Mr. Super Soldier, out here guarding some kind of stealth teleportation device from the public. What does it do? Is it a weapon? What if someone accidentally stumbled on it? Where would it take them? This is very irresponsible—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked, incredulous. “You’re the one who’s out here violating the rules of secrecy by trapping me. Who are you working for?”
She cocked her head to the side and appeared to consider, that furrow in her brow back as she examined him with a mixture of wariness and confusion. Like she had any right to be confused. Or was she just acting dumb? Did she think she could play him, get him to spill the secrets of the townsfolk, not to mention his own?
Maybe she was just crazy.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t know what a girl like you is doing out here in the desert—”
“Girl?”
“—spying and playing with dangerous equipment—”
“Did you just call me girl?”
She flipped the switch and sent a jolt of electricity through his body, the little shit. When the world came back into focus, he scowled up at her. “What happened to being ‘sorry’ for hurting me?”
“I’m not a girl, Mr. Super Soldier, I’m a woman and a scientist. And I’m not playing with dangerous equipment. I’m using sophisticated equipment of my own design and manufacture to expose hidden technology disguised as magic so people will stop believing in superstitious nonsense.”
Oh, yeah. Definitely bat shit crazy.
The upside? If she thought he was conspiring with the government to cover up military technology, it stood to reason that she wasn’t actually in league with the government and trying to capture magical creatures. If she was telling the truth, that is. Because how could a witch who was clearly practicing magic not believe in magic?
Not that it mattered. She could still kill him or worse—incapacitate him and ship him off to some nightmare research facility. Escape was his first priority. His second? Making sure this witch didn’t share what she’d witnessed with the wrong people.
“So,” she said primly, smoothing her wild tangle of hair. “Now that we’ve established that I’m the woman in charge here, I want you to tell me what kind of portal you just came through, who created it, and how. I want to see the process and the mechanism. And I want to know what kind of stealth technology is being used to camouflage the town.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but she interrupted him again. “Oh, and I want you to tell me what sort of technology you’ve got embedded in your skin.”
Damn it! She’d noticed the tracery. The enchanted force running beneath his skin marked him as a dragon, a silver dragon, no less. He and his sister were the first silvers born in five millennia and prized for their gifts of prescience, for all the good it actually did them. Only wizards could wield dragon magic, and they did so by draining dragons in their indenture to gain power over other dragons, wizards, and humans in their dimension. The only magic he could wield was the power to shapeshift into his dragon form.
Then again, that power could help him for once, at least in this situation…
He lifted the corners of his lips into a smirk and said, “You want to know about the portal?”
“Yes,” she said, eagerness replacing the faux menace in her gaze. “I want to know everything.”
He should not do this. He should focus on laying low in this dimension. He’d already risked too much by returning to Tarakona so many times to help Nadia. And he’d failed to find a way to close the portal between his dimension and this one. Earth remained vulnerable to Tarakonan wizards—and so did he. But giving this infernal little witch a taste of her own medicine was damned near irresistible.
Besides, he couldn’t very well let her go. She was a threat to Magic.
Smiling wider, he whispered, “Everything? Are you sure you’re ready, that you can handle it?”
She took a step closer to the cage to hear him, just as he’d hoped. “Yes, tell me everything,” she said, wide-eyed and eager for secrets to fill her conspiracy theory-addled mind, no doubt.
Well, there were two big secrets he was ready to reveal. Secrets that would knock her on her sweet, round ass. Not that he was looking.
“The portal is the gateway to another dimension. My dimension. And I am a dragon.”
Before she could scoff, he traded tooth and nail for fang and claw in his fearsome dragon form. The metal lattice of her prison couldn’t withstand the force of his body’s expansion or the sharp slice of his talons. The witch screamed in shock and terror. Even better, she dropped the box that controlled her trap before electrifying it. Not that it mattered. His pain tolerance was greater in this form, as was his temper.
He stretched his great wings, grabbed her with his talon-tipped foreclaws, and took the air with a mighty roar.
***
Torren slipped through the portal and stumbled into an alien landscape, barren save for a few scraps of plant and dry as bone. It was not what he’d expected when he’d tracked the dragon through the ruins beneath Valiant City, but for the chance to capture a silver, any adversity was worth it.
Did the humans in their endless warrens or the governor of Valiant Province even realize there was a whole labyrinth beneath the city?
Though he’d been dragon hunting at the time, this little side quest had become infinitely more interesting when he discovered the hidden portal. Some crystal wizard of immense power must have created and planted it here, far below the city streets. He wouldn’t have realized what it was save for the loud voices and commotion, which he now surmised came from the other side of the portal.
Decaying wood and detritus littered the entrance to the portal room, and the stench of rot was horrid enough to keep even the most curious from venturing further. Strange, glowing moss gleamed on wet rocks. This escape route for dragons was quite cleverly hidden from the province’s ruling wizard, actually. She’d never deign to set an elegant boot in this part of her domain.
But he deigned. And he who deigned…was destined to reign.
His Honor Torren Transom, wizard of some renown, dusted off his fine linen robe and took a deep breath of hot evening air, blessedly free of the foul stench that plagued the slum from whence he’d journeyed. He had no idea where the portal had taken him, but he was certain that he no longer stood in Tarakona. Unlike the crystal magic that simply transported one from place to place, this portal had led him to another plane entirely, one that seemed devoid of intelligent life, at least on the surface.
So what had brought a dragon here? The heat? Not all dragons loved the chilly Tarakonan climate, but they were hardy animals and could bear it. Or had he discovered a secret free dragon enclave, one where he could fulfill his wildest dragon-owning desires. He did have a small stable of indentured dragons already, along with the magic they provided him as tribute for his protection. But a wizard needed more than dragon magic to make his mark in Tarakona. He needed a province, territory, subjects rendered loyal by proper discipline, and the means to stay one step ahead of his enemies. Having none of those things—yet—he’d been forced to swallow pride and revulsion in order to pretend to be a resistance fighter—a member of the treacherous Dragon Liberation Front—that provided him with tips on where to find free dragons.
But the DLF had grown wary when he failed to participate in one too many missions, and he’d had to cut and run. Luckily before he’d run he’d bumped into a man he was ninety-five percent sure was a silver dragon while the tall blond had been purchasing a death potion for emergency use.
And he had tracked that man here.
To this harsh, hot planet.
Torren retrieved one of his ice amulets filled by draining his white dragon and concocted a chill spell for his robes. In Tarakona, one was more likely to need a heat spell, but he was inventive. Coolness blessed him with the ability to concentrate. A sun dragon amulet blessed him with the ability to see.
The ground around the portal exit was extremely scuffed. By animals? By the dragon? The dragon had come through in human form, but there were no footprints. Scrabbling in the bushes indicated small animal life but nothing as large as a silver.
He practically salivated at the thought of a silver in his grasp, even though it was so dry here his tongue felt like kindling. Silver dragons produced the magic of prophecy, and as far as most in Tarakona knew, there was only one silver in existence—a female who had somehow escaped Her Grace Victoria the Valiant, a governing wizard who’d set her sights on conquering all the whole of Tarakona. He’d spied on that female several times, hoping for a chance to steal her, so he knew her human face. Thus he, Torren, skulking around the DLF outpost that day, had recognized the blond man who resembled that female so much he had to be her twin.
Bringing a silver into his service would gift him with the knowledge of where and when to strike a ruling wizard and how to gain control of his or her territory. Once he enthralled this silver into his stable, he’d secure his rightful place among the most powerful wizards in the realm.
And rule them all.
But first he had to find the blasted dragon.
All of a sudden, a roar sounded from above, causing him to seek shelter in a nearby cluster of trees and clasp his iron talisman in fear. He flicked off his light and scanned the sky, and what he saw there caused the corners of his mouth to curl into a smile of triumph.
At last. He’d found his silver.