Chapter Thirteen
The hour of retreat had come. Vyktor and Aria stood near the perch at the top of the world and watched as the dragons called one another with deep vibrational rumbles. One by one, they filed out of the caves, took their dragon forms, and soared into the sky. The same process was repeated at the other roosts, several columns making their way to the portal.
“It’s not too late to go, Vyktor.” Aria said the words softly as they stood together and watched his kin leave. Her collar was safely back in place around her neck, to her relief. She had felt quite naked without it.
“I will not leave your side,” he promised, wrapping his arm around her to pull her close. He was holding on to her as he watched his people leave and her heart broke for him. In a short while, he would be the last of his kind on the planet. He would never see his home again. And he was doing all of this so that she would not be without him.
“You should go!” She turned to him. “Don’t give everything up for me. Don’t stay here.”
“Aria,” he said, looking down at her with those beautiful golden eyes. “I will not leave you. You mean more to me than the world I left behind. I have lived there all my life. But I have only had a few months with you. I want nothing more, in this world or the next, than more time with you.”
Their mouths met in a passionate kiss. She loved him so much. She loved him more than she could possibly express. More than she had ever known she could love anyone.
Behind them, a sudden flash of light burst across the sky. Following it by a few seconds, a low rumble grew into a roar that threatened to deafen Aria. And then there was the wind, so strong that she could not stand up to it. So strong that she would have been blown off the side of the mountain if not for Vyktor’s arms wrapped around her, drawing her down into the winding tunnels of the dragon’s base.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Either that was the portal closing, or something just went very, very wrong,” Vyktor surmised.
Either way, something had gone very, very wrong. They were over a thousand miles from the portal. The detonation must have caused incredible damage to anything nearer it.
“It almost looked… nuclear,” she said, hoping that she was wrong.
“If they have detonated one of their nuclear weapons, they have made the greatest mistake they could possibly have made. They will have supercharged every dragon in the radius… and killed all of their own kind.”
Aria wanted to say that they wouldn’t have done that, but she wasn’t sure. So many strange and impossible things had already happened in this war. But victory was at hand. Why would anyone take aggressive action now?
Vyktor hustled her to the very heart of the hold, a room so deep in the rock that even a direct strike would not affect it. The dragons had paid close attention to weapons capabilities in their short time on Earth, and had engineered around them in many respects. Aria felt her eyes filling with tears as she sheltered in Vyktor’s arms as he pulled them both down to the floor.
They sat together in that dark place, illuminated only by a single torch.
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to wait,” he said grimly. “If that was the portal closing, we may have nothing to worry about…”
They looked at one another, neither one of them believing for a second that all was well. A sense of foreboding was sinking over them, an inescapable feeling of unease that made Aria hide her face in Vyktor’s chest and hope against hope that they were wrong.
“What if the portal blew up instead of closing?”
“I don’t know,” he murmured, holding her close. “Only time will tell, pet.”
They sat like that for what felt like an hour. Aria stayed buried in Vyktor’s chest, praying for the best.
He lifted his head suddenly. “Something is here. Stay.”
“Vyktor!” She called after him as he rose and left her, but he simply repeated his command.
It took everything in Aria to actually obey him. She wanted to rush up by his side and face whatever was coming, but if their suspicion of radioactive detonation was accurate, doing so would be death. She had to sit there, when every bit of her military training told her to go toward the danger. She had to wait, hoping that whatever Vyktor had sensed was not a danger.
“Aria!”
He called her by her real name, something he did so rarely it sparked her into immediate action. She pushed up from the floor and ran up the winding passages toward the sound of his voice. They met midway. Vyktor had the body of another dragon in his arms—one she did not recognize at first in his battered state.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. Eldor just barely made it back here,” Vyktor growled angrily. “His wings were in shreds.”
She could see the remnants of the damage in Eldor’s human form. He was bruised, bloodied, and broken in a way Aria had never seen a dragon look. She had never much cared for Eldor, but seeing him in that state provoked a spark of protective anger.
“What the hell? Why did they do this?”
“Let’s get him to his bed,” Vyktor said. “He will regenerate over the next few hours, but it will be painful and the process will not be pleasant to watch. Check the reserves for dragon herbs and bring me everything you find. I suspect we will have more wounded.”
Aria had once resisted his every order, but now she was as motivated to follow them as he was to give them. The dragons had not always been kind to her, but she did not want to see anything suffering in the state Eldor was in. She ran to do Vyktor’s bidding, gathering all the supplies she could carry. In short order she returned with an armful of the scented branches and leaves and powders the dragons had brought with them from their world. They were all contained in dark velveteen bags, clasped with gold ties.
Vyktor tied a gag in Eldor’s mouth, both to muffle the screaming and to stop the dragon from damaging his teeth as he gnashed them together.
Aria felt hot tears of frustration as she watched the dragon suffer, feeling helpless. Vyktor took the bags and emptied several of them into a flask of water that he brought to boiling point simply by holding his finger in the water and concentrating for a few moments.
Watching Vyktor, Aria was reminded just how powerful the dragons really were. They could have done so much more damage than what they had. Vyktor had told her in the beginning that if they could not find a way to end the war peaceably, they would turn the world into a charred husk. At the time, she’d thought he was exaggerating for effect. She was no longer so sure.
He steeped the herbs and mixed in the powders, moving with a concentrated focus she respected highly. So many men fell apart when they saw their comrades injured, either erupting into emotion, or retreating into a shell-shocked haze. Vyktor worked with a calm she found almost frightening, knowing what it would surely precede. Someone would pay for this.
“Hold his head up for me,” Vyktor said. “He needs to drink.”
Aria stood behind Eldor and lifted his head in her hands. He was burning hot, and she could feel smears of his blood being left on her skin. God. What had they done? Vyktor pulled the gag out of the wounded man’s mouth and before Eldor could scream, he grabbed Eldor’s lower jaw, held it open, and poured the concoction down his throat.
“Hold him!” Vyktor yelled as Eldor began to thrash against them. It was all Aria could do not to be thrown across the room as the dragon contorted in agony.
“That made it worse!”
Vyktor looked over Eldor’s writhing form and locked eyes with her. “It has to be worse before it can be better.”
The words seared themselves into Aria. Over the next hour, three more dragons landed, all wounded in some way. Aria and Vyktor attended to them with the herbs and listened to their tortured cries as they took effect. The sounds of dragons in pain was not one Aria would ever forget. They were so reluctant to show any kind of discomfort. To see one of the strong beasts whimper like a whelpling was more than she thought she could bear. She did her work with tears in her eyes, blinking them back as she tried to be brave for the wounded.
Over the course of an hour or two, they all began to settle. Eldor was the first to recover enough to speak properly. Though he still looked weak, his wounds seemed less serious than they had been before. These dragons had incredible resilience and an unparalleled ability to heal themselves. It must have something to do with their ability to change shapes—although it obviously did not come without the cost of pain.
“What happened, Eldor?” Vyktor asked the question gently, though his face was a mask of cold anger. Aria felt that same anger burning inside her. “What the hell happened? It was supposed to be a retreat.”
“They were waiting for us,” Eldor said, his dark eyes wet with what might have been tears. “We were on the very verge of leaving this hell realm, but they closed the portal before more than a dozen or so of us could escape. Then they unleashed hellfire upon us. A great explosion which filled the sky and shook us to our bones. The land where the portal once stood is gone. It is a crater in the ground. It is a grave for our men. They killed all but a few of us in their missile fire and their detonations and…” He took a weak breath. “I do not know how many have survived, but I know this place is not safe for long. They had jets in the air before they opened fire. They were holding at a distance and we assumed that they were for human protection, but once the portal closed, they swarmed like flies. We were betrayed.” He breathed a heavy, scratchy sigh. “Your pet sent us to our deaths.”
“What!? No! I only delivered the message,” Aria said, her face pale with the shock of being accused of such deadly treachery. “I wasn’t part of any plan. I didn’t know they were going to do this. I didn’t!”
“If she had betrayed us, she would have to be suicidal to return to us,” Vyktor pointed out. “You are wounded and you are angry, Eldor. But this is not Aria’s fault.”
Eldor gave her a look that cut her to her very soul and made her feel guilty in spite of her innocence.
“I’m sorry this happened,” she said, tearfully gritting her teeth. “I didn’t want this.”
She knew command would be celebrating their actions. If she had never been taken by Vyktor, never learned the true nature of the dragons, she would have celebrated too. But now she felt only deep sadness at the loss of so many great minds and souls. Whoever authorized the strike did not understand what they were doing. So many were dead, so senselessly.
Vyktor had treated her as a pet from the beginning, which he should not have done, but humans looked at dragons as dumb animals to be slaughtered at will. Neither side was blameless, but this latest act of aggression tipped the scales of sin in the human direction.
“Now we are the prisoners,” Eldor said gravely. “Locked in a world we do not understand. Already their planes are hunting us. We will surely die.”
“No.” Aria shook her head. “No. You will live. I’m going to make sure of it. You can pass in your human forms, I think. You’ve just never really tried.”
“But our eyes,” Vyktor said. “As soon as anyone looks at our eyes…”
“Don’t worry about your eyes,” she said. “We can fix that. We can fix anything and everything we have to. You can turn dirt to gold. With that kind of power…” She shook her head. “We can do anything. But…”
“But what, pet?”
“I might have to break the law. A little.” She looked at him under her lashes.
Vyktor gave her a grim ‘do not mess with me now, human,’ look. “Human law, or mine?”
“Oh, human law, of course.”
Vyktor nodded, satisfied. “Not a problem, pet.”
* * *
Vyktor had never been so proud of anyone as he was of Aria. Under pressure, she had been graceful and helped to the best of her ability. And now, her natural sense of justice and some kind of feminine human compassion had made her more than his pet—it had made her his true ally.
Under cover of darkness, Vyktor and the dragons flew down to a quiet little farm town nestled on the far side of the mountains in a place Aria called Montana. There were cultivated fields all over this region of the country, quite pretty in their own way.
Vyktor flew clutching Aria in his talons as he had the very first day he captured her, but this time he was much more concerned with the possibility of dropping her. She was the most precious thing in any world to him, and to have to bring her down from the giddy heights in his hands was more frightening for him than it was for her.
“I could just ride on your back,” she’d suggested before they set off.
“And what if you fall? No,” he’d insisted. “I will keep a firm hold of you, pet.”
In the early hours of the morning, he watched as Aria sneaked into the yard of a human dwelling and picked clothes hanging from an outdoor clothes tree. She visited several places like that, until she had enough clothing to cover them all, including herself.
“I do not like these coverings,” Eldor complained when he was dressed in what she had brought him, a plaid shirt with baggy brown pants. “They are too flimsy and yet too tight.”
“You look good,” Aria encouraged him.
“I want something like you’re wearing,” Eldor insisted.
“Eldor, this is a dress,” Aria explained patiently. “It’s rare for males to wear dresses and it would draw attention to us.”
“In our world, males can wear what they please,” Eldor grunted. Vyktor knew the old man was feeling better. His innate aggravated self was back.
“In our world, dragons who are beggars cannot be choosers,” Aria replied pertly.
“That’s enough, pet,” Vyktor intervened before Eldor’s outrage could peak into some kind of fracas.
She rolled her eyes at him. Vyktor was beginning to realize that he had been wrong about humans. They were actually almost impossible to fully tame. One could seduce them into submission for a short period of time, but their independent will always seemed to reassert itself. Or perhaps a longer training period was necessary.
“I’m going to steal a car,” Aria announced with a grin he didn’t quite like the look of. “We need to get as far from this place as quickly as possible.”