Chapter Sixteen
Aria never thought she’d be buying an island. At first she didn’t know where to begin with the island buying process, but it turned out that all one had to do was fly to Greece, meet a soon to be impoverished ex-billionaire, and offer him more gold than he could carry for the title. Simple.
For several months, Aria and the dragons lived a fairly idyllic life on their private island. It was always warm, always sunny, and Aria truly began to believe that this could be it. The war was over, and they were safe. The rebuild was underway, the economy stimulated by all the work there was to do to fix the damage that had been done in the war. Those who had been lost were mourned, and it felt as though there was a new spirit of healing. Humanity had overcome a dangerous foe and as a result there was a global celebration.
Eldor had been working on a version of the portal in order to get the dragons who still desired evacuation home again. He seemed to be making good progress, but Aria and Vyktor did not pay as much attention to his work. Vyktor did not like to so much as think of the possibility of returning to his realm, and Aria didn’t either. The dragon realm was the past. This was the future, sunlit days on an island so remote and so well hidden in a greater archipelago that they would never have to interact with any world other than their own little paradise ever again.
Aria and Vyktor walked hand and hand upon the beach. It took just over two hours to circumnavigate the island, and they made the journey once a day at least. Golden sand coated Aria’s feet, little granules creeping between her toes as she walked barefoot with the man she loved more than life.
They stopped to kiss beneath a palm tree where they often made love to one another. It was their little secluded spot, a place apart from a place. Vyktor no longer wore human clothing, and he had gotten rid of the contact lenses too. Both were stored away in the room they shared deep in the mountain.
“I think…” Aria drew in a deep breath. “I think this is the first time I’ve ever been really happy.”
Vyktor smiled and ran his hands down her back, pulling her close to him. “I believe I know what you mean, pet.”
“Do you miss your realm?”
He looked at her and she knew that the answer must be yes, even as his lips said no. “This is my home now, pet, with you. I can accept that. We have many years ahead of us here. I believe in time that the world will change and perhaps we will not always need to hide. For now, I have you, and this little world we have made together.”
He spoke with such poetic passion that she almost believed him. But deep down, Aria knew that he could not be happy. The dragons yearned to fly, but they could not risk it. Some of the younger ones had been caught sneaking out in the dead of night and wheeling about the islands—something Eldor and Vyktor put a hard stop to once rumors of dragons began to spread through the locals.
Living as hunted creatures was a strain, and it showed in various ways. Eldor in particular had become incredibly reclusive and angry. He would not speak to Aria at all—not that he had spoken to her much when she was their captive, but it was a different kind of silence now, a more contemptuous one.
“I love you, pet,” Vyktor said, lowering his head to kiss her. “And I love our life together. Stop worrying.”
She succumbed to his kiss and let her dragon lover drive all concerns from her mind with his plundering tongue.
Suddenly, Vyktor broke the kiss, leaving her panting against his chest. He looked straight up and at the horizon and she felt every muscle in his body become tense.
“What’s wrong?” She looked up at him with concern.
“I think we should go back to the base,” he said. “Now.”
“Why?” Aria looked in the direction he was staring, but her eyes could not pick out what he was seeing.
“I think we are about to have very unpleasant company.”
“What do you mean?”
He pointed northeast. It took a couple of seconds, but then she saw what had him so worried. A fleet of helicopters were making their way over the open water, and under them, military speedboats fitted with significant artillery.
Aria’s heart began to pound in her chest. Her fingers and toes tingled as adrenaline saturated her body in an instant. “Oh, god,” she gasped. “It’s an invasion!”
“Back to base, pet,” Vyktor said calmly. “We will defend this place as best we can…”
“We won’t be able to defend it. There’s nowhere to hide. They will tear this place apart piece by piece.” She felt her eyes welling with tears. Why couldn’t they just be left alone? None of the dragons had taken the slightest aggressive act in return for the betrayal at the portal.
“They won’t be able to penetrate…”
“Yes, they will. They have bombs capable of tearing through mountains. We will hide in the base like rats and they will tear it open and pull us out.”
“Come. Back to base,” he repeated. “We still have time. They may not know we are here. They may simply be searching.”
They didn’t have time, though. All the time they had was borrowed. They had been out of time from the moment the portal was closed—and Aria knew it, though she had allowed herself to live in denial. But she knew when her time was up, and time was definitely up.
Vyktor didn’t understand that though. Vyktor always thought he could fix everything. It never occurred to him that he could be defeated. He had her by the hand and was urging her up the hill toward one of the hatches. The dragons had worked hard on the rocky island, created a warren inside the hills that would have been inhospitable to your average human—but would be no challenge at all to highly trained marines. He pulled open the hatch and pushed Aria down inside it, then more or less dragged her down to the lower levels of their base, where Eldor and the others were already waiting. Apparently every dragon on the island had detected the problem already.
“So, this is bad,” Aria said, trying for a smile that didn’t work.
“Your military is coming for us,” Eldor said grimly. “There are no fewer than sixteen attack helicopters on their way here.”
“How could they have found us?”
“Satellite? Sonar? Perhaps one of the tourist planes spotted something and reported it? I don’t know. Perhaps we were betrayed.” He looked at her in a very unfriendly fashion and she sank back toward Vyktor.
“Why would I betray you? I helped you escape!”
“Who knows why humans do anything,” Eldor growled. “I don’t care. Fortunately, my machine is operational to some small degree. We are going to open this portal. It’s not stable, but it doesn’t matter anymore. It just needs to open long enough to allow us through. I should have opened it before now but I listened to you, Vyktor, when you said that we would be safe here.” He shot a look of pure poison in Vyktor’s direction, making Aria angry.
“It’s probably your damn portal generator which brought them here,” she said. “I told you, those things suck power. We might have our own generators, but that doesn’t mean the power can’t be detected. This island probably glows on their scanners thanks to all the electromagnetic activity.”
“I had to test it,” Eldor snarled.
“Why?”
“For this very reason,” he growled. “For the day when the humans would come and we would be trapped like rats on this cold rock.”
“You brought them to our door,” Aria told him. “I’m not the one who betrayed us. You are. In your desperation to escape, you have killed us all.”
There was a silence following her words, broken by a growl from Eldor. “Get your pet under control, Vyktor.”
“I don’t think we should open the portal. I think we should stand and we should fight,” Vyktor growled, wrapping his arm around Aria’s shoulders and pulling her away from the increasingly agitated Eldor.
“For what? We could be victorious over these helicopters, but they will send more. They will not let us rest, Vyktor. They will hound us to the very ends of their earth. We must escape. The portal is not stable, but I believe I can power it sufficiently to draw us through.”
“I’m not leaving,” Vyktor declared. “Not without Aria. And I can’t take Aria, so I’m not leaving.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No,” Vyktor said, his expression as intense as Aria had ever seen. “I am not.”
The tension in the room was so thick that Aria almost choked on it. Vyktor and Eldor stared at one another with gazes filled with something close to hate. Eldor’s anger at Vyktor’s insubordination was obvious in every line of his body, and in the clenching of his fists. For his part, Vyktor held his head high and stared the grey-eyed dragon down.
“I will give you one final chance to comply, General,” Eldor insisted. “We do not have any more time to argue, and I do not have any more time to entertain your fantasies of living a human life.”
“And what will you do to stop…”
Vyktor never finished the sentence. One of the other dragons who had been standing behind him lifted a heavy piece of metal and brought it down on the back of his head. Vyktor dropped like a stone and Aria heard herself screaming as he fell unconscious to the floor.
“What are you doing?”
Nobody answered her. They ignored her completely. She tried to rush forward to see if he was okay, but they blocked her with their bodies and her attempts to break through them were useless. They were moving in a way that suggested that they had planned this. Aria watched, stunned at the betrayal unfolding before her as Eldor’s men picked up the unconscious Vyktor.
“What the hell!” Aria stepped forward, putting her hand on Eldor’s arm. “What is this? What are you doing to him?”
“Sorry,” Eldor said. “But Vyktor is too important to leave here, and we will not allow him to die for the sake of his…” he looked at her with a curling lip, “…curious obsession with a human.”
He turned his back on her and started barking orders.
“The portal will be open for less than thirty seconds. Move through quickly. Do not attempt to take your flight form until you have returned to our realm. Ready?”
“Ready!” A chorus of voices answered him.
Aria could not stop them. She did not have the power to overwhelm them, and even if she could have stopped Eldor from opening a portal, to do so would be to sentence Vyktor to death. A small army was descending on their location.
He activated the portal. For a second, nothing happened and Aria was simultaneously happy and horrified. Then a small circle opened in the air. It opened swiftly to around six feet in diameter, and finally Aria got what she had always wanted—to look through and see the world beyond. She saw tall white cliffs populated with great spiraling buildings. She saw a clear sky filled with whirling dragons of all colors and sizes. She saw a world that Vyktor belonged in—and she did not.
The dragons carried Vyktor’s insensate form through the gleaming portal, exiting within the thirty-second window Eldor had mentioned. It was well they did, for the edges of the thing shimmered and then collapsed in on themselves a couple of seconds later.
“Goodbye,” she whispered as the portal closed, leaving the thick stone walls around her and the sound of heavy boots descending down the myriad stairs above.
In a matter of seconds, she was on her own. Betrayed and heartbroken, Aria sank to the floor and sat there. The only small spark of hope she could cling to was the knowledge that Vyktor was alive on the other side of the realm’s divide.
She ached without him. It was an immediate, almost physical pain that paralyzed her. She began to sob floods of tears, filled with grief that made her feel as though her heart was truly breaking. There was a pain in her chest and a hollowness in her stomach that made the world feel sore and sad all at the same time.
Above her, she could hear the military breaking down doors, rummaging through the various rooms and storage places. They would be finding the gold and the jewels. They would be finding all the evidence of her life with the dragons.
Finally, a detonation above her blew the final door open. The sound was enough to temporarily deafen her, and the light from the explosion left her stunned and disoriented as a horde of military flooded down the stairs toward her.
“Where are the fucking dragons!?”
They screamed the questions at her, their weapons pointed at her in terrifying fashion. Grabbed roughly and dragged first up to her feet, then pushed back down to her knees, Aria was certain that she was about to die. These men had come for blood, and it had been denied them.
“They’re gone!”
“Where!?” She was shaken roughly, her teeth chattering as fresh adrenaline flashed through her body. If Vyktor were there, he would have killed every one of these men where they stood, she had no doubt about it.
“Back where they came from!” she screamed back at her interrogator.
“Liar!”
“I’m not lying. They made a portal. They activated it when they heard you coming. And they left.”
“Fuck!” The man questioning her kicked the portal generator hard. “Get this bitch out of here.”
A dark hood was put over her head, her hands were zip-tied behind her back. She’d known from the beginning that if they came for her, it would not be a rescue mission. She was half surprised they hadn’t summarily shot her. Maybe they thought she knew something.
She was dragged up from the ground and roughly manhandled back up the stairs of what had once been her home. Finally, they tossed her into a waiting helicopter. None of them said a word to her, but she could feel derision flowing from those she had once known as comrades. They thought of her as the worst possible thing any person could be: a traitor. Not just to her country, but to her whole species.