Chapter 19
Flynn sensed the seizure coming before he saw it. Kira’s body arched out of her chair, Ashley’s hands glued to her shoulders, blue magic with spikes of white crackling around them.
His lion roared. “Bring her back!” he shouted. “Dammit, Ashley, bring her back!”
“She can’t!” Israel yelled. “That damned Al-Maddeiri magic has them both. They’re trapped in there…”
He was out of his chair, running around the table, but the magic knocked him back. Ashley’s hands began to smoke.
Fuck it all. Flynn lunged for Kira. The magic grabbed at his, pulled him in, roaring around him. He felt himself sliding into darkness…
Oh hell no.
He held on to her, held onto himself. “Kira! Kira, get out of there. Come back. Come back now!”
He could feel her stirring, trying to go toward the sound of his voice, but she couldn’t fight her way through the pain. Flynn did the only thing he could think of. He seized the back of her neck and his lips crashed into hers, beseeching and demanding.
Kira gasped in a breath, her mouth opening under his. She seizure released her and she slammed back into her chair. Ashley jerked her hands away from Kira, stumbling back, and Israel was there, wrapping his arms around her.
Flynn was still holding Kira, blue fire crackling around them both. There were wounds in her arms, her upper chest, bleeding through her shirt. As he watched, they closed up, healing over, even the blood burned away by the magic.
He heard Israel cursing, and turned to see him holding Ashley’s hands. The palms were burned, and Israel covered them carefully with his own hands, light streaming out of the Dragonstone in his palm.
Fuck. It took a lot to burn a fire dragon.
As he watched, the burns healed over.
Israel glared at Flynn, as if this were all his fault. “What the hell was that?” he demanded.
“That,” Flynn said, “is what we’re dealing with. Whatever magic the goddamned Al-Maddeiri bound up inside her his trying to break out. She can’t control it. And it’s getting stronger.”
Kira said, “I thought us being together was helping control the magic.”
“Yeah. We can all see how well that worked out.”
Fuck it all to hell. He should have followed his first instinct and left her alone. Being with him wasn’t helping her. It was just feeding the magic.
Israel echoed his thoughts. “It’s not controlling it. It’s amplifying it.”
“That’s what it’s designed to do,” Harrison said. “The two of them together, their union amplifying the magic, until they bond for good and the sorcerer who bound the magic unbinds it, and it goes out into all the Al-Maddeiri.”
Flynn snarled, “Except we don’t know the bonding ritual, we don’t have the fucking sorcerer, and the Al-Maddeiri are all dead, so there’s nowhere for it to go.” He looked around the room. “Anyone have any useful fucking thoughts on that?”
Kira said, “Why don’t we all sit down and have a drink?”
Flynn was fuming, but he got out a bottle of whiskey and poured shots all around. It did calm him down, a little, and it gave everyone else time to calm down too.
Israel said, “Did you have a vision? Did you see anything useful?”
Flynn didn’t fucking care if they saw anything useful. He cared that the two of them had almost burned up in a maelstrom of magic.
But Kira cared about the vision. He held her hand while she talked, because she needed him to, even though he really wanted to kick everyone out, wrap her up in soft cotton padding and put her somewhere where she could never be hurt again.
And he knew she wouldn’t be the woman he cared about if she let him, which made him want to throw fragile things at the wall and hear them smash.
“It wasn’t a vision this time, exactly,” she said. “I found the woman. I was in the lab. Except…I was inside her body.” Her voice grew hard. “I felt what she felt.”
Damn it all to hell. That’s what those wounds were. The places all those tubes and wires were attached to her.
“I was there too,” Ashley said. “There was a set of wooden doors. They had the Al-Maddeiri coat of arms carved into them.”
Kira’s eyes grew wide. “They did! I didn’t see them the last time. I wasn’t looking…”
“So someone has taken over one of the Al-Maddeiri castles? I thought they were all in ruins,” Harrison said.
Israel pinched his lip. “An outpost, maybe? Or someplace that was abandoned before the war, so that no one bothered to destroy it?”
“It’s a place to start,” Ashley said. “But it may mean that Kane and Rachelle’s contacts won’t do us much good. If they’re not in this world…”
“But someone from this world has to be involved,” Kira said. “I don’t know about the lab equipment, but there were computers, like the kind you’d see in any Earth lab. There was even a logo on the screen. You know, a screensaver.”
Flynn got her a pad and paper and she sketched it. When she was finished, he and Israel looked at each other.
“Gen-X,” he said.
Gen-X was moving between worlds, and screwing with dragons. This was a lot bigger, and even more fucked-up, then he’d imagined.
And Kira’s magic wasn’t dissipating. It was growing.
He turned to Ashley. “Is there anything you can find out about this damn ritual? Kira can’t go on like this. You must have felt how strong the magic is getting. If it breaks free…”
Ashley bit her lips. “There might be something in the Akkabi archives. Or one of the ancient sorcerers might know. I could try to find out, but I’m not exactly anyone’s favorite person in the House of Akkabi right now. Especially the elders.”
“There has to be something,” Flynn said. “What about this other thing, that her guardian did? That cloaks her dragon nature? That’s got to be more common—you have something like it, don’t you? Would taking it off help Kira at all? Or would it just make things worse?”
“I don’t know.” Ashley frowned in thought, then turned to Kira. “Do you have any of your guardian’s papers or records? He might have a copy of the spell. We could at least see how it’s formed and what he designed it to do.”
Kira nodded. “When Markus died, I saved his papers, all I could find. I don’t have them with me, though. I—”
Flynn lost track of what she was saying. That one name reverberated through his mind, blocking out everything else.
Markus. She’d said Markus.
That wasn’t fucking possible. It had to be someone else.
“Markus?” he said. “Markus Dobari?”
Her eyes went wide, and he could see it in her face. She knew.
She knew what Markus was to him—had been to him. She knew, and she hadn’t told him.
This was why her fighting style had looked so familiar, that night they fought the hellhounds. It was Flynn’s style of fighting as well. The same man had trained them both.
Markus hadn’t died in the last battle. He’d survived, and he’d been alive until three years ago.
Flynn’s world crumbled, and fell apart.