I landed around six in the morning at a park that has silver loafs of cars covering the entire property.
I frowned as my eyes skidded to chairs and man made fires with tables on the sides of the loafs. They had doors. Was it some sort of a home.
At one silver loaf vehicle was a washing line and I grabbed a pair of jeans with a shirt that looked like it might fit. I put the jeans and shirt on and rushed to the exit.
I entered the city. The traffic was bumper to bumper, honking and hooting. All sorts of smells irritated my nostrils. Pollution, a car’s exhaust, freshly brewed coffee.
Colorful graffiti against one building grabbed my attention as I turned left on the corner of the street. I passed a light pole, papered with flyers and the first coffeehouse’s welcoming sign flashed green.
A lot of woman stared at me and I put the hoodie over my head as I stopped with a group of people at a traffic light, waiting for the green. All the noises worked on my nerves as I looked at the top of the buildings. The sun glistened off some windows at the top.
A few blocks further and the organization rose up into the sky in front of me. I entered the building, and it was busy for this time of the morning.
Chlorine, a smoky scent, and a gassy smell caressed my nostrils. The strong acid that lingered on Night Villains hit me full blast and my eyes landed on the guy with the black hair, working the copy machine.
Massive windows that ran floor to ceiling radiated light on the gleaming marble and granite wall panels.
A long front desk took up one side of the wall as a lady with fiery red hair spoke over a telephone. Behind her, a tasteful water-wall feature with fluorescent blue light gave that welcoming feeling.
I walked to reception and waited for the woman with the red hair to get off the phone. I breathed in her essence. Human. She almost fooled me. The cold, polished granite caressed my palms as I rested against the marble top.
“Not a problem. I’ll give him the message. Bye now.” She put the phone down and looked at me. Her eyes slightly widened as she released a mixture of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. Her lips curved into a grin. “May I help you?”
“I’m here to see Matt Rollings.”
“Who, may I say, is waiting?” She picked up the receiver of the phone.
“An old friend.”
She looked at me.
“Tell him it’s urgent, Paegeia business.”
“Oh, okay. I want to say you look a bit out of place.” She playfully narrowed her eyes as she put the receiver against her ear. “Mr. Rollings, there is a dashing young man who said he is a friend, and it’s of high importance that you come see him.”
Silence lingered before a giggle escaped her lips. “Fine, I’ll tell him.” She put the phone down. “He’ll be down in a few minutes, you might want to take a seat.”
“Thanks.”
I walked over to the spacious sitting area. The white leather designer couches were a bit pushing it. Dark, heavy coffee tables with stacks of magazines on top broke the whiteness of this place.
My eyes roamed over the artwork that hung from the wall and I almost did a double take as I saw a painting of the castle in Tith.
The murmur of voices coming from reception and the squeaking of shoes on the marble floor put me on edge. The chime of the elevator sounded in my ear as I picked up a magazine, but didn’t register a thing that I read. I kept hearing Elena’s crying. What was our life going to be like? The bond might never heal properly.
She might not even like me after this.
I wished I could speak to Lucian, hear his voice, and get his advice.
“Hello,” Matt’s voice spoke, and I looked up at him. He frowned immediately. “Blake, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m here on business, important business. I need your help and we have to get in contact with King Helmut.”
“Okay, follow me.”
I got up, put down the magazine, and followed him.
“How long have you been here?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was a secret mission. My dad is here too, but he stayed behind. Make sure the mission is safe, but we need help to get back to Paegeia.”
“You are the Rubicon, nothing—”
“It’s not for me. I need to speak to Helmut, please.”
He nodded as the doors of the elevator opened. “It’s not like the elevators back—“
“No, these are harmless.”
We stepped inside and I folded my arms as the doors closed and moved. An irritating tune played from the speakers, and I sighed.
Matt chuckled. “I know, it drives me up the walls, but it’s part of being human.”
“I’ll die here.”
“I thought you would do anything to get out of Paegeia?”
“Yeah, no. It’s bland.”
He chuckled, and the elevator opened into a spacious loft.
A security system with motion sensors grabbed my attention first.
Matt walked into a spacious entryway with high ceilings, more marble floors opened up to a large living area.
Wood and leather were Matt’s style, as it was clear in all his furniture.
A state-of-the-art sound system and TV hung majestically from the wall near an opulent fireplace.
Floor-to-ceiling windows boasted the skyline views. The smell of fresh-cut flowers arranged in a crystal vase sat on top of a dark wooden table.
“What’s this?” My eyes flickered to Matt.
“My private loft. It’s where I eat and sleep.”
“You don’t leave this place?”
“Only on missions.” We walked to a black glass door and pressed keys on the pad against the wall. The doors opened, and I followed him.
High-tech equipment stationed in front of the mother TV welcomed both of us.
There wasn’t a soul in sight, and Matt pressed a few keys on a keyboard stationed on a table. The TV lit up.
One of Helmut’s fleet members picked up. She took her brown hair up into a roll.
“Matt,” she greeted, and her eyes grew when she saw me. “Blake?”
“I need to speak to King Helmut, immediately.”
She nodded, and I could hear the call being made. “You are going through,” she said, and the screen went black before his face popped up, sitting in his office.
“Blake? Where is your father?”
“Protecting the mission.”
“What is the mission?”
“You won’t believe it?”
“What?”
I leaned with my fists on the table. “Jako Lemuir and King Albert and Queen Catherine’s daughter. It’s why Tanya and him left. She gave birth a year before their deaths. I have a rider.”
Both of them stared at me. Matt standing next to me and Helmut on the screen.
“A true royal of Paegeia. How sure—”
“A dragon always knows. She looks like her father, had that same disappointing look, and green eyes.”
“Holy fuck!” Helmut cussed. He never cussed. “Your father said it was something important to Paegeia’s survival, but I never imagined this, Blake. When are you coming home?”
“We need backup. There is a colony of dragons—he doesn’t know how many—that keeps pushing him back, further inland, away from Paegeia. This colony tried to kill them many times. We need backup not just from this side but from Paegeia’s as well.”
“Give Matt the coordinates and we’ll send a fleet, Blake. How do you feel?”
“Okay, I guess. Nervous. You know me. I already messed up beyond repair.”
“Hey, don’t think like that. Dragons always think about the worst of the worst because of how deep they feel. Humans forget quickly if you nurture them right.”
Matt chuckled as I stared at the king.
“What, it’s the truth? I’ve been one for a long time. We will see you soon. It’s time for them to come back home.”
“You knew?”
His face slacked. “Does it look like I knew?”
“No, why didn’t he tell anyone?”
“I don’t know, but that is not important now. We can speak about it more when you get back with the package and Jako Lemuir. He needs to come home too.”
“He wasn’t part—”
“I know, but he is still a royal dragon, Blake.”
I nodded. The connection broke.
“You have a rider?” Matt asked.
“Yeah, one that is not very impressed with me now?”
“Just show her your cool features.”
“And let her scream her head off. Apparently, she is not doing so well with the dragon part. Jako begged me to keep that part hidden until she is more settled. How long that is going to take? I don’t know.”
“How did you discover this?”
“I didn’t. My dad did and then he dragged me with him.”
“How is she?”
“Looks like her father, but there is no way she is going to claim me in the next six months, that is a promise.”
“Hey, she exists. That is more than enough for now, Blake. The best of the best will train her. You feel the urge to kill her?”
I squinted at Matt. “Fuck no.”
Matt laughed. “Finally.”
“Fuck off, I wasn’t that bad.”
“No, of course not,” he said with sarcasm dripping off the words.
I stayed with Matt. It was for the best. I gave him the coordinates with Dad’s number and took a shower while Matt arranged everything.
I ate like the beast I was and afterward crashed on a bed in one room.
Matt was still on the phone with Dad when I drifted away.
I dreamed of my Never-breath. But it wasn’t the girl with the red hair and the freckles. She became Elena.
I didn’t even give her time to say hello. I just kissed her.
There was no current this time, but I didn’t care. She was home. I needed to fix it.
ELENA
Two days have passed, and most of my questions revolved around the Rubicon. Robert answered every one of them. He knew him well.
His height was something that made me want to reach for a brown bag, and apparently, he was still growing. For the love of blueberries, how was I going to tame him?
Robert also knew plenty about my father and mother. Why didn’t they trust him and then he answered that part, too? They must have thought that he was one of their suspects who could betray them as the woman that saw things, didn’t see the person. She only saw it was one of their closest friends, and Robert was really close to my dad.
From what I gathered, every Dragonian, human with magic, had a dragon. They must find them if the seers didn’t see them like they had with me and the Rubicon.
They claim them in a ring sort of building. The way Robert explained it reminded me of the colosseum, like the gladiators used to fight in. There was one in Dragonia Academy and one in Tith and Areeth, which were countries that the two kings ruled.
They held those for the important ones, and I was probably going to claim the Rubicon in the one in Tith. It was an event that they deemed important.
The way Robert spoke about it sounded too easy, and when something sounded easy, they usually sugar coated things.
I went back to my room again to process and the next day I would have a list with more questions.
I guessed the rest I would discover once I got to Paegeia.
I watched TV as Dad refused to let me go back to school. There was no use for it anymore, as we would leave soon. Blake hadn’t come back yet.
A knock on the door startled Robert and Dad. Dad came closer to me, sort of shielding me from whoever was at the door if it was this Fox guy.
Robert looked through the keyhole and then opened the door and greeted whoever was on the other side.
A bald guy walked in.
Dad bowed to him.
“Stop, you are longer in the service than what I’d ever been, and from what we learned, you basically raised a Malone.”
Oh, yeah, that was the other thing. I wasn’t Watkins. I was a Malone. The last bloodline of the Malone Monarchy. It still felt so unreal.
I was a princess. I said it a thousand times every day, and it still sounded unreal. Princesses were brats and snobs, not running away for their lives.
“Elena, I want you to meet one of my closest friends and the bravest dragon that I ever met.”
“Ooh, we may throw the dragon word around?” the guy asked.
If he knew how I felt about that word, he might think twice, but what else was I going to call them—beasts?
The guy looked young, like somewhere in his mid-twenties. He was big, had muscles pressing against the black long sleeve shirt he wore. He had pushed up the sleeves to below his elbows. The pair of jeans hugged every muscle in his legs. He had a Chris Daughtry thing about him.
“Princess.” He bowed.
I didn’t know how I felt about that either, but my curiosity was at its peak. “Show me?”
“Elena?” my father questioned.
My eyes flickered to Dad. “I need to see for myself what he looks like, please?”
The guy winked and smiled. “The barn will be big enough if I lay down.”
Dad spoke to him in Latin again, and I rolled my eyes. I was so over their secret language. The guy answered back.
“Thanks, Emanual.”
“Anything for the Rubicon.”
I felt like throwing up. That was my life. Everyone was going to step aside if he asked. I did not know what he even looked like.
Was he going to make promises too that he wouldn’t be able to keep?
A part of me was still so angry at Blake. He didn’t have to make those promises. He sounded so sincere.
“Let’s go, Elena,” Dad said. I pushed myself from the couch and followed. A throng of people waited outside. They were all dressed casually. Some had black hair, others blond. One had red hair, there was a skinny one with silver hair. I kept staring at him. He had piercing blue eyes.
I looked away when he bowed his head. He looked way too feminine to be part of the rescue team. Like he should rather be a model walking on a runway somewhere in Milan.
“Get up!” My dad spoke, and I looked back. They all bowed.
They bowed for me? I shook that from my thought. It sounded so unreal.
They men stood straight and followed us to the barn.
I waited outside with Dad and Robert as baldy, Emanual, was busy doing his thing in the barn. My heart pounded, imagining what I was going to find.
“Don’t scream, okay. I will not ask Tanya again to take your memory away, Elena.”
“I’m ready, I think. Just let me process. No matter how long it takes, please?”
Dad nodded.
A deep Latin voice came from the barn.
“He’s ready,” Robert said. “You’re doing good.”
I grabbed Dad’s arm, and we slipped through the barn door.
A fire smell, like after something burned, irritated my nostrils. I froze as I stared at a heap of a beast taking up half the barn. My heart pounded in my chest.
“Elena!” Dad ordered.
The beast looked majestic. Like he truly was royalty. Long vertical scales, thorny ones, round ones and diamond shaped ones covered his entire body. His nostrils stood straight on top of his snout. Scales turned into long horns that laid flat on top of his head. The burned smell came from him.
“Elena,” Dad said again and my wide eyes flickered to him. “Breathe.”
I took a deep breath as my body slightly trembled at the sight of the beast. His enormous tail fanned at the end. It laid like the size of a tree-stump next to him.
Paws with sharp claws tugged neatly underneath his body. One claw was like the size of a long dagger.
My eyes flickered to the beast’s feline-shape eyes. Scales covered his eyebrows. It sort of protruded over his eyes, protecting them.
The beast spoke in a deep, raspy voice.
Robert translated. “Emanual can hear your heartbeat. He wants you to relax. He won’t hurt you.”
My eyes scanned big wings that protected the side of his torso.
He was lying on the floor. I struggled to imagine his size when he stood on four paws.
Dad spoke in Latin, and he replied, making everyone around me chuckle as the dragon stared at him, snorting through his nostrils.
Dad spoke again with a slight rasp in his voice, and then the dragon opened his mouth.
Sharp teeth lining his upper and lower jaw with a mother of a tongue. My feet didn’t want to move, and a slight tremble ran down my body.
“Elena, come,” Dad said.
Is he insane! My feet betrayed me and made me walk closer to him.
Dad spoke in Latin again, and he closed his mouth as the others chuckled.
I never thought Dad was the funny type.
He touched the dragon as his other hand gripped mine. I tried to pull away, but Dad didn’t let me.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
I nodded.
He took my hand and placed it on the dragon’s skin. It was warm, like the warmth that came from standing too close to a fireplace, or freshly ironed clothes. My hand moved with his breathing.
His skin was rough like hard rocks and glass. I kept staring at the horns on his head.
“He is King Helmut’s dragon. He is a very noble dragon and from what Robert told me, the fastest in Paegeia at the moment.”
The dragon spoke something, eliciting more chuckles.
I looked at Dad.
“He said he doesn’t know for how long. The Rubicon is gaining on him.”
The Rubicon again?
“You okay?”
I nodded.
“I think it’s enough.” Dad spoke to the dragon then in Latin and led me out of the barn. My legs felt heavy, and it was an effort to walk, as my body still trembled. How on Earth was I going to tame one of them?
We went back to the house, and I sat on the couch trying to get my heartbeat under control and my mind to process what the hell I just saw.
“Elena?” Dad asked, sitting next to me.
“Peageia is full of them?” I whispered.
“It’s their home. You are their princess.”
“I didn’t ask for this.” It barely came out, even my tone trembled.
“I know. I’m proud of how you didn’t yell and scream. Emanual is one of the best among his kind. He saved more people and dragons alike in his lifetime.”
“His lifetime? He began saving people when he was ten?”
Dad laughed. “No, he looks young. He is over three hundred years old.”
“What?” My eyes grew as I stared at Dad.
“They call it the essence, and if their riders are good to them, they will grant them part of that essence. Your father was almost 250-year-old when you were born, and your mother around two hundred.”
“Come again?” How was my mind going to process that?
“They didn’t look that old. They both got the essence from their dragons a long time ago, when they were young. She just struggled to get pregnant. They waited almost two hundred years for you, and then they had to give you away. I couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been for your mother, Elena. She wanted nothing more in this world than to have a little baby of her own.”
Tears filled my eyes. I didn’t even know what she looked like.
“Paegeia is full of their stories. You will learn about both of them in no time.”
The dragon came back in his human form. He stopped in front of me where I sat on the couch and bent a knee to be the same eye level as me. “Not that scary, am I?”
I just stared at him. He had these weird brown eyes, almost auburn. I shook my head, and a smile lingered on his lips.
“Good.”
“Where is my son, Emanual?” Robert asked as he got up from the floor. He made that look so effortless.
“He’s going to meet us at the first stop in Virginia with Matt. He feels more needed there at the moment.”
Robert huffed and smiled. “If he thinks that, I trust him.”
“Yeah, I didn’t say your son is a genius.”
Everyone chuckled, Dad included.
He thought so.
“So when are we leaving?” Dad asked.
“Pack lightly, rest. We will leave around two this afternoon as it’s a push to Maryland.”
“What about Fox, Emanual?”
“Let us worry about him. He will not harm her.”
“He’s not that guy anymore.”
“Then he will meet a different side of me.”
The guy that wanted me dead was friends with him?
I got up and went to my room.
Dad came with me.
I laid on my bed as Dad started packing only a backpack.
“I need more clothes than that.”
“You will get more clothes once we reach Paegeia, Elena. Right now, none of these things matter. Only you.”
I nodded. “The guy that wanted to kill me, is he friends with Emanual?”
“No. It’s his brother.”
I gasped. His brother?
“He is a Moon-bolt dragon. Almost six hundred years older than Emanual. He saw you when other Moon-Bolt’s struggled.”
“Those are the blue dragons, right?” Dad and Robert tried to give me the crash course on them.
“Yes. I can’t tell you how bad he feels that it’s his blood that made our lives a living nightmare, Elena.”
“I thought you were paranoid. Why did you let me think that?” My lower lip vibrated as I wiped the tears that formed in my eyes.
Dad crouched in front of me. “It was better than the truth. If I could give you a better life on this side, believe me, I would have.” He touched my face softly. “I don’t know what is going to happen tonight, Elena. But please, if I leave, just stay close to Emanual.”
“Leave?”
“If. I’ll find you, okay. Your safety is important. The only thing that is important.”
I nodded again. “I’m sorry that I made it so difficult for you.”
“Don’t.” He wrapped his arms around me.
I took a sniff of his musky scent as my arms curled around his neck. Dad always smelled like home. “I’m scared.”
“Of course you are. We all are. It’s usually the important missions that scare us the most, and believe me, I’ve been on plenty. But this is the scariest one of them all. We have come so far. It’s time to go back home.” Dad’s warm lips brushed my cheek softly.
I nodded.
“We will both be home in the next 48 hours, Bear.”
