Possessed by a Dark Warrior (22 page)

Blood.

She stared at it. Blinked. How had it gotten there?

She frowned as she drew her hands away from her arms. Crimson coated her fingertips too. It stained beneath her nails.

“What were you seeing?” Tenak whispered and rubbed his thumbs across her shoulders.

Fingers touching.

Touching.

Caressing.

She jerked free, scooted backwards and bumped into something warm.

Something that soothed the pain that had engulfed her, making her brother’s touch feel like that of a terrible fiend bent on destroying her, not someone who loved her.

Taryn looked behind her at the elf male. His thighs pressed against her spine, the touch comforting. So comforting that it stripped her strength away and tears filled her eyes.

“Taryn?” Tenak reached for her and she whipped her head towards him and bared her fangs. He instantly moved back, giving her the space she needed, and she settled as the sense of comfort rolled over her again, sinking harder against the elf’s legs, seeking the reassurance of his touch. Tenak settled on his haunches and eyed her. “What were you seeing?”

She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself. “The arena. The black market. A few lunar cycles ago… the elf was there. He had many more men with him that time.”

She swallowed hard, desperate to wet her dry throat and mouth, and rubbed her arms again as a chill went through her.

“There might be more this time. I did not see how many there were back then… the light from the stage… it… it made it…” Her throat closed and she shoved her hands into her hair, tugged it back from her face so hard that her scalp stung. “I cannot.”

But she had to.

The pain of her memories, she could handle. She could deal with it. She wasn’t sure she would be able to handle the pain of her brother killing the elf. Her fated male. His death would kill her too. She had to keep speaking, telling her brother about what she had seen. She had to convince him to go easy on the male. If she had to hurt herself to make that happen, she would do it.

She would bear any pain to spare her fated male.

Tenak eased forwards, recapturing her attention. Fear and agony collided inside her as she lifted her eyes to meet his, afraid of what she would find.

That fear abated when she found his eyes were soft and tender, and melted away when he spoke.

“We will take the male and question him. Do not think about your past anymore, Sister. I ache when I see you in pain.” For a moment, a heartbeat of time, he was the brother she had grown up with back at the village, but then his face darkened and his eyes turned cold. “Think about the future, my precious one, for it will be glorious.”

She suppressed the shudder that wracked her. Glorious? Bloodshed and violence wasn’t glorious. Slaughtering all who stood in the way of ruling an entire realm wasn’t glorious. It was madness.

The sort of insane thinking she had been exposed to and at the mercy of for three centuries.

Her brother shifted into his dragon form. When he reached for the elf male, every instinct she possessed roared at her and she sprang to her feet and launched into the path of his front paw. He halted and his huge eyes moved to her and narrowed.

“I will do it.” That didn’t seem to be explanation enough for her behaviour, because she could almost feel the suspicions taking root in her brother again. His eyes narrowed further. She rushed out, “You need not sully yourself with the elf. It is beneath you to carry such cargo back to our stronghold. I will do this for you. It is my place.”

That seemed to appease him. He pushed back, causing rocks to tumble down the mountainside, and twisted as he beat his wings. She watched him take flight and then looked down at the elf and cursed him, wishing he hadn’t been foolish enough to pursue her.

Tenak roared, a command that she felt all the way to her bones.

The shift was quick to come, transforming her swiftly into her dragon form. She skidded down the mountain until her huge paws found some purchase and she was able to claw her way back up to the elf, using a few flaps of her wings to assist her.

He lay where she had left him, the bruises on his throat exposed together with the scars she had given him.

Taryn carefully scooped him up into her right paw, cradled him gently and stared down at him.

Tiny dragon.

He had looked like one when he had been in full armour, his helmet flaring back into two horns and coming down into a point above his nose, and the slats covering the lower half of his face.

He was as fierce as one too. As determined.

Relentless in his pursuit of her.

She canted her head. Did he know why he pursued her so tirelessly?

Why he couldn’t let her go?

She wasn’t sure that he did. She wasn’t sure he knew that she was his mate.

As she stared down at his prone form, his quiet steady breathing loud in her ears, her strongest dragon instincts roared to the forefront, urging her to carry him far away, to a place where he would be safe.

She couldn’t.

She could feel Tenak’s steady gaze on her. He had stopped a few hundred metres away and was hovering in the air, watching her closely.

She sighed and her breath stirred the elf’s dark hair.

He had brought this upon himself, and all she could do was try to subtly control whatever awaited him, lessening the pain her brother would inflict on him and upon her without knowing it.

She curled her paw around her fated male and cradled him close to her. Her heart warmed behind the white plates of armour that spanned her chest as she felt him press against her, and she switched all of her focus to him as she kicked off.

Her wings beat at a slow pace to keep her flight smooth and avoid jostling him too much.

He was cool against her, weighed nothing in her palm, but she knew he was a male whose blood was fire and body was strong. She knew he could survive whatever awaited him, and she wouldn’t leave his side. She would protect him as best she could.

She would find a way to set him free.

It stank.

Wherever he was, it reeked of fetid things. Stale water. Putrid blood. Rancid bile.

Bleu groaned and breathed slowly, fighting to get air into his lungs and not only because the foul odour robbed him of breath and made him want to retch. His already bruised and battered throat now felt as if someone had gone at it with a vice, squeezing it until his trachea had been close to breaking.

His wheezing breaths only served to stir the wretched pool of filth beneath him. He mustered all of his strength, planted his palms against the cold stone floor and pushed himself up, opening his eyes at the same time. The dim light from the wooden torch mounted on the stone wall opposite him was a mercy, giving his eyes time to adjust to being used again.

He slowly took in his surroundings. One wall of metal bars in front of him, and two more sets of bars on either side, those ones filling an arch. He looked behind him as much as he could without hurting his throat. That wall was solid black stone.

A cellblock. In the castle he had been scouting by the looks of things. No windows for him to check whether the outside world matched the valley though. Where else would the dragon have taken him?

He was surprised the male had taken him anywhere.

Bleu gingerly touched his throat and winced when even the slightest pressure hurt it. He needed blood to restore the strength his body was already devouring in order to speed his healing process, but he doubted he would get it here. His captor was unlikely to want to keep him strong. With every second that ticked past without him drinking blood, he grew weaker, and something told him that the male wanted that.

Why hadn’t the dragon killed him?

A flash of the female shot across his mind and he grimaced and clutched his head as it ached.

Had she stopped him?

He had caught the concern in her eyes, had felt her fear when her brother had been strangling him, and he had the feeling that he owed his life to her. She had somehow gained him a reprieve. He looked around the cell again. Although, he wasn’t sure his situation had improved at all.

He pushed his hands against the damp black flagstones and froze.

Bare hands.

Bare arms.

Bare wrists.

Panic lanced him and he looked himself over. Bare
everything
. He growled through his fangs and crawled around the cell, the rough stones biting into his knees as he scoured it for his armour bands. After an exhausting few minutes of searching, he slumped against the solid wall, breathing hard and shivering. Something wasn’t right.

It made sense that he would be weak from his body using his blood to speed the healing of his throat, but he shouldn’t have been this weak.

Bleu leaned the right side of his head against the cold stones and tried to focus. He dove deep into his body, calling his portal, willing his wristbands to appear.

Nothing.

Perhaps the dragon had them locked somewhere his power couldn’t reach. There were many ways of sealing away objects and stopping him from being able to call them.

He focused on his apartments in the castle in the elf kingdom instead and reached for something that held no power and was therefore less taxing. Trousers.

A hazy connection formed, wobbled. He focused harder on it, drawing on his limited strength to reinforce the bond between him and the item of clothing. Sweat beaded on his brow and rolled down his back, cold against his exposed skin. His breath came harder, scraping in his throat.

The link shattered and he slumped against the wall, his limbs like rubber.

Gods damn it.

Bleu looked himself over and his eyes halted on an innocuous red spot on his right forearm. He managed to lift his left hand and rub his thumb over it. The spot didn’t go away, no matter how hard he rubbed it, and the area around it was tender.

Drugged.

He twisted and sank with his back against the wall. His breathing evened out but his heart didn’t steady. It continued to race, driven by the fear slowly sinking its claws into him.

He drew down a shuddering deep breath.

The scent of blood hit him hard and his fangs itched.

He suppressed his hunger, forced his fangs away, and tried to focus. He could get out of this. Somehow.

He tipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling, and his senses stretched outwards, covering as much ground as he could manage while he was weak. Where was the female dragon?

Taryn.

She had saved him. He knew it. He had lived long enough to recognise when someone had put their life on the line for him, and she had definitely risked her neck for his sake. She had been afraid of her brother but she had somehow stopped that dangerous male from killing him.

He pulled down another deep breath through his nose and closed his eyes, reaching for her.

He could almost feel her moving around above him, and he could definitely smell her. He lifted his fingers to his nose and inhaled, taking the scent of her down into his lungs. She had touched him. Had she been the one to strip him?

Was she in possession of his armour?

He inhaled again, felt light as her scent filled his lungs, dominating the rank odour of the cells with the unique smell of her that was so out of place in this grim citadel that reeked of death.

She smelled like sunshine and blue skies, and he wasn’t sure how she could smell of such things when she was restricted to Hell and had probably never seen the mortal world.

Bleu sighed and willed her to come to him, to help him out of this mess he had gotten himself into, or at least let him see her again and drink in her beauty before he died.

He huffed. Idiotic thoughts. He had been in worse situations and had made it through, and this time wasn’t going to be any different. He would find a way out of his cell, would escape the castle and lay low until the drugs had left his system, and then he would teleport back to the garrison and admit that he had been a fucking idiot.

Gods, Leif was going to have a field day with this.

He needed to investigate his surroundings before the male dragon came to see him.

The bastard would come, Bleu was sure of that.

Drugging him and putting him in a cell wasn’t the end of the male’s plans for him. The way the male had looked at him, a sick sadistic edge to his smile, had promised pain and suffering, and it wouldn’t be long before he came down to deliver on that.

Someone tossed a dirty rag into his cell through the bars to his right. He frowned at the scrap of black material and crawled over to it, not trusting his legs to bear his weight when his head was still fuzzy and he was growing weaker by the second. He picked up the cloth, looked at it and then peered into the cell beside his.

The female kneeling in the centre of it tensed and shrank back, dirty arms racing to cover herself. She wore similar cloth to that which she had offered him, two strips of it that barely covered her breasts and her hips.

He thanked her with a nod and tied the scrap around his hips, covering himself.

“What is your name?” he said in English, choosing a neutral language. Many in Hell spoke a little of it, but his decision this time was made based on the fact that she was a fae of some sort. Most fae travelled regularly to the mortal world or lived there. “My name is Bleu.”

She huddled into herself, her matted brown hair falling down over her face, and shook her head. Her bloodstained fingers jerkily stroked her arms and he grimaced as he spotted that her left little finger was bent at a horrific angle, twisted backwards. The finger beside it appeared broken too.

Those injuries weren’t her only ones. There was barely an inch of her that wasn’t bruised or cut. What sick things had the dragon male done to her?

“What is your name?” he tried again, this time in the old fae tongue, a language he hadn’t spoken in millennia.

She gasped and her bloodshot golden-brown eyes shot to meet his. Tears splashed onto her cheeks and she shuffled away from him, backing into the far corner of her cell. He had seen terrible things in his years, but nothing on this level. He had never seen a female so broken and scarred, withdrawn into herself.