Possessed by a Dark Warrior (5 page)

He couldn’t stop himself from thinking about the others. Iolanthe had Kyter. Sable had chosen Thorne. Someone had even been insane enough to fall in love with Vail.

He growled under his breath before he could think the next thought, the one he could feel coming.

One he didn’t want to acknowledge.

He didn’t need a mate.

He didn’t need anyone.

He just needed to keep hunting the dragon.

He stiffly bowed his head, turned on his heel and stalked away from them, his focus locking onto his mission once more. He ignored the words of hurt Olivia spoke to Loren and just kept walking, heading towards the grand archway in the wall, his pace gaining speed.

The garrison came into view as he passed under the archway, an imposing pale three storey square building off to his right. Horses whinnied in the stable as they were groomed, tended to by the youngest soldiers. He bowed his head to the ranking officers that he passed, exchanging silent greetings with them. As commander of the legion directly under Loren’s control, he held a rank above all of the males present, but he had never elevated himself to such a position. He didn’t demand respect from his subordinates, or treat them as inferior as some of the commanders of the other legions did. He preferred to work alongside his men, as an equal.

Bleu halted and backtracked as one of the males he had come to see walked out of the stable block, dusting down his black trousers, the wood-and-leather soles of his boots a steady click on the cobbles.

Leif.

The bastard looked more like Loren every day. Sometimes, Bleu swore he emulated their prince. Other times, he decided it was just genetics. Leif was born of noble blood, had an irritating regal bearing and aloof tone of voice bred into him.

Leif’s step slowed and his purple eyes drifted towards Bleu, his fine black eyebrows dipping as his lips compressed.

Leif was rarely pleased to see him too.

He blamed Bleu for losing the female dragon three centuries ago, believed Bleu should have been less concerned with bleeding to death from the brutal claw marks she had placed on his throat and more concerned about grabbing hold of her before she could run.

Bleu couldn’t hold it against him. He would have felt the same had Leif been the one in his shoes, placing his life above the mission. They shared a compulsion to complete missions, and he was banking on that drive still being there, making Leif want to take up the hunt for the dragon again.

“There is only one possible reason you have shown your face now and if it has anything to do with the rumours going around the garrison about a shady black market arena and our dearest commander being launched across it by a female dragon, then you can count me in,” Leif snarled each word as he stalked towards Bleu, darkness rolling off him, hunger to continue their mission. “You took your damned time returning though. Dacian has been putting poor foolish soldiers into sickbay for the past three lunar cycles.”

That was a nice way of saying that Dacian was taking out his frustration and impatience on the soldiers he was meant to be training in the ring. Bleu sighed. The big elf warrior had never learned to express his emotions in other ways, always preferring to unleash them in the ring in the form of fighting.

“I suppose he is there now?” Bleu was already heading in the direction of the open stretch of sand behind the stables before Leif could answer.

The male fell into step with him, and Bleu almost felt as if it was Loren there. Same six-five height and slender build, same neatly clipped blue-black hair and ridiculously noble profile. Leif lacked something though.

A sense of humour.

Even Loren had one of those.

But where Leif lacked it, the fourth member of their troupe had it in spades.

Fynn’s raucous laughter reached Bleu’s ears long before he had finished traversing the narrow cobbled alley between the stable block and garrison. He rounded the corner and found the young elf male sitting on top of the low dark stone wall that enclosed the training area, rocking back on it but somehow maintaining his balance as he laughed his backside off at something. His long ponytail swayed with his movements, brushing across his bare back, reaching the small of it.

Bleu peered into the sand-filled ring and grimaced.

Dacian lay on his back, sand pushed up around his bare broad shoulders, his naked feet resting in a groove in the amber dirt. Bleu followed that track to the one who had laid one of their biggest, most brutal, warriors out cold.

No wonder Fynn had been laughing.

The young female elf breathed hard, one hand still tucked defensively against her chest and the other still outstretched, her palm facing Dacian.

Bleu clapped slowly.

Fynn stopped laughing and snapped his head towards Bleu. The female blushed a deep shade of red. She was pretty. As vicious as Bleu remembered too.

He bet that the sparring match had been Fynn’s idea. Dacian hadn’t been there the time Fynn’s sister had come to visit, so he hadn’t witnessed that she had some of the strongest telekinesis Bleu had ever seen, her gift a natural one from the gods. She had begged Bleu and Leif to train her, but females weren’t allowed in the ranks, a tradition still firmly in place today.

Bleu had trained his own sister in secret, passing on everything he had learned so she could fight and defend herself. That knowledge had probably saved her life countless times.

By the looks of things, Fynn had done the same with his sister.

If Bleu had his way, the council would listen to him and allow females to enlist. Elf females were only marginally weaker than elf males. There was no reason for them not to have a place in the army if they desired it.

The young female elf brushed her jaw-length black hair from her face, blew a rogue strand upwards, and bowed.

Fynn grinned. “She’s a cocky little runt, don’t you think?”

His sister glared at him, but held her tongue. Bleu could see she wanted to retaliate, but his presence was silencing her.

“No more cocky than her brother,” Bleu said and sighed again as he looked from Fynn to Dacian. “Although, I would prefer you didn’t damage my men when I need them.”

The female bowed her head again and Bleu smiled inwardly at the same time as Fynn’s grin widened. It was cruel to tease her, but amusing too. It reminded him of when Iolanthe had been younger, and life had been easier.

Dacian groaned, his face contorted, and he rolled onto his side. He slowly pushed himself up and shook his head, dislodging the sand that clung to his shorn hair and revealing the long scar that cut diagonally across his scalp. It had been a close call the day he had received it. An axe in the back of the head was the sort of injury most elves didn’t walk away from, but Dacian had incredible senses and had felt the blade before it had reached him, swiftly calling his helmet to shield his head.

The big elf huffed and pushed up onto his knees, sat back on his heels and dusted himself off.

When he swung his icy violet gaze towards the female, she squeaked and curled up, squeezing her hands together in front of her chest. Dacian lumbered onto his feet and heaved another sigh, shifting his thickly-muscled shoulders with it and causing his honed chest and stomach to tense. He had at least two hundred pounds on the poor female and she wisely backed towards her brother when Dacian advanced on her.

“Weapons, you said. A fight with weapons,” Dacian growled through bloodstained fangs and pinned his violet gaze on the female first and then Fynn.

Fynn tensed, his smile fleeing his face. He shrugged, but it came off stiff. “Telekinesis could be considered a weapon.”

Not by a warrior like Dacian. The psychic powers available to elves were only used in defence by those of the warrior class, viewed as a last resort when traditional weapons, and even claws and fangs, failed and they were close to losing their lives.

Dacian snarled, flashing his fangs.

The little elf female teleported, reappearing behind her brother, using him as a shield. Not the wisest move. Dacian wasn’t the sort of male who cared if he had to go through a friend to get to a foe.

His steady hard gaze shifted back to her and then he did something that left Bleu wondering what the hell had happened to change the male.

Dacian backed down, huffing as he strode away from her and her brother, muttering things beneath his breath.

Bleu eyed him. Maybe he hadn’t changed. Maybe Dacian had always been lenient on females.

He looked back at the female in question.

Or maybe Dacian had a reason to be lenient on this one.

She whispered something to Fynn, who nodded, and then she teleported. Dacian looked back in Fynn’s direction, a brief glance before he swiped a grey cloth from the wall near Bleu and rubbed himself down with it.

“I take it from your appearance that we have a mission again?” Fynn dropped to his feet from the wall and strode across the sand, all humour gone from his face.

Bleu nodded. “The rumours running around the garrison are true. I encountered the female dragon again, and Prince Loren has ordered us to complete our mission.”

All three males nodded in unison, and Bleu nodded too, a sense that their mission was finally coming to a close running through him, a familiar feeling that was comforting and made him feel at home.

Loren had given him a purpose, and he was going to fulfil it.

“We will not fail this time.”

The valley seemed larger from the floor of it, the mountains taller and more forbidding as they loomed over her. She felt small and vulnerable, her step uneasy as she walked forwards despite the voice in her heart that told her to turn back.

To leave before he realised she was here.

Taryn pulled down a deep breath, wishing it would steady her even though she knew it wouldn’t. The last thirty breaths she had sucked in to calm herself had had no effect, so it was ridiculous to expect the thirty first to succeed where they had failed. There would be no settling of her fears, not until she had faced them.

Her eyes locked on the distant citadel where it rose from the black rock of the mountains at the opposite end of the valley as if they had birthed it, the sheer spires as pointed and cragged as the peaks beyond it, causing it to blend into the range. It sent a chill through her just to look at it, a place fit for a king but also for a killer.

Distant howls of Hell beasts mingled with the thunderous boom of rock splitting open in the valleys beyond the one she traversed, but down in the basin of the Valley of the Dark Edge, it was quiet.

Ominously quiet.

No sign of life stirred in the black land, but the shadows that crawled outwards from the gnarled black trees still made her jittery, causing her to jump at times when a flash of amber light shot up from one of the jagged fault lines she had seen in the other valleys and made them dance across the obsidian earth, reaching towards her like smoky claws.

There was only death in this valley.

It surrounded her, always there wherever her gaze fell.

The evidence that her brother killed anything that roamed into his domain.

Taryn slowed as she passed another set of bones, picked clean and startlingly bright in the dim light that passed for day. This one was the skeleton of a Hell beast, enormous and canine-like, with broken horns that protruded from its broad skull. She had fought enough of its kind to recognise one without its flesh.

She pulled her gaze away from it and continued walking on a direct path to the castle. It was closer now, but she had been walking for hours and had crossed only a tiny fraction of the valley floor.

Another flash of light leaped across the land as lava spewed high in a valley beyond the mountains to her right, and she stopped dead, her heart lodged in her throat and her eyes fixed on the empty pits in the skull just metres ahead of her.

Dragon.

Tears filled her eyes as she walked towards it, shaking her head as her heart ached. Her eyebrows furrowed as she neared it and she reached a hand out. It trembled in the air and her instincts told her to turn away, to not look at the skull of one of her kind, the damning evidence that her brother had truly lost his mind.

He had killed a dragon.

Taryn swallowed hard and laid her shaking hand on the beaked snout. The bone was cool beneath her palm and her senses stretched along it, mapping the shape of the skull, from its enormous teeth to the ridged bone above the eye sockets, to the four horns that flared back from the top of the skull.

Still gold in colour.

She dashed away the tears in her eyes with her free hand as she tried not to picture the dragon as it would have been, a beautiful and majestic gold, its scales shimmering and reflecting what little light pierced the dragon realm.

Tenak had killed it.

He had destroyed its beauty.

Gods, she felt sick.

She covered her mouth and looked beyond the skull, to the shattered bones of its spine and ribs, and the scattered wing bones that lay around it. It had been big. A male. Ancient.

She turned away, screwed her eyes shut and fought for air. Her fingers clasped the leather strap across her chest, the power of the magic humming beneath her fierce grip, drawing her focus to the weapon she carried.

A sword capable of ending her brother with one blow.

She swore to the dragon gods that she would avenge her kin. She would stop her brother.

Taryn marched forwards, pinning her gaze on the citadel again, her steps steadier and stronger than they had been in centuries. She knew her purpose, and she wouldn’t falter. Her brother had gone mad, and she would stop him before he turned that madness on anyone else.

She closed her eyes briefly as she passed the barbed tip of the dragon’s tail and prayed to the gods and her ancestors that she didn’t end up like the poor soul. Her step faltered but she forced herself to keep marching, refused to slow her pace or allow her fear to get the better of her. She had a plan, and she believed in it.

Her brother had lost his mind, and to win his trust, she would act as if she had lost hers.