Dragon Guardian (Drakins of Wyrmarach) (17 page)

Ethan squeezed the cheek of her ass with a firm possessive
stroke. “There are fewer and fewer bonded couples in the modern generations. It
has become rare and is greatly revered by our people.”

“Do you know what your own marks will be?” Wren asked.

Caleb traced the Y shape of Gamma γ. “This is Ethan’s
symbol, Gamma. He is our Anchor.”

Ethan continued the narrative. “Caleb is Zeta and has the
role of Focus.” He traced the Zeta ζ symbol on her skin. With using the
gift, we’ve had inklings of what our symbols are. We’ve used them successfully
to aid in drawing the psi-energy to us so we’re pretty sure they’re accurate.

Caleb eased his head toward his shoulder in a half shrug. We
aren’t sure which essence you will receive, it will come upon you during part
of the claiming process. I suspect from the etchings on your sword you will be
delta. He drew the Delta δ mark with his fingers.

“Those marks are so familiar.” She climbed out of the water and
retrieved her sword. “There is one mark on this sword like what you said. It
came up when the Goddess gave it to me. Yet, after I had your blood on my hands
I looked again and two additional marks were floating on the surface of the
metal. Later they were gone.”

“Wren.”
Caleb cautioned.

“No I wanted to show you. I thought I might remember looking
at the sword. I’m pretty sure the marks on it were the ones you’ve just
described.”

A loose haziness engulfed her as if walking in a dream. A
sense of other slid into her awareness. The feeling was feminine, like a
benevolent mentor. “I’m feeling something, remembering something. So these
marks have significance to an essence of our souls?”

She pointed the sword at Caleb.
“Focus.”
Then slowly arched it over to point at Ethan and said.
“Anchor.”
With unsure, questioning expressions they exited the water and reached out to
her as she raised the sword in the air and declared.

“I am Relevance”. The words created an incantation. Magic
sizzled around them through the air. The energy danced over her radiating from
her dragon necklace in a flood of power. The sense of other within her grew.
A thousand fire-flies tingling against her skin.
Caleb and
Ethan both looked at her with growing concern on their faces.

“Guys, what’s happening?”
 
She knew they spoke to answer because she could see their mouths moving.
The roar in her ears prevented her from understanding what they were saying.
The air around her grew brighter and brighter until she had to close her eyes
and throw her arm across her face to shield herself against the harshness of
the light.

A strange feeling of tightness was followed by a sensation of
shrinking and pulling, as if she were being compressed and at the same time
stretched like taffy. The roar in her head stopped. She heard a sound like a
large section of fabric torn in half with one clean rip.

Caleb and Ethan’s voices sounded very far away. She couldn’t
distinguish their words but recognized agitated tones of concern. Blackness
descended on her blanketing her in a cocoon of pitch emptiness, blacker than
darkness. It was absence of everything, utter nothingness. She had no sense of
direction, no up,
no
down.

She couldn’t touch herself or feel any indication of
sensation. She struggled to curl up her body in a vain hope of rolling into the
landing, if she was falling.

Wren had no idea of how to find her way back to Caleb and
Ethan. She couldn’t begin to know how to find her way forward to anything. Was
forward even a concept?

She was in a place of
complete non-existence. Yet it was not, because her thoughts existed. She
needed to breathe. She was going to die, trapped in this nothing place. There
was no air, suffocation clawed at her mind

Ethan’s amusement for what
their protégée had unexpectedly
managed to do
turned
to grave concern in the course of
moments.

“Caleb
tell
me what the fuck just
happened and where hell our…” He wanted to say mate but the title wasn’t his to
use officially as she’d not claimed either of them yet. “…our woman is?”
 
Wren had disappeared from the room after
lighting up like a glow stick.

“I didn’t do anything. Whatever happened originated from
her.”
 
One minute she was there smiling,
then she looked like she was fading the way old photographs do when they age.
Beams of light erupted from her dragon necklace momentarily encasing her in the
center of a vortex of blinding whiteness. Then, she vanished.

Caleb sank to the ground. “I can’t find any sense of her,
Ethan,
I can’t feel her at all.”
 
Their connection to her had increased
exponentially in the past couple of days. Even without the shared bonding
complete there was a constant presence in their mind that was
Wren
. That sensation was glaringly
absent.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before. What does it mean
Ethan?”
 
Fear laced Caleb’s voice. “I’m
guessing it was a magically induced portal the way her necklace lit up.”

 
“That would be my
guess. But she didn’t have any arrival coordinates for the other side, did
she?”

There were several kinds of conduits between the dimensions.
Ethan and Caleb had an established passage from their home here to their
apartment in Wyrmarach, which remained open at all times.

“I wouldn’t think so. We’ve not described anything specific
enough for her to latch onto to form an anchor for the destination. I don’t
know what the consequence of opening the passage way without a place to go
would be.”

A temporary one could be activated with stones like Wren wore
around her neck, but you had to know a destination, a place you’d been to before.
The difference was like taking an elevator compared to flying a plane. He
wasn’t sure Wren knew the dynamics of how portal’s worked.

Then there was the manner in which she vanished. That wasn’t
like any portal opening he’d ever seen. Of course, the Goddess split the veil
and walked through a few days ago, from what Izzy described. He’d never seen
that before either. Caleb’s worried expression didn’t make him feel any better.

“I don’t either but we’re going to find her. I refuse to
accept that she doesn’t exist anymore. She is somewhere and we’re not stopping
until we fucking find her.”

Where should they start? The essence that was Wren was gone
without a trace.

≽
∞
≼

Little pin points of
light
emerged in the darkness. They seemed real rather than dots from
lack of oxygen. The lights were more like stars in a constellation, yet they
weren’t. Some of the points were larger and brighter than others. One in
particular felt familiar, an essence of someone she knew called to her.

Emotions reached her in a searing shaft of desperation,
embroiled with complete and abject hopelessness mingled with a compelling need
to protect, latched onto her and pulled with a gut twisting yank.

The weird non-feeling of free fall floating changed to a
rapid spiraling rush downward as she became a spinning top pulled in
accelerating speed down a shaft toward a small pinpoint of distant light. In
the space of seconds the experience was over.

She smashed to the ground without the hoped for
concussion-absorbing tuck-and-roll grace she had strived for in the
nothingness. Her sword went flying out of her grasp. She didn’t even remember
having the thing in her hand.

The landing robbed her of what little remaining air her lungs
had managed to hold onto through the overpowering absence of everything. She
lay in the dirt unable to do more than gulp for life giving oxygen. Instead of
clean sweet air she inhaled dust and the decayed smell of things long dead. The
putrid taste layered on top of the whirling vertigo twisting through her.

She rolled up onto her hands and knees to vomit with a
retching coughing spasm that left her feeling turned inside out. She collapsed
back onto the ground to embrace the blackness of unconsciousness.

Wren came back into awareness, muffled by a sluggish fog,
telling her she had been out for a while. She sat up in a dark musty room that
reeked with the fetid sweetness of waste and death. Gradually moving her arms
and legs, she determined the extent of her injuries. Okay, bruised and battered
but apparently nothing broken.

Where was she? How much time had passed since she fell into
this place? If fell could quite describe what had happened to her. Caleb and
Ethan were probably very upset. She couldn’t reach out for them. She felt like
her mind was muffled with cotton locking her within herself unable to extend
even a minute psychic feeler.

Wren’s head throbbed with an intense excruciating pain.
Somewhere a concentrated cacophony of deep throbbing sound beat against her
mind. The pitch of the noise was so low that it became a pressure more than an
actual sound.

Her ears vibrated with the deep resonance creating a density
on the edge of her awareness that pulled at her in a twisting wrench of
something physical that her body evidently didn’t know how to respond to. Her
heart slowed to pace the measured throbbing beat. The sound drove sharp spikes
into her brain shredding her thoughts like shards of glass.

The swirling spin started up again and she emptied the rest of
her stomach across the dirt floor in violent projectile spew. She tried to
breath past the pain and dizziness. She crossed her palms over her chest below
her neck and concentrated on breathing. Her arms brushed against her icy cold
naked skin.

The metal of her torque warmed under her fingers. The heavy
bass beat faded from her fore conscious mind. The physical unsteadiness seemed
to ease. Where was her sword?

Not ready to get up, she stretched out her hand feeling
around in the dirt and brushed the metal hilt with her fingers. She rolled onto
her side to capture the blade. Holding it stabilized her more, decreasing the
symptoms incapacitating her.

She reached out with her thoughts trying to find the guys.
Caleb? Ethan?

When she felt Caleb’s soft mental touch crooning with worry
and fatigue, she started crying in relief.

Wren, are you hurt? Do
you know where you are?

No to
both.
She tried to breath and
regain
some
sense of rightness inside her head. Despite the scare, she’d done something wonderfully
magical. She’d transported herself from one place to another. Was she in
Wyrmarach?
Does your world smell like
dead animals?

Fuck Baby you’re not
making any sense. Caleb, focus on her location, find her right fucking now.

Ethan, I don’t seem to
be hurt really, but I am a long way from all right, and I have no idea where I
am. Would you please just turn on your mojo and come find me quick. Am I in
Wyrmarach?

Caleb’s voice emanated soothing tones in her head.
Don’t move. Neither one of us could feel
you anywhere. We’ve been searching for you for four hours. Where ever you are
is a black hole for psychic energy. It was like you no longer existed. Now it’s
clearer and we have a fix on you maybe we can find you. Just don’t move.

Ethan joined him,
don’t
you fucking move. You stay put until we can fucking get to where you are. Do
you hear me? Are you listening to me
Wren.
You scared
the fucking shit out of me.

Yes, Ethan was upset. He spoke the word as if he liked the
crisp way it rolled off his tongue as a barometer of his distress.

Their fatigue poured through the psychic link. They had been
searching for her for four hours with psi-energy and not feeling her presence
anywhere. No wonder they were exhausted and Ethan was cursing.

I was unconscious, that’s
probably why you wouldn’t feel me.

Unconscious
for four fucking hours.
What
the hell…
He shouted in her mind.

There is a low
throbbing noise. I have a splitting headache, I’m dizzy, throwing up and you’re
not helping me by shouting at me.

A screeching mind rending bellow echoed from somewhere in the
complex. What was that?

Ethan and Caleb’s exclamation,
Dragon!
Gave a name to the sound.

Dear Goddess, there’s a
dragon here?
Again the roar sounded. Somehow she did recognize the tones as
a distinctly dragonic bellow of pain echoed through the complex.

She scrambled onto her knees releasing her hold on the
torque. The external noise pressure increased in volume and intensity drowning
anything else Caleb or Ethan would have replied to her mentally into white noise
of the incessant deep pulsing beat. As the pressure increased the bellow
escalated into mind shattering screams.

The emotions that had snared her from the nothing place
washed through her.
Pain,
despair, protectiveness
.

The notes of sound reverberated across her ear drum in a
cascade of pain. What could possibly be causing it to make those hideous
sounds? She clamped her hand over her mouth biting back the urge to moan.

Her sword
tingled
whispering
Dragon Guardian
to her senses and she
felt knowledge from outside herself revealing answers to her thought questions.
Someone was hurting the shifter, a male dragon shifter. The noise was not an
accidental sound. There was power enough to entrap a dragon shifter?

Caleb! Ethan! There is
a dragon shifter being held prisoner here and he’s being tortured.
Oh No,
No dear Goddess, Caleb and Ethan were on their way into a trap and she had no
way to warn them.

≽
∞
≼

She was naked
,
lost, afraid and the only person who could stop the dragon from suffering. Wren
struggled to her feet. With little to no solid information, she needed a plan.
The noise had decreased allowing her to clear her head a bit to think.

Windows boarded shut, only allowed slivered shafts of light
to peak through, giving her barely enough visibility to feel her way through
the maze of primitive pressboard rooms. She stumbled and fell to her knees on
the hard packed dirt floor. Getting up for what seemed like the dozenth time
she noticed a complete absence of sound.

The quiet was a welcomed relief. Now her every movement
echoed through the hollow empty structure. Had she been too loud stumbling
along? Did she make too much noise and alert whoever held the dragon that they
had company? She looked around hoping it was only her fear stalking her in the
dark.

If she could just see a little better or figure out the
logical strategy for the layout of the building. The dragon had to be contained
in a larger room of the complex. It appeared that she was in some kind of
warehouse. The smell of death and animal manure permeated everything.

An overhead conveyor rack ran disused along the ceiling
connecting all the rooms. Fear rode up her throat with bile and she paused,
leaning up against a door frame fighting the nausea triggered by her senses.
She froze hearing the sound of a vehicle starting up outside the building.
Someone was leaving.

She wound her way through another series of rooms that
unexpectedly opened into the center of the complex. She ducked down to hide
from anyone that might be in the room.

Massive speakers mounted in the ceiling pointed the sound
waves toward the holding area below. The throbbing bass beat must be doing
something that interfered with her communications and the dragon physiology.

The guys had said it was like she was in a black hole of psi-energy.
Whoever orchestrated this private hell must be giving it a rest. Somehow she
had to stop that sound or when Ethan and Caleb arrived they would be snared.

The quiet was broken by a low moaning sound of agony laced
with despondency. A mountain of dark hide, big as a mid-sized moving truck rose
up in the middle of the room in front of her.

So, that was how freaking big a dragon really was. The
massive body lay stretched out like a bug pinned in a freakish entomology
collection
.