Dragon Void (Immortal Dragons Book 2) (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Evie

Canadian Rockies

Present Day

B
eing able to fly again under her own power would have been heavenly, but Evie didn’t want to chance shifting until after the baby was born. It had taken enough convincing for her mates to agree to let her join them, she made the concession to ride on Ked’s back with Marcus rather than cavort in the wind with her brothers.

Her sense of dread increased from moment to moment, the closer they got to the North American mountain range where the compound was hidden. Not even Marcus’s comforting arms wrapped around her from behind could dispel the chill.

“I don’t want to go back any more than you do, but this was the last place Aurum’s satyr was seen. If there’s a chance we can get him out, I agree we need to take it for everyone’s sake.”

Evie squeezed his hand and turned to kiss him on the cheek, trying to dispel the dread through her intimacy with Marcus.

“I’m not worried about being captured again. I just hate the idea of being that close to him as long as the baby’s doing well.”

They soon landed in the same clearing Evie remembered from her rescue, but the place had changed even in the short time since they were there last. It was late Fall, so there shouldn’t be many leaves on the trees anyway, but even the evergreens surrounding them were bare of needles, the entire area as silent as a grave. When the others shifted around her, she heard a collection of soft curses from the dragons.

“Nikhil is either here, or has recently departed,” Ked said, his darkness pulsing around him.

He seemed far too eager to fly to the compound and confront the evil bastard. Thankfully his brothers kept him reasonable.

“Let the Norths reconnoiter and tell us the situation first, brother,” Gavra said, placing himself between Ked and the direction of the peak the Ultiori lair was nestled behind.

Evie’s brothers flew away again, disappearing into the gray November sky. While the rest of them waited, Evie closed her eyes and listened for any secrets that might be carried on the wind. Around her the bare, dead branches of the trees rustled eerily, causing her to shiver. The Wind herself spoke of sadness and pain, but that was nothing new compared to what Evie had experienced when she’d been there last.

Deep in the undercurrents, she could hear other notes. Abandonment, deep regret, loneliness, hunger, despair. The notes came from the direction of the compound but sounded like two different instruments, their songs dissonant echoes carried on the wind.

Her brothers returned a few moments later, grave looks on both their faces.

“It’s abandoned,” Lukas said. “I could hear nothing inside. No life. Last time we were here, the place was full. Mostly with prisoners, but not even a rat is in residence now.”

“There are two still,” Evie said, surprising herself at the ringing strength of her voice. She was even more surprised when Lukas abruptly stopped talking and turned to stare at her, along with everyone else. “I may be out of practice, brother, but maybe fifty years of trying like hell to hear
anything
has refined my senses. There are still two inside. I don’t know more than that, but everything I can hear suggests that they were left behind. Abandoned with the compound.”

“Two?” Aurum asked, grabbing Evie by the arm. “Is it both of the males from my dream, or only one? Can you tell?”

“No,” Evie said, gripping the dragon’s hand and squeezing. “I can’t tell who it is. The place is deserted otherwise, though.” She turned to tell Ked she believed it safe to go in, but he was already flying away, with her brothers close behind.

“Climb on my back, sister,” Aurum said, her eyes wild with excitement and worry as she shifted and bent low for Evie to climb on.

They flew together, following the others up over the ridge line covered with dead pines and rocks. Aurum’s massive wings pulled them through the air and in spite of Evie’s elation at being aloft at all, she could sense the female’s apprehension as though it were her own.

Aurum made a slow circle around the roof of the sprawling building that had been constructed into the mountainside over the rapidly churning river. Evie had only seen that view once in the dead of night when Ked had taken her away. Her only other memory of the river was from the view she’d seen the day she and Marcus had arrived. That day she’d thought it beautiful from within the glass trap she’d let herself walk into unknowing.

Now it seemed violent and unforgiving, the white caps of the water churning over the rocks.

When Aurum landed, Evie slid off and Aurum immediately shifted and walked toward the rest of the group. Evie followed close behind, hoping she would be able to hear any hint from the Wind that would give her insight into the situation. Ked was inside now, she could tell that much, and he’d taken Marcus in with him. She knew they’d gone together to more quickly navigate the place, but their absence now in the belly of this dead beast made her anxious.

The air currents shifted around them suddenly. Only Evie and her brothers seemed to notice, all three of them turning their heads at the whispers of approach.

At the other end of the rooftop, a dark cloud coalesced and Ked appeared holding a large, limp body in his arms. Aurum and Evie both ran to him and helped him lay the body down.

The man’s long arms and legs flopped to the rooftop and his head lolled to the side, but he was breathing.

“This isn’t either of them,” Aurum said with certainty. “The ones from my dream both had dark hair. This man has white hair. But he needs help, still.” She turned and called over her shoulder. “Numa! Come help, please!”

Aurum’s sister rushed over and knelt on the other side of the unconscious man.

Before Evie could reach him, Ked disappeared in a cloud again. Marcus had yet to make an appearance, and she guessed he was still inside.

Instead, she went to kneel beside the unconscious man.

He wasn’t entirely unconscious. Numa touched his face gently, and he turned into her palm. His lips moved constantly, repeating words over and over. Sometimes they sounded like, “Mama, save me.” Other times they were just gibberish. With a breath from Numa’s lips, his ranting slowed and he slept.

Evie studied his white-haired features that seemed contradictory to his youthful appearance. Maybe youthful wasn’t the word, though. He wasn’t young, but he was by no means old, either. His body, in spite of appearing malnourished, was strong and fit. Yet he had long white hair and a white beard. He’d been inside for a very long time. And for fifty years she’d been in there with him, yet had never known him. She’d caught so many fleeting impressions of the residents on the days when her door had opened and she was led to the lab, but had no memory of his voice carried on the recycled air around the facility.

Before she could hear more from Numa’s soft questions, an uproar came from behind her.

She turned in time to see Ked struggling with a black-haired man who kept yelling, “Let me die!”

Beside her, Aurum let out an incoherent cry, and the air around Evie grew thick with her friend’s power.

Every cell in her body gravitated to Ked and Marcus. She went to Ked and he met her, pulling her into a tight embrace. Marcus appeared out of the stairwell a second later, walked toward them, and embraced them both. She didn’t understand this need to be with them until Ked grumbled, “She found him, I guess.”

They turned together and watched as Aurum approached the man who knelt a few yards away, raking his hands through his long, lank black hair.

He wasn’t just a man, though. Beneath his crouched form, Evie saw hooves rather than feet, though his upper half was entirely human in appearance. A very upset human.

Aurum knelt in front of him and he held completely still while the golden dragon spoke.

“Do you know me as I know you?” Aurum asked.

The man let his hands fall to his lap and bowed his head. Beneath him, his hooves transformed into human feet.

“You are she,” he said. He let out a sigh through quivering lips. “I don’t deserve you. Not as I am.”

“I still want you,” Aurum said. She reached out to touch him, hesitating with her long, delicate fingers close to the edge of his face. She tucked a strand of his hair behind his ear and let her palm rest on his cheek.

His closed eyes clenched tighter and he turned away from her touch.

When he opened his eyes, he stared hauntingly down over the edge of the rooftop, watching the churn of the river beneath. He let out a sigh that reached Evie’s ears a second too late.
I’m going home
, was what Evie heard on the Wind.

Then he stood and in only a few swift strides, he vaulted off the rooftop.

They ran to the edge in time to see his body splash into the violently churning water of the rapids far below.

Before Evie’s eyes, Aurum shifted and let out a roar. Her massive gold-scaled shape swooped out over the ravine and down toward the river, following it until she was no longer visible.

They all stood there, still as statues. Evie took comfort in the touch of her mates, but they couldn’t keep the tears from falling.

“He was damaged,” Ked said. “But he is hers, so we will do what we can to find him.”

“How could he survive that?” Evie asked. The man hadn’t even sprouted wings when he leaped off the roof. He’d just plummeted straight into the churning rapids of the river below.

“He’s a satyr,” Numa said in her melodic voice. “The last male of his kind. The nymphs won’t let him die, if he’s coming back to them.”

A moment later, a dripping wet Aurum landed and shifted in front of them. “I lost him, but I’m going to find him. He’s in the water now, so I’m going to the source. You’ll help me, won’t you, brother? I need you. I need all of you to help me find him.”

“That looked like a suicide jump to me,” Marcus said. “That was Calder. The mad goat, we always called him because all he talked about were his regrets and how he wished to die.”

“He’s a water elemental. A nymph,” Ked said. “It explains his state of mind the first time I met him, but Numa’s right—a leap into any body of water wouldn’t have killed him. We have more immediate concerns, though.” He pulled away and moved to crouch beside the other man who was still incoherent, but had calmed under Numa’s touch.

“We have to leave now,” Aurum said, frantic and pacing around them. “If we get to the source, we can find him, but we can’t waste time.”

“The source is protected.”

They all stared at the man who had spoken. The white-haired stranger lying between them opened his eyes and looked around for the first time. He struggled to a sitting position and bowed his head, taking a deep breath, his bare, broad shoulders shuddering. Tangles of white hair fell over his bearded face. His voice and posture were weary, reinforcing Evie’s sense that he was even older than the white hair suggested. But when his gaze landed on her, she saw no lines around his eyes and his skin was perfectly smooth and pale. It was then that she understood what he was.

The color of his features wasn’t due to age, though he was no doubt ancient. He was so pale he seemed nearly translucent, the way a plant might when deprived of sunlight. The lack of sunlight had made her own skin paler, but her hair and wings had darkened over the past five decades in captivity. Not so for one of his kind, as bound to the Earth as the ursa were.

He glanced at all of them before his gaze fixed on Aurum when he spoke.

“Solstice. That’s when we go. What day is it today?”

“November twentieth,” Evie said.

“My mother will help us find him,” he said. “You must take me home on Solstice.”

“And who, pray tell, is your mother?” Numa asked.

Evie answered for him, the Wind already whispering the surprising name in her ears.

“His name is Stonetree. His mother is the Ursa Queen, Maia Stonetree.”

His gaze shot to her again and he studied her, as though trying to understand how she knew. When a breeze blew past, whipping his hair around his head, he closed his eyes. The cock of his head and the imperceptible whisper Evie heard caused her eyes to widen in disbelief. He was most certainly an ursa male, and yet the wind was speaking to
him
just then. She glanced toward her brothers, who both stared back at her in shock.

Evie’s fascination with the exchange was interrupted by Ked rising again and pushing her away.

“This is Aurum’s ordeal, not yours. Be careful.”

“You don’t understand. He’s different. How can he hear the Wind the way I can? He’s an ursa, not a turul!”

“I am many things,” the man called to her and Evie pulled away from Ked’s tight grip.

“Please tell me,” she said.

“My mother knew when I was born that I was more than just an ursa child. She gifted me with all my secrets when I was a baby, before they took me away from her.” He stood to his full height then, towering broad shouldered and as tall as any of the dragons. Turning his back toward Evie, he tugged the waist of his pants down low enough to display an intricate, bear-shaped scar near the base of his spine that glimmered faintly with power. When he turned around again, he focused intently on Evie. “I was conceived inside a place like this, hundreds of years ago. My father was an ursa male—a Windchaser—who was mutated with the blood of a turul before he was given to my mother to service her through her estrous. After she escaped, my father was destroyed for the sake of the master’s cruel experiments. You carry a child like me inside you now, so you understand more than anyone what I am. Guard that child with your life when it is born, for the Master will hunt you down to reclaim it if he learns that it exists. I know that if he could have killed my mother when he stole me back, he would have, but she was far too powerful, and he dared not capture her as well, or she would have destroyed every last one of his hunters in her mother’s rage.”

Evie had certainly heard stories about the fearsome power a female ursa could wield in order to protect her cubs. Turul mothers were protective, but their mates shouldered as much or more of the responsibility of ensuring their offsprings’ well-being. Still, she reflexively placed her hands over her abdomen and was comforted by the solid presence of Marcus and Ked as they moved close to her sides.