Earth's Hope (5 page)

“Knock it off.” Aislinn moved back by his side.

“He’s right to protect you from us,” Celaeno said. “We could snuff out your pathetic existence with a thought.”

Rune snarled and launched himself at the Harpies. Before he got even close to striking distance, a blast of magic picked him up and tossed him twenty feet backward.

“Control your bond animal,” Aello said, “if you wish him to live.”

The wolf leaped to his feet and shook himself all over. Before he could charge again, Aislinn snapped, “Rune. To me.” It would piss the wolf off because he couldn’t refuse a direct order from her, but it was better than having him cut down before her eyes.

This time, Rune’s snarl was for her as he stalked to her side. When she settled her hand on his head, he jerked from beneath it.

“Come with us.” Aeollo’s voice, directed at Fionn, was liquid honey.

“I don’t think so.” Aislinn squared her shoulders. “He’s mine.”

“If I come with you, then what?” Fionn asked.

“Your woman and her bond animal will be allowed to return to your home,” Celaeno spoke smoothly.

“Bullshit!” Aislinn spun so she stood in front of Fionn facing him. “Not an option. We face this, whatever it is, together.”

“But we don’t want you, human,” one of the Harpies said.

“Of course you don’t.” Aislinn twirled and faced them. “Not if you’re thinking of seducing him again.”

Aello laughed, and her mirth cut into Aislinn’s heart like sprinkles of grated glass. “I wouldn’t be so certain just who seduced whom, human.” She snapped her fingers and tossed her hair over her shoulders displaying her full, white breasts to advantage. “We waste time. There are only two outcomes. Either you join us, or fight us.”

“There might be three.” Aislinn spat the words. “We could get lucky and kill you.”

Fionn placed his hands on her shoulders and pulled her back to his side. “Nay, leannán, ’twould never happen. Not against two. Harpies are soul stealers. Not mine, but they prey on human souls.”

“Shall we?” Celaeno extended a hand, her fingers tipped with curving red talons.

“Hold.” Fionn’s face could have been carved from stone. “I want your word that Aislinn, Rune, and my bond raven will have safe passage between here and my house,” Fionn said.

“No!” Aislinn shrieked. “I—”

“Hush.” Fionn cut her off. “We doona have a choice, lass. Tell Gwydion and Bran exactly what happened. Arawn and the dragons too, once they return.”

“But when will you be back?” Aislinn cried.

“He won’t,” Aello said.

Magic flashed and the place where Fionn had stood lay empty. Smoke roiled, stinging her nostrils and eyes. Aislinn pulsed destructive magic in a wide enough arc to disable damn near anything, even though she knew in her bones the Harpies were gone.

“Goddammit!” Aislinn pounded her fist into a nearby fencepost. The pain cleared her head.

Rune nipped her leg. “Hurry.”

“Where?”

“Fionn bought our freedom. Don’t throw his gift away.”

She ground her jaws together until she was surprised her teeth didn’t shatter. “I was going to go after him.”

“Do you know where to find him?” the wolf asked.

“No.” The word tore out of her.

“Maybe Gwydion or Bran will.” Rune pushed his snout into her thigh. “Come on. Before those bitches change their mind and return.”

At the very edges of her hearing, Aislinn heard shrill, tinkling laughter that sounded a lot like Aeollo. She shook her fist at the night sky. “Fine. I’m leaving, but this isn’t done. You can’t have him.”

She took off through the night running as fast as she could with Rune right beside her. Just before she passed beneath the manor house outer wall, Bella landed on her shoulder, cutting deep with her long, sharp talons.

“Stop it!” Aislinn grunted. “That hurts.” But the bird didn’t loosen her grip.

Aislinn pelted past the moat and up the greenway to the set of stairs leading to the front door. As soon as she got inside, she raised her mind voice to a shout. “Gwydion! Bran! Find me now.”

Chapter Four

Dewi lumbered into the cave system on the dragons’ borderworld right behind Nidhogg. Limestone walls rose around her and stalactites and stalagmites glistened in light reflected through the cave’s entrance. Soon it would be pitch black except for the faint glow she and Nidhogg emitted. The cave system was extensive; it could easily take two or three hours to wend their way to the fountain at its center.

She was still seething that something as important as not being the last living dragon had been hidden from her. By now she’d figured out the Celts wanted her right where they’d sent her: to spy on Lemurians from the infernal tunnels beneath Taltos. Had she known other dragons lived, she’d have left her post in search of them.

Bastards! They used me.

“Sorry for eavesdropping on your thoughts,” Nidhogg lowered his voice, “but you have to be rational.”

“All I can say,” she muttered, “is I’m having one hell of a hard time imagining what would keep our kin locked on this world. Arawn said the dragons remained because he wanted them to. Since when do we kowtow to the Celts?” Fire streamed from her mouth. “Dragons owe their allegiance to me.”

“And me.” Nidhogg’s tone was mild.

“You were gone forever,” Dewi said.

“So? Calling on dead gods is a time-honored occupation.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be,” he countered. “Remember our agreement.”

“Which was?”

“You will not harm anybody unless we have fully discussed it and are in agreement.”

“I won’t have to harm them.” Dewi blew fire-streaked smoke out her nostrils. “If I command it, they will throw themselves into the caldera. Even dragons will burn if we’re in there long enough.”

“When did you grow so bitter?”

“When the Celts refused to help me rescue you, and I lost both you and our children.” She swallowed back an acrid taste coating her throat. “Once I’d lost everything, it was impossible not to be…bitter.”

They walked in silence for a long time, winding lower and lower into caves that flowed into one another. The temperature increased incrementally as they moved downward. Nidhogg picked up the pace when they got close to the bottom. Dewi heard rustling and smelled the other dragons before she saw them. She inhaled their scents and recognized each of them.

“At least this explains something,” she muttered.

“What?” Nidhogg asked.

“When I needed assistance once you’d been captured, I called upon our own kind first. It didn’t take long, since there were only eight dragons left. The four who lived near our cave were impossibly old and feeble. When I tried to locate the four I sense down here—Kra, Berra, Royce, and Vaughna—I couldn’t find them. It didn’t make sense at the time, but I was so flummoxed about you being gone I couldn’t figure it out. It never occurred to me they’d gone AWOL. I assumed they’d been killed.” She punched a wall with her foreleg in frustration.

Finally, she rounded the last corner. Huddled in an enormous oblong chamber littered with wildebeest bones were four dragons, one red, one green, one copper, and one black. Nidhogg ground to a halt just inside the final cavern and thundered, “Explain yourselves.”

The copper dragon, Kra, rose on his hindquarters, his dark eyes whirling pools. He bowed first to Nidhogg and then to Dewi. “We knew Dewi would come eventually,” he began, and steam billowed above his head. “We believed Nidhogg dead until Arawn told us differently earlier today.”

“What else did you know?” Dewi asked.

“How angry you would be,” Kra replied.

“Then why remain here?” Nidhogg cut in. “I was imprisoned by the dark gods for hundreds of years. If any of you had been available, Dewi might have rescued me far sooner than she did.”

Fire belched from Dewi’s mouth. She wanted to launch herself at Kra, rip his throat out, but she forced herself to remain by Nidhogg’s side. “Answer him,” she growled.

Kra focused his gaze on Nidhogg. “Have you been to Asgard since your return?”

Nidhogg shook his head until his scales rattled. “I haven’t been to Asgard, or spoken with Odin, since he threatened me.”

“Threatened you with what?” Dewi clacked her jaws together. “You never said anything about it.”

“Oh but I did, just not directly. He said if I mated with you, he’d hunt us down and kill our young.”

Fire roiled from Dewi’s belly and burst through her mouth. “That bastard! I’ll hunt him down and—”

“Which is exactly why I was vague about the particulars,” Nidhogg broke in. “Odin didn’t mean it. That man always had a nasty disposition. I figured he’d get over himself if we gave him a wide berth.” Steam and smoke rose from his nostrils. “Perrikus captured me about twenty years after Odin threw his temper tantrum.”

“Aye.” Berra, the red dragon, moved to Kra’s side. Dewi recalled they were mated.

“Once you’d been kidnapped”—she shot a meaningful glance at Nidhogg from whirling golden eyes—“Odin came unglued. He rampaged through Asgard and Valhalla and said if his dragon was gone, no dragons should survive.”

Suddenly Dewi understood, and felt thunderstruck by the revelation. She clacked her jaws together and said, “Since Arawn knew your whereabouts, he must have rounded the four of you up and brought you here.” At Kra’s nod, Dewi went on, stuttering with fury. “He had no right. He didn’t ask my leave, or for my help. It was my job to protect you. Mine.” She scraped a taloned foreleg against a nearby limestone formation, reducing it to dust, and then pulverized another.

“At first, Arawn said we wouldn’t be here for very long.” Royce stepped out of the shadowed section of the cavern, bringing his mate, Vaughna, with him. Royce straightened, and his black scales chittered against one another.

“So much time passed, I feared the god of the dead forgot about us,” Vaughna cut in. The green dragon narrowed her copper eyes. “Royce and I left on a reconnaissance after we’d been here a few years. The first person we encountered was one of Odin’s spies.”

“Crap!” Dewi leaned forward, fearing the worst. “You didn’t.”

“We had no choice,” Vaughna said. “If he’d lived, he’d have reported back to Odin.”

“But the covenant forbids us from killing humans who haven’t harmed us,” Dewi protested, aware how feeble the words sounded. “Never mind. It’s not relevant. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this? Why didn’t Odin harm the other four dragons? The ones living near me.”

“They were old,” Kra said. “Nearly at the end of their lives. Odin probably didn’t think them worth bothering with.”

Dewi remembered how feeble they’d been, and how sad and apologetic, when she’d asked for help hunting Nidhogg. They’d even declined egg nanny duty to keep her clutch warm, saying they no longer possessed enough heat. It hadn’t been long after that when they’d teleported for the last time, returning to the dragons’ borderworld to die. They’d been gone when she returned without her mate.

With her clutch gone cold, Dewi had almost returned to the borderworld herself, intent on self-destruction. No one who had kin left could possibly understand what she’d gone through. She’d never gotten used to being the only dragon. Even joy at discovering Aislinn, a MacLochlainn bonded to her through ancient ritual, hadn’t tempered the grief that shrouded her with numbness.

I’d have done away with myself if I weren’t such a coward.

“I’m leaving,” Nidhogg said.

“What?” Dewi stared at him, incredulous. “Where are you going? Our brood needs you.”

He laid his snout alongside hers. “You’ll have help caring for them. Bring these dragons back to Fionn’s. I’ll join you once I’ve had it out with Odin. He overstepped his bounds when he targeted our kind to get even with Perrikus for kidnapping me.”

“You think?” Scorn saturated Dewi’s voice. Fury left an ashy residue in her mouth, and she shook herself to contain her anger. An idea took root, and she nuzzled Nidnogg’s neck, infusing compulsion into her words. “Kra knows where Fionn’s manor house is. They scarcely need me as an escort. Maybe—”

“No.” Nidhogg’s eyes whirled faster. “You’re not coming with me.”

“Why not? These four dragons are my subjects. He had no right to terrorize them and force them into hiding for centuries.”

“Oh, believe me, he’ll hear that.” Nidhogg’s tone dripped menace. “And more. This is between Odin and me. Technically, I’m his subject, but I won’t be after we get done.”

Berra stepped in front of Dewi and bowed low. “My humble apologies for not letting you know we yet lived. I thought you’d show up here, and we could tell you then. Except you never did.”

I can’t very well tell them I avoided our world because it would have made it too easy to take the coward’s way out of my pain…

“Apology accepted,” Dewi grunted through stiff lips.

Vaughna lumbered to Berra’s side, her coppery eyes aglow. “We’d love to see your younglings. Because things on Earth were so uncertain, we didn’t think it wise to create new dragons if they were just going to end up sport for Odin and his Viking horde.”

“We could remedy that.” Kra strode behind his mate, caught her eye, and winked lewdly.

Dewi smirked in spite of her ire. Men. No matter what race, they were all the same, with sex-saturated brains.

Nidhogg backed away from her.The air shimmered and thickened, smelling of a newly lit fire, as Dewi felt him summon teleport magic.

“Be careful,” she said.

“He can’t kill me,” Nidhogg said. “I’m one of the gods.” He skinned dark scales back from his teeth and smiled with all the warmth of a scimitar. The air around him took on a glittery aspect, and he whisked out of sight.

Dewi looked at the other dragons. It was impossible to be angry with them. “Bet you’re ready to leave,” she said.

“More than ready,” Royce concurred.

“Rather than return to your caves in Norway, why not move into the ones near mine in Inishowen? That way we can support one another. Odin isn’t our primary foe.”

“What do you mean?” Kra blew a gout of flame.

Dewi shook her head. Apparently Arawn hadn’t been any more forthcoming with this group than he’d been with her. “We have much to catch up on. Let’s teleport out of here. We can talk once we’re at Fionn MacCumhaill’s. You do remember where he lives?”