LIAM (The Rylee Adamson Epilogues, Book 2) (5 page)

“Ophelia,” I said, “tell me that’s you.”

It’s me, wolf. It will take much of my strength but I can pull on the weather to push us.

I only wished she’d given us warning about the lightning.

A BOLT OF BRILLIANT
, blue-white lightning flowed out of the sky and danced around us. It forked and split over and over again until there was a web of lightning hovering over our heads.

“Fuck, Ophelia, I’m not sure this is a good idea.” I was thinking of Levi more than anything. I was pretty sure I could survive a brush with lightning, but I didn’t know how much he could take. How strong was the elemental blood in him, and was it enough to protect him?

It looked like we were about to find out.

“Levi, hang on!”

The web of electric blue lightning loosed as though shot from a weapon. Hissing and crackling, it kissed along Ophelia’s wingtips and rushed through me and consequently through the kid. Power like nothing I’d ever felt lit me up, my nerve endings and muscles screaming—not in pain, but sheer energy.

Of course, we weren’t grounded, so the lightning had nowhere to go but
in
us. A howl ripped out of my throat at the same time a roar escaped Ophelia and a scream from Levi. Underneath me and the boy, Ophelia’s muscles bunched, her wings swept down and back with a stroke that shot us forward as if we’d previously been hovering in air, unmoving. The wind screamed as we sped through the cold, dark night air.

The sheer velocity began to pull at me, and I was wishing we’d taken the time to get a harness together for her.

I bent at the waist, doing my best to reduce the drag on my body. Carefully I reached back and took one of Levi’s hands. “Slide your arm through my belt!”

He fumbled under my jacket, but managed to get one hand around my leather belt.

I clung to her, and Levi to me, as the force of the wind pulled us in every direction. A little warning next time, was all I could think. I didn’t dare think about what would happen if we slipped off. Ophelia felt like she was barely able to control the headlong flight as it was, never mind turn the power off and spin around to catch us if we fell.

“Liam, I’m slipping!” Levi yelled.

I reached back with one hand, and grabbed the edge of his jeans. “I’ve got you, just don’t let go.”

I could barely open my eyes, the wind was so fierce. I turned my head sideways in an effort to see if I could somehow change position to help Levi get more secure in his seat.

A flash of metal, tailed by a burst of flame, had me staring to our left. A jet screamed toward us. “Ophelia!”

I see it
.

She rolled as the jet approached and I was upside down, and Levi was hanging, staring up into my eyes. I was the only thing holding onto him, the only thing keeping him from falling. The look in his eyes as he hung upside down, it would haunt me. He’d thought I was going to drop him. And had fully accepted that he was going to die.

“I’ve got you,” I said, even while my fingers slipped on the waistband of his jeans.

More incoming. Hang on, you two.

Shit, that was not going to help, not one bit.

Ophelia righted herself, and Levi slammed into the scales beside me. I pulled him up and jammed him in front of me. “Hang onto the scales.” I wrapped my arms around him, and dug my hands into the red spines. “This is about to get rough.”

“That wasn’t rough?” he squeaked.

“Not by a long shot.”

“Fuddruckers,” Levi whispered.

The rumble of more jet engines snapped my head around. Two more jets raced toward us, though these were not from the same team by the shape of the wings and paint. Ophelia dodged them both with ease, rolling and twisting in the air while never really losing her own speed. I kept a grip on the kid, so hard that I knew he probably was struggling to breathe. But it was that or have him hanging by his underwear again.

I watched the jets disappear, noting the colors and symbols told a very interesting story. Two jets were American. The first had been Canadian. And shots had been fired between the three.

They are fighting again. Even after we saved them? The ingrates.

“The humans, you mean?” I yelled into the wind, not because I wasn’t sure. But you never knew with a dragon what they were picking up on in your head. Always best to be crystal clear when someone could read your thoughts like reading the newspaper.

Who else? They are the only fools who can’t seem to realize we must all coexist on the same planet. They are the ones who keep creating mass weapons, who hate with a virulence that leaves their children afraid to step outside, and their women afraid to trust any man, and their men stupidly thinking they can change it all with more weapons. Idiots. They’re going to end up killing us all, aren’t they?

She was right, and I knew it, but I didn’t want to agree, not out loud. Almost as if by agreeing, I was somehow making it become a reality I did not want to see.

Hell, I’d been a human a lot longer than I’d been a supernatural. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t help them. I understood what Rylee had meant when she said she knew something bad was coming, but it wasn’t entirely clear, and there wasn’t much we could do about it until that clarity came through. However, between her info and what I’d gotten from my contacts, I could put together a pretty good picture.

The world was on the brink of another war. And this one would be with weapons that could wipe out the entire planet if it wasn’t stopped. There would be no reason to try to save anyone if we let this happen.

There was an explosion and two of the jets erupted midair, leaving only a single American jet flying. Shrapnel blasted in every direction, flames shot through the clouds in bright sprays. Ophelia didn’t say a word, just climbed higher.

Levi shook in front of me. “I’m freezing, and I can barely breathe.”

“Don’t think about it,” I said. “You aren’t human, this won’t kill you.” I hoped. He was sucking wind hard, but he hadn’t passed out. Something he would have done had he been fully human at this height. We were way above the clouds and the air was thin.

Ophelia kept her pace up while she spoke.

They won’t stop until their world is dead and their species extinct.

“Maybe that would be for the better.” The words slipped out and I shook my head, denying them right away. I knew it was a knee-jerk reaction, but I couldn’t help it. We’d saved the world, only to watch it disintegrate into a human-made war? That wasn’t going to happen. I prayed.

If we let them fight like that, they could end up taking us with them.

The truth in her words echoed what I’d already been thinking. So I changed the subject.

“How long before we get to Seattle?”

We are almost there, Liam. Where do you want me to take you?

I checked the positioning of the sun. Two hours was all it had taken, faster even than a commercial flight. In front of me, Levi’s head was ducked and he clung to Ophelia’s spine as though he would be swept off at any moment. Here and there he shivered, but otherwise, he didn’t move. I had to give him credit, he hadn’t completely lost it, despite almost being dumped from the dragon’s back.

Which was saying a lot considering the situation.

I checked myself; it was time to focus. Two hours, and the plan I had was still barely sketched out. It looked like I was about to pull a Rylee and leap before I looked.

From what Rylee said, the majority of the ogres camped out in Kerry Park, but that was a small strip of green according to Levi’s phone. The likelihood of it actually being their real haunt was small. But I wasn’t about to ask to be dropped in the middle of where their last known whereabouts was. Call it a feeling, but I doubted my sudden appearance and request for one of their females was going to go over well. Of course, it’s what Rylee would have done, fully expecting to fight her way out and win. A grin twisted my lips.

“Let’s do a fly-over, see if we can see any ogres, or a good place to land.” She nodded and banked to the side, heading to the north.

A few minutes passed and we slid over a small section of green. “Can you drop lower?”

Of course.

She spun us downward until we were only about a hundred feet above the treetops. A faint whiff of ogre musk was there and gone in a flash. I might not be able to shift into my wolf form, but my nose worked as well as it ever had, even as a human.

“Levi, try your phone. See if it can tell us where we are.”

Shivering, he sat up slowly and fished around in his jacket. “The screen is dark. I don’t understand, I had like eighty percent still.”

“Supernaturals and technology don’t mix,” I muttered. “It might come on later when you are away from me and Ophelia.”

He looked over the side of her carefully. “That’s Kerry Park.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, see that building there?” He pointed at a large blocky structure across from the green space, and I nodded.

“Yeah, I see it.”

“I remember it when I did the search for the area. That sign on top of it is hard to miss.”

The sign in question said something along the lines of the current president was going to cause the apocalypse. Another day, another life, I would have laughed. Not so much now after all I’d seen.

“Good job, kid,” I said. I scanned the area, seeing in the distance a glimmer of water. “Head to that lake, Ophelia.”

You got it. That will be a good place for me to rest before I head back.

“That little green space back there is hiding ogres?” Levi mumbled, twisting to look behind us. “That’s not possible. I mean, is it?” He looked at me, awkward with the fact that I was holding him in front of me.

Ophelia snorted and shook her head.
The world of the supernatural rarely fits into what is possible. The place may look small to you, but with the right magic, they could bend it in on itself and make it a monstrous forest you would never escape from if they chose.

I startled, surprised. “Seriously?”

She nodded.
Yes. Be wary; if they have a mage that can do that, you will have to truly watch yourselves. As you’ve seen, ogre mages are even more vicious than the rest of their warriors. Bloodthirsty assholes, the bunch of them, if you ask me. The only good ones are those three you will raise, because I know you will show them a better path.

There was more than a hint of rage simmering under her words; grief thick and heavy swam over the syllables, making them hard to stomach. Her loss had been as great as any of ours. Blaz had been her mate, the father of her children, and he’d fought her a long time before he let himself realize that truth. And then he’d been killed by a band of ogres.

I put a hand to her side. “I miss him too. We all do.”

She bobbed her head.
I know. I only wish it had not ended the way it had. All dragons expect to die, but not at the hands of a creature we could snap in half with a single bite.

I gritted my teeth as she flew lower to the lake, doing my best to fend off the emotions that flowed from Ophelia into me. By the way Levi trembled, he was getting a dose of it too.

I’d never mentioned it to Rylee, but Ophelia’s way of speaking was very different than Blaz’s. Blaz was your typical male, straightforward and blunt.

Ophelia’s words held emotion like a cup held water, and if you drank from it, those emotions spilled into your own mind. Maybe Rylee didn’t notice. Or maybe it was just the difference between male and female.

The emotions eased as she focused on bringing us down. The bobbing turbulence of landing setting my teeth on edge, and my stomach rolled more than once as we bounced along. Levi gasped as we slid through the downward air currents, which shook us sideways hard, before landing on a strip of beach tucked in a tiny cove. Ophelia’s claws dug into the soft dirt, back feet and tail dipping into the water with barely a splash.

I unwrapped my arms from the kid and jumped from Ophelia’s broad back, sliding down the left side, away from where Levi had emptied his stomach. Levi was right behind me, stumbling on wobbly legs as he hit the ground.