Love Bites (18 page)

When Percival’s stomach was finally under control again, he recognized the song his friend was whistling: “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

*   *   *

H
uar’s great jaws opened, and a blast of flame that looked like the product of a thermonuclear explosion boiled out of his mouth and shot directly at Morgana’s head.

Knowing the blast would blow right through her shield, she opened herself to the Mageverse and let still more power rush in. A heartbeat later, she sent it roaring out again to slam into Huar’s attack.

The two spells collided, swirled together in a vicious storm of opposing forces . . . and canceled each other out, dissipating back into the Mageverse.

“Human bitch,” Huar hissed, his forked tail snapping in fury as he winged in dizzying bat-like circles around her. “I am going to rip the beating heart out of your mate’s chest and eat it before your very eyes. Then I’ll set the other two aflame so you can listen to them scream while I rape you.”

Morgana knew the threat wasn’t hyperbole. The dragon’s great orange eyes blazed with madness, and raw evil swirled around him like sewage around a drain.

So yes, he’d do it. Hell, he’d done worse. Would do worse to her if she let him.

But even as her blood went cold, she laughed in his face. “All that Death Magic you’ve been using has rotted your wits,” she hissed in the draconic tongue. “You’re the one who’ll burn like a torch. Fit payment for your filthy crimes.”

That threat
was
hyperbole. Morgana was tiring, and the power she had to keep drawing from the Mageverse hurt almost as badly as Huar’s attacks.
Which is actually a good sign,
she told herself.
I’ll be in trouble when the magic starts feeling good.

Morgana knew the sequence, had experienced it before. First pain from drawing too much power, then numbness, then a wild pleasure turning quickly to euphoria. Then . . . She didn’t remember what came after that.

And it was that which frightened her most of all.

*   *   *

M
arrok worked to banish the last of the green Death Magic symbols with grim swings of the collar, though he looked as if he’d fall on his face at any moment.

As his friend worked, Percival shot a glance skyward, painfully aware of the sound of lethal combat in the air over their heads. Morgana fought for her life—and theirs—while he was trapped down on the ground, unable to help her, unable to save her.

Finished at last, Marrok dropped the collar in sheer exhaustion. It took Percival and Cador together to steady him.

Lifting the spell had an immediate effect. Soren raised his great head and blinked at them in confusion. He said something in the hissing language of his kind before switching to English. “Sir . . . knight? What . . . ?”

“You were kidnapped by Huar, the dragon you were hunting,” Percival told him, as Marrok straightened away from his steadying hand. The big knight was still pale, but his color was rapidly improving with the last of the spell gone.

Soren’s head snapped up on his long neck, and his iridescent eyes went wide. “Huar! Egg-sucker . . . trapped me . . . cut a cursed Death Magic spell . . . into my scales!” His teeth bared, his head swung in search of his foe. “I’ll have . . . have his blood . . .”

“I don’t think you’re up to it right now,” Percival told him. “That spell has been funneling your life force to Huar. You need to concentrate on healing yourself.”

“Yes . . .” Great dragon eyes blinked slowly, their pupils dilated and dazed. “I need to . . . heal.”

“While he’s doing that, we’d better check on the women,” Cador said, shooting Marrok a concerned stare. “Are you up to it?”

“I think so.” Marrok braced his tree-trunk thighs apart. “But we need healers. There’s not a hell of a lot we vampires can do for these girls.” He looked at Percival. “Have you tried calling Avalon yet?”

“I’m about to. You and Cador go check on the other victims.”

“You won’t be . . . able to get through,” Soren said in a voice that sounded so uncharacteristically weak, it was hard to hear him over the roaring blasts of the combat overhead. “I just tried to reach Kel again . . . been trying . . . for hours now. Huar erected a spell around this clearing to keep us from calling for help. It’s still there.”

Percival pulled the enchanted iPhone off his belt and tried anyway, only to discover the dragon was right. The phone might as well have been a brick. “Is there any way you could open a gate so one of us could go for reinforcements? Maybe if you heal your injuries first?”

“The spell blocks any gates but those he . . . chooses to allow,” the dragon said in that breathy, fading voice that was so uncharacteristic for him. “As to healing . . . I fear I am too weak. Perhaps after I rest . . .”

Percival wanted to snap that Morgana might not have that much time, but under the circumstances, even he wasn’t that big of a dick. He bit it back. Instead, he and Soren watched the battle taking place overhead.

“Oh, Morgana,” Soren breathed. “Don’t draw any more power. You’ll destroy yourself . . . and Cachamwri knows who else . . .”

His heart in his throat, Percival stared up at the battling dragons. “She may not have a choice.”

*   *   *

M
organa no longer felt the pain. Not from the burns where Huar’s blasts had penetrated her shield, not from the wounds he’d inflicted with claws and teeth.

She knew he was beating her, but the thought seemed distant, despite the chilling knowledge that once she was dead, he’d slaughter Percival and his team.

They’d die in agony.

Yet instead of the terror that thought should inspire, all Morgana felt was a growing euphoria. Every time she raked her claws across Huar’s muzzle, pleasure rang through her like a great dark bell.

Huar might be winning, but she was hurting him. Making him pay for those women and Soren and her knights. And every moment she fought him was a moment he wasn’t attacking those she loved.

And if some part of her knew this giddy pleasure was very, very bad, all she wanted was to bleed him. She thirsted for his blood like water in the desert heat.

Huar juked in midair, avoiding the spell blast she sent roiling at him, his huge sword-length teeth bared in draconic rage and frustration. “Human bitch! I’m going to rip you apart and feast on your steaming guts!”

“Big talk, lizard,” she snarled.

Glowing orange eyes blinked and narrowed, trying to rid themselves of the blood that seeped into them from the bite she’d inflicted on his head. “Then when you are dead, I’m going to shift and fuck that mate of yours until he dies in blood and agony!”

At the threat, her wings lost their rhythm, and she faltered in the air.

Huar struck. His huge body slammed into hers, forelegs and rear claws snapping around her as he sank his jaws into the back of her neck just behind her skull. Her body twisted, trying to break his hold from sheer spinal reflex, but her mind . . . her mind . . .

She balanced on a stool on the tips of her toes, her hands bound in front of her, spots dancing in front of her eyes. She couldn’t draw breath for the pressure of the noose around her neck, its rope taut, looped over the hook in the ceiling of the priest’s cottage.

When the beatings hadn’t made her admit to the perverted sins he described, he had decided to give her a taste of hanging.

The dragon’s forelegs raked along her ribs . . .

She’d been sure—so blindly sure—he wouldn’t actually dare kill her because he wouldn’t be able to explain it to the bishop. And she’d known that if she did sign that disgusting confession, the Church would hang her as a witch.

“You will sign!” Bennett shouted, and stormed from the room. “You
will
confess your crimes!”

Her blood went icy in her veins as a five-year-old boy screamed. Bennett dragged Mordred into the room, jerked the struggling child to the floor in front of the stool she balanced on, and started jerking his tunic up. “Sign it!” Bennett shrieked. “You will sign it now!”

Huar’s teeth tightened their grip on the back of her skull. She heard his teeth grinding into bone, the pressure vicious . . .

Morgana’s hands flew up to grab the tight rope looped over the hook. With a scream of mingled defiance and terror, she leaped straight upward with all the strength she had left, taking the tension off the rope so she could flip it forward. The stool fell with a crash.

If she’d misjudged her leap, she’d have hanged herself. Instead, she successfully flipped the loop off the hook.

Morgana hit the dirt floor on her backside with bruising force. She heard Bennett shout in angry astonishment, rising from her shrieking son . . .

Just as she jerked up the stool in both bound hands and swung it, slamming it hard into the side of Bennett’s head. Then she hit him again. And again.

And again.

When she’d told Arthur that Bennett had died of plague, she’d lied.

Any second now, Huar’s teeth would punch through her skull and into her brain, and she’d be dead. And she knew—
knew
—he’d carry out his threat to rape Percival to death. It seemed she could hear her lover’s bellow of agony, the sound blending with Mordred’s high-pitched child shrieks . . .

Morgana ripped away the last of the barrier that protected her mind from the Mageverse and let the infinite flood her brain like a tsunami hitting a sandcastle.

*   *   *

P
ercival heard Morgana scream, and terror froze his heart in his chest. He heard Marrok and Cador curse in unison with his own horrified “No!” Soren hissed something, the fear in his tone needing no translation.

The dragons fell, tumbling earthward in a tangle of desperately beating wings and lashing tails.

“Morgana!” Percival bellowed, and began to run toward the direction of their fall, terror for his woman gripping his heart. Cador and Marrok ran with him. He had no fucking idea what any of them would do when they got there.

A fall from that height would surely kill even a dragon.

The crash sounded like an explosion. Chunks of wood flew through the air, forcing them to duck and throw up their arms to protect their heads. Droplets pattered down like rain, hitting Percival’s arms and shoulders and rolling down his face. He swiped at one runnel with his palm as he ran, threw a downward glance at it. It was a dark violet.

Dragon’s blood.

A quick, frantic scan showed him no sign of red blood.

Then he looked up, squinting against the sudden wind, and saw why Huar’s blood covered the ground. The great dragon had fallen into the trees, breaking and crushing several huge trunks like weeds.

He counted at least five shattered trunks impaling the creature like stakes. There was no sign of Morgana’s body, though it had looked like the two had fallen together.

Percival looked upward, blinking against the wind, his heart frozen in his chest . . .

Morgana spiraled downward, landing on a shattered trunk impaling Huar through the back. She worked her way down the broken tree’s length, her tail lashing.

Percival bent forward and braced his hands on his knees, heaving in breaths of sheer relief. She must have somehow pulled out of the fall at the last second and flown clear. “She’s all right. Thank Jesu, she’s all right . . .”

“No,” Cador said in a voice rough with horror, “I don’t think she is.”

Percival glanced up. And froze.

Morgana was ripping into the dragon’s belly with her jaws. As he stared in horrified disbelief, she swung her head up in a thoroughly inhuman gesture and gulped down a chunk of something that shone violet and wet in the moonlight.

“What the fuck . . .” Cador breathed. “Why is she doing that?”

“Because the . . . Mageverse has her,” Soren wheezed, collapsing on the ground behind them in exhaustion, “and she’s lost.”

Percival hadn’t even known the desperately wounded dragon had followed them. He wondered how the ambassador had found the strength.

Cador whirled on the blue dragon. “What do you mean, the Mageverse has her?”

“Let me try to heal . . . myself . . . first, and I will . . . explain. With Huar dead, I’ll . . . be able to . . . repair most of the damage.” The dragon closed his eyes and began to hiss a chant. Green energy began to swirl over his massive body, finding the bloody cuts and erasing them.

Tersely, Percival explained what Soren had told him while his partners had checked on the women—who by some miracle were all still alive. That was something, anyway.

Reminded of the human victims, he turned toward Cador. “Get on the phone and call the healers. Now that Huar’s dead, his shielding spells will have collapsed. We’ll be able to call out.”

As Cador moved to obey, Percival looked at Soren. “What do we do? How do we bring her back?”

“I don’t know if we can.” The dragon’s voice sounded much stronger now. His scales looked clean and whole, but something in the way he’d collapsed on his belly suggested the effort had exhausted him. Now he watched Morgana eat her dead foe with a kind of horrified fascination. “We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t go after us next.”

H
alf afraid of what horror he’d see her performing now, Percival glanced around at her.

She had begun to glow. Her black scales shimmered with dancing waves of energy in a thousand shifting colors. As he watched, the glow grew brighter with every second that passed.

“What the fuck?” he breathed. “Soren, what the hell does that mean?”

“She’s becoming an elemental.”

Cador dropped his phone. He had to scramble to catch it before it hit the ground. He clipped it blindly on his belt as the three knights stared at Soren. “What, like Cachamwri and Semara?”

Cachamwri was the godlike being the dragonkind worshipped; Semara was his equally powerful mate. If Morgana was gaining that kind of power, if she went mad—and it seemed she was halfway there—she’d be able to kill every last one of the Magekind, the Dragonkind, and everything else on Mageverse Earth.

And she’d be lost. Morgana le Fay, the woman he loved, would be as dead as if Huar had killed and devoured
her
.

The realization that he loved her didn’t startle Percival, barely made him even skip a thought. He’d always known in the core of his soul how he felt about Morgana. He just hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself, because he’d feared she didn’t return the emotion.

Now he simply didn’t give a damn whether she loved him back or not. All he wanted to do was save her.

Percival straightened convulsively as a wild idea surfaced in his consciousness. “A Truebond! If I mind-linked with her, formed a Truebond, could I bring her back?”

Soren considered the idea a moment, watching Morgana feast. Finally, reluctantly, he shook his head. “It’s more likely she would drag you into madness with her.”

“I’m no stranger to madness,” Marrok said suddenly. “What if both of us Truebond with her?”

Despite the desperation of their circumstances, Percival’s inner cave wolf sent up a growl of protest. “Three people can’t form a Truebond, Marrok.”

“Actually, they could,” Soren said thoughtfully. “Kel, Gawain, and his wife Lark formed one briefly in order to free Kel from that sword.” After Kel’s uncle had trapped him in sword form, he’d served as Gawain’s talking enchanted blade for centuries. “But I’m still not sure your sanity would survive.”

“What if all three of us Truebonded with her?” Cador turned to Percival. “It wouldn’t be permanent—just long enough to bring her back. Then Marrok and I could back out of it and leave you two alone.” He grimaced. “Believe me, I have no desire to have Morgana le Fay in my head for the rest of my life.”

Soren paused a long, nerve-wracking moment. “With three of you, and given Marrok’s experience with being a berserker . . . Yes, it’s possible.” His tail lashed, the gesture agitated. “But it’s still no guarantee. You all may end up mad.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve always been willing to die for each other,” Marrok said. “This is no different.”

“Oh, yeah, it is,” Cador grumbled. “I don’t want to end up eating people who piss me off.”

The man had a point.

But despite the grim battle they faced, a shaft of warmth shot through Percival like sunlight. He’d always said his brothers were willing to follow him into hell. Now it seemed they were willing to prove him right.

“The problem is, you’re going to have to convince Morgana herself to open the mental link,” Soren warned them. “You can’t force a Truebond.”

“Shit,” Cador growled. “How the hell are we supposed to talk her into anything? I mean, look at her . . .”

It was a damned good point, Percival thought, as Morgana ripped another hunk of meat from the corpse. Maybe if they could get her to shift back to human form . . .

An idea made his eyes widen. “Take off your armor,” he snapped. “All of it.” He seized one of his gauntlets and dragged it off his hand. “Strip down to your leggings.”

Cador stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“If she decides to kill us, all the armor on the planet won’t stop her from doing it.” Percival pulled off the other glove.

Marrok exchanged a look with Cador and shrugged. “In for a penny . . .”

Grumbling, Cador went to work on his own armor. “I’d feel a lot better about this if she wasn’t busy eating the last guy who pissed her off.”

*   *   *

J
ust getting to her wasn’t easy. Huar’s plummeting body had knocked down and shattered trees, which had in turn uprooted and broken others. The three knights had to climb over or around the snapped trunks, while avoiding jutting spears of ragged wood. Their knee-high armored boots provided some protection, but they still had to move carefully.

Finally they found a spot left clear by a group of trees that had somehow remained standing not thirty feet from the red dragon’s impaled corpse. And Morgana, still busy ripping it apart.

Looking up at her, Cador grimaced. “Now what the hell are we supposed to do?”

Percival took a deep breath and blew it out. “Get her attention.”

Marrok laughed without real humor. “Are you sure we want it?”

“Probably not, but that’s not the issue.” He lifted his voice. “Morgana!” When she didn’t look up from her meal, he shouted in a deep, harsh bark, “Morgana le Fay, leave that alone and come here!”

Cador stared at him, wide-eyed. “Are you trying to dom a thirty-foot dragon? A crazy,
cannibalistic
thirty-foot dragon?”

But she’d stopped to stare at them. Her muzzle shone wet and black in the moonlight. Even Percival was surprised when she leaped down off Huar’s corpse like a cat leaping off a counter. She moved toward them, weaving between some trees, pushing others aside with a thrust of her neck.

Merlin’s Balls, she was powerful. But was Morgana still . . . there?

Percival felt sick. Had he lost her so soon after finding her?

She stopped about fifteen feet away, studying the arrangement of trees that had fallen to form a rickety pyramid. “Could fall,” she rumbled, and began to push them off to the left and right. One of the trees started to tip toward them, but before the knights could jump back, Morgana’s head shot forward. She caught the trunk in her jaws and twisted her neck, uprooting it and turning to put it carefully aside.

Percival blinked, realizing that she was trying to make sure the knights weren’t injured by falling timber. Once the trees were clear, she moved a few feet closer and settled down on her belly. Glowing eyes focused on them intently with what looked uncomfortably like . . . hunger.

“Morgana?” Soren rumbled behind them. Wood crunched and splintered with loud cracks as the big dragon moved toward them.

Morgana’s head jerked up, and she half rose, her huge wings curling forward to mantle the three men. Her lips back from her blade-length teeth in a snarl. “Mine!”

Everyone, including the ambassador, froze at the stark rage on her inhuman moonlit muzzle.

“You’d better get back, Soren,” Percival said with tight, careful control.

The ambassador spoke in a low voice, “But Percival, I think you’re in danger.”

Morgana hissed in rage, her tail lashing as her big body tensed in obvious preparation for an attack.

Percival swallowed, looking up at the figure towering over him. “We’re in more danger if you don’t get the hell back.”

The dragon grumbled something in his own language, but began to back reluctantly away. Percival didn’t dare take his eyes off Morgana long enough to look around at him. She glared after him, then finally settled down again, the fury fading from her inhuman gaze. She turned her eyes to them. “Am here.”

“Yes.” Percival’s heart pounded in his chest, knowing if she chose, she could kill them before they even knew what hit them. Particularly since he’d decided they should leave their swords behind.

A man did not, after all, talk to a lover with a weapon in his hand. If they treated her like a potential enemy, she might well act like one.

But if he treated her like a submissive . . . “Shift,” he ordered. “We want to talk to you.”

“Talk?” She tilted her head and eyed their half-naked bodies with that unnerving hunger. “Or fuck?”

“Only if you brush your teeth,” Cador muttered.

Her shimmering eyes narrowed; she’d obviously heard him. “Huar ate women.” Her lips peeled back. “So ate Huar.”

“She’s got a point,” Marrok murmured.

His tone unbending, Percival ordered, “Shift, Morgana.”

Magic flared in her draconic eyes, bursting into a blinding blue-white swirl of sparks. Percival blinked the dazzle from his eyes to see her standing there in human form, lovely and completely naked. His shoulders slumped in relief.

Only to stiffen again as he abruptly realized her skin shone with an unearthly glow. And her eyes, normally a deep and verdant green, blazed with the same swirling blue iridescence they’d had in her dragon form.

Oh, that’s not good
. He exchanged a quick, dismayed glance with Cador and Marrok.

She moved toward them, barefoot as a nymph, lovely in her lithe nudity. He glanced down in alarm as he imagined the kind of damage all that jagged wood could do to her bare feet. Yet she strode toward them without evident hesitation. There was a reason for that; as she stepped on the splintered wood, it instantly burned to ash. Surprisingly, the ground litter beneath did not catch fire, despite the burning footprints she left behind.

Percival’s gaze flicked back up to Morgana’s face. Normally that kind of magical effort would have shown clearly on her face, if only as an expression of concentration. Yet she didn’t even seem aware of it at all, as if her magic was eliminating threats without her conscious volition.

But as terrifying as he might find that, he couldn’t let it matter. He had to be her dominant if he was to save her. He moved to meet her, coolly determined. She looked up at him with a hint of challenge, her eyes swirling with that strange blue iridescence. Percival reached out and cupped her face between his hands. Something hot and tingling invaded his fingertips, like an electric charge.

Ignoring that, he tipped her head up, and kissed her, making it as deep and possessive as he could, his tongue sweeping around hers, stroking over teeth and lips. For a moment she stiffened, and it crossed his mind to wonder if he was about to get very dead.

Then she relaxed, melting against him, kissing him back. As he concentrated on making love to her mouth despite the way her power burned him, he sensed Marrok and Cador step up on either side.

The two knights began to caress and kiss any part of her they could reach. One of them grunted softly in discomfort, reacting to the alien lash of her power.

By the time he drew back, they were all breathing in rasping pants, and his cock was beginning to press against his fly. “Truebond with me.”

“Truebond with us,” Marrok corrected.

Cador nodded. “With all three of us.”

Morgana looked up at Percival with those alien eyes, then at his partners. “Truebond . . .” For a moment she appeared to struggle, frowning. “Only two . . . in Truebond.”

Cupping her face between his palms again, Percival hardened his tone into a dominant’s demand. “With all three of us, Morgana. Truebond with us all. Now.”

She blinked up at him, confusion in her gaze. “But . . . It could destroy you.”

“
Now,
Morgana.” He used the inflexible tone that had always worked on her before.

And it worked again.

Her eyes widened, magic whirling and sparking in her gaze. The blue glowed brighter and brighter, seeming to grow until he had the sense of tumbling headfirst into that cobalt storm of energy.

For a moment he was aware of the familiar mental touch of Cador and Marrok—but not Morgana. He reached out, groping for her, trying to find her in the ripping winds of magic and light.

The sparks striking his skin began to burn with such intensity, he feared he’d actually burst into flame. He sucked in a breath, instinctively fighting the pain. It did him no good. Fireworks pelted him, flying into his consciousness faster and faster until it seemed he stood in a hurricane of energy.

Desperation growing, Percival fought to shield himself, but he didn’t have the power to do it. Instead the sparks beat against him like sand in a sandstorm, shredding his flesh, his very consciousness. He realized it would eventually erode him away until there was nothing left.

And he had no idea how to stop it. Even worse, he’d dragged Cador and Marrok into this. They’d be destroyed too—and for nothing. He’d never managed to even touch Morgana, much less bring her back to herself. As despair raked him, something tightened around his throat, digging in, cutting off his breathing.

A noose.
There was a noose around his throat
.

He balanced on his toes on a stool, on the verge of hanging, fighting to breathe as a little boy screamed in pain and utter terror.

A man in a priest’s rough robe dragged the struggling dark-haired child in front of Percival, and pushed the struggling child to the floor. As the knight watched in helpless horror, the priest began trying to jerk the child’s tunic up. “Sign it! You will sign it now!”

Rage blinded Percival, but his hands were bound, and the noose strangled him into helplessness. There had to be a way . . . He looked up at the rope, gathered himself to leap . . .