The Passionate Queen (Dark Queens Book 2) (23 page)

A very large, very ancient tree with a massive base was suddenly cracked in two as a dragon’s body sliced through the center of it with sheer brute force. Ragoth’s aquamarine eyes were on me hot and heavy, and I could read the fear inside of them.

I was now curled on my side, trying desperately to cram pine needles, the edges of my shirt, even dirt into my ears to stop the bleeding pain that rolled wave after wave after wave through me.

He never said a word as he scooped me up in his massive claw and with a powerful beat of his wings took to the sky. The moment I could no longer hear that hideous song, the pain stopped and I could breathe again.

I trembled as I clung to him, burying my face inside the cage of his fist.

Projecting telepathically to me, he asked,
Are you hurt?

Swallowing hard, and with ears still buzzing painfully, I shook my head. “It’s getting better. What was that?”

A siren
, he snapped.
I’m going to set you down in a safe spot, then I’ll fly back and get the rest of them out of there
.

Seconds later, Ragoth gently deposited me on the flat surface of a dormant troll mountain.

“No, I’m coming with you. Those are my people, and I am their queen!” My nerves were strung tight, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do now was have Ragoth leave me again.

No
. He shook his massive head.

And even through my fear, I was wonder struck by the sheer mass and deadly grace of his dragon form. Such a powerful, deadly creature, he could strike me dead if he so wished, but he’d never laid a hand against me. I should fear him, but I didn’t. I never had.

The siren is of my world; I can guard myself against her powers. But you are without your powers
.

I curled my hand to my chest. How had he known that?

The best thing, the only thing you can do now is stay here and stay safe. Zelena, stay safe. Do you hear me?

The mental blast of his worry and fears had me sucking in a sharp breath.

“I am their queen, Ragoth; I cannot just abandon them. Magic or no, I must—”

The only thing in this world that could ever hurt me is losing you. I’ll not hear another word about this. You’re staying.

“Ragoth, you can’t do that! You can’t simply leave me here, you can’t—”

He never waited for me to finish. Banding his wings tight to his body, he turned and swooped away from me like a speeding bird of prey.

My dragon was magnificent as he cut through the trees, gleaming like spun silver and glittering ice, before he disappeared beneath the canopy of trees.

“You rotten beast!” Cupping my hands around my mouth, I shrieked it at him, but I knew he couldn’t hear me. And even if he did, he wouldn’t have returned.

Furious, angry that a part of me even knew he was right, because I could not have remained in that siren’s presence much longer, I turned and stared at the place he’d set me down.

I was on the small plateau of a very large peak with sheer cliffs on either side so that there was no chance of me crawling down. I was stuck here until he returned.

The bastard had made sure I could not follow him.

I was angry; I wanted to punch him in the throat for his high handedness. But I was also terrified. My people were in grave danger, my dragon who I both adored and currently despised was also in peril, and here I sat, powerless to help any of them.

There was nothing left for me to do but pray to the gods that none of them fell prey to the lethal beauty of one of Kingdom’s most deadly creatures.

“Please come back to me, my dragon. Come back...”

~*~

Ragoth

I
hated sirens.

Gorgeous. Deadly. And with a voice that could crack one’s soul.

She’d formed her mouth into an “o” shape; the high-pitched mournful wail even caused me to fidget this close to her.

I slammed down into the ground, digging my claws through the soil, and snapped, “Stop now, filth.”

The rest of the men were held thralled by her demonic enchantments. Teetering just on the water’s edge, their gazes vacant.

The siren, who also happened to be part gorgon (as she had a writhing mass of metallic-blue snake hair that hissed and snapped their tiny baby fangs at me), smiled, finally ceasing her song.

But unless she released the men from her thrall, she no longer needed to sing to keep them bespelled.

“Dragonborne.” Her voice was a sibilant whisper that was both seductive and hypnotic. “How is it that you are here in Kingdom?”

A pronged tongue quickly hissed from out of her bow-shaped lips. She was a thing of dark beauty.

Nude from the waist up, with ethereal features that were both exotic and alien in quality, her skin was a shade of pearlescent green, and with each breath she took, the gills on her neck hissed and whooshed wetly open and shut.

She had the skulls of monkeys dangling from thick braids on either side of her face. Her lambent obsidian tail flicked idly back and forth on the rock she sat on.

She looked like a dark queen surrounded by a moat of thick, infinite gloom.

I bristled, snapping my fangs at her. “Turn off your enchantments, witch.”

Throaty laughter spilled from her lips, and the men raised their feet an inch above the water. If she pulled them under, there was nothing more I could do for them. Water was not my domain. But I had an ace up my sleeve, the only thing a siren like her dreaded more than death itself.

A curl of steam hissed from my snout, as my intent became deadly clear. “Release. Them.”

The fire in my belly coiled tightly, ready to be blasted loose. It’d been a while since I’d released my flames, and the need to do it now made my muscles quiver with suppressed desire.

Jet-black irises widened, and she held out a hand as she shouted, “Keep away from my waters! They are mine by right.”

She was correct. I was immune to the siren’s charms because of my inherently magical nature. One of the reasons why a dragon was so difficult to entrap was because we nullified the magical natures of most creatures, not the least of which was the siren’s call. But there was another way to be released from her charms. If a man or woman’s heart already belonged to another, they could pull themselves out of the fog of delirium.

I looked at the three men. I’d bet my last gold coin neither Midas nor Jonas would be able to break off the spell.

Icarus however...might.

I shook my head, fluttering my wings in agitation. And I took a step closer, ready to let the flame go. “You vex me, woman.”

Her wrists and tail fluttered in agitation. “But I am willing to make a trade.”

These men were nothing to me. In fact, they were less than nothing. They were my rivals. I should let them go. Let the devil have them. Lena would never know.

But there was a still small voice inside of me that knew this was wrong. Not by the standards of my people. Dragons survived and thrived because we did not involve ourselves in the fights of others. Our wars were fought for power and greed. Not to save the helpless. That was a battle that belonged to other more noble creatures.

I thought of Lena. Of what she’d think of me when she saw me return without the men. She would know. I wouldn’t have to say anything, and she would know that I’d let them suffer their own fate.

And I knew she’d never thank me if I did. I’d promised her that I had changed, and I’d meant it. I still meant it.

Closing my eyes, I rumbled, “What is it that you want?”

She gleamed prettily, exposing long rows of fangs. The siren was more akin to a sea serpent than a true mermaid.

“A scale for each male.”

My nostrils flared. A dragon scale was worth several thousand rubles on the black market, not only because of its indestructible nature, but because of the magical elements it inherently possessed. A scale could grow back, but it was excruciating to lose one.

A low rumble vibrated through my throat pouch. I could eat her and end this now. But then the men would live on as half-living, half-dead things, devoid of all emotion and thought.

The only way to counteract the effects of a siren or a gorgon was to return the victim to the very creature that’d bespelled them and get her to willingly release them.

I glanced at Icarus. He stood to the very left of me, but unlike the other two who were still as stone, the bird fingers twitched.

That flash of movement told me two things. He was at least marginally aware of what’d happened to him, and, worst of all...his heart was engaged.

He might not be in love with Lena, but he cared.

Damn him.

“Let me try to free them first.”

She smirked and licked her forked tongue along the cupid’s bow of her lush lips. “And if you can’t?”

“Then I render payment.”

Clapping her hands gleefully, she nodded. “Terms accepted. You may proceed, dragon.”

The lack of animal chatter in the woods made sense now, and I didn’t doubt that part of the reason for why the unicorn had fled as she had could possibly have had something to do with this creature being here.

Sirens were not known to dwell within such small bodies of water, which had me suspecting there was something more at work here. Aphrodite had urged me to come for Lena; this seemed like just the sort of “heroic” act she’d orchestrate to ensure a match.

As irritated as that made me, it also gave me hope. If the goddess of love was still in my corner, then regardless of how Icarus felt, he stood very little chance of destroying a future for Lena and I.

With that thought fixed firmly in place, I roared at the bird, spraying him with a jet of steam not quite hot enough to melt the flesh off his body. The sensory explosion of pain should be enough to snap him from his trance, if his heart was truly engaged elsewhere.

Icarus roared, dropping to his knees, as he wrapped his now slightly mottled and singed wings around himself. Giant drops of sweat dotted his brow.

“Dragon,” he grunted.

And I grinned. I shouldn’t have liked that as much as I had. “Wake up, you fool.”

Still breathing heavily, the bird glanced up, spotted the gorgon-siren, and quickly darted his gaze back to the ground, his neck stiff and rigid with the pain of burns and the monster’s enchantment.

“What has been done to me?” he asked with stuttering breath.

“You’ve been ensorcelled by a siren.”

“And you burned me to wake me up?” he asked, glowering in my direction. “Somehow I doubt that was absolutely necessary.”

I shrugged one massive shoulder. “No, it wasn’t. But it was fun,” I said unapologetically. “Can you walk?”

Grunting, he slowly moved his arms, then his legs began twitching, and soon after his wings ruffled. “I can move a little, but not well.”

“Good enough. Get up and get behind me.”

It took Icarus at least ten minutes to do so; his movements were slow and shuffled, each step read like agony through the lines scrawled tightly across his pinched features. I kept my eyes on the siren the entire time, defying her to intercede.

But true to her word, she merely sat and watched with a ghost of a smile on her lovely face.

“Seems to me,” she said slowly, “that you’ve quite changed, Ragoth Nur of the House of Drakon.”

My nostrils flared. “You’ve heard of me.”

A string of pearls suddenly manifested in her hands as she dragged them back and forth between her fingers. “The lone dragon with a reputation for debauchery and women. Oh yes, I’ve heard of you. Though I must confess, you’re nothing at all like I’d expected. I did not ever peg you as the noble sort.”

“I’m not.” A small blast of flame hissed from my snout, and she glowered at me as I’d accidentally on purpose shot it in her direction.

“I know the hearts of these other two.” She pointed to Midas and Jonas. “You’ll not be able to break my spell. So pay up.”

“Pay up?” Icarus mumbled behind me.

But I chose to ignore him.

I shot curls of heated steam at both Midas and Jonas. Only after the legs of their pants began to singe did I realize they were firmly gripped by the siren’s spell. Clenching my jaw, I knew what I’d have to do.

Though every inch of me balked at the idea. Midas and Jonas were pathetic excuses for a human. They weren’t worthy to lick the muddied soles of my boots, let alone vie for the hand of my Lena.

“What are you doing?” Icarus stepped out from behind me, his expression serious and contemplative.

With a long-suffering sigh of disgust, I turned to him. “I’m going to gift you two scales. Pull them when I say, and hand them to the siren.”

“Why?”

“Just shut up and do as I’ve asked,” I snapped, angry at him for no other reason than I did not want to give up even a tiny sliver of myself to the avarice of the sea creature.

Said monster licked her lips with anticipation. Quickly I decided that the least painful place on my body would be to pull the scales from the very tip of my tail. They were smallest there.

“Where should I tug?”

“At the tip of the tail.” I lifted it high, leaning it toward his face.

My anger abated somewhat when I noticed Icarus’s hand tremble. No one wanted to be around an annoyed dragon.

For millennia, hunters had tried to take my species down for our armor; they’d learned after many trials and tribulations that if a dragon did not wish to lose its scales, it wouldn’t. Period.

But every so often, someone wise and devious could force us to give them away. Closing my eyes, I focused all the heat inside of my body to shoot like a spear to the very tip of my tail, heating it to magma levels.

With a roar, I screamed, “Grab it now!”

My body felt like it would combust; the heat that I was so careful to keep chambered in my steel gut was now whipping through my veins like lava. I nearly passed out from blistering and excruciating pain when Icarus finally yanked the two smallest of scales free.

In the far distance I heard Lena’s cry; just the sound of her voice comforted me. Eased the terrible ache now throbbing down my spine. I felt the bare tender bit of flesh now exposed.

A dragon’s scales covered their body in such a way as to overlap and make us impenetrable to fire, steel, or poison. Until the scales grew back, I was exposed. It was a feeling I did not at all enjoy.