He turned his back on her and started barking orders.
“The portal will be open for less than thirty seconds. Move through quickly. Do not attempt to take your flight form until you have returned to our realm. Ready?”
“Ready!” A chorus of voices answered him.
Aria could not stop them. She did not have the power to overwhelm them, and even if she could have stopped Eldor fromopening a portal, to do so would be to sentence Vyktor to death. A small army was descending on their location.
He activated the portal. For a second, nothing happened and Aria was simultaneously happy and horrified. Then a small circle opened in the air. It opened swiftly to around six feet in diameter, and finally Aria got what she had always wanted—to look through and see the world beyond. She saw tall white cliffs populated with great spiraling buildings. She saw a clear sky filled with whirling dragons of all colors and sizes. She saw a world that Vyktor belonged in—and she did not.
The dragons carried Vyktor’s insensate form through the gleaming portal, exiting within the thirty-second window Eldor had mentioned. It was well they did, for the edges of the thing shimmered and then collapsed in on themselves a couple of seconds later.
“Goodbye,” she whispered as the portal closed, leaving the thick stone walls around her and the sound of heavy boots descending down the myriad stairs above.
In a matter of seconds, she was on her own. Betrayed and heartbroken, Aria sank to the floor and sat there. The only small spark of hope she could cling to was the knowledge that Vyktor was alive on the other side of the realm’s divide.
She ached without him. It was an immediate, almost physical pain that paralyzed her. She began to sob floods of tears, filled with grief that made her feel as though her heart was truly breaking. There was a pain in her chest and a hollowness in her stomach that made the world feel sore and sad all at the same time.
Above her, she could hear the military breaking down doors, rummaging through the various rooms and storage places. They would be finding the gold and the jewels. They would be finding all the evidence of her life with the dragons.
Finally, a detonation above her blew the final door open. The sound was enough to temporarily deafen her, and the light from the explosion left her stunned and disoriented as a horde of military flooded down the stairs toward her.
“Where are the fucking dragons!?”
They screamed the questions at her, their weapons pointed at her in terrifying fashion. Grabbed roughly and dragged first up to her feet, then pushed back down to her knees, Aria was certain that she was about to die. These men had come for blood, and it had been denied them.
“They’re gone!”
“Where!?” She was shaken roughly, her teeth chattering as fresh adrenaline flashed through her body. If Vyktor were there, he would have killed every one of these men where they stood, she had no doubt about it.
“Back where they came from!” she screamed back at her interrogator.
“Liar!”
“I’m not lying. They made a portal. They activated it when they heard you coming. And they left.”
“Fuck!” The man questioning her kicked the portal generator hard. “Get this bitch out of here.”
A dark hood was put over her head, her hands were zip-tied behind her back. She’d known from the beginning that if they came for her, it would not be a rescue mission. She was half surprised they hadn’t summarily shot her. Maybe they thought she knew something.
She was dragged up from the ground and roughly manhandled back up the stairs of what had once been her home. Finally, they tossed her into a waiting helicopter. None of them said a word to her, but she could feel derision flowing from those she had once known as comrades. They thought of her as the worst possible thing any person could be: a traitor. Not just to her country, but to her whole species.
CHAPTER 17
“What!?” Vyktor’s rage made the very stone of the mountain shake. He had woken in the dragon realm with a sore head and a great fury. “Where is Aria?”
“She is back where she belongs, with her people,” Eldor said calmly. “We did this for your own good, Vyktor. You were obsessed with her. She’s just a human.”
“A human who…”
“Yes, I know, saved our lives. The fish we eat save our lives by sustaining us, but we don’t form romantic relationships with them, Vyktor. You’ll see now that you’re back here. Your head will clear. You’ll understand that I did the right thing for you.”
Vyktor snatched Eldor in his hands and snarled, his teeth snapping at the ends of the man’s nose. “You will build another device. You will open the portal and you will return me to Earth, or I will take you apart piece by piece until I do. Like one of your machines, Eldor. I will lay out the little bits of you and I will feed them to the birds as you watch.”
The threat was delivered at a volume no louder than his normal speaking voice, but it was all the more frightening for it. All who heard it knew instantly that he meant every violent word.
“I can’t make another…”
“You figure out how,” Vyktor insisted. “Or it will be the end of you. I promise that on my father’s heart.”
