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“That’s fair,” Kieran said, and Kallan nodded.
“Let’s go,” he said, crouching on the balls of his feet.
Kieran and Synora went in separate directions while Kallan melted into the woods around the crest of the ridge. Holly waited in tense silence, the bubble of air Synora had kept them in fading with her disappearance, and if Holly concentrated hard enough, she could hear the faintest creak of scales from beyond the ridge.
On silent feet, she started inching her way up the ridge. Before her head crested the top, she paused and lay flat on her stomach on the stone. A bird whistle cut through the air, and Holly’s breath caught in her throat as a dragon’s roar crashed through the silence.
She popped her head up over the ridge. The hoard was in a crater against the side of the mountain. At the back of the crater, a large cave opening yawned against the stone face of the mountain. The bottom of the crater was probably no more than forty paces long. It was an excellent location for a secret hiding place, and it was only made more excellent by the large green dragon that was facing off with her mates.
Kieran and Synora stood about twenty paces apart. They were about thirty paces from the green dragon. He roared his challenge again at the intruders who dared interfere with his hoard. Holly’s heart clenched at the sight of the dragon. His scales were dusty and dim, so unlike the shining scales she was used to seeing from Malcolm and others. His body was thin—much thinner than he was supposed to be. His shoulder blades poked out as he crouched before the intruders.
His jaws snapped a mere pace before Kieran and Synora. He let out a cry of pain, and Holly raised herself further up on her elbows to see what had hit him. Thick metal chains wrapped around his back legs, anchoring him to the cave. Thick scar tissue wrapped around each leg, but Holly could see pink patches of raw skin against the green scales. Even after all these years, he still fought the chains that kept him here.
The longer Holly focused on the dragon and his condition, the more she could feel the pain rolling off him. It was like his emotions were spilling over and hitting her in stronger and stronger waves. Holly took a deep breath and imagined them flowing over her like a wave over sand, like Vali had taught her. Her stomach unclenched and her muscles relaxed.
Movement caught her eye, and she saw Kallan sneaking around the far side of the clearing. There was barely any cover, but he was doing his best to blend into the background while Synora and Kieran let out battle cries and clanged their swords together, trying to keep the dragon’s attention.
It didn’t work, however, and a golden eye narrowed on Kallan. The dragon’s head swung around at the same time as his tail did, and Holly let out a horrified cry as Kallan went sailing into the side of the crater, then slumped down in a heap, not moving.
Synora fired arrow after arrow at the dragon while Kieran ran to his brother’s side. Even a dragon wasn’t totally impervious to arrows, but they bounced off him like nothing more than pebbles against a stone house. The dragon swung his head around to focus on Synora, and that’s when Holly saw it. A slightly red tinge covered his eyes. All of a sudden, his impenetrable hide made sense. He was dosed with dark magic.
Holly watched with dread as the dragon opened his mouth, fire kindling in the back of his throat.
“Luca!”
She was on her feet before her brain caught up with her body, shouting his name in a desperate attempt to distract him.
The fire died in his throat as he swung his head to look at Holly. His entire body froze when he spotted her. She should have dropped back to her stomach, tried to make herself inconspicuous, but something urged her forward. She picked her way down into the crater while watched by an eerily quiet dragon. The entire area was eerily quiet. Holly was sure her mates would be yelling at her if they weren’t so worried the noise would agitate the dragon. It didn’t seem as if there was any humanity left in Luca, although Holly hoped for his sake that wasn’t true.
The green dragon’s eyes narrowed as she approached. She should have been terrified out of her mind, but there was nothing but calmness as she walked toward him. Maybe she was so terrified she was calm? Or in some sort of trance? But something deep in Holly knew this dragon wasn’t going to hurt her.
In her peripheral vision, she saw Kieran sneak his way to Kallan and run his hands over him, getting him into a sitting position. Synora kept one eye warily on the dragon and one eye on Holly. She tried to speak. “Holly…”
The dragon turned instantly and roared at her.
“Hey, hey…” Holly got his attention back on her. “It’s okay… Luca, it’s okay. We’re not here to hurt you.”
His eyes were still wild as he brought his attention back to Holly, and they were hard to read with the pain and dark magic clouding them. The former she could do something about, the latter she could not. Not yet. Or maybe… Claire had said that Elves seemed to know more about dark magic.
“Synora,” Holly said softly. “His eyes.”
She didn’t dare say any more as the dragon shifted, so instead, she focused on the thing she could control. Reaching into her center, she brought out a strand of her Empath magic and quickly wove a strand of her earth magic into it so she would have some control. She couldn’t afford for it to slip here.
Extending the magic to the dragon, she carefully collected some of the pain wafting off him and brought it into her. Her earth magic helped disperse some of the effects, and she was able to keep pulling until the dragon’s eyes cleared a bit.
“That’s it,” she soothed, getting even closer. Apparently too close, as in a blindingly fast movement, one of his front paws flashed out and yanked her off her feet and into his chest.
Mine,a growly voice echoed in her mind.
Oh shit.
CHAPTER15
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Holly kept repeating, soothing not only the dragon that was cradling her to his chest but also her frantic mates.
Kallan had chosen that moment to wake up and was shouting as Kieran tried to keep him quiet, still trying to assess his injuries.
“I’m fine,” she said again, louder. “I’m fine.”
