Dragon Void (Immortal Dragons Book 2) (12 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

Evie

Dragon Monastery, Sunda Islands

Present Day

“S
ix months—he was gone for that long? And the man who helped you…” Ked trailed off.

Evie closed her eyes, remembering the kindness granted to her by Sterlyn that first night. Yet how cold he was to her after that. Dr. St. George would be away for months and only there for a day or two at a stretch, and she saw no one but Sterlyn and his counterpart, Naaz. The two men were the antithesis of each other, yet somehow seemed to have the same trapped look in their eyes when they talked to her.

“I know you’re thinking how in the world I didn’t manage to escape if the king was away from the castle, and the soldiers left in charge were so deferential to me. I did try, but they just looked so sad every time I asked. It was Sterlyn who finally told me why.”

* * *

Ultiori Compound

1967

“He’s gone for
months
, yet you two still just do his bidding. Why?”

Evie had made the argument so many times and received no answer. If they were all prisoners here and the warden was absent, why the hell couldn’t they just leave? Especially if the men who commanded the place in their master’s absence had the keys and wanted to escape just as badly.

Sterlyn was the one who broke first. After hearing her needling him and calling him a fucking coward for a week straight, he finally threw her empty dinner tray against the wall so hard it bent.

“Don’t you think I
want
to be free of him? I can’t. He’s too smart for all of us, and too careful. The second you get free, the woman I love dies. He employs magic not even I can unravel to track our activity. As far as I know, he’s learned to do it all himself, too. He has a thousand years of experience on all of us. He gets into our
heads
when he’s here. He
stays
in the heads of the other hunters—the ones who aren’t like me and Naaz. He doesn’t need to coerce them into following him the way he does to us. They just
do
.”

Evie sank down on her cot. She normally enjoyed the moments when Sterlyn would come and sit with her while she ate. Tonight she regretted haranguing him about helping her escape. But she’d grown weary of asking about Marcus every time and receiving vague replies. She’d been there nearly a year already, but Sterlyn still refused to answer those questions aside from telling her that Marcus was alive.

“I’m sorry,” Evie said. “You have no idea how he does it? How he controls you?”

“It must be the blood he transfused us with at the beginning. It made me crazy for the first few weeks after it happened. I’d have sucked the man’s cock if he’d asked then. All I wanted was more. The power was
incredible
. I felt like I was whole for the first time in my life. Like I’d been missing a piece of myself that he’d managed to give me. Life had new meaning, until I met Zamirah.”

Evie stared down at his dejected form where he slumped against the wall beside the door to her cell. Sterlyn had already told her the story of meeting and falling for the female dragon he and Naaz had hunted and captured more than a decade ago. He’d been a loyal Elite until that moment, and from his words, Evie could tell it was his Blessing bleeding through that had attracted him to Zamirah.

He had rejected his orders to bring her in, but Naaz had made him do it anyway. “We fail and he’ll know. He always knows,” Naaz had told him.

Ever since, he’d tried and failed to find a way for them both to escape.

Evie would have hoped Marcus might feel the same about her, but since that horrible day when she’d been forced to watch him bleed almost to death, she hadn’t seen him. She would do anything to see him, but neither Naaz nor Sterlyn were susceptible to bribery. They both had loved ones locked away in the bowels of this place and could do nothing but continue to follow orders to keep them safe.

“Please help me,” she said. “I just need to know he’s all right.”

Sterlyn turned his tortured blue gaze to meet hers. “He isn’t okay,” he said bitterly. “Because you’re locked up down here, he will
never
be okay. Not until we find a way to get away from that bastard and burn this place to the ground.” He let out a harsh sigh and shook his head. “Sayid doesn’t permit us to see them—to see our lovers. But even if Marcus were allowed to visit you, or willing to break the rules to, he doesn’t want you to see what he’s become, which is understandable.”

Evie’s eyes widened. “What do you mean? What has he become?”

Sterlyn closed his eyes and whispered the words. “He’s an Elite Hunter, like me. A monster. And more ruthless than either I or Naaz ever was. At least, he’s afraid that’s how you’ll see him.”

Evie closed her eyes, holding back tears. She only wanted to see him to make sure he was safe. But this… this was more than she’d anticipated.

“You made him like you. Why?”

“He’s special. I think you knew that already, being a turul. Why do you think you tolerate talking to me so much? I’m like him, so is Naaz. It took Naaz and me awhile to learn why Sayid wanted us, in particular. Why we were the ones who were cursed with the right physiology to accept the blood he gave us. The dragon blood in our veins would kill a normal human. But us, it simply makes stronger.”

To illustrate, he held up his hands, palms facing up. Glimmering white smoke rose from them, like fog from the river outside. Before her eyes, he gestured, crafting the cloud of smoke into the form of a dragon that expelled a tiny, white flame before taking wing and flying straight to her.

The little dragon flitted around her head silently, spouting flames at her intermittently. Evie giggled and swatted at it, but it evaded her, finally hovering before her face, its tiny legs curled up under its belly and its wings flapping slowly. The details of it were uncannily realistic. When she reached out a finger to tap the center of its belly, it disappeared in a puff of smoke. She was oddly sad to see it go.

“That’s my essence,” Sterlyn said. “I could use that power to control your mind, if I wanted to. I could use it for so many things. That’s what we do, though. We hunt your kind, and the other races… dragons especially. We use our nature to seduce you—because your kind are always attracted to a Blessed—then use our dragon power to keep you docile while we lock you up for his experiments. This combination is deadly to the rest of you. It makes us crave your blood enough to hunt you, and makes us powerful enough to subdue you. Luring you and Marcus here was the highest profile catch we’ve ever had—a Blessed
and
a turul princess. The only thing that could have topped it is if both of you had been dragons.”

“What experiments?” Evie asked. For the past year, she’d only been held captive. Trapped, but nothing more.

Sterlyn closed his eyes. “If I could protect you from them, I would, but I can’t even protect Zamirah from them. Stay strong, Evie.”

She let out a harsh breath. “Fine, I can deal with whatever that fucker throws at me. Just please try to convince Marcus to come see me? If I’m going to be trapped here, I want to know he’s safe.”

He stood and knocked at the door, signaling Naaz to let him out.

“I’ll try,” he said. “Forgive me if he’s not what you expect when he comes to you.”

* * *

Two days later, the sound of the bolt sliding open in her door roused Evie from half-sleep. She sat up abruptly as the door swung open. Before the interior fluorescent lights flickered on, all she saw was a large, decidedly male, and very familiar silhouette in the doorway, which disappeared when Marcus turned wordlessly and shut the door behind him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he said. “I didn’t know how to face you, after what they did to me.”

Evie barely even heard the words. Her eyes welled with tears. It was
him
. She knew it without even seeing his face. It was crystal clear when the lights in her room finally flickered on and she could see all of him.

Her entire body ached as though she’d been beaten. Her soul thrummed with need to connect with him.

She shook her head. It couldn’t be him. Sure, it was Marcus, without a doubt, but something about him had changed. She’d always been attracted to him—he was one of the most beautiful men she’d ever met, after all. Yet, she’d never had such an all-encompassing craving to be with him before. Like she might just die if he didn’t hold her in his arms.

He was the
One
. The singular person who could fill the void in her soul that she didn’t even recognize needed filling until this moment. She closed her eyes, trying to gather herself. As she pulled in a breath, she marveled at the fact that her race’s laws weren’t based on a myth. This draw to him was too real to deny.

“Are you all right, Evie?” he asked.

When she opened her tear-moistened eyes, she saw him take a hesitant step forward, then pause as though he wasn’t sure he should go to her. But she needed to feel him so much.

“Marcus… By the Winds, you’re all right.” She stood and rushed to him, desperate for his embrace. Just as she got to him, his hands shot up and gripped her shoulders, holding her back.

“No, Evie. I’m only here because Sterlyn was worried about you. I can’t…” His face twisted into an anguished knot. “I can’t keep you safe unless I do what Sayid asks. The second we cross that line, we’re both dead.”

“No! I need you, Marcus. You don’t know what it’s like being locked up in here.”

Marcus closed his eyes. A bead of moisture seeped out of one corner. “I know, Evie. I’ve seen every corner of this place. I’ve been locked up for months, too. But I’m going out now.”

He reached up and cupped her cheek. “I promise you, if I can find a way to get us out, I will. Even if I die trying.”

Then he left, and Evie fell back onto her bed feeling even more lost than before. She shouldn’t have been drawn to him that way. A man didn’t just start being her true mate halfway through knowing him, did he?

Chapter Twenty-Two

Evie

Ultiori Compound

1967

The experiments started a few weeks later.

At first, she went willingly. Two anonymous hunters in lab coats escorted her across the hall and urged her to lie down on a medical table. They undressed her and put her feet into stirrups. One of them injected her in the arm with something before she could object, and a few moments later, the world went fuzzy.

Then
he
was there. Sayid’s dark eyes peered up at her from between her legs as his latex-covered hands gripped her thighs. He held an instrument in his hands which he inserted into her, his alien fingers unwanted on her tenderest parts. At least he wasn’t overly familiar with those parts. He treated her like a scientific specimen—analytical and disengaged, even as he shoved something deep into her to the point of causing her pain.

Evie gasped at the invasion, at the sudden tight cramp that overtook her abdomen. But then it was gone and he’d retreated, whispering orders to the orderly who stood at his side.

She was taken back to her room and told nothing more.

A month later, she had the worst period of her life, spending nearly a week doubled over in pain from the cramps and bleeding heavily.

Six months later, he repeated the process.

A month after that, she broke down in tears when she understood what was happening.

That afternoon, Sterlyn found her bleeding and crying beside her toilet after she’d spent half the day alternately puking and bleeding from a pregnancy that should never have happened.

“I want to fucking kill him,” she said.

“Get in line.”

Evie stared up at him through hazy eyes. “He’s getting me pregnant with those tests. There’s no way these babies will ever live. I can’t be forced to conceive. Fertility is sacred to all the higher races. It takes more than simple science—cells bumping against each other at the right time—to make a baby. We have to love each other to make it work.”

“He’s doing it to Zamirah, too,” Sterlyn said. “He wants something with these tests, but I don’t know what.”

Sterlyn trailed off, and Evie heard what he was unwilling to say. Their captor wanted a child, but only a child that would require this kind of morbid sacrifice to create.

Evie gave the attendants hell the next time she left her room. She didn’t give a shit what they were going to do with her; she just wanted out.

She learned quickly that she had no means of escape. Her cell was right across from the lab, so there was little time to rebel, and they were prepared for any eventuality. In the end she simply sang out, hoping the winds would hear her and take notice.

A week later her cell door mysteriously unlocked and she took advantage, but didn’t get far enough to escape.

“Gag her,” Sayid said when they caught her, and she spent the next few weeks of her captivity with a rag in her mouth except when she needed to eat. Either Sterlyn or Naaz guarded her with their own judgmental looks.
“Damn yourself and damn us in the process,”
their eyes seemed to say.

When she finished the meal Sterlyn had brought her not long after that, she told him, “I’m not going to cry again. I’m sick of the damn gag. I promise, I’ll keep quiet.”

After that, she didn’t say a word. She submitted to the experiments that went on for years and tried to forget each brief glimmer of new life that struggled to take hold inside her womb before fading just as quickly. She stopped considering herself pregnant with the ones that didn’t take, except for the ones that came from Sterlyn and Naaz. They were the closest things she had to Marcus. After so long living in a cell, simple contact from those two kind men made her crave their presence even more.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Ked

Dragon Monastery, Sunda Islands

Present Day

“P
lease, stop.”

Ked’s attention shifted from Evie’s story to the voice of Marcus inside his mind. The man’s emotions had transformed from dark apathy to an even darker resistance to hearing Evie’s story.

Ked had never expected to wind up an emotional conduit between two lovers, but had deliberately left his mind open to Marcus while Evie told him of her ordeal.

“This is your story, too. One side of it, at least,”
he replied to the man’s plea.

Anguish flared in his mind from the other man, but Marcus didn’t retreat. A glimmer of curious need arose.

“What is he telling you?” Evie asked softly. She reached up and pressed a palm against Ked’s cheek, urging his attention back to her.

“Not much. He’s hearing everything you tell me, you know. It’s difficult for him to absorb.”

“Tell him that I don’t blame him. I knew what I was in for almost from the beginning. We were meant to follow that path to get to you. I wish it could have been easier, but we both survived.” She smiled and leaned up to him, pressing her lips against his softly, then pulled back and whispered, “Tell him I love him and that this is for him.” She slid into his lap and pressed her body fully against his. Ked opened up to her completely, accepting her sweet, velvet tongue and caressing it with his own, melding his mouth with hers until his arousal was reflected back to him by the other man’s presence in his mind.

He craved an even deeper connection with them both and impulsively exhaled a breath into Evie’s mouth. She shuddered in his arms and deepened their kiss. A moment later, her thoughts flared brightly in his mind, strong enough to make him moan in surprise at the intensity. He’d been aware of the fluctuation of her emotions through her aura, but being inside her mind at that moment nearly overwhelmed him.

In his mind, Marcus said,
“Is that her? Evie?”

Evie pulled back from the kiss with a sigh and closed her eyes. Ked rested his forehead against hers, cradling her on his lap as the pair of battered lovers tentatively reached their thoughts out through the shadows of his consciousness.

“I am here, Marcus. Please, don’t give up. Not yet. I still need you.”

“He could have killed you. And all those years of torture—what you had to endure. It’s all on me, Evie.”

“But he didn’t. We survived, and here we are. But we have barely even spoken in five decades, Marcus. Let me rest my voice for a while. Tell me what it was like for you.”

After that, Ked simply stayed in the shadows of his own mind, a silent observer to their separate, yet shared ordeals.