Where Sleeping Dragons Lie (Skeleton Key) (9 page)

It wasn’t until early the next morning,
bleary-eyed and watching a gloriously naked Taron hunt around the space for his
discarded clothes that Briana thought about the skeleton key again and realized
with a jolt of panic that she had no idea where it was at the moment. She
remembered having it up until Taron had pulled her into his lap and kissed her.
Had she dropped it then, or somewhere between Dagon’s cot and her bedroll?

She sat up, blankets
pooling forgotten around her waist and began looking around for her shirt. She
vaguely remembered Taron tossing it aside after yanking it over her head…

“Briana?”

Taron had paused after
pulling on his breeches, a forest-green tunic in hand, and was now staring down
at her with a hint of lust as well as concern. Realizing her boobs were on full
display and her nipples erect, Briana quickly covered up with a blanket and
shot him a half-hearted glare.

“Have you seen the
skeleton key?” she asked. “I dropped it somewhere around here last night.”

He raised an eyebrow,
before pointing to a space over on her right, his expression suddenly opaque.
“It’s right there next to your breeches.”

She turned to look where
he had pointed and sure enough, the key was lying on the rug only a few inches
away from where her head had just been resting. How in the hell had it gotten
there? She slowly picked it up, half-convinced that it would be freezing to the
touch just as it had been after she had used it to open the door into this
world, but the glass-like substance was only cool.

A vision of the key
growing legs and walking to the back of the tent in search of her while they
had made love last night flashed within her mind’s eye and Briana shuddered.
Just thinking about the bugged out eyes of the skull possibly watching them
have sex was the stuff of nightmares.

“This thing is really
creeping me out right now.”

“As I said last night,
we can just lock it away if that’s what you truly wish,” he said carefully.

Briana sighed and
clenched her hand around it. She said nothing, unsure what she
should
say, or even what she wanted to say.

A warm hand firmly lifted
up her chin, making her start. She hadn’t even heard him walk over. For a
dragon, he sure moved around as silently as a cat.

Taron planted a gentle
kiss on her lips that made her heart ache. “Hey, it’s all right, remember?
You’ll soon learn that immortals are incredibly patient beings.”

She flashed him a small
smile. “You mean stubborn.”

He laughed. “Yes, that,
too.” He dropped her brown shirt into her lap. “Get dressed. If you’ll sit with
my brother, then I’ll go see about breakfast.”

“Let’s hope he waits to
wake up until you’re back. I can imagine the fun I would have trying to explain
who I am when I can’t speak your language or he, English.”

Taron smirked. “One
smell and he’ll know exactly who you are to me.”

Briana looked up at him
sharply. “On second thought, forget breakfast. I’ll go wash in the stream again,
instead.”

“You’re so adorable when
you're shy,” he said fondly as he finished dressing.

“I’m
not
shy,”
she grumbled. “You just have no shame.”

His laughter at her
expense followed him out of the tent, but she really couldn’t fault him for
teasing her so much when she made it so easy for him.

After dressing, washing
her face using a pitcher of water and a metal basin, and finger-combing her
hair, Briana searched around the tent for something that would allow her to
create a makeshift necklace to hang the key around her neck. The only think she
could find was a black scrap of the same kind of linen-like material as her
shirt and breeches and what she guessed was a small whittling knife. She settled
down onto the stool beside Dagon’s cot and set to work cutting the cloth into a
strip narrow enough to twist to somewhat resemble a cord necklace.

By the time Taron
returned with a plate full of an undeterminable type of meat and slices of a
green-colored fruit, Briana had finished making her necklace and the key was
currently tied to it like a charm and the necklace around her neck. The key
rested against her chest, hidden beneath her shirt. Deciding that it was
probably better not to ask about the meat, she accepted the food with thanks
and without question.

“He hasn’t so much as
twitched the whole time I was watching him,” Briana said as they ate.

“My father once had a
Soul Sleep last a hundred and twenty years. It took him almost two days after
his Dragon Flame was given back to him for him to awaken. I know it’s the human
way to always be on the go, but in this matter, there really is nothing more to
be done but to wait.”

She nodded and then
nearly dropped the piece of fruit she was holding when she realized that a pair
of sunset-colored eyes that were not Taron’s were now staring up at her. She
started to say Taron’s name, but he must have noticed that Dagon was awake at
the same time because he suddenly leaned forward and begun talking to the older
dragon-shifter in his language a-mile-a-minute.

Through that whole
discourse, Dagon kept looking between Taron and her with an unreadable expression,
speaking only a few phrases here and there that had the intonations of questions
before he finally nodded and rose from the cot into a sitting position. Briana
hastily scooted her stool over so Dagon could swing his legs over the side if
he so chose.

Even though he was
Taron’s brother, this was the king of the dragon-shifters. Forget not being
able to talk with him, she had no idea how she was supposed to act around him.
Was it rude to look him directly in the eyes? Was it all right to offer her
hand to him for a shake?

However, Dagon saved her
from working herself up into an anxiety attack by nodding towards her and
saying his own name followed by a few words she didn’t know. She immediately bowed
her head and replied, “Briana Wright. It’s nice to meet you, too.” She then
turned to Taron and added, “Can you tell him that last part for me?”

He grinned. “Of course.
I definitely need to start teaching you Draknar sooner rather than later.”

She agreed. She was
tired of feeling so awkward around everyone. The thought brought her up short.
Her easy acceptance of language lessons was as though she already expected to
be in this world for some time. Was it her imagination or did the skeleton key
suddenly feel a little bit colder against her skin?

Taron abruptly took her
hand and urged her to stand. “Come on. Now that my brother’s awake and I’ve told
him what has happened to our father, me, and this kingdom, we need to go meet
with the soldiers of this camp.”

Briana marveled at how
calm and collected Dagon was after being told that his father had been assassinated
and the kingdom plunged into a civil war while he had been in his Soul Sleep.
She wondered how long he had meant to sleep in the first place. True that two
hundred years was probably a drop in the ocean in the whole scheme of things,
but two hundred years was two hundred years. A lot could happen in that time
even for an immortal. In this instance, a prince had become a king in the worst
possible way.

The next few hours were
a flurry of conversations and activity that Briana mostly sat clueless through
as she was loathed to ask Taron anything while he was so obviously up to his
eyeballs in war plans with his brother. That’s why it took her a moment to
sense the rising tension in the group, but once she had, it wasn’t hard to
guess its source. The more she watched Taron and Dagon speak with each other,
the harder and harder their expressions became and the blanker the surrounding
soldiers’ faces became until Briana started to worry that they were about to
come to blows.

Feeling useless, she
could only watch silently from a stool next to Taron and hope she wasn’t going
to have to get between two snarling dragon-shifters before long. Then Taron
spat something that sounded like an expletive and straightened up from where he
had been leaning close enough to his brother to literally butt heads.

It seemed Dagon had won
the battle, whatever that battle was. Even so, the dragon king didn’t look triumphant
at all. If she had to say, Dagon just looked sad as he regarded Taron’s angry
face.

Briana hesitantly
touched Taron’s hand, wanting to comfort him but not sure what was wrong, what
he needed.

Taron turned to her and
shook his head. “There’s no need for you to fret,” he said quietly. “My brave
but foolish brother just made a decision that I’ve been trying to save him from
making.”

Her eyes flitted over to
Dagon, who was watching them out of the corner of his eye while listening to
one of the ranking soldiers, and then back to Taron’s grim face. “What can I do
to help?” she demanded.

He reached over beneath
the table and linked their fingers together. “Just stay by my side,” he replied
gruffly. “Stay by my side while we all watch my brother challenge Jathar of the
House of Blue Stone to a fight to the death.”

Briana had expected the
group of royal messengers Dagon had sent into the midst of the stone dragon’s
blockade to parlay with the enemy to not return for at least a day. However, an
hour after they had first departed, their camp looked like a colony of ants
scrambling around after a firecracker had been set off among them. The enemy
had accepted the dragon king’s challenge.

One-by-one, the soldiers
had shifted into their firedrake forms until a magnificent dragon army stood
among the trees like a surreal fantasy painting.

The last to shift were
Taron and Dagon. From his tone as they talked animatedly, she got the sense
that her lover had tried one last time to talk his stubborn brother out of the
fight, to no avail. Finally, Taron just sighed and leaned over to embrace his
brother fiercely before stepping away to allow Dagon to shift.

He then walked over to
Briana and reached over to tug softly at the cloth necklace around her neck. “If
the worst should happen, the new king will demand my head in the name of peace.
For the sake of my people, it’s something I will not attempt to avoid. I have
already instructed Ylda to make certain you are given an opportunity to use
this key.”

Briana flashed him a
stricken look. “This is why I
hate
monarchies,” she said thickly. “All
these stupid rules just for the sake to retain power.”

Taron bent down and
kissed her soothingly on the forehead. “I know, but sometimes those same rules
in the right hands can usher in a longstanding peace.”

A thunderous roar
sounded behind them as over a hundred red and black dragons flapped their wings
and took to the sky.

“Looks as if that’s my
cue to shift.”

Like his brother, Taron
embraced her hard. However, before he released her, his lips crashed down onto
her own and kissed her hard and desperate as though it would be their last.

Briana felt as if she
was tearing off a scab from a wound when he finally pulled away and she had to
release his tunic from her grip. She struggled not to cry as she stepped away
from him so he could shift.

The skeleton key felt
like a cold, dead weight against her chest.

For perhaps the last
time, she watched Taron transform into a magnificent firedrake. Then she
stepped into his open palm as he wrapped it securely around her body and then
his other cupped over her head.

“You have to find a
better way for a human to travel with a dragon,” Briana scolded once they were
in the air and her stomach had stopped doing flip-flops.

“You are the only human
I want to soar the skies with,” came his prompt answer.

She couldn’t help but
smile. “That’s so cheesy.”

“But no less true.”

Within minutes, Taron
had landed. Once Briana had been set down onto the ground, she saw that they
were on the edge of a cliff with a clear view of a vast grassland that Taron
informed her was the palace lawns. High up to the left along the face of a
mountain that rose higher than the clouds, she could just make out the palace,
itself, a magnificent structure carved directly out of the face of that
mountain. An army of thousands of firedrakes waited in formation at the base of
the mountain beneath the shadow of the palace.

As Briana looked to the
right, her mouth went dry when she saw an equally impressive army of blue stone
dragons.

“A front row seat to the
fight of the century starring my older brother,” Taron growled bitterly. “We
should all be so lucky.”

She reached over and
rubbed over the scales of one of his forelegs in a manner that she hoped was
soothing. Could he even feel her touching his scales or were they like
fingernails? So many questions she hadn’t had time to ask him about his nature.
She prayed with everything in her that when this was all over, she would get
that chance to ask them.

Briana’s attention
turned back to the scene unfolding far below them. She squinted as she saw one
of the dragons in the front break off and fly to the center of the field.

“That’s the bastard who
started all of this,” Taron snarled, his rage almost palpable. “Jathar.”

Almost immediately, the
stone dragon formation split down the middle with military precision, and a
lone firedrake flew through the opening from the back. She didn’t need to see
Taron stiffen to know that the red and black dragon was Dagon.

“Fool,” Taron muttered,
his pain now more apparent with his voice booming down on her from above.

“Why didn’t he wait to
challenge Jathar until he had been awake for at least a month, hell even
another day?” Briana found herself asking, her eyes riveted to the two dragons
squaring off. “I don’t understand.”

“We are never more
invigorated, more powerful than after the sleep,” he answered, sounding more
disgusted than happy about such an obvious boon.

“Jathar must know this.
Why would he accept with the odds so out of his favor?”

“Long ago, Jathar was
once my father’s greatest warrior. Perhaps that’s why he was not content with
his lot. Those of the House of Blue Stone have always prided themselves on
their strength, believing that the most powerful beings in all things should
rule. Given this philosophy, it’s not a surprise that they allied themselves
with a non-shifter people strong in magic such as the
Ansi
.

“My family, well, we’re
more scholarly, than warrior, I suppose. Our strength lies in our knowledge,
our wisdom. This has always been a point of contention between our two houses,
but the various noble houses of the stone dragons have always respected us for
that strength—until Jathar. The Houses flocked to his banner without
hesitation. We should have known it was really a grudging respect, at best.”

“And Dagon?”

“He believes that today
is the only day in which he has a good chance of winning, today when both his
mind and body are optimized to one hundred percent vitality. He is—right,”
Taron admitted reluctantly.

Two roars sounded from
below as both dragons leaped into the air, and Briana couldn’t help clutching
at Taron’s leg in anxiety. It had begun. There was no turning back now, and she
had never felt more frightened in her life.

The two dragons slammed
into each other a split-second after the dragon king unleashed a stream of
death-fire right into Jathar’s face. However, the other shook it off as though
he had only been sprayed in the face with a water gun and immediately went for
Dagon’s jugular, smoke pouring from his blue face as he managed to only slice a
tooth harmlessly across the scales on his king’s neck.

“Can he—actually
bite
through
Dagon’s scales?” Briana asked faintly, horrified that she might
actually witness something so gruesome.

She was immensely
relieved when Taron shook his head, but it was short-lived. “No. A dragon’s
scales are impenetrable by tooth, claws, or sword. The trick is to use them
effectively as a distraction while hitting the few points of vulnerability we
do have—eyes, ears, an open mouth, and most importantly, our necks. They may be
covered in scales, but they can still be crushed in the powerful jaws of a
dragon if bitten just so.”

Suddenly, Dagon’s wings
folded back onto his back as he latched onto the stone dragon with his talons
on both hands and feet, and he started to drop like a rock, taking a startled
Jathar with him into the beginnings of a death spiral. She both heard and felt
Taron gasp as Dagon did some weird-looking flip upward of his hind legs, the
result making Jathar’s fall even more unstably as the stone dragon’s flapping
wings struggled to right himself with Dagon still awkwardly clinging to a space
just above both wing joints with the talons on his hands.

Seconds away from
crashing into the ground, Dagon abruptly released Jathar and unfurled his
wings, having time for only one mighty flap upwards with all his might before
he turned sharply to the side and hit the ground rolling. Even though Jathar
had been flapping his wings like mad the entire time, due to Dagon’s strange
acrobatics, his wings never got any lift, and he slammed brutally into the
ground.

“Looks as though Dagon
found one more point of vulnerability,” Taron said in something like disbelief.
“If Jathar didn’t just break every bone in his body, then I’ll eat my own tail.
Even a dragon’s scales can’t protect us against an impact from that kind of
fall…”

The stone dragon lay
still and silent where he had fallen in the center of a small crater of his own
making, one of his wings bent at an odd angle and crushed beneath the bulk of
his body. From so high up, she couldn’t tell if he was dead or just
unconscious.

“Dagon hit the ground
pretty hard, too,” Briana said worriedly as she watched the dragon king
continue to tumble uncontrollably across the palace lawns in a whirl of reds
and blacks.

Taron’s talons dug into
the earth, betraying his desire to rush to his brother’s side. To be unable to
help a loved one in obvious need was pure torture, even for her who barely knew
Dagon.

After what felt like an
eternity holding her breath, Dagon finally stopped rolling and fell still for
another heart-stopping eternity. What if he, like Jathar, was too injured to
get up? In a fight to the death, was there such a thing as a draw if neither
one could even get up to finish the other?

Then a rush of
adrenaline surged through her as Briana saw Dagon lift his head and shake it
vigorously before staggering up onto all four limbs.

“You foolish, crazy
bastard!” Taron growled, the anger in his voice belying the blatant relief in
those large eyes.

Briana hugged as much of
his forelimb as possible in her excitement as she watched the dragon king flap
his wings once and then walk stiffly over to the rim of the crater Jathar’s impact
had punched into the lawn. He peered down for a brief moment at his fallen
opponent before suddenly turning towards the silent army of stone dragons at
his back and shouting several phrases in the Draknar language that seemed to
reverberate to the four corners of the world and send ripples of unrest
throughout the enemy ranks.

“What did he say?”
Briana demanded.

Taron’s tone was gleeful
as he translated, “‘Let this serve as my judgment for the murder of my father,
the late King Lyven of the House of the Red Flame.’”

Then without further
preamble, Dagon jumped down into the crater. He picked up Jathar’s limp head
and pried open his mouth. Like watching a train wreck, Briana couldn’t turn her
gaze away even though she could guess what was coming.

Dagon opened his mouth,
and a burst of orange-red flames flowed from his mouth into the mouth of his
enemy for at least a full minute. When Jathar’s smoking body hit the ground
again, this time, Briana had no doubts that he was dead.

The battle was won, and
now the hardest part of the war would truly begin—the aftermath.