The Cursed King by Abigail Owen

Chapter Twenty-Five

Angelika’s eyes popped open as she went from deep sleep to wide awake with a disorienting jolt.

“What?” Airk mumbled in the sexiest, sleep-laden low voice. Her body shivered in immediate, stark reaction.

But what woke her was too urgent to stop and indulge first. “Kasia wasn’t wrong.”

Rather than waffle or ask what she meant, his pale blue eyes opened, trained on her face, instantly alert. “How so?”

“Her vision.” She shook her head—how had they not guessed sooner? “She wasn’t wrong. He’s coming here next.”

Airk’s thick, dark brows drew down over his eyes. “How would he know to come here?”

“Brock.”

The truth of her realization settled in his own expression.

She laid it out anyway. “These are all guesses, but Brock was sent here specifically and probably should have checked in by now and hasn’t. Because my sisters had to go somewhere, and now this place is suspicious. Because Pytheios has been a step ahead of us all along. Take your pick.”

After a long beat, his eyes hardened to frosty flame. “I think you are correct.”

They needed to get everyone out of this mountain and somewhere Pytheios wouldn’t think to look. Now.

Without another word, they were both up, hurrying to the bathroom to shower and dress. Not together, because even with the urgency that would be distracting. She went first. As they traded, Airk told her, “I called Jordy. He is gathering your sisters and our councils together. Here.”

For privacy? Good call. While these rooms had some updates, they weren’t exactly comfortable. Hells, they were lucky to have running hot water.

She was tempted to kiss him, but they didn’t have time. In short order, they dressed. As she braided her wet hair to get it out of her way, she could hear Airk letting the others in. When she emerged, it was to find the living area of their suite filled to the brim. Not just her sisters and their mates, Mös, Belyy, Tovar and the other council members of her father’s clan, but the viceroys and guards from Ladon’s, Brand’s, and Samael’s clans as well.

Full house.

The way the groups stood, each of the four gathered with their own in a different corner of the room, put her in mind of middle-school kids at a dance, still figuring out hormones.

“Are we waiting on anyone else?” she asked Airk.

He shook his head.

Raising her voice, she addressed the room in general. “Has everyone been introduced?”

A few nods, mostly from the kings and her sisters, along with a lot of sour faces. She shook her head, wishing that she had more time to prepare them, to show them how to work together. Something deep inside told her she could—look at where they were now, so much further than anyone had believed—but she was out of time. “Whatever past offenses, personal or otherwise, you are dealing with, if we want to survive this—if we want to take Pytheios down—then we work together. Can you do that?”

Sour blanked out, adjusting after another beat to expressions not blank but purposeful.

“What is this about?” Ladon was the one to ask.

No way to ease into this. “Kasia’s vision wasn’t wrong,” she said.

Her sister blanched but didn’t bobble. “It happened exactly as I saw it.”

Angelika shook her head. “When you first told me, right after the vision happened, you said that he used different words.”

Kasia frowned, gaze going fuzzy as though trying to remember. “I must have been in shock. I’m sure he said—”

“Bow to me now, or die—that’s what you told me he said.”

“Is it?” Kasia shook her head.

“But yesterday, he said it slightly differently. Right?”

“True…” Kasia let the word trail off as she thought through it. Then her chin came up, eyes going harder. “My visions aren’t always easy to interpret, but the words used are never wrong.”

Brand set a hand to the small of his mate’s back, a gesture of support.

One Angelika appreciated, because she didn’t have time to comfort them through this. “Exactly. I think your vision was of this mountain. We’re next.”

“Holy hellfire,” Mös muttered, then snapped an accusing glare to her and Airk. “What have you brought down on us?”

Before Angelika could respond, Airk’s snarl set every person in the room on edge as he speared the Beta with a look filled with rage and promised retribution. “You could be ruled by Brock right now, and that gold dragon would be ordering you to attack the Black, Gold, and Blue Clans. You think you would be any safer?”

After a long, twitchy stare down, Mös looked away first.

Not that that eased any of the tension suffocating the people in the room, at least if the set of shoulders and jaws was any indication.

“We need a plan,” Angelika dropped into the stony silence. “One that he won’t expect.”

Skylar and Ladon exchanged a look, then glanced at Samael and Meira, then at Brand and Kasia.

“It’s time,” Brand said.

Time? Time for what? What plans had her sisters and their kings been making while she and Airk been off recruiting?

…

“Are you sure about this?” Skylar whispered as they all took their spots inside the massive hangar.

Angelika shot her a look that said to quit.

“Leave her alone,” Meira said. “We’ve asked her already.”

“But the bond… She can’t shift. She’s not fully dragon yet.”

If ever. Angelika had survived Airk’s fire, but something was missing. She could feel it, but she couldn’t pin down what, exactly. As though the change couldn’t happen. Or wouldn’t. What was the point of her showing dragon sign if she was going to remain human the rest of her life? Maybe they’d done the mating wrong? But she didn’t think so, and she refused to worry him with her questions.

“We’re better bait if he thinks he’ll get all four of us,” was all she said now.

Each of their mates had expressed displeasure in this part of the plan. Loudly. Or, for Brand, lots of growling and grunting. Airk, however, had remained dead quiet.

Not punishing her with silence. More like he didn’t trust himself not to lose his shit if he opened his mouth. The kiss he’d laid on her as the kings had left with everyone else had been…explosive. And desperate.

“Do what you must,” he murmured against her lips. “But come back to me.”

She’d loved him even more in that moment and yet hadn’t told him so. Neither of them had shared that word yet. She didn’t want him more distracted if she said it. For a newly mated dragon, leaving her alone in the mountain of Kamen while he and the kings took their four clans halfway across the globe had to be nothing short of torture. So she’d kept her feelings to herself.

“I’ll see you soon,” she whispered back.

She didn’t think about how the gargoyles had said no to being part of this. Or how Hershel and the Covens’ Syndicate had agreed to only limited help. No one had been able to track down the hellhounds. But they had the majority of four out of the six clans’ worth of dragons. They had Enforcers from the Americas colonies. They had the wolves. And they had a plan.

Their plan had to work. It had to.

They didn’t dare use the mirrors. Not yet. Which meant using the same interconnected method that had allowed Kasia and Skylar to get dragons out of Ben Nevis quickly. Apparently—Meira’s idea—the Blue, Black, and Gold Clans had been drilling all their dragons to group together in specific, relatively protected places throughout Ben Nevis. As soon as the attack hit, fighters had kept Pytheios’s forces distracted while Kasia and Skylar used their combined versions of teleportation to go from group to group, sending them to Angelika in Kamen. They’d waited for their attackers to herd the fighters into a single group together so that they were able to get them out in one shot.

Such an action had drained both of her sisters terribly, but blood transfusions from their mates had brought them back to full ability. All of which had been used again, getting every soul in this mountain to a new location.

A secret location nowhere on this side of the world.

Alaskan wilderness. Genius move.

Angelika glanced at the five white dragons who’d insisted on remaining behind to guard them. Two who had made an oath to Skylar a while back, plus Belyy, Tovar, and Jordy.

Kasia had been the one to convince Angelika to allow it in the end. “My vision,” she’d said. “They’re in it.”

Now she and her sisters were together and, mostly, alone for possibly the first time since their mother’s death.

With a sigh, she laid her head on Meira’s shoulder. “How’s mini-you doing?”

She felt more than saw her sister’s smile. “I felt him move for the first time last week.”

“What?” Kasia demanded on a squeal. “Why didn’t you say?”

Meira shrugged. “We were…busy.”

“Not too busy for baby stuff,” Skylar insisted, tapping Meira’s foot with her own.

Meira’s deep breath moved Angelika’s head up and down.

“What did it feel like?” Angelika asked.

“Like…tiny bubbles.”

“It was gas.” Skylar’s eye roll was in her voice.

Angelika reached across Meira and flicked her arm for that, and Skylar actually pretended to jump. “Hey.”

Meira chuckled. “It wasn’t gas. I’d thought, a few times before, that I was feeling the baby, but I wasn’t. This was…different.”

Another deep breath, and Meira’s hand crept over her belly in a protective gesture as ancient and instinctual as motherhood.

“What did Samael say about you staying behind?” Angelika asked her.

“I think he would rather have remained here with me.”

A massive understatement, no doubt.

Skylar’s sarcastic snort said she thought so, too. “I believe Kasia threatening him with fucked-up, world-ending paradoxes if we didn’t match her vision was the only thing that made him go.”

“Made them all go,” Kasia tagged on. “Those lizard brains are definitely all instinct when it comes to their mates. But it’s kind of cute.”

They all chuckled over that.

“I heard that,” one of the white dragons called out in the dark.

Which only made them laugh harder.

Gods, it felt so good to be with her sisters again. Angelika’s smile slipped into a frown. “After this is over—”

“Please let this be the end of it,” Skylar muttered.

They all nodded.

“Anyway, after this is over, we’ll be apart.”

They were all quiet for a second, contemplating what that life might look like. Apart, yes, but safe. And settled. No more running. No more hiding.

They’d be living among dragon shifters, who tended to be ruled by their passions and had difficulty letting go of the past, especially past grievances. She wasn’t naive enough to believe there’d be no more fighting. But still…no one coming for her or her sisters all the time would be a refreshing change.

“Do you remember that time…” She paused to think. “I want to say we were about seventeen or eighteen years old. Europeans—and therefore dragons—had discovered the ‘new world’ existed, and Skylar got the bright idea that we should get ourselves over there somehow. That distance would make it harder for Pytheios to find us.”

Skylar leaned forward. “Uh…and I was right.”

Angelika grinned. “Not for another few hundred years, Sky. Anyway, Mama was trying to explain how we’d have to travel with humans, and that they weren’t just letting anyone go, and all the dangers. Weather, provisions going bad, months cooped up on the ship, the possibility of being caught between two warring human factions on the seas. But especially that it would be unsafe for women traveling alone in general. And Skylar said—”

Kasia straightened suddenly. “That’s right. She said, ‘We’ll build our own ship.’ Oh my gods, I’d forgotten that.”

Meira hid a grin behind her hand, and Skylar scowled at them all.

“Is this going somewhere?” she demanded.

“Well, Mama, of course, said no, but you decided we would do it anyway and surprise her. You were so sure of yourself and managed to convince the rest of us to go along. And Kasia went to check the price of ships.”

Kasia frowned slowly. “No. That wasn’t me. That was you.”

Angelika shook her head. “Don’t you remember? You had to run away—”

Her sister winced. “From those ruffians trying to steal my purse.”

“Who’s laughing now?” Skylar crowed.

Angelika chuckled at Kasia’s embarrassed frown. “Anyway, while we didn’t get our own ship and sail off right away, we did beat most settlers to it eventually. It took more planning and more time than we anticipated, but we got there.”

They smiled at one another. Those years before dragons finally started coming over in big enough numbers for them to worry about had been some of their happiest. No looking over their shoulders constantly. They’d found friends and shelter with the native inhabitants. They’d lived full lives.

Not lives without danger or sorrow or hard times. Living as long as they did meant a lot of goodbyes and seeing friends and loved ones pass on to the afterlife. But there was a difference between living and simply surviving. The same as the difference between raw cocoa powder and milk chocolate.

“My point is, we can do damn near anything when we do it together.”

After a beat, Skylar wrapped her hand around Angelika’s and squeezed, then took Kasia’s on her other side, and Meira slipped hers into Angelika’s. They sat there together in silence. Just being together. Waiting for the man they’d always been waiting for.

To find them. To try to kill them.

It ended now. It had to.

…

Airk sat on the stone floor, back against the rough wall of the cave and legs splayed out in front of him. Along with Ladon, Samael, and Brand, he waited in the smaller space where a single mirror had been positioned. A mirror that only reflected themselves back.

They weren’t sure if Meira would be able to use it to communicate once the attack on Kamen came, but they had to try.

Skylar was the one who’d come up with this spot. Or, more particularly, she’d reached out to a contact in the colonies. A black dragon shifter—Rune Abaddon—who’d been rogue for the last few decades but had been reinstated to his team of Enforcers very recently. A situation that apparently involved taking down the leaders of the Alliance, whom the old kings had set to govern dragons in the Americas. An act that should have marked them as traitors and yet didn’t. Something about taking out Pytheios’s lackeys.

Airk had no idea what to think of that.

However, Skylar trusted the man implicitly. Her mother had sent her to Rune for protection when she died. Meira and Samael, whom Rune had helped in a separate incident only a few months ago, did, too. So, for that matter, did Brand, who’d interacted with the black dragon as well as his Enforcer team, the Huracáns, soon before he’d found Kasia. Airk trusted Angelika’s family, so here they were in a mountain in the wilderness of Alaska. A raw mountain, unexcavated or made for dragons. One they didn’t all fit in. Which meant most of their people were camped out in the forests around it.

Exposed.

And ready to fight.

He slid a searching glance toward the other three men in the room. Their connections with their mates, through the bonds already in place, meant they could feel them. Gods, what he wouldn’t give to feel Angelika right now. Still, not one of the dragon kings had so much as twitched. He had to take it on faith that they would know if something bad happened.

“Ladon?”

Airk glanced briefly at Arden, Ladon’s sister, standing in the entrance to the small cavern where he sat, only to return his gaze to the mirror.

“Yes?” Ladon asked.

“The red dragon named Jakkobah is awake, and he wants to speak with the kings.”

Fuck. “Bring him here,” Airk said.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught her wince. “He can’t be moved yet.”

“Then it will have to wait,” Brand growled.

Airk nodded. No way in hells was he not going to be here if Angelika suddenly needed him.

“He insists it is urgent. Turn more hearts to our side,” Arden said. “Particularly white dragons.”

Airk stiffened at that before glancing at Ladon. Jakkobah had been his informant, after all. The blue king’s face could’ve been carved from rock as he stared back, and Airk knew what they were all thinking.

Of the three of them, Airk was the liability. Unable to shift. If their phoenixes needed them, the other three would be better equipped to do something about it. More than that, he could picture Angelika if she were here. She would volunteer or urge him to. He knew it.

“I will go,” Airk said finally, though his dragon snarled at the idea.

Ladon jerked his head. “He may only speak with me.”

They’d deal with that if it happened. “Do you trust him?”

“Yes.”

“Do you trust me?” Airk asked next.

“Yes.” No hesitation.

Airk tried damn hard not to be surprised by that. Angelika was the only one, other than Skylar to a certain extent, who’d shown that kind of faith in him since his release.

“Is there anything that would make this man trust me?” he managed to get out of his own head to ask.

“Aniferes,” Ladon said.

The word slid with sour recognition through him, but Airk only raised his eyebrows.

Ladon shrugged. “Our code word. One he made up so only he would recognize it.”

“Actually…that word was made up by another.” By Nathair. The one who had kept him educated. The one who, in the end, helped him and Skylar escape.

Aniferes was “Serefina” spelled backward.

A word they’d come up with to mean hope and hold on. Nathair would never entirely turn his back on his brother. His hope was in Pytheios, not against him. But he hadn’t agreed with what the red king had done to Airk, either.

Airk pushed to his feet. “If I am not back before the attack comes, tell Angelika…” Gods, what message could he leave that was enough?

But Brand was the one to nod. “We’ll tell her.”

He searched the faces of the three men in front of him. The only ones who might understand. With an answering nod, he strode out of the door with Arden.

All those still healing from injury had been set up deep inside the mountain, where fewer lives might be risked protecting them if the battle found its way here. Airk hadn’t left the mirrored room since they arrived, so he followed as Arden let the way through pitch-black twists and turns leading deeper into the ground. He jerked to a halt at the sight of what appeared to be a massive boulder blocking their way. Only the texture of the rock was…off.

“Is that a…”

“Cave troll,” Arden affirmed. “He came with Rune Abaddon’s team of Enforcers who knew of this place. Apparently, this was the troll’s mountain until recently.”

Arden patted a pattern on the creature’s back, or maybe its knee. Suddenly, the boulder shifted out of the way, uncurling from what appeared to be a deep sleep.

He blinked at Airk as he passed through. Or at least appeared to. Difficult to discern, given the crunched-up arrangement of features making a face. For his part, Airk refused to turn his back on the massive, gray-skinned beast. The thing had to be close to fifteen feet tall and looked to be made of rock, dust coating its leathery skin and facial features hidden in a face made up of crags and crevices.

“You new dragon,” the troll said in a voice that was low but surprisingly smooth. Slow and even, like time itself.

How was one supposed to greet a cave troll? He settled for introducing himself. “Airk Azdajah.”

“White dragon?”

Not really a question, but Airk nodded anyway.

The troll grunted. “Me called Vilsinn.”

“Pleasure,” Airk said. He eyed Vilsinn warily, waiting for any sign of aggression.

When the troll meekly stared back, Airk glanced around, searching for any signs that this might be a carnivorous one of its kind. Most trolls were vegetarians, but a few got a taste for human blood, and that was it for them. At least he didn’t see human bones scattered about the chamber.

“Me protect Airk while in this place,” Vilsinn said. “Protect everyone in here.”

Airk pulled his gaze back to the troll and caught the implication. If he hurt anyone in this space under the troll’s protection, Vilsinn wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. “Fair enough.”

That earned him a slow bob of the head before the troll rolled, with the creak of leather and a sort of grinding sound, into a ball and tucked himself back into the doorway he’d been blocking, looking, suddenly, like any other boulder. Airk would be checking all the other boulders a little more closely in the future.

But he didn’t have time to waste, turning to find Arden waiting for him. Even deeper into the mountain, Arden led him to a tiny alcove where the man named Jakkobah was laid out on the ground. Reed, Arden’s soon-to-be mate—news Angelika had squealed over when she’d been informed shortly before everyone left Kamen—was there, grim faced as Airk entered. If Reed had expected his own king, he didn’t show any sign of it. A Healer was also in the room, sitting on the floor beside Jakkobah, tubes hooked up to draw blood from him into the Stoat’s arm.

The Healer—one Airk recognized from his helping with all the injured the day before, a man with black hair and bright blue eyes—glanced up. “I’m almost finished.”

Airk nodded. “I’m Airk.”

“Fallon.”

“With Ladon’s people?”

“At the moment. I was an Enforcer with the Huracán team until a few years ago. Finn, their alpha, is my brother. Rune is a friend. But Ladon needed my services more.”

Another nod. An Enforcer with the same group that had set them up with this mountain? They’d take all the fighters they could get.

Finally, Fallon finished his work—not that Jakkobah looked any better for it, but he’d always been naturally pale. As soon as they were alone, Airk knelt beside the man he’d always believed to be Pytheios’s faithful right hand. Hells, he’d probably jerked the king off when the man was too decrepit to do it himself.

“You have one minute to convince me that I should not snap your neck.”

Jakkobah blinked his pale eyes at him. “I believe the cave troll would have issues with that threat.”

He wasn’t wrong. “Fifty seconds.”

“If I could have gotten you out of Everest sooner, I would.”

“You did not get me out. Not good enough.”

“Every attempt to kill Pytheios resulted in the death of the person I sent to deliver it. I covered my tracks well, but losing a man who could tell all the clans the truth of what happened to our kings and phoenixes…there was no way that wouldn’t blow back on me.”

Airk considered those words. Pytheios always was steps ahead of everyone else, and he would no doubt eventually learn who was behind Airk’s escape.

Nathair. What had happened to his friend?

“Who do you think encouraged Nathair to befriend you?” Jakkobah asked next, as though reading his mind.

That snapped Airk’s brows down. “What do you mean?”

“A long play.” Jakkobah’s lips quirked. “A bit of what American football fans call a Hail Mary. Nathair’s loyalty to his brother was ingrained, but I had hoped that if time allowed a friendship to develop between the two of you, eventually he might be the key to your freedom. So I encouraged him to visit you from time to time.” Satisfaction pulled at the man’s angular features. “I was right.”

Airk battled his dragon, who raged inside him, because that still wasn’t good enough. This man had hidden behind others all while protecting himself. Even if he had worked against Pytheios, it hadn’t been nearly enough.

Then Jakkobah’s choice of words penetrated, dread thudding inside him like boulders down a mountainside. “You said was?”

Pale red eyebrows lifted in question.

“You said Nathair’s loyalty was ingrained.”

An emotion passed over the red shifter’s features that looked a hell of a lot like regret and guilt. “Pytheios executed him before my very eyes.”

The hit came out of nowhere, and yet he’d seen it. He should have known. Airk bowed his head, breathing hard through the thunder of emotions lashing at him with the news. His friend. His sweet, kind, brilliant friend. His only friend for centuries. Nathair was dead.

At Pytheios’s hands. His own brother. “Why was he killed?”

Jakkobah hesitated, as though he was weighing the cost of telling the truth.

“Why?” Airk snapped.

“For his part in your escape. Pytheios found proof of it and killed Nathair in front of me…to loosen my tongue during interrogation.”

The truth. A truth that could bring Airk’s fury down on Jakkobah, and the Stoat knew it. Which meant he was being honest.

Hands fisted so hard his nails drew blood, Airk closed his eyes against his own grief and searched for the ability to see beyond personal retribution and use this man for what he could do to help the cause. The way Angelika would. “Aniferes.”

Jakkobah didn’t react, but something told Airk that he’d relaxed with that word.

“Ah.” The Stoat seemed unsurprised. “I see we’ve been speaking with Ladon Ormarr.”

“And Nathair. He told me that word.”

“Who do you think told it to him?”

Airk blew out a long breath on a half growl. Either he trusted him or he didn’t. If Jakkobah had information to share, he would, at the very least, listen. “You wanted to speak with me?”

“With a king.” He cocked his head in a motion that reminded Airk of a bird. “That’s not you.”

“And yet, I am who came to listen.”

“True.” The Stoat paused, calculations going on behind his eyes. Then Jakkobah slipped a small metal device into Airk’s hand.

Looking at it, he knew from being around Meira that it had something to do with modern-day computers. “What’s this?”

“Proof that Pytheios’s phoenix is a female-born white dragon shifter who was made into a phoenix by his witch.”

Airk almost pulverized the small device as his hands clamped around it. “What kind of proof?”

“Video footage of the magic performed to make it so.”

Seven hells. “How did you get this?”

“As soon as the tech was good enough, I spent years setting up secret cameras throughout Everest. There’s more on there, but Pytheios’s false phoenix… That’s what you need to bring him down.”

“Why did you not tell us sooner?” Airk’s voice descended to a growl.

Jakkobah simply lifted a bored eyebrow. “I was unconscious, dear boy. And you are wasting time.”

He was right.

Airk surged to his feet, pausing at the door to look over his shoulder at the heap of bones that was a dragon shifter lying on the floor. “Thank you.”

Jakkobah’s eyes flared briefly, and the man actually hesitated a beat before finally giving a nod.

Airk left him there, rushing back to the kings. They could share this with those gathered here, bolster the truth with those fighting for them. But even more important was reaching the dragons not yet on their side. Meira was their best bet to get this information out to everyone else. Preferably before the fighting started.

The question was: How could they get this to her?