The Cursed King (Inferno Rising), page 35
Perhaps the grief of losing his mate was so immediate, so all-consuming, that the battle going on overhead was shut out.
“No!” a woman shouted, followed by another’s cry, then sobs.
Kasia and Skylar, some small part of him acknowledged. Sounds that exactly matched the one his dragon was making as he stared at the pile of ashes that had been Angelika only minutes ago. And yet, the sound wouldn’t come out of him. As though his dragon was protecting Airk by taking all the pain into himself.
All he felt was…numb.
“He killed her.” Some random dragon shifter’s voice drifted through his mind. “The king killed a phoenix.”
“Maybe he isn’t the High King,” another voice whispered.
Only to be overridden by, “Maybe she wasn’t a phoenix.”
Then another voice. “He turned her to ash in a minute. What does that mean?”
Then another. And another. And another. Until Airk’s mind was a cacophony of voices beating at him.
Vaguely, he was aware of a shadow looming overhead. A deep chuckle scraped over him, followed by the wind of wings as Pytheios took off into the air. Where were the kings? The Enforcers? Probably in shock.
Screw them all.
“My people.” Pytheios’s voice was like a spike through his head. “A true phoenix wouldn’t have been touched by the flames.”
The voices went quiet. Listening.
Pytheios continued, “I have only eradicated a liar and a charlatan from our midst.”
Angelika was dead. Airk didn’t give a shit.
“I’ll show you touched by flames, you rotting red bastard—” Ladon or Kasia must’ve gotten to Skylar before she could do something rash, because her words broke off abruptly. Airk didn’t look to see why.
“We showed you who the liar is,” Brand’s voice boomed through him. “That video is the truth.”
“Lies!” Pytheios hissed. “A desperate attempt to make you doubt after what you’ve seen with your own eyes. Fight with me now!”
A roar rose up from both sides, from every dragon around him. The noise only escalated as the battle overhead resumed with an impact of bodies and a conflagration of fire.
“Get into the mountain!” Samael’s voice pierced the noise. Aimed at Meira, probably, though how she’d gotten out here, Airk didn’t know. The panic there should have had Airk trying to help, because he could hear in the king’s voice that they were losing.
But all Airk could do was kneel beside his mate.
They were mated, but he wasn’t dead. He should be a pile of ash with her, following her into death.
Oh gods… She would have survived if their bond had solidified and she could shift into her dragon form. But he’d held himself back. He hadn’t let himself love her as deeply as a mate deserved.
Because I am a coward.
The promise of everything he could ever want had been there in her eyes, in every touch, in the way she didn’t give up on him, even when he pushed her away.
If he had only reached out and accepted it. The fates had given them the chance, with Angelika showing dragon sign and surviving his fire.
This is my fault.
She could have survived. She could still be standing here, facing down the bastard who had taken everything—everything—from them both.
My fault.
My fault.
My fault.
“I love you.” The words came out of his swollen mouth so cracked, even Airk couldn’t understand them.
He swallowed hard and tried again. “I love you, Angelika Amon.”
The clash of dragons all around him faded away, drowned out by the numb and cold threatening to consume him.
Gods, this hurt. This was too much. More than losing his parents or his king. More than the physical pain inflicted during his incarceration. More than holding his dragon back all this time.
A rumble sounded around him, the ground shaking with it, shifting violently under his knees, but Airk braced against it and didn’t look.
“Oh my gods. Airk, get out of there!” Kasia yelled.
But he refused to tear his gaze from Angelika’s ashes. His body started involuntarily rocking, and the words, now that the dam had broken, spilled out of him.
“I think I have loved you from the start. Even before you approached me that night in Ben Nevis, I noticed you. How did no one else see what and who you were?”
He shook his head, still rocking, silently pleading at the same time that her soul might still hear him from the heavens. Hear these words he should have told her ages ago.
“I thought, maybe, the gods had sent me Skylar. But I knew that night when you offered to be my friend…I knew…that they had sent her to bring me to…you.” He crumpled over the last word, bending in half as the pain finally penetrated the numbness and his dragon howled in his head. “I should have told you.”
He leaned forward, pressing his forehead into the ashes of his mate, the closest he could get to her now. He couldn’t even hold her, see her face.
“I am sorry. I will spend the rest of my life being sorry.”
A tiny, wet, hot nose pressed into his cheek, and Airk lifted his head to stare straight into the red glowing eyes of a hellhound puppy.
With a grunt, Airk straightened, eyeing the creature before him, the strong scents of smoke and putrid rot filling his nostrils.
Legend held that the arrival of a hellhound portended death. Probably because they tended to kill anything that encountered them. But he knew for sure now that hellhounds embodied warriors who had unfinished business and were killed before their time—reincarnated to finish that business.
“Maul?” Kasia’s voice broke over the word, closer than she had been a minute ago.
Airk stared into red glowing eyes, looking for the man who had been his king in them. Could Zilant Amon have been reincarnated again?
An image flashed in his mind, the way hellhounds communicated—that of a man with military-short hair and hazel eyes.
Even through the numbness, a tiny spike of shock broke through.
Jedd.
Jedd was a hellhound now?
The black puppy—though still the size of a small horse—lowered his head to nudge Angelika’s ashes with his nose, emitting a whine that wrapped Airk’s pain in a layer of acid, eating holes through him. The wolf shifter had loved her, too.
A movement had him glancing past the hellhound to find three full-sized ones lined up before a massive, steaming crack in the earth. Jedd had brought reinforcements.
“Grandfather?” Meira’s voice sounded from behind him, and he turned his head to find all of them—Meira, Skylar, and Kasia—standing behind him, staring at the remains of their sister and the reincarnation of… Was one of those hellhounds the previous King of the Red Clan?
Unfinished business.
Kasia suddenly sucked in. “Are you…Brand’s father?” She was staring at the largest of the death dogs.
Another surge of emotion pierced the numbness. If the kings Hanyu and Astarot were both here—two of those whose lives had been cut short by Pytheios’s own hand, warriors with unfinished business—what about…
He turned his gaze to the last of the animals before him. The one staring at him hard.
“Father?” Airk croaked.
The hellhound’s face spasmed with what? Pain? Regret? Pride? Then he bowed his head, flashing an image of Airk as a boy, as his father taught him hand-to-hand combat.
A slow burn ignited inside him, traveling over the pain in creeping cinders of flame, turning it into something explosive. The numbness disintegrated under a wellspring of rage. Rage…and purpose.
Angelika would want her people to live—those loyal, at least. To thrive. But Airk had nothing to live for anymore. Not without her. He was expendable.
He looked at Jedd, watching him so intently, and gave his order. “Find the false phoenix. Kill her.”
Kill Pytheios’s mate, and the king would die, too.
Before he could blink, Jedd disappeared with an odd popping sound, then reappeared with the white-haired woman who’d brought Angelika to her death clasped in his jaws. Her body flickered, as though she tried to teleport and it worked for a beat only to stop, returning her right back to the hellhound.
Tisiphone’s eyes grew wide with fear as realization that she couldn’t escape sank in, and Airk actually smiled, and he thought maybe Jedd did, too, around his grip on the woman. So did the line of hellhounds behind Jedd, drawing flapping lips back over gruesome teeth, eyes glowing brighter in the darkness of their skulls.
“A phoenix for a phoenix,” Airk told Tisiphone. “Only seems fair.”
At no visible sign from Jedd, the hellhounds descended on the girl, snarls ripping from their throats. Her screams pierced the air, only to cut off abruptly as they ripped into her flesh, tearing her to shreds until all that was left of her were strings of meat and skin and shards of bone in a pool of crimson blood that dripped over the boulders like a waterfall of carnage.
High overhead, a roar to rattle the heavens blasted out louder than all the fighting and fire raging around them.
Pytheios.
Only the sound wasn’t the death throes of a mate whose soul was being dragged to the underworld by his connection with his other half. It was a challenge.
How was the king not dead?
“You think I didn’t protect against that?” Pytheios demanded. “My witch made sure my mate’s death would never take me.”
Four massive hellhounds turned to face the sky almost as one unit, the military men they had been in previous lives showing in their precise movements. The growl they answered the rotting king with wasn’t a warning. It was a dare.
“Watch over Angelika,” Airk said to Jedd. “I’ll take care of Pytheios.”
Actually, fuck that. He was going to kill everybody.
This was why the gods had trapped him in that hellhole. Because his feral dragon was going to take down the king. Even as beaten and broken as he was, he would find a way.
Airk started his shift right there, unlocking every gate inside him, tearing down every wall he’d ever built around the wild creature trapped within his soul. The shift didn’t explode from him. It came on slowly, his bones realigning with each stage in agony-rending cracks, as though his dragon was being forced to piece them both back together.
But when he was finished, while still weak, he was at least whole.
Airk beat his wings, launching into the air, careful not to disturb Angelika’s resting place with the wind he created. As he lifted his gaze to search for Pytheios, though, the tiniest of movements from Tisiphone’s remains caught his attention.
The roar of his dragon in his head almost pulled his focus away from what was happening, until his dragon also caught the scent, and together they looked closer, hovering and watching.
Ashes.
Sooty, feathery ashes the color of storm clouds rose and floated into the air, drawing out of the scattered bits and pieces that had been Tisiphone the same way that video had shown them rising to hover over the false phoenix’s body when she was made.
A dance of death and impossibility, undisturbed by the breeze.
Gods above.
Everything inside him seized, his dragon more still than he’d ever been as they stared at what was happening before their eyes.
The deep gray cinders floated through the air to hover over Angelika’s ashes, then coalesced above her. Swirling and eddying and rippling, the pieces formed into something not solid but recognizable. The familiar face of a woman. Of Serefina. She opened her mouth, lips forming a single word.
Angelika.
Even after her death, the phoenix was still fighting for her daughters.
Arms of ash formed out of the swirling mass and reached down to touch Angelika’s ashes, which seemed to ripple as though they recognized her mother, and Serefina’s apparition smiled.
Mother and daughter finally reunited.
The deep gray soot turned white-hot, glowing so brightly Airk’s eyes ached and burned in his head until he wanted to claw his own eyes out. Around him, he could sense others looking away, unable to watch. But Airk fisted his claws, needing to see. Needing this to be real.
The combined ashes swirled and writhed like a hurricane made of pure light.
Then he saw it, and hope that he’d been holding back burst around him, as bright as the light coming from his mate.
From that molten, churning mass, a figure arose, like Aphrodite being born from the sea.
A figure so gloriously beautiful, Airk’s heart threatened to burst inside him at the sight.
Angelika.
Her white-blond hair flowed around the perfection of her figure, her frosty eyes now entirely white as they shone with the power manifesting inside her. And all over her skin, unmistakable lines formed, sparkling brilliant white.
Feathers.
The mark of a phoenix.
Chapter Thirty
Silence overtook the mountain and skies as though every creature on earth had come to a ragged halt. Airk wasn’t sure if the silence was because shock had shut down his hearing or because all the fighting had stopped. He didn’t care, either.
She’s alive.
Gods, what did that mean? Was this a specter of her? Like Jedd or his father? An angel sent to finish this fight, then leave him again.
If anything, his dragon’s rage escalated, turning molten in his veins, because his mate was here now. His mate, who needed Pytheios dead. But Airk wanted to go to her.
Desperation and rage tore him apart as he and his dragon battled in his mind as they always did, always at odds with each other, jerking back and forth in the air.
Angelika made the decision for them.
Her sweet, beautiful face contorted into something that reflected the heat of wrath consuming him from the inside out and sent terror lancing through both parts of him. Because his Angelika would never show an emotion like that.
“Angelika?” Meira, standing close by, called to her sister, reaching out a hand. Worry, not relief, wavered in her voice. No doubt the empath could feel as well as see what was going on with her sister.
Skylar apparently didn’t need empathic abilities, because she pulled Meira back slowly, shielding her pregnant sister behind her, putting her body between them.
This terrifyingly beautiful creature wasn’t Angelika. Not entirely.
Her body continued to glow brighter and brighter. Then, in a flash of light more brilliant than any sun flare, white flaming wings rose from behind her. Her lips curled in fury as she lifted her hands and light shot out of her. Electric strands like lightning, but ones that didn’t flash then disappear. The strands connected her to every dragon, every creature around them, like a web of sizzling light, and she was the spider in the middle.
The light hit him so hard, Airk grunted with the impact. With that, a sensation of electricity ran over his nerve endings, as though he’d grabbed hold of a lightning bolt and couldn’t pull away. His dragon roared as they both realized they were paralyzed. Held suspended in the air, not able to even move the muscles of their eyes. Angelika hadn’t even left her sisters out of this web of paralysis.
Staring at his mate in horror, he could sense the moment she decided to do something so against her true nature the expression in her eyes shattered his heart all over again.
“This is what I died for?” she asked in a voice so soft, terror ripped through him along those electric lines. The terror of every person caught in her net.
“I died to save creatures who treat female-born as political objects or built-in nannies. Who have killed precious, vulnerable mates by manipulating the mating system to falsely give them to dragons not destined to be theirs. Who allowed this lying king, who murdered your kings and queens and two phoenixes, to reign for centuries.” Her face contorted more. Twisting into something impossibly brutal. “Centuries!”
Her head whipped round to stare at a dragon in midair. White. Mös? Difficult to tell out of the corner of his eyes, which couldn’t move.
“Either you were blind, oblivious, or in on covering things up,” Angelika declared. “Either way, you are unfit to lead.”
Mös’s scream hit the air, his body contorting with whatever she was doing to him down that electric line.
“Or…” Angelika suddenly mused, sounding bored. Like a cat playing with a mouse when she’d already eaten her fill. “Perhaps you are unfit to live.”
“Angelika, stop!” Airk shot the thought at his mate. This wasn’t who she was.
Only the creature who had risen from the ashes wasn’t his mate. His sweet, funny, merciful mate who everyone loved the moment they met her because they could feel that she was on their side…that she made everyone in her orbit important to her. What looked back at him from those glowing, white eyes was something wild, uncontained, and uncontrolled. All passion, all rage, all sensation, all revenge, and nothing of her softness.
A creature to match to his own dragon.
Mös’s screams cut off, but Airk had no idea if the white dragon was dead or she’d merely stopped hurting him.
Then Angelika turned her head to look directly at Airk, brows lowering as though she were confused.
“Can you hear me?” he thought at her.
A slight narrowing of her eyes he took as a yes.
“Who are you?” Her lips didn’t move, but the thought was clear inside his head.
“I am your mate.”
Pain skated over his nerves, as though someone dragged razors over the soft flesh under his scales, and he ground out a groan even as he tried to keep it in. But the sensation ended quickly. A warning.
“Liar.”
She didn’t recognize him? Airk’s dragon howled inside. Maybe they hadn’t mated.
