Marked by the Dragon King (2 page)

“Tribe? I don’t have a tribe and I don’t have black hair so…” Why the hell does he look so familiar? The sleek dark hair, the nearly black eyes, a set of cheekbones and jawline that could have been chiseled from stone. I’ve seen this face before. “Do we know each other?” I ask.

“I…” he trails off, finally releasing his hold on me. “I don’t know.”

Chapter Three

“Are you a warlock?”

That question seems to confuse him even more. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Well, where are you from?”

“I… I can’t remember.”

“How long have you been down here?”

“A very long time. I… I haven’t seen anyone else in… I don’t remember ever seeing anyone else, yet I know that I have. But their faces… I cannot see them when I try.”

“Well, what’s the last thing you do remember?” I murmur.

The confusion on his face dissipates, replaced by a nearly triumphant grin. “The basilisks. I need to kill a basilisk,” he says, jumping to his feet.

“You just killed one.”

“I… yes, that’s right. But I forgot to get its fang.”

“No, you had your hand in its mouth and then it disappeared.”

“Right,” he replies, shaking his head. “Then I need to find another one. I need a tooth.”

“For what?”

“To get out. I need a fang to get out, but I can’t seem to find one.”

“Get out of where?”

“Here,” he whispers, looking around the cavernous chamber. “How did I even get here?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same thing. What do you remember before the basilisks?”

His eyes narrow and he rubs his forehead, almost like he has a headache. Then that peculiar grin crosses his face. “The basilisks, yes. Yes,
that’s
why I’m down here. They’re hard to find now, but I need to kill one. I need a fang.”

“We’ve already established that,” I remind him gently. Nodding, the smile drops away and the bewilderment returns. He’s obviously under some type of spell that’s trapping him in a circular pattern of thought. “Do you know your name?” I ask.

“I’m… No. No, I don’t know it. How could I possibly have forgotten my own name?”

“It’s okay. I can’t remember mine either,” I confess.

“I came here for a basilisk fang, but the only reason I need one is so that I can get out. That doesn’t make any sense,” he reasons. “You. Maybe I came down here to find you?”

“I don’t think so. I just got here.”

“I know you.”

I think he’s right. “Yes. Somehow, I know you too.”

The man drops to his knees and brings his face close to mine. “Lindy?”

The moment I hear him speak my name, I remember him. “Yeah. Melinda, that’s what everyone calls me. Except you.”

The rhythm of his breathing gets faster as he drags his thumb across my smiling lips. “What do you call me?” he asks, his eyes desperately searching my own for an answer.

“Ash. Short for Asher.”

“You call me Ash,” he says, linking his hand with mine. “I call you Lindy. And you belong to me.”

“You belong to me, too,” I reply.

“That can’t be. Only one of us can possess the other.”

“That is not necessarily true,” I insist.

“We’ve argued over this before,” he chuckles, bringing my hand to his lips and kissing my scraped knuckle. “Haven’t we?”

“Yes, I believe that we have. And I won.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did,” I laugh.

He reaches up and gently tucks a lock of my hair behind my ear. His hand lingers on my face and he stares intently with eyes so black it’s like falling into the night sky. I’m mesmerized, like I’m being drawn towards him against my own will. My body flushes with excitement knowing that mere inches separate our lips.

I feel a sudden shock of pain that breaks our entranced gaze. My body tenses in agony and I draw in a ragged quick breath through gritted teeth. I forgot about the jagged piece of torn flesh on top of my thigh. Oh crap.

Ash’s nostrils flare. “You’re hurt,” he snarls, sniffing the air around me.

“I’m okay.” I wince and cover the wound with my hand. My heart beats ferociously as rage flares in his eyes.

“Move your hand.
Now
,” he growls as I hesitate. “Lindy, I can fix this. I can’t stand the sight of you in pain.”

“You can heal my wound?” I ask.

“Yes, I think so. I remember being able to do something like this before. This flesh belongs to me,” he says, his teeth clenched as his fingers tenderly trace a pattern on the intact skin of my inner thigh. Asher’s eyes flick to mine, an eyebrow raising as I let out a reluctant sigh. I never have a chance to resist when he gives me that look. Ignoring his smug satisfaction, I move my hand and can clearly see just how deep the gash is. “Don’t move,” he orders, pressing his lips to my forehead. “This may hurt.”

He places his other hand over the wound, the fingers still tickling my inner thigh splaying out. If I weren’t so intrigued and this didn’t feel so familiar, I’d probably be embarrassed by how close he is to the throbbing between my legs.

Suddenly his hands grow warm, then searing hot. I can feel my skin knitting back together and it hurts like crazy. I startle myself as I scream out in pain, but I don’t dare move. He pulls his hands away and I can see that my leg looks as good as new. Well, besides being streaked with congealed blood.

With both of us breathing heavily, he pushes away and sits down on the floor in front of me. My leg feels so warm and relaxed, but it’s sort of numb where the gash was.

“That was incredible,” I laugh, reaching out to him. I pull back in wonder because my hand looks strange. That’s odd. I can see through it, almost like I’m turning into a ghost.

Ash looks at me with sad eyes. “Don’t go, Lindy,” he whispers. “You’re about to disappear like you always do, I can feel it.”

I suddenly understand. I can vaguely feel the bed underneath me and Edgar curled up next to my legs. An insistent beeping is calling me back to reality, but then it abruptly ends and my fingers tingle. I think I just hit the snooze button. “We aren’t really here,” I murmur, watching my hand become solid again. “I always disappear because we aren’t really here. I wake up.”

“Wake up?”

“Yeah, in my bed at home. And then I forget you, for the most part. I remember a little bit, but it doesn’t seem real and it fades away.”

“I bet you don’t forget what I do to you,” he rasps, smirking playfully.

“Ash,” I chuckle, doing my best not to encourage him. “You’re right, I definitely remember some of that and... I’m rather embarrassed about it, actually.”

“You shouldn’t be,” he replies quickly, some of the arrogance dropping away as his hand wraps into mine. “It pleases me. You seem to enjoy it quite a bit yourself.”

Our laughter mingles, echoing off the cavern walls. It’s such a familiar sound, like I’ve heard it a thousand times. “It’s so lonely when I open my eyes and you’re not there. I can still feel your arms around me sometimes,” I croak. “Is that how you feel when you wake up?

Ash leans forward, his lips kissing a teardrop away. “I don’t think I get to wake up, Lindy,” he says. “But the loneliness. Yes, that’s how it goes. You disappear and I’m… completely, utterly alone. Then I forget your face, and I hear the call of the basilisk… yes, the basilisk,
that’s
why I’m here.” On cue, a hiss travels down one of the many corridors leading to this room and reaches our ears. That hungry, triumphant grin crosses his face as his eyes glaze over. “We need a fang, Lindy. We can’t get out without a fang.”

“No Ash, we’ve already been through this, remember?” I implore him, my fingers digging into his shoulder as he moves to rise. He stays kneeling next to me, but his attention is focused on the basilisk’s call echoing throughout the chamber. I’ve seen this face on him so many times. Sometimes I can’t pull him back from it and just have watch as he runs away. The chittering gets closer and his jaw tightens. He can’t resist.

“You stay here where it’s safe, love,” he orders, his eyes staring into the distance as if in a trace. “I’ll get the beast’s fang and come back for you.”

“Ash!” I rise with him and throw my arms around his neck, clinging to him as I drag my trembling lips across the hot skin on his collarbone. He grunts, his hand sliding down my spine and pulling me closer by the small of my back. Our gazes meet, his ravenous, mine timid.

The basilisk’s call is getting louder, but Asher’s eyes stay locked with mine until they fall lower to my breasts. With a growl, his mouth clamps onto mine, swallowing my surprised gasp. His hand slides the strap of my gown down over my shoulder, pulling at it hungrily until I hear the sound of fabric tearing and feel my bare flesh against his as the kiss gets deeper.

Ash’s hands wrap around my wrists, bringing my arms up over my head as he presses me into the wall. My legs spread around his waist and I groan, but then all sensation disappears.

“Lindy?” he says, his breath quickening. I try to answer, but the words are trapped in my throat as his panicked eyes dart around me, but don’t meet mine. I look up and see his hands clench into fists inside my disappearing wrists. He chokes, his teeth clenching as his brow furrows. I try to reach out to him and soothe the pain away, but I feel nothing when my fingers graze his forehead. Blinking in confusion, his hand flies to his face right where I’m touching him and he inhales raggedly, almost like he knows I’m there.

But I’m not. The basilisk hisses again and I watch Asher’s eyes glaze over, his lips curling upwards. The white haze filling the room thickens as he turns, the muscles on his back twitching beneath his russet skin as he strides into the mist and disappears.

____________

The alarm clock blares as my eyes flutter open to the sight of my bedroom. I bring my fingers to my lips, gasping as a familiar emptiness inside my chest throbs and consumes another little piece of my heart. I miss him so much.

Wait a second. Who am I missing so badly this morning? I sit up in bed, rubbing my temples and struggling to recall the dream world that I’ve been playing in all night.

A vision of deep dark eyes and sleek dark hair swims forward in my consciousness. My heart skips a beat as I feel the heat of his kiss against my lips and the warmth of his skin against mine. Ash. My stomach churning, tears prick my eyes as the loneliness that’s always in the background grows heavier and becomes a longing for a specific person. I can be so pathetic when I wake up from dreams like this.

Determined not to waste yet another morning in bed missing a man that doesn’t actually exist, I throw back the covers and shake off the memories of the dream.

“Ouch!” I cry out when I shift my body to crawl out of the bed.

I stare down at the pain radiating from my inner thigh and my eyes widen. The symbol I saw on the book that I brought home last night is seared into my flesh. There’s no blistering and the wound appears to be healed entirely, but that definitely wasn’t there when I went to bed. I slide my fingers across the raised, rubbery skin and flames lap at the peripheral of my vision. It’s that same power I touched the night before in the library, the inferno that I should find terrifying instead of tempting.

Chapter Four

The book. That’s right, how could I have forgotten about that? I search through my blankets until I find it, but the cover is blank now, just a smooth black leather surface. Did the rune leap to my thigh, right where Asher’s hand was tracing a pattern before I let him heal me?

My breath catches in my throat as the memories come flooding back to me. The sound of his laugh, the heat of his kiss, the roughness of his touch. That infuriating cocky grin on his beautiful lips. The dark eyes that flare red whenever he wants me and the sadness that fills them when we both know that time is almost up. My chest has been hollowed out and I wrap my arms around myself. This feeling usually fades away as I fully start to wake up, but instead it’s getting worse.

“Ash,” I whisper. Edgar is slumbering peacefully on the end of my bed, but his eyes fly open. He doesn’t even bother to stretch as he gets up, purring as he makes his way over to me and drags his body against my knee. He flops next to the book, rubbing it with his chin.

My hands are shaking as they open the mysterious tome. Aside from the symbol branded into my thigh, it’s the only connection I have to the man that I’m positive is real now. He has to be, I can feel him.

The writing was gibberish to me last night, but now I can read it clearly. If I was going to catalog this book in the library, I would surely put it under fiction. Everyone knows that dragons are a myth, the stuff of human legends like vampires, angels, and gluten free bread that tastes like the real thing.

I spend the morning flipping through the pages. In many ways, it reads like human religious text, with various accounts of famous dragons and their triumphs, family lines, and even honor codes. Apparently, dragons have two forms, the commonly used scaled flying serpent and a human looking form. According to the book they can shift between the two at will.

The Age of Fire. It’s a strange term that keeps appearing in the text. How long they’ve waited for it, the power it will bring to their race, the peace it will bring to the people. I’ve never heard it before and it should mean nothing to me, but my skin flushes whenever I read the words.

If they are real, the dragons have a serious problem with the Fae, not that I can blame them. Wizards aren’t their biggest fans either, but at least we’ve learned to get along. There’s never been an all-out war between us like the battles described in this book.

My heart leaps into my throat when I turn to a page with a drawing of a younger version of Asher in front of a slain basilisk with that triumphant smile on his face and a fang in his hand. There’s a summary of the short life of a peculiar dragon heir with a love for hunting in his human form, which was unusually strong. He had a particular hatred for the basilisks that attacked the vulnerable human tribes that lived near the caves.

I eagerly flip to another page to learn more about him. Instead, I find a drawing of a girl with flame red hair standing before a massive black scaled dragon bound in chains, eyes closed and hunched over in his slumber.

That girl looks just like me. And the giant dragon is probably Asher, trapped in the dark, his mind on repeat as he gleefully slays basilisk after basilisk and watches them disappear. But why would I be in this book? It doesn’t make any sense. If this tome is accurate, it’s a recording of events that happened thousands of years ago, most of which have fallen into legend. The next page is a drawing of a long tooth, the fang he’s searching for that he’ll never find because none of what he’s experiencing is actually real. Except for me.

I trace my fingers over the fang, my eyes widening as I watch the drawing transform. Everywhere I touch leaves a trail of fire behind it until the tooth is covered with shifting black and gold symbols. The edges of the page fill with flames and I draw my hand back, but the fire travels with me, swirling around my fingertips.

Is this seriously happening? I focus on the heat and will it to get stronger, watching in amazement as it grows until I’m holding an orb of flames. The brand on my thigh gets hotter, but there is no pain. I’m entranced with the control I’ve longed for but could never find and for a moment I think about tossing the fire, but I’m in my bedroom so I can’t. Instead, my eyes flicker closed as I draw the flames inside of me, my heart pounding as heat radiates through my entire body.

The alarm beeps again. It’s time to get ready for work. There is no way that I’m bringing this book back down there with me, it’s too dangerous. I wouldn’t leave it alone at all, but I need to get to the library to do more research. I have to find a way to get him out of there.

____________

When I arrive at work, I instantly see that something is wrong. The library is usually slow at this time of day, but now it’s crawling with strange men clothed in black robes pulling books off the shelves in a rather undignified way.

Mags, the 80 year old head librarian, is pacing in front of the checkout desk. Her normally smooth gray hair is frazzled and the fact that she’s chewing her nails means something big is happening. She spots me and hurriedly makes her way over, grabbing my shoulders tightly and leading me away from the chaos.

“Did you not get the Magic Memo about what happened?” she asks after seeing the perplexed look on my face.

“No,” I mumble looking embarrassed. Magic Memos never make it Uptop.

“Of course you didn’t Melinda. I’m sorry my head’s not in the right place with all of this,” she says, gesturing at the figures defiling her orderly books. She is shaking like a leaf and close to tears.

“Mags, what’s going on?

“I’m not entirely sure. This morning King Aralt declared the library unsafe. They said that an ancient, dangerous spell has been detected and that they need to find out what triggered it.”

“It came from the library?” I ask, my heart sinking as I think of the strange book I have secreted away in my apartment.

“Well, dear, you know that all of these books have some power in them. You can’t bind spells together and not expect something to happen occasionally. I just wish they had a more civilized way of finding it,” she whispers as one of the men in black robes approaches us.

My heart is beating with a steady thump thump. It's so loud, I’m sure Mags and the man can both hear. I wonder if there is some way that he can tell I have the book. Oh shit, the symbol on my leg! If he does a Search spell to see if I have any lingering magic on me he will most certainly find it.

“This one of your Assistants, Madame Librarian?” a man with no hair and a hook nose says, looking me up and down. My mouth goes dry and my skin is covered with goose bumps. The irises of his eyes are such a clear white that I can hardly tell that they're even there. He notices my shiver of apprehension and sneers, bearing pointed teeth. His bright red lips hideously contrast his paper white skin. Looking closely, I can see the dark purple veins pulsing through his face and neck. Holy crap, what is this guy?