Chapter Twenty-Two

Meira left her sisters where they stood at the edge of the cliff and sprinted for Samael. Checking as she went, the cavern appeared wide open. Beyond, from what she could see through the storm, only a dwindling remnant of white and green dragons remained, though not for long. In one glance, she witnessed a green dragon screaming as a gold dragon gutted it. Midscream, it disappeared.

She didn’t care.

All she cared about was getting to the black dragon on the other side of the chamber. Her legs burned with the effort, lungs heaving, as she sprinted across the room. A flicker of movement caught the corner of her eye, and she yanked up sharply only to have a white dragon land in front of her.

Meira held up both hands. “As a daughter of Zilant Amon, I have no wish to harm you.”

As if she could.

“I’m coming.” A dark voice filled her mind. Behind him, Samael suddenly rose from where he’d been lying on the ground. “Hold on.”

“You are a false phoenix,” the white dragon sneered, though its mouth didn’t move. “An abomination, created by these traitorous kings with dark magic to cause confusion.”

Samael was still too far away. Trying to distract the creature before her, Meira drew herself up to her full height. “I am the daughter of Serefina Hanyu and Zilant Amon. A phoenix. And rightful heir to the—”

The white dragon snapped its head around, got one look at Samael bearing down, and, in an instant that didn’t slow but seemed more to speed up, slashed its tail at her.

Wicked spikes that appeared more like icicles came at her so fast, Meira didn’t even have time to lift up her hands in defense.

Except Maul suddenly appeared at her side and, in an instant, they blinked away, but not before he yelped in pain.

The sound cut off in the silence of the in-between. Usually Maul moved so quickly through that plane, you didn’t feel the nothingness with him. But that beat of silence told Meira all she needed to know. Before she’d processed everything, they reappeared in Samael’s room. A pathetic whine coming from his throat, Maul swayed and dropped to his side. Sticking out from his broad chest, the spike from the white dragon’s tail jutted into the air.

“No,” Meira whimpered.

She shuffled around to the big dog’s head and dropped to her knees. Already his labored breathing sounded squishy, gurgling rushes of air in his lungs.

“No, no, no. Not for me. Not like this.”

Glowing red eyes met hers, and a picture flickered in her mind, not steady, but jerking in and out of her consciousness. A picture of her as a child laughing as she threw a ball for a puppy the size of a doghouse. And…happiness that she could feel from him, even in this moment.

“Maul.” His name tumbled from her lips.

Working his head up, she managed to lay part of it in her lap, uncaring of the drool and the blood and the stench. “You can’t go. You’re too strong.”

Another image flashed, for less time even than the first. Samael watching her, the longing in his gaze, even in that jerky image, so acute it made her ache. “What are you telling me? That Samael will watch over me now?”

An image of stone men, and a growing sense of cold.

“The gargoyles?” She shook her head. “But you’re supposed to take care of us.” She could hardly get the words out now.

He’d always watched out for them. Even when she didn’t want him to. Even when he’d scared her, and she’d stayed away. Why had she stayed away? He never, never would have hurt her.

Maul let out a rattling wheeze, as though he was telling her it would be okay, even as the red glow in his eyes flickered and dimmed.

“No.” She shook her head, her curls falling in her face. Tears soaked her cheeks and into her clothes. “I won’t let you.”

Leaning over him, she blinked the tears onto the hellhound. Then waited. Kasia had healed Brand this way once. She’d said it had taken time.

Please, please, please.

But his breathing slowed, each inhale and exhale more painfully labored than the next.

“Please don’t die.” She gently moved his head and tried again, letting her sorrow drop onto the wound directly. Then went back to cradling that massive head. She watched and waited, smoothing his big ear with her hand. A faint emotion reached her through his fading…comfort. For her.

But nothing happened.

What if only Kasia could do this?

“It’s going to be okay,” she assured him.

She needed to get him to her sister. Only she couldn’t teleport without a mirror, and no way could she heave his massive body through one. But…Maul could teleport if he could see. “I’m going to get help, boy.”

Lighting her fire, what little she had left, she looked toward the glass door leading to the atrium, changing the reflection to the hangar, zooming in on her sister’s dark-red hair. Skylar at her side. “Do you see her? Do you see Kasia?”

Her sister was there, at the edge of the landing, out in the open, in view of the entire mountain. Maul whimpered, then wheezed. She was losing him.

“Can you get us to her?”

She’d hardly gotten the words out and they blinked, paused in the black, cold abyss of the in-between, then appeared at Kasia’s feet.

“Maul!” her sister screamed.

Meira lifted her tearstained face to them. “I can’t fix him. It’s not working. It worked for Kasia.”

“Oh gods. Please not him.” Kasia’s voice broke.

Her sister stumbled over his legs, trying to get to him, then placed her hands on the hellhound and did the same thing Meira had, feeding phoenix tears directly to his wound. Tears that should have healing properties.

Maul struggled to lift his head, his body shaking, and gave Kasia the tiniest lick a creature that huge could manage, then dropped back into Meira’s lap with a whimper.

He heaved one last breath, the air shuddering from him. The red glow in his eyes went out.

Meira dropped her head so they lay cheek to cheek, softly petting his spiked fur, and cried quietly, her tears soaking his fur, her own emotions blocking everything else out. Kasia’s sobs and Skylar’s soft murmurs to her sister the only sounds in a world gone utterly silent.

…

Samael shifted to human form as fast as his injuries and exhaustion would allow, which was not fucking fast enough.

Stumbling, one leg trying to buckle under his weight, he made his way to where Meira lay with the hellhound. Her emotions were so broken inside him though the channels, barely formed, now binding them together, he had no idea how she could bear them. How had she borne the empathic ability she carried without going mad?

Rather than try to take her away, Samael dropped to the ground behind her and wrapped his arms around her.

She took a deep breath, the only acknowledgment he was there.

But the rawness of the feelings battering him from that link eased slightly, and he knew she took some comfort from his presence.

“I’m sorry,” he said. For Maul. For Gorgon. For pushing her away. All of it. “I’m so sorry.”

“You were going to leave me.” Her accusation was raw.

He squeezed his eyes shut tight. No use denying it. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered. “You changed your mind.”

The relief and joy she felt, even through her own grief, penetrated the darkness inside him like a sunbeam, warmth spreading throughout him.

A sucked-in breath had them both lifting their heads. Everything stilled inside him, inside her.

Maul was glowing. Not a bright, heavenly light, but red, like his eyes, eerie. His body pulsed with the color that lifted from him like an aura, before solidifying into streamers of flowing red, casting its light over everyone gathered around the hellhound.

The streamers slipped and swirled and coalesced, forming an image. Murky at first, then clearer, each feature of a man becoming more defined with every passing moment until he stood, hovering above the hellhound’s body.

Skylar jerked forward, though Ladon, now beside her, tried to stop her. “Father?” she asked.

In his arms, Meira gasped and struggled to her feet. Samael helped her, staying close to her at the same time. He studied the man’s face, which was vaguely familiar.

Tyrek Amon’s brother. The resemblance was there.

Could it be? Legend held that hellhounds were warriors with unfinished business, returned in the form of death incarnate to complete it.

“Zilant Amon.” The name flew on hushed tones through the chamber and around the mountain. Turning his head, Samael discovered every single white dragon remaining had stopped fighting and hovered, wings beating slowly, staring at the figure of the man.

“The king,” those voices said in hushed tones, now in his mind as much as spoken.

The figure of the man looked at each phoenix in turn and smiled.

“Dark magic.” A voice boomed through his internal thoughts. Everyone else’s, too, if the way the white dragons flinched was any indication. “Lies.”

A single white dragon dropped lower in the sky, the only one to move. Not King Volos, whom Samael had met in both dragon and human form before. That white dragon’s opalescent scales were hard to miss. This one was more the color of curdled milk.

“They killed our king.”

Volos was dead? When? Today?

“They go against the true High King,” the white dragon continued. “They feed us lies about more than one phoenix when there has only ever been one. That one has been mated. You’ve seen with your own eyes the change in our king, no long rotting from old age—”

He cut off as the figure of Zilant Amon burst into a column of flame that reached a hundred feet into the sky.

The tips turned white, then consumed the red before the flames suddenly disappeared, leaving the spectral figure a pure glowing white. Another smile at his daughters and he held out a hand, as though beckoning them.

Meira stepped forward, but Samael shot out a hand, stopping her. She turned to face him, gaze earnest and untroubled, despite the tears staining her cheeks. “He would never hurt me. He’s my father.”

Skylar and Kasia also calmed their mates before all three women stepped forward. Zilant Amon’s figure turned back into the glowing, twisting ropes that writhed and slithered around them, lifting their hair and setting them awash in ethereal white light. The ribbons linked the sisters’ hands.

Suddenly, Meira’s eyes turned bright white, glowing in her face as though she were possessed. Kasia’s and Skylar’s, too. Almost as though in a trance, they spoke.

“We are the daughters of Zilant Amon and Serefina Hanyu,” they said. Samael shivered at the power emanating from the three. It crackled around him like electricity, raising the hairs on his arms. “Let us show you.”

Suddenly Samael’s vision changed, as though someone had taken over his mind. He watched as though a movie played out against his eyelids. Memories, perhaps, or the way Kasia saw visions. Was the ghost of Zilant Amon using his daughters’ powers to protect them now?

Images, clips of memories flooded his mind. Zilant Amon, speared on Pytheios’s shifted tail and Serefina’s scream before she disappeared from the room. Serefina pregnant and alone. Then with four babies.

He’s showing them Angelika. No more secrets now.

Four little girls learning and loving at their mother’s feet. Four young women, playing with a hellhound puppy in the snow, laughing as he melted it around them, forming puddles to splash in. Four fully grown women, each as beautiful and unique as the other. Each so clearly a reflection of their white dragon shifter father and phoenix mother, the resemblance could no longer be denied. Then Serefina’s last moments as she sent her daughters away to safety before turning to ash. The last act of a desperate mother.

A bright flash of light blinded Samael, followed by the electric crack of lightning sizzling the air around it. The blast knocked Samael off his feet. His vision cleared to find everyone on the ground around him, including Meira and her sisters, who looked around, dazed and confused. Zilant Amon’s presence was gone.

Samael jerked his head around to see the white dragons disappearing one by one. All the green dragons were already gone.

The lone leader hung in the air the longest, staring at the three phoenixes slowly getting to their feet.

“Lies,” he hissed before he too disappeared.

Several gasps, Meira’s striking him hardest, brought him back around to find Maul’s body burning away, tiny flames creeping across his black fur in a steady line of fire, bright-red embers lifting into the sky in their wake, eating at his body until nothing remained.

“Sam,” Meira called, her voice broken and small.

She swayed on her feet. Ignoring his own pain, and willing his leg to hold him, he jumped closer and caught her as her eyes rolled back in her head, her body going limp in his arms.