They did not like their assignment and questioned it, both of them. Once they saw their friend as a puppet, they were horrified. Neither wanted to continue, but of course, they had no choice in the matter. They had been programmed.
See? She jumped on that. They have good in them. They can be saved.
They can never be trusted. They wanted immortality enough to agree to deliver a woman into the hands of a vampire. They knew at the time of the agreement exactly what they were doing in exchange. Sergey likes to make certain his people are aware of what he is.
Lorraine pressed her fingers to her eyes. She was trying to make Adam and Herman into decent people. She needed them to be decent. They changed their minds. Sometimes something sounds as if it could be good, but then when you’re actually in the moment you realize it’s all wrong. People aren’t perfect, Andor.
He leaned down to brush a kiss across her lips. Her heart fluttered alarmingly. She blinked up at him, and he shook his head. I am not passing judgment on humans for weaknesses, Lorraine. I am very cognizant of the fact that you are holding your brother close to your heart and it hurts that so many think of him as a monster. I do not. I do not think these men are monsters. The fact remains, they were here to harm my woman. They will not get close enough to you to do so again.
She was all right with that. She nodded to show she was in complete agreement. “What will happen to them?” She whispered it aloud, afraid the way the intimacy of his voice brushing strokes of velvet along the walls of her mind persuaded her that Andor was right in all things.
“We will take them to the compound and Tariq will decide. He has a couple of other human psychics who worked for Vadim now working for him. They are invaluable in that they recognize other men who have aligned themselves with Sergey. They also have a wealth of memories to tap into.” He glanced up at the surrounding trees, and Lorraine followed his gaze. Several crows watched with beady round eyes. “Why are we delaying?”
“Isai is not back as of yet,” Ferro said. “I reached out to him, but he has not answered. I fear he has run into problems.”
Lorraine caught Adam’s head movement as he turned toward Herman. She narrowed her gaze on them and stepped closer, in spite of Andor’s restraining hands. “What do you know about Isai’s disappearance?”
Herman started to shake his head, and she glared at him. “If you lie, they all will know you do. Your master planned for you both to die hideous deaths. You failed in your mission and now he’s going to be looking to hurt you both before you die. He’s like that. So spill it. Where is Isai?”
Adam shrugged his shoulders. “If he went hunting to the east, a trap was set up to kill one of these men. A campground with a family of five.”
Her heart caught in her throat. Instinctively she reached out to catch at Andor’s arm to steady herself. “You mean children? You knew Sergey was going to use children to bait a trap for a hunter?”
Again, Adam shrugged, and she wanted to hit him. She took another step toward him and Andor circled her waist with his arm, locking her against him. “You wanted it that much? You would exchange the lives of children for your ticket to immortality?”
“For power,” Andor corrected. “For having the power of life and death over others. You chose death for those children and our brother. The thing you might remember, both of you, is that hunters do not die so easily.” He turned to the others. “Reach for Isai collectively. All the brethren have exchanged blood with him. We do not need his voice to find him.”
“Why would he choose not to send for you or answer you?” Lorraine asked.
“He knows that is expected and they have readied the playing field. They have the advantage when they have set the battleground.”
“Then we need to change it up and do the unexpected.” That was a direct quote from her father. When an opponent had had the advantage, and known what one of them was going to do, known how they preferred to fight, her father had always told them to “change it up and do the unexpected.” This situation called for just that.
You are thinking of using yourself as bait again. Andor made it an accusation.
Ferro moved out into the wider meadow, just to one side of where Andor had been so wounded. She couldn’t help but stare at him, knowing he was going to do something huge. Something wonderful. Something terrible. She held her breath.
He shifted. One moment, there was a tall man with long flowing hair down to his waist and the next a giant rust-colored dragon. The dragon was magnificent, very beautiful, its scales gleaming in the moonlight. He stretched his neck long and lowered a wing. Beside her, Andor sighed while the two human males gaped.
Show-off. Andor whispered it under his breath and into his mind.
He tugged at Lorraine’s hand. She was fairly certain she was gaping right along with Adam and Herman. Still, she went with Andor right up to the enormous dragon. Even having seen Ferro shift and knowing it was him, she was apprehensive and more than a little awed. She tentatively touched the scales. They were cool to the touch, hard, but silky smooth, even over the raised bumps she felt within each scale.
The dragon’s color was unique, like hematite iron ore, red with grayish overtones—or the opposite, like now, when they were more red than gray. Ferro’s eyes were the same color. Like flames burning deep under the surface. The dragon’s body looked very much as if a fire burned beneath the scales, the orange and red flames showing through.
Andor climbed onto the extended wing and reached a hand back to help her up. She took a breath and then let him clasp her wrist and pull as she stepped up. Does it hurt to have us walk on you, Ferro?
That is an absurd question.
She laughed. In spite of the tension, her anxiety over the two human men and what was going to happen to them, and the fact that Ferro had just become a dragon, which made her feel a little faint, he was still Ferro.
Andor settled her in front of him on the neck of the mythical creature. She glanced back at her pack and the two men. “I don’t want to lose my parents’ or my brother’s things.” That was a very real fear.
“They will be transported to the compound,” he assured.
Ferro began to flap the giant wings, hopping for a moment on his back legs, and then he was in the sky with a surge of power she felt rumbling beneath her. Once in the cool night air, they began to climb. She clutched the dragon’s neck and pressed back into Andor, her heart accelerating rapidly. It was crazy. Amazing. Impossible. It was a dream come true and a nightmare of insanity. More and more, she was being drawn into the complexity and fantasy of a world she’d never conceived of.
Had Lorraine been the type of woman to read fantasy and go to that type of movie, she might have thought that the trauma of her family’s demise had thrown her deep into her mind and taken her somewhere else, a place she didn’t have to deal with their deaths and the repercussions of how they’d died. But she wasn’t that woman. She’d always been practical. She wouldn’t have believed in the existence of vampires or dragons in a million years.
She tipped her head back to look at the stars as they circled the camp below them. Even up so high, the lights seemed far away, sparkling like diamonds scattered across the deep blue sky. She looked down. One by one, the others shifted, taking the form of dragons, the two human men on the back of what looked like maybe Dragomir.
Ferro led the way. Andor had taken the coordinates of the campground from the minds of Adam and Herman; the humans had set up camp some miles from where Lorraine had been. Below her, she could see the canopy of the forest, trees lifting their limbs toward the sky. Ferro dipped low and set down beside a small lake, shifting the moment Andor and Lorraine leapt from his wing.
Andor had jumped off and then lifted his arms to Lorraine. She didn’t hesitate, landing safe against his chest. If he winced on impact, she didn’t feel it, but she did feel bad that she hadn’t considered it might not be the best idea, jumping on him. For a few minutes, while they were flying through the air, she’d felt elated. Happy. The problems facing them had dropped away with the earth and left her feeling every touch of the wind, seeing every beauty the night provided. The stars overhead had sparkled brighter, and the lake below them had looked like crystal glass, still and untouched. Perfect.
I wanted to show you my night. There is so much more, sívamet. So many beautiful things that in one lifetime it is impossible to see them all. I want to travel with you, take you to places no other has yet discovered. Caves of crystals. Pools of fresh, untouched water. So much. This will be over soon and we will explore.
Lorraine knew that “soon” to a Carpathian was very relative. They lived several human lifetimes so “soon” might be the span of an entire human life cycle. Still, she wanted to see those things with him. She knew every minute in his company, in spite of the dangers, brought her steps closer to choosing to be in his world with him.
They moved into the shelter of the trees. Ferro shifted a second time, going from the gigantic dragon to a much smaller bird. He chose a crow, and she knew immediately he planned to spy using its sharp eyes and his own acute senses. He took to the air. Several of the others followed, each going in a different direction.
The moment Dragomir’s dragon claws gripped earth, he shifted, dumping both Adam and Herman onto the ground. Instantly, they were whisked into the trees, and sat frozen, unable to move or speak. She didn’t protest. There were children’s lives at stake.
The camp is through the trees east of you. There is a meadow right beside the stream running into the lake. They are there. I smell the taint of vampire, and the grass is brown all around the camp area. Flowers are wilted there as well, Ferro reported.
I believe there is at least one master vampire orchestrating and running this battle, Gary added. He is hidden in the trees, one of two trees. Isai is on the ground not far from the camp. I touched his mind. He has shut down heart and lungs to keep from bleeding out. That was all that was left as a message for us. That and the name Farmington. Does that mean anything to you?