The Dragon Legion Collection(32)

“I’m sorry I was gone,” Alexander said.

“I have no regrets in my choices. It was always said that my kind would be unhappy in marriage, and I’d been lucky for a year, at least.”

“It’s not enough.”

“It had to be enough.” She looked at him with all the light of the stars in her eyes and he ached that he couldn’t make her the promise they both wanted to hear.

“I wish we had been honest with each other sooner,” he said and meant it.

Katina smiled and curled her fingers around his. “What’s important is that we’re honest with each other now.”

“You only know part of the truth, Katina, and the rest isn’t good.”

His bold wife didn’t flinch or avert her gaze. “Tell me,” she urged.

Alexander stared at the ground, uncertain where to start, but once he did start, the words flowed more easily. He wondered, even as he spoke, whether that, too, was part of her gift. He told her of marching away with Drake and the company of Pyr, of their sworn task to hunt those of their kind who had turned against mankind and silence them forever.

“We called them vipers.”

“But what do vipers do?”

“They bury themselves deep in the earth and whisper a spell of evil. Their songs aren’t discerned by men on a conscious level, but they enchant the men within their range. They fill the hearts of those men with wickedness and incite them to violence.”

Katina shivered. “Like old-speak. We can’t hear it clearly, but it can influence us.”

Alexander nodded. “And like beguiling.” At her questioning glance, he continued. “A Pyr can enthrall a mortal, by lighting flames in his eyes. The mortal stares and is entranced, at which point he can be told what to believe or what to think.”

Katina frowned, as Alexander had known she would. “Have you done this?”

“I don’t have the skill and don’t wish to learn it.”

She looked away from him. “Maybe that’s what happened to Cetos.” At Alexander’s frown, she held up a finger. “He was never violent before or so filled with rage. And it makes no sense to me that he would agree to send Lysander away. He wasn’t happy that I had a son, but there was never such a desire to be rid of him, much less entrust his welfare to a stranger. He was like a different man. What if he was enchanted? What if the merchant who wanted to buy Lysander was Jorge?”

Alexander was startled by the idea, but the more he considered it, the more sense it made. Trust Katina to see what he’d overlooked. He squeezed her hand. “You’re right. Jorge could have smelled Pyr on Cetos and pursued him. I smelled Slayer when Cetos came home.”

“I’ve interrupted your story,” Katina said, smiling at him. “Tell me.”

He told her of their company hunting a viper to its lair and their attack upon that fiend. He cast a glance at her, knowing that few other women would believe this part of the story. “We thought we had defeated him, but that was part of his spell. In fact, we were enchanted ourselves and captured by the viper.”

“How?”

“Each warrior snared by a viper becomes another of his teeth, a weapon that can be used against mankind against his own will.”

“You became teeth?”

“All of us. In time, the viper aged and grew soft, more like a worm. His teeth fell out, although we were still enchanted. The teeth were discovered, collected, even coveted by men who sensed there was something potent about them. We were trapped in that form until we were sown in the earth and given release.” He ran his thumb across Katina’s hand. “And when that finally occurred, more than two thousand years had passed.

She stared at him in astonishment.

“I thought to never see you again. I thought all of this was as dust and lost to me forever, but then something strange happened.”

Katina bit back a smile. “Only the first strange thing?” she teased.

Alexander couldn’t smile because the next part of the story troubled him deeply. “My kind know of a special flame, called darkfire. I don’t know its origins, but it burns with a blue-green light. Some wizard had locked this force into three quartz crystals, but a Slayer broke one of them in those future times, releasing it.” Alexander sighed. “Its talent is in introducing unpredictability. Strange things become possible when the darkfire burns, and assumptions are challenged if not overturned.”

“That’s how you got back,” Katina guessed. “That’s what the light was that glittered when Jorge disappeared.”

“Drake, our leader, believed we had to take custody of one of the remaining darkfire crystals, and so we did.”


“Why?”

“He heard a summons and took it as a command. I don’t know if the crystal commanded him or another Pyr, but with Drake, there was no question but to obey.”

“Drake is the commander you knew here as Stephanos? The father of Theo?”

Alexander nodded. “He believed his past was lost beyond retrieval, we all did, so he chose to take a new name. The enchantment changed us, all of us.”

“Yes,” Katina said quietly, then reached to kiss his cheek. “How could it not?”

Alexander looked at her, needing to know if she preferred him now or before.