Feel the Burn (Dragon Kin #8)(97)

After about five minutes, Zoya stopped and faced them all, raising her hands with their now bloody knuckles. “Now we can all enter, comrades!” she crowed.

“Thank you, Zoya.”

“You are welcome, Rebel King.” She slapped her hand against Gaius’s spine as she walked past him and Gaius looked to Kachka.

“Owww,” he whispered to her.

Then Kachka did something rather remarkable. She rubbed his back before entering the battered opening. An effort to ease the harshness of Zoya’s hearty backslaps.

He doubted that Kachka had any idea what that small move meant to him. More importantly, he doubted she understood what it meant to her.

Gaius followed behind Kachka, but she stopped before he could go into the crevice with her.

“Stay here.”

“Kachka—”

“I am the one they sent, Gaius. Not you. Me. Stay here. Watch my back.”

She disappeared inside and Gaius began to pace back and forth, his gaze constantly straying to the Dwarf King and his soldiers. Finally, he stopped.

“What haven’t you told us?”

“You Irons. You don’t trust anybody.”

“Have you met my family? Oh. That’s right. They destroyed half your people! So, yeah . . . I don’t trust anybody.” Gaius stepped closer. “So what haven’t you told us?”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

The king studied him a moment. “I’m sorry, Rebel King, but I can never risk what happened under Thracius’s rule happening again to my people.”

“Why would I attack your people?”

“Not you.”

Gaius frowned. “Then what are you talk—”

“Gaius.”

Gaius turned toward the voice behind him. Kachka stood in the opening, a small leather bag in her hand. She held it up for him and smiled.

Letting out a breath, Gaius started toward her, but he stopped when something wrapped itself around Kachka’s waist. She looked down at what appeared to be something living. By the time she looked back at him, she was yanked out of sight.

“Kachka!”

The slimy tentacle dragged Kachka back through the small passage, through the tiny cavern where she’d discovered the eyes of Chramnesind and into a larger cavern filled with a lake.

“Hello, dear,” a beautiful woman said to her. She reached down to grab the bag from Kachka’s hand, but Kachka yanked her dagger from her belt and stabbed the tentacle around her waist.

The woman roared and the tentacle released Kachka. She rolled backward and got to her feet.

The woman shook off the pain. “Foolish bitch. Now give that to me.”

“I give you nothing.” Kachka looked down and realized that the woman stood in water that covered her from the knees down. And whatever was going on under that water was . . . unnatural.

There was more than one tentacle down there.

“What are you?” Kachka had to ask. Had to know.

“Blessed,” the woman replied. She held out her hand. “Now . . . give it to me.”

Kachka didn’t reply, she simply crouched down to avoid the arrows shooting past her and into the woman’s neck and shoulder. Marina’s aim, true as always.

And that’s when the woman exploded, her rage shaking the walls of the cavern, the water she stood in bubbling as if it boiled.

Flames suddenly erupted around her and she went from human to She-dragon.

“Vateria,” Gaius gasped from behind Kachka. And Brannie ran up, abruptly grabbed Kachka by the back of her neck, and yanked her out of the way just as he shifted into his natural form.

“Vateriaaaaaa!” he bellowed.

The She-dragon grinned, showing row after row of fangs. “Cousin.” She held open her forearms. “It’s been so long. Come! Greet your kin!”

Gaius charged across the lake, and Brannie pushed Kachka toward Zoya just as she and Aidan shifted to dragons.

Kachka thought that was so they could all attack Vateria, but the She-dragon wasn’t alone. Two more steel-colored dragons ran in from another entrance. One had two axes, the other a sword and shield.

Brannie took on the two interlopers while Aidan rushed to Gaius’s aid. Something Kachka was eternally glad to see since Gaius was not just fighting that She-dragon . . . he was also fighting her multiple tentacles, which had only grown larger and more disgusting when she’d shifted.

Zoya helped Kachka to her feet.

Gripping the leather bag in her hand, Kachka pointed to a high spot on the cave wall that was like a small balcony. “Marina! Go!”

She pulled out her own sword and backed up. “Zoya . . . move mountains, comrade.”

Zoya grinned and ran to the other side of the cave, where she grabbed large boulders and began flinging them directly at the She-dragon’s head.

Kachka stepped back, looking for a way out. She didn’t want to leave her friends, fighting to protect her, but her main concern was this thing that Vateria wanted. From the little Kachka knew about the She-dragon, she understood that the last being in the world who should get her claws on anything with this much power was Vateria Domitus.

As she kept backing up, kept searching, Kachka walked into something small. She turned around, expecting to see the currently unhelpful dwarves, but found a little boy standing behind her.