The Warrior King (Inferno Rising) by Owen, Abigail (online e book reading txt) 📗

you do,” Rune insisted, “I suggest you be ready to fight. That’s what we need now. A warrior. It’s what we always needed.”

Samael shook his head. “Gorgon is alive. We’ll find him, and he’s a fighter now. He was waiting for the right time, the right allies, and he’s found that in Brand and Ladon.”

Rune settled back, the passion dying from him as though stripped away, replaced by a bitter disappointment. In Samael? Or in Gorgon? Or all of it? “I pray you’re right.”

“We’ll figure it out together.” Meira’s voice dropped quiet as rain into the void, soothing and yet, at the same time, filling Samael with an odd sort of pride. He squeezed her hand.

Rune gave a sharp nod. “Together or not at all.”

“Then let’s get on the same side,” she said. A challenge to everyone in the room, though put so mildly, it sounded almost like an entreaty.

“If we’re on the same side, then we can’t abandon you,” Aidan said. Each man in the room straightened, turning to face her fully. Even the green shifter in the back.

Except Samael knew Meira. She wasn’t going to allow them to protect her at the cost of their own lives. Not if she could save them. To a big heart like hers, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. Always.

He knew he was right the second she sighed, the sound determined. “As the only queen in this room,” she said slowly, “I believe I outrank you all.”

Gods, she was incredible. “There’s a way we can all get away, but the timing has to be right.”

…

“This is only going to work if we can get enough of a head start. Agreed?”

Samael’s voice when he was in dragon form dropped lower, more of the animal in the raspy, dark tones. After years fearing the creature he was, Meira half expected to be terrified right now, standing beside the massive black shadow of a beast. But she wasn’t. Not even close.

They’d walked down the narrow tunnel leading out of the mountain, even Meira had needed to stoop to get through. How Sam, well over six feet, managed it, she didn’t know, though a few soft grunts told her he hadn’t been entirely successful.

Now they stood in unspeaking silence inside a wide caldera with a hole in the ceiling overhead, the moonless sky black above, stars scattered as though the gods had thrown diamonds up there. Only things that flew could get in and out of the room they stood in.

Only the two of them. The others waited for Samael’s signal.

Meira nodded.

“If I’m going to fly silent, I need to lay my spikes flat. You won’t have anything to hold on to, so I’m going to carry you.”

Not her preferred way to try dragon flight for the first time, but she understood. She gave a thumbs-up.

“Even the smallest sound, before we’re ready for whoever is after us to know where we are, could alert them to our presence.”

She kept herself from rolling her eyes and gave a more exaggerated double thumbs-up.

“Right.” It said a lot for Samael’s tension levels that he didn’t laugh. She almost expected him to.

Instead, he stood on all fours and flipped one large taloned claw under, opening the spikes of razor-sharp talons for her to be able to walk through and stand on his palm, before closing the talons upward around her, like a creepy birdcage.

With more qualms than she wanted to give voice to, or he’d talk her out of this—they’d all already tried to—she sat down in his palm and wrapped herself around the slimmest digit, the skin there more like leather, the scales starting farther up around the base of each talon.

“Ready?” he asked. Odd that the telepathic communication sounded so clear in her head. She almost expected to feel the vibration of the noise through his body, but he was utterly still.

With no way to vocalize without risking giving away their position, she patted the digit she held on to.

“Hang on.”

Samael extended his wings to either side, then gave a massive push, wind buffeting her and scattering small rocks across the surface of the ground. Good thing her clothes had dried from earlier. He rose, dipped, and then another downstroke, and up he went another twenty feet or so. Another dip. Another beat of silent wings until he cleared the mouth of the caldera. Still, he continued to lift them slowly from the ground, one stroke at a time until they hovered above the rocks. Even in early spring, the mountains were still blanketed in snow, the air cutting through her clothes and, since her own inner fire was spent for now, immediately freezing her to the bone.

Only she couldn’t say anything. So Meira gritted her teeth to keep them from chattering and held on tighter.

With a move that reminded her of a roller coaster dropping to gather momentum, Samael changed their trajectory. Like a shot, they flung forward. At the same time, he raised his legs, lifting her up until she lay almost on her stomach with her back to his belly, still surrounded by her taloned cage.

To cut the wind, she realized. The way an airplane pulled its wheels inside.

Also, against his belly, the warmth of his inner fire kept her slightly less frozen, allowing her to unclench her muscles. Not that she relaxed.

Like flowing ink, black against the only slightly less blackness of the sky around them, he set a steady rhythm of soundless strokes of his wings. After the initial shock of speeding through the air over the ground under the canopy of dragon wings, Meira closed her eyes and let herself simply feel. Gods, this was glorious. Total freedom. As though nothing, not even gravity, could contain them. Kasia was nuts for fearing this. Meira wanted to climb up Samael’s leg to stand on his back and fling her arms wide. If she fell off, she had every confidence he’d catch her before she hit the ground.

Silly and