Page 27 of The Sapphire Dragon Prince
I didn’t have a chance to say anything more on my own behalf. The terrain we’d been walking through had grown rockier as we approached the mountains, and all of a sudden, one of the rocks moved. It wasn’t a rock at all, it was a man dressed in a rough, gray cloak. He was seated on the ground,and as he turned to us, he unfolded from his crouched stance, holding up a battered tin cup to us.
“Spare a poor old man a coin or a bit of bread,” the man said in a dry, cracking voice…but one that sounded strangely familiar to my ears.
I glanced quickly to Azurus for reassurance, but he looked as confused as I was. “I wasn’t aware there were beggars in my mother’s kingdom,” he said.
“Times are hard,” the beggar said. “Every man must do what he can to survive.”
Azurus and I reached the man and paused to watch him for a moment. I twisted to open one of the pockets in my pack, taking out an apple I’d brought with us from the storeroom. “Here,” I said, extending my arm and cautiously handing the apple to the man, wanting to help as much as I wanted to flee.
The beggar stared at the apple from under the hood of his cloak and sniffed. “You call that an offering?” he asked.
I pulled the apple back, hugging it close as if the beggar’s harsh words might have offended it. “I…I was just trying to help,” I said, confused about why someone in need would be so snappish.
“Coins,” the beggar said, shaking his cup. There was something in it already that made a rattling sound. “Coins are what I need.”
“You would refuse an offer of nourishment from my omega?” Azurus demanded incredulously. “Is there not a saying about beggars not being choosers?”
“I am no beggar,” the man said, his voice growing stronger and even more familiar. “And this omega owes me. He owes me his very life.”
I gasped and jumped back, hiding behind Azurus as the beggar stood and pushed back his hood. Instead of some weak, old man standing before me, it was my father. Underneath thecloak he wore a regal suit trimmed with gold and jewels. His eyes blazed with hatred and avarice, and he continued to hold out the tin cup, shaking it as if it were some sort of weapon.
“You owe me!” he shouted, glaring straight at me. “You and your brothers. You are mine, my property to do with as I see fit. Your wretched waste of an omega papa tricked me by only having useless omega offspring. You owe me recompense for the alpha sons I should have had.”
“No!” I gasped, hiding behind Azurus. Although with the pack he wore, I couldn’t get close enough to him to really feel secure. “No, leave me alone!”
It was like every nightmare I’d had recently, only worse. Father was standing right in front of me, reaching out grotesquely with his tin cup and its sickening rattle.
“He owes you nothing,” Azurus said, holding his arms out to shield me even more. “Misha is his own man, and he is free of you forever.”
“He will never be free of me,” my father cackled. “Not as long as I live inside him. All the magic in the world cannot remove me from his head.”
“No! No, go away,” I wept, trying to turn away from my father. Everywhere I turned, though, it seemed like he was there. He was right, I would never be able to be free of him.
“You’re not real,” Azurus said in a steely voice. “You’re some sort of test thrown into the road to test us. Be gone with you.”
“And how do you propose to get rid of me?” my father, or at least the specter of him, asked with a laugh. “With your magic?”
Yes, that was it. Azurus was a powerful, magical dragon. He could make my father go away.
“Please, Azurus,” I said, trembling like a leaf as I tried to keep my mate’s body between me and my father. “Please banish him.”
Azurus made a frustrated sound and raised his hand, but nothing happened. The ghost of my father was still there.
“You are mine, boy,” my father growled. “Now and for always.”
“Azurus, please,” I cried. “I’m scared.”
“Leave us!” Azurus shouted, holding one hand up to my father and reaching behind him for me with the other. “Go back to wherever you came from.”
“You cannot make me,” my father’s specter laughed. “You do not have it in you.”
I sucked in a breath, suspecting that my father meant what he said literally. Azurus did not actually have the power to banish my father’s ghost.
“You are nothing,” Azurus told my father in return, also meaning it literally. “You are just an idea, just a phantom. You cannot do any harm to him.”
But he could and he already had. Just the memory of my father was enough to have my knees shaking and my heart feeling weak.
“Can’t you do anything?” I wept, stepping away from my mate, hurt not only by my memories but by Azurus’s lack of honesty with me. “Can’t you help me?”
