Page 65 of Awaken the Dragon
He cloaked his truck and drove like the wind to get back to the Office, to find Shola and explain everything to her. But the minute he turned onto the road leading to the mountain, he felt it, a deep cold emptiness that spread the closer he came to the house.
Now he was walking through the door, he knew. His chest tightened, and he shivered. Theo was a Drakon; their normal body temperature ranged between hot and hellaciously hot. Drakon did not shiver. They didn’t get cold, chill, or anything of the kind. Yet, as he stood in this lobby, he felt like everything was freezing, from his toes up to the top of his head.
Reece appeared first, with Magnum, Bleu hot on his heels. The way they filed into the reception area, all looking at him warily with their dragon eyes—Reece’s cocoa-brown eyes were alight with fierce gold specks that would highlight his brown body when he was fully shifted; Magnum’s cognac-brown eyes took on more of the red hue which appeared like molten lava in his dragon’s bronze body; and Bleu’s russet-brown eyes appeared as if they were boiling, wavy tendrils of his beast’s heat moving through his eyes to offset the prestigious silver tone of his body.
His fingers clenched and unclenched at his side while fire swirled in the pit of his stomach. Words wouldn’t come, and he swallowed at the bile bubbling in his throat. The eyes of his beast met those of his team.
“Where is she?” he finally managed to ask.
Reece boldly stepped closer to him, but not too close. The black dragon was not known for its kindness.
“When I arrived at the lobby, I saw her heading for the front door. I called to her, but by then the building alarms were blaring, so she may not have heard me. That’s when I ran toward her. She went through the doors. I went through the doors, and then I continued to go through the doors. It was as if there were some eerie time loop that kept me going there for endless moments until something heavy began to clog my lungs. It rose from my feet and snaked around every part of my body until I was able to erect my skin shield and break through the glass. By the time I stumbled to the sidewalk, there was a white truck speeding down the block. I found this.” Reece recited the story in a clear and concise voice, all while knowing the black dragon could lash out at any moment. He extended his hand to offer Theo the necklace with the silver pendant.
Theo took the necklace from Reece, running his fingers over the silver disc engraved with black stars around the edge, a lightning bolt down its center, and two arrows crisscrossing the bolt. Shola never took this necklace off. He’d seen her rubbing it just before Hikeen came into the office tonight and on other occasions. It gave her some type of encouragement. He inhaled deeply, closing his fist around the pendant. Tonight, it would work for him.
He looked back at Reece. He should have shifted. The moment Reece was out of the time loop, he should have let the brown dragon have its life and took to the sky, swooping down over that white truck until it came to a stop. He could have rescued Shola then.
But Reece hadn’t shifted because of Theo’s rule against using the Drakon power.
“I came out minutes later, and Reece was trying to figure out what to do. I hadn’t seen this in my dreams. We raced down the block and managed to catch up with the truck two blocks away. Reece threw himself at the truck to stop it from moving, but it was covered in some type of shield,” Magnum said.
“It felt like a blocking haze,” Reece added.
Blocking haze was used by the Drakon when subduing a being on the Far Realm. It locked the being in a colorless shell laced with Drakon magick so that it was impenetrable until the time that the initiating Drakon relinquished it.
“As Isla was rebooting the system, she found the hacker’s signature embedded deeply in the code she’d written. It was a high-level demonic, a mist that had infiltrated through the vents and seeped into every aspect of the building—”
Theo interrupted, “Not a mist, smoke. Cloudy smoke. The same smoke that rolled off that metallic sludge.”
He could see it so easily as it had wafted around the bottom half of their truck last night. Shola had said the sludge wrapped around her legs too, trying to pull her out of the truck before taking the form of a hooded man. The hooded man who had entered Torrance’s private chambers more than two hundred years ago, with Theo’s betraying mother at his side. His mother, who had come to him in a swirl of fire the night he decided to leave the Far Realm forever.
“I was able to track her,” Bleu said, his voice quiet, yet laced with a lethal hiss. “They’re on the move.”
Theo gave a nod that caused pain to shoot through his entire body in milliseconds. Bleu didn’t have to tell him where they were going with Shola. He knew Hoan’s endgame. “I’m going to get her,” he said evenly, the deep brogue of his dragon seeping through.
“But you know what that means,” Bleu reminded him. “You left the Far Realm because of your father’s alliance with Hoan. Going back there to kill Hoan will put you in direct betrayal of the Drakon emperor. He will challenge you, and you will win, Theo. You will win because Hoan has been siphoning Torrance’s power for hundreds of years now. The Emperor is no doubt weak and will be easily taken. His death will call for your ascension to the throne.”
Theo heard the words. He felt the sting of each one pelting his body like shards of glass as they broke through the barrier he’d erected around himself so long ago. He never wanted to be emperor, especially not after his mother’s betrayal and his father’s misguided trust.
Aliceanna, the name he hadn’t allowed himself to think, let alone speak, in hundreds of years, had brought the demonic spirit into Mt. Cedius, the home of the emperor and his Noble Drakons. Through Torrance’s love and trust of Aliceanna he gave Hoan audience, and the demonic used that time to possess the Drakon emperor. Torrance’s stern but just rule over the Far Realm began to shift to a heavy-handed domination. The Noble Drakons—those of pure breed and from leadership clans—were directed to kill any resisters of the new laws on sight and to burn down any property they owned. In addition to the chaos that slowly began to break out on the Far Realm, Torrance used the force of his legion of Drakon to overrule the Spirit Realm, releasing more of the demonics that had been jailed there. That was when Theo left. When the killing and forceful domination had begun to take its toll on him, and he knew there was no getting through to his father. When Theo left the Far Realm, Aliceanna was ill, probably dying, and the demonic spirit, also known as the Dark One and more nefariously known as Hoan, was the actual ruler of the realm.
“I’m going to get her,” he stated again.
Magnum stepped in front of him. “I’m going with you.”
“I will follow,” Reece added, lowering his head as a show of dedication.
Theo wanted to look away from the Drakon’s action because he had never wanted to rule. He’d never wanted to be in a position to be manipulated the way his father had been. But none of that mattered now. Nothing mattered but Shola.
“You will not be alone,” Bleu said. “Not as long as we breathe.”
Bleu caught Magnum’s gaze and nodded in his direction.
“Get the truck,” Bleu told Reece.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The FarRealm
