Through the emotionless numb where he usually existed, a gut punch of fury swept through him in a scorching wave at her recklessness showing herself here like that, risking her preciously rare phoenix neck.
Airk didn’t have time to argue with her methods right now, though.
Shoving the emotions down deep where they couldn’t touch him, he kept moving. Five more steps and he ran past her through a rotting wooden door disguised to blend with the rock face and into what had once been a home.
“What in the seven hells are you doing here?” he demanded. No emotions, only logic now.
“Helping.” She shot him a patient smile, though it quickly disappeared behind urgency. “Follow me.”
He stared at her back…then did as she asked. They had one minute. Two at most.
Limping hard by now, he picked his way around toppled furniture and over shredded pieces of wood covered in layers of dust and grime. The air smelled dingy. This residence hadn’t been used in a century at least.
He kept close as Angelika rushed to a back room. One that happened to have an intact mirror, though spotted with age and exposure to the elements.
He skidded to a stop in front of it beside her and blinked at the sight of his reflection staring back. Always a shock, after five hundred years in Pytheios’s prison, to see himself. He looked like hell. Even more than usual.
Taking out the guard in the small dungeon in order to rescue the woman he now hefted had left him with a decent gash above his eye, already closing thanks to a shifter’s accelerated healing abilities. His starkly white hair—that he’d shorn short as soon as he’d had a chance after escaping captivity—was spattered with blood. His, he was fairly certain. More blood dripped at a rapid pace onto the stone floor from whatever he’d just done to his leg, pooling under the heel of his boot.
“What are you doing?” the woman over his shoulder asked, starting to squirm again.
“Waiting.” He glanced a question at Angelika, who kept her gaze on the mirror but nodded an affirmation.
The shouts outside were growing louder. Closer.
“What for? They’re coming.” His passenger was starting to panic, nails biting into his back.
Airk started to plan in his head what he’d do if he had to fight.
The unmistakable thud of a dragon landing nearby set his own dragon slashing inside him even more frantically. The creature half of him had never been this uncontrollable inside their prison cell, maybe because, strangely, there Airk had never been under direct threat. He fisted his hands against the raging push to shift, and he waited, the effort tightening his muscles to the point of pain.
He glanced at his watch—a handy invention he’d been introduced to at the time of its making several hundred years ago, while he’d still been held captive in the Red Clan’s high dungeons in Everest. Back when he’d still had hope of escape. He’d had no idea it would take another three hundred years before he would succeed.
His heart thumped with each movement of the second hand, and he found himself urging what came next to happen faster, counting down to the arranged moment the portal was supposed to be opened with each tiny tick. “Four. Three. Two…”
He dropped his hand and looked up as the image in the mirror changed abruptly, with no warning or sound, now no longer showing his reflection. Instead, a couple stood in a cavernous bedroom framed by the tarnished edges of his own mirror.
Samael Veles—black hair, black eyes, a bred warrior, and the King of the Black Clan—watched from beside his mate, Meira, his fiery gaze on whatever threat might come through the mirror.
Meira’s strawberry blond curls, so at odds with her more angular face and serious mind, lifted around her head in a halo of black-tipped flames as she used her power to teleport through reflective surfaces to manipulate both sides of the portal she’d created.
“Perfect timing,” Angelika said, except her voice was tight. She clearly knew the hells were about to rain down on them and jumped through quickly. Then she turned and faced him, head cocked as though to ask what he was waiting for.
His dragon went eerily still, and the roaring in Airk’s head went dead silent, as if seeing her safe on the other side of the mirror settled them both.
Her scent—sunlight and summer and fresh air, all things he’d missed—wafted toward him.
Fuck.
The beast inside him lunged for Angelika. A patch of skin on his arm shimmered like a desert mirage, white scales showing hazily through. Airk slammed down every mental cage he’d built in his head to contain both his own emotions and the instinct-driven animal inside him.
The woman he carried screamed as men burst into the room in the same instant, and Airk finally forced his legs to move. He threw himself and his female passenger through the gateway opened in the mirror. His injured leg collapsed as soon as he was on the other side, and they both went sprawling across the hard rock floor.
“What happened—” Meira started to gasp.
“Close the mirror!” Angelika shouted and shoved her sister.
Immediately Meira’s fire was doused. The angry expressions of the people coming at them from the other side turned to shock, especially the man closest who’d reached an arm through. Because the “doorway” slammed shut, becoming a mirror again. The man’s arm severed cleanly and dropped to the floor to twitch there like a crushed cockroach.
They all stared at it for a second.
Airk, chest heaving from the effort of escape, and even more from the effort to hold his dragon in check, dropped his head back against the cool stone floor, reminding him incongruously of the slab he’d used as a bed in his prison cell for so long. Only this wasn’t Everest anymore; this was Meira’s bedroom in the black dragon stronghold of Mount Ararat.
He flung an arm over his eyes with a grunt.
“That was a close one,” Angelika murmured.
Even with his eyes closed, he could picture her smile, deliberately casual. Did others catch how forced those smiles had become lately? Or would they only see what she wanted them to?
Still, what the hells had she been thinking, putting herself at risk like that? Had she been afraid for him? She shouldn’t be. He was expendable.
Curling up inside him, his dragon damn near purred at her nearness, even as it snarled at Airk. Airk didn’t trust it not to try for her again, but at least he could shut back down now.
The way he functioned best. The only way.
“How did you know where I would be?” he asked, dropping his arm, gaze on the ceiling.
“Kasia had a vision,” Angelika said simply.
“That did not mean you needed to come in person.” He shouldn’t care that she had, or even be grateful, but he was still getting over the unaccustomed fear that had struck him like a damn thunderbolt the instant he’d heard her voice.