Mate Of A Dragon Villain (Skeleton Key) (2 page)

“
T
his time
, I will cut your fucking head off!”

King Eldric swooped in, blue wings tipped with the blood of the men he’d cut out of the sky, his sword raised to come down.

Prince Hargreave Kendrick readied his spear. This was the thing he’d been waiting for. For that fool to lose his temper and fly down at him so Hargreave could stab his spear right through that idiot’s throat.

His black wings shuddered. He wanted to fly back at the man coming down at him. He wanted to rush at him as though they were in a race to kill each other, but he held still in the sky, knowing the kill would be better if he let Eldric come to him. Then the fool would have no one to blame for his death but himself.

Eldric had his sword raised so high Hargreave would have more than enough warning, more than enough time, to thrust his spear forward and gut him before the king could slice at his wing.

A shriek caught his attention. It was a fool thing to do, but he took his eyes from the king for a breath of a second, and only because the noise was so odd in a battlefield full of roaring men.

A woman. A woman with blue hair fell from the sky. A human, if the lack of wings was anything to go by.

Blue hair…

Hargreave recalled where his attention should have been, and he returned it to where it was supposed to be just in time to keep his head from being taken off, as Eldric really wanted.

Hargreave grunted as the edge of that heavy blade cut through the leather armor at his shoulder, slicing him deep enough to notice, to be more than a nuisance. To be painful.

That was fine. Eldric hadn’t gotten his wings or his head, and the momentum the king flew downward at prevented him from getting another swing in at him.

Fuck! Blast it all to the fires of hell! What a stupid—

“The woman!”

He shouted it out loud as he flapped his wings hard, cutting through the air and propelling himself towards his target.

Her body was out of control, spinning, arms flapping, though the screaming had stopped.

Hargreave’s body crashed into hers, two hundred feet above the rocks that would have splattered her blood like the fragile thing she was.

He nearly had to drop his spear, but he knew better than to do such a thing in a place like this.

She wasn’t unconscious, as he thought she would be. Water flew from her eyes and down her cheeks. She blinked blearily, as though trying to discern where she was and what was happening.

Hargreave clenched his jaw. He should have known Eldric would attempt to distract him by tossing innocent women from the sky. He looked around, wondering why there were not more of them. Could she be the only one? Unlikely, but he could see no others falling from the storm clouds that rushed quickly across the plains.

Eventually, the woman found her strength. She reached forward, slinging one arm around Hargreave’s neck, and the other clutched at his bloody shoulder.

He grunted. She didn’t seem to notice the pain he was in. “Wh-what happened? What’s going on?”

“Quiet, woman!” Hargreave snapped, searching for a place to land to deposit her.

A battle cry from above, Hargreave looked up as Alger, Eldric’s second in command, fell down upon him, wings drawn in to use the weight of his body better, his sword pointed at Hargreave’s face.

The woman saw this warrior coming, held him tighter, and screamed again as Hargreave twisted himself around, angling his face and neck just as the sword came down upon him, close enough to cut his nose off, so close he could smell the dried blood that crusted on the edge of the steel as he spun around in the air.

Then Alger was beneath him, spreading his wings to slow his fall.

Hargreave raised his spear, unable to stab from this angle and because of the woman he held, so he smashed the blunt side down on Alger’s head.

He went limp and fell. Hargreave hoped he would die like he deserved.

He glanced around. No other warriors coming that he could see had their attention on him. Eldric was in the air, hovering, searching around, probably for Hargreave, but his men were keeping the king preoccupied. He might as well land here. It was as good a place as any and the woman could hide in the rocks until he could return for her.

Hargreave landed. He sent one withering glance to Alger’s body. He wasn’t moving. Good. He was dead. Eldric would mourn him for decades. Hargreave hoped he mourned the man for the rest of his natural life.

The woman with the blue-tipped hair stared at him, her arms still around his neck. “You…you’re…”

Hargreave rushed to the rocks and set the woman down. He didn’t want to leave her here. Anything could still happen, but he had to. The enemy was still flying above, and it would take but a single glance downward before they noticed the leader of their enemy was on the ground.

“Stay here. Do not move out into the open. Do you understand me?”

The woman trembled. She didn’t answer.

He gripped her arms. “Do you understand?”

She jumped, a gasp escaping her, her eyes flying wide as she stared at him, right into him.

Grey eyes, the color of those storm clouds above them right now. The blue rims surrounding that grey cold were like the sky on a clear day. The sky above his ruined home.

And he realized why she looked so familiar, why she looked like a woman he’d seen before.

Because he
had
seen her before. This same mouse-brown hair tipped with blue and teal, the color of his enemy, her nose slim and pert, with those eyes that felt like home… He’d dreamed of this, thought it nothing at the time, a fool’s wish for something better.

He’d dreamed of this woman as his queen. Hargreave’s heart slammed loud and heavy in his chest, as loud as it had done that day he’d discovered his parents nailed to those crosses in front of his castle, as hard and desperate as the day he’d been taken as a small boy, as the day when Eldric’s father had razed his lands, stealing cattle and crops before setting everything else on fire and salting the land.

His desperation increased. The need to see to her safety, to take her away with him and be gone with her before Eldric could find her and ruin her the way Eldric’s father had ruined Ludolvic.

The woman blinked at him several times. Those grey eyes moved to his shoulder, then to the blood on her hand. “You’re hurt.”

He didn’t have time for this. “Those men up there will kill you. Stay here until I return for you.”

“Are you Hargreave?”

She sounded in awe of him, the way his enemies sounded startled or shocked to realize they were in his presence. He normally liked that, but with her, he couldn’t figure out what her shock really meant. He could be confusing it for terror.

In that moment, there was nothing that terrified him more than returning to find her dead. “Do not move from this spot. I will not say it again.”

He leaned in, because he had to, had to show her that she now belonged to him.

Hargreave wasn’t normally a man who took pleasure in stealing kisses, but in this case, he took great pleasure in it.

It had been so long since he’d enjoyed the soft pleasure of a woman’s lips, or the soft gasp and warm sensation of licking in her mouth, and perhaps it was because of that reason that this felt so wonderfully good.

It was a chore to pull away, and had his life, and hers, not depended on it, he wouldn’t have. He would have taken her right then and there and let the world know he’d found his queen.

Hargreave gasped for breath when his mouth was separate from hers. He’d been flying and fighting all day, but this was something…different.

He tightened his grip on his spear. “I’ll come back for you.”

Eyes still wide, his woman nodded as though in a daze. Hargreave spread his black wings and launched himself into the sky to return to the fight.

* * *

M
aybe she was still dreaming
. That was the only explanation for it because there was no way in hell this could actually be real. This couldn’t be happening and…did that guy way up there just get his wing chopped off? How did he have wings?

Amanda was sleeping. That’s right. She never woke up this morning and she was still in bed.

Except the tiny rocks beneath her knees felt real enough. The blood that was now sticky on her hand felt real, and when she put her hand to her nose, it smelled of blood, too. She had blood on her, and that man who had caught her, who had the black wings tipped in red—not from blood, but with scales—and those bright red irises she’d imagined again and again as she wrote her stories…

That was Hargreave. She’d said his name, and he hadn’t acted like a man who would be confused at hearing such a strange sounding name. Amanda had chosen it for him because it sounded like Heathcliff, one of her favorite literary characters.

Maybe that was part of why she didn’t want to write him getting killed. Just as she’d sympathized with and had kind of fallen for the twisted hero of Wuthering Heights, she’d done the same with Hargreave.

Her mouth still tingled from where he’d kissed her, as if she’d just sucked on a spicy mint.

That was real. He’d saved her life and kissed her like the hero in one of the romance novels she wrote, and now he was in the sky, swinging and stabbing his spear, just in the way she’d always imagined he would whenever she thought of his scenes in her head.

And the man he’d smashed in the head before…

Was still lying way over there. There was an injured man lying in the dirt and rocks, and Amanda was sitting here. What if he was dead? He’d looked an awful lot like…but it couldn’t be.

She had to know. Amanda peeked her head out of her hiding place between the grooves in the enormous stones. She could just make out the top of his head. Auburn, almost pure red hair.

That was Alger. That had to be. Everything inside her told her it was Eldric’s best friend, and he was injured over there. He’d fallen so far when Hargreave hit him. What if he was dead?

Heart slamming, and her breath rushing out of her like a racehorse, Amanda told herself to stop thinking about it and just run to him.
Run! Run!

She did. Her feet flew, surprisingly fast considering she wasn’t a runner, and the terrain wasn’t exactly smooth. Rocks jutted up and got her in her bare feet. She hadn’t been wearing shoes, slippers, not even socks when she’d fallen through the closet door.

And if she didn’t stop thinking about that right now, she was going to lose her damned mind. No one fell through a closet door like that.

One problem at a time. She’d deal with one problem at a time, and right now, that was Alger.

She found him lying face down, not moving in the rocks and grass.

First aid training. She tried to remember it. She’d made herself take it as part of her research, but now that she was here, that she could hear the battle cries and screams of pain above, metallic noises of swords and spears clashing against each other, keeping her thoughts straight was hard.

Shivering in her grey housecoat and leggings, Amanda got down to her knees, reached her hand out, and pressed her fingers to the side of his throat, all the while trying to ignore the almost oily look of the blood in his hair and the bright red slashes in his wings that had probably come as a result of sliding along the rocks.

Her fingertips found nothing at first, then, blissfully, a pulse. That tiny throbbing had to be a pulse.

She breathed a sigh. Alive then. Okay, great. That was done. Now onto the rest.

Amanda wasn’t supposed to move him. There was the risk of a neck injury, and of making it worse, but she felt she had to roll him over if only to see the damage. It was hard. He was heavy. Had to be almost twice her weight with muscle alone, and the wings didn’t help anything, but she got him onto his back by folding his wings around him, preventing any more damage to them.

His face was a mess. She could still see the handsome shape of what he was supposed to look like, what he actually looked like, but there was blood on him, his skin shredded on the rocks and oozing blood everywhere.

Something hard and sharp struck the ground inches from her hand. Amanda shrieked and yanked herself back.

A sword. A big, heavy sword had been knocked out of one of the warrior’s hands, and it had fallen blade down and struck the rock and grass, stabbing itself deep into a soft area of the earth.

Hargreave was right. She was in danger out here and so was Alger. She had to get them back to the safety of the rocks. That tiny indent would hopefully keep them safe from any more falling weapons.

Or falling warriors as they were killed in the air.

Amanda got to her feet, grabbing onto Alger’s wrists. She pulled. He barely moved an inch.

Too heavy. He was too heavy for her, but she couldn’t leave him here. Someone dropped a spear, farther away from where she and Alger were, but still. A man screamed as he fell hard to the ground, one wing missing.

His fall was from higher up than Alger’s, so she didn’t want to think about it when the scream stopped when he came to a hard land.