Possessed by a Dark Warrior (16 page)

Centuries later, he had forgotten he had even found his mate, had merely believed that he had decided to set aside that dream he had always told Iolanthe about.

Gods, it had been there in the back of his mind, locked deep in his heart all along though. A soul-deep awareness that he couldn’t have his mate that had coloured everything in his life, making him view them as a nuisance and then making him jealous when he had seen others find theirs, able to start a life together with them.

One he could never have with his female.

He had buried himself in work because he couldn’t have her. He had condemned himself to a life alone, one cold and devoid of love and light.

He hadn’t even tried.

He had been a fucking idiot.

He groaned and tipped his head back, stared at the slightly grubby white tiled ceiling of the break room. Loren had told him once, several thousand years ago, that with age came wisdom. He wasn’t sure that was the case for him. Seven centuries ago he had been old enough that he should have recognised the dragon female as his mate, his dream come true, and he should have done something.

He shouldn’t have given up on her so easily.

His kingdom and his position meant something to him, but was it worthy of the sacrifice he had made?

He had changed himself, discarded the male who had always dreamed of finding his mate and had denied his true nature.

Seeing how fiercely Loren had fought for Olivia, and Kyter for Iolanthe, and even damned Thorne for Sable, had set him on edge for some reason, and at the time he hadn’t been able to name it, but now he could.

It had made him angry.

With himself.

Every male he knew had fought to claim his mate, and he had fought to forget his.

He wasn’t sure what kind of male that made him, but he didn’t like it and it was time he changed.

Well, it was time he changed back.

He could no longer deny his true nature.

He couldn’t bring himself to believe that there was a chance for him and the female, but he could finally see that it was a possibility. Nothing was impossible after all. He had proven that countless times and he should have tried to prove it with her too.

He had been wrong to believe that everyone but him was finding their mate.

His was out there. Waiting.

Running from him.

Gods, the thought of having her set his blood on fire but chilled him at the same time. He wasn’t really sure of himself now or what the future held for him. Everything that had happened in the past few months had tipped him off balance, but he wasn’t going to just give up and throw in the towel. He was going to figure everything out and come up with a strategy, one that would bring him and the female dragon together and give him a chance to speak with her.

It would be difficult now that he had brought Leif, Dacian and Fynn in on the hunt for her.

He cursed the gods. The trio would want to pursue the original plan of reclaiming the sword and they wouldn’t care whether the culprit was caught or killed in the process. He couldn’t even tell them that Loren had issued an order to capture the dragon, because their prince had issued the exact opposite.

In writing.

He cursed Loren this time. The male was only doing his duty, but Bleu wished he hadn’t followed it to the letter this time. Normally, Loren allowed teams out on special missions without a written warrant. Maybe Bleu should have cursed the council. It was their constant bickering with Loren and pressuring him to stick firmly to the rules in order to placate them and restore some balance between him and the elders that had no doubt made Loren bother to issue his team mission orders in a formal manner.

Bleu groaned.

He wasn’t even sure whether attempting to speak with the female was the right course of action. She had attacked his people, had killed thousands of his kin, and had stolen the most precious treasure of his prince. He knew that to be true, even when there was a piece of him that wanted to believe it wasn’t. He had seen the sword on her person when he had first met her and there was no denying that, not even when it pained him to accept it.

His fated female was the enemy of his people.

His enemy.

“Brother,” Iolanthe whispered softly and his groan deepened as he remembered that he wasn’t alone.

He dragged a hand over his face and sat up, found her watching him closely with an edge of concern in her eyes.

“I’m just tired.” Another lie. He really had to stop lying to his sister, but it was easier than spilling the truth—his fated female was a murderer and he had orders to kill her.

“It is the dragon, is it not? The mission plays on your mind and weighs on your heart for some reason.”

Bleu gazed off to his right, to the door there, and sighed. “A little… but it is nothing for you to worry about.”

Her eyes didn’t leave him and he knew she wanted to say that she couldn’t simply stop worrying about him. She didn’t need to tell him. He shifted his gaze to her and held it, silently letting her know that. The bane of being a sibling, he supposed. One was always worried about the other for some reason.

“You could help me,” he said and she perked up, sitting straighter in her chair, her violet eyes bright with enthusiasm that he scowled at because he knew the source of it. “I’m not asking you to come with me.”

She huffed, her fine eyebrows knitting together and lips flattening into a mulish line as she folded her arms across her chest.

“Gods, you two look frighteningly alike sometimes.” Kyter strolled into the break room, the overlong grey sweats he wore swishing around his bare feet, and yawned fiercely, his face screwing up as he flashed short fangs. He shuffled towards the counter in the kitchen area, scrubbing a hand over his mussed sandy hair. “I need coffee. Coffee… coffee… sweet coffee.”

He opened the cupboard on the wall above the coffee pot and fumbled with a blue mug, barely catching it before it hit the dark counter, and set it down as he yawned again.

“Did we wake you?” Iolanthe said as she turned in her chair to look at Kyter, all sweetness and light now her mate was around.

The transformation was startling, but impressive. Bleu had never noticed the true depth of the effect Kyter had on her mood, but he couldn’t fail to see it now. She had gone from irritated and grumpy to bright smiles in a heartbeat, her cheeks flushed with heat and eyes sparkling.

Bleu eyed the sandy-haired golden-skinned male in the kitchen and frowned.

He couldn’t see the appeal himself.

Kyter was amusing at times, a good friend at others, but the rest of the time he was annoying as hell.

The jaguar shifter yawned so hard that his eyes closed and the coffee he was pouring into his mug hit the brim and flowed down the sides and all over the counter.

“Fuck,” Kyter muttered and mopped up the mess. When he turned around, he scowled at Bleu. “That was your fault.”

Bleu frowned right back at him. “My fault? I fail to see how you spilling coffee is my fault.”

Kyter slumped into the chair to his left, between him and Iolanthe, kicked his bare feet up onto the white table, and sank lower, his coffee held in both hands above his naked torso.

The male slid a mischievous look his way. “It was your lusty screams waking me at this fucking ungodly hour.”

Bleu growled at him, flashing fangs in warning.

The bastard just winked at him, the look in his eyes making it clear that he knew what had had Bleu crying out.

Iolanthe’s gaze burned into him and he didn’t dare look at her, didn’t want to see how horrified she looked as she stared at him.

“I told you I was fighting,” he said.

“No… you said you were having a nightmare.”

“I was.” Bleu shot her a look that demanded she let it go, one he’d had to use a thousand times on her in the past when she had been stubborn and acting like a Hell beast with a bone.

Kyter grinned. “So we’re up in the middle of the fucking day because Bleu was having dirty dreams?”

Bleu hissed at him this time, his ears flaring back against the sides of his head, unable to contain the reaction or stop himself from threatening the male.

And confirming that he had been lost in a fantasy and not a nightmare judging by the wicked smiles Kyter and Iolanthe exchanged.

He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at both of them.

Kyter shuddered and muttered, “Far too alike.”

Iolanthe petted her mate’s leg and spoke to him. Bleu paid her no heed as he tried to figure out a way to convince both of them that he hadn’t been having a dirty dream. It was only when she mentioned dragons and the sword that he dragged himself back to the room.

“Do you tell him everything now? Even things that were told to you in private?” Bleu frowned at her.

She shrugged. “We are mates. Mates tell each other everything.”

Fantastic. He couldn’t wait to come back to Underworld and have Kyter tease him about his desire to find his own fated female and everything else he had just confessed to his little sister.

“Since we are going to talk about my mission, perhaps you could help me. I need all the information you have about the dragon realm and the borders with the Devil’s domain. Vail believes the sword is there, and you have travelled extensively in that area.” He was about to tack on an order in the elf tongue to keep his private matters to herself when Kyter spoke.

“If you want information on the dragon realms and beyond, why don’t you just ask Loke?”

“I would, if I knew the dragon’s location. Prince Loren will not give it to me.” He was also fairly certain that Loren would be angry with him for openly ignoring the promise he had made to the dragon, swearing he would leave him alone.

But Bleu hadn’t made that promise, and he wouldn’t be breaking it if he visited the dragon male and questioned him. The more he considered it, the more he wanted to do it. It would certainly stop him from wondering why Loke had pressed his prince to swear such a thing in the first place when Loke had given him no information on the female dragon or the sword.

Bleu had always obeyed his gut, and his gut was screaming that the dragon knew more than he had told Loren.

It was time he spoke with the male himself.

He looked across at Kyter. “You know where Loke lives?”

“No,” Kyter said and Bleu was on the verge of snapping at him and asking why in the gods’ names he had mentioned the male then when the jaguar shifter jerked his thumb towards Iolanthe. “But she does. She teleported Anais there once when Loke went radio silent and the huntress was worried.”

He shifted his focus to his sister.

“I have a huge favour to ask you.”

Green swirled around Bleu as his feet hit the ground in the centre of the portal landing zone, the air surrounding him shimmering with the tell-tale trail of his teleport. He strode forwards, across the dewy grass, his back to the glowing portal suspended in the sky that acted as the sun in the elf kingdom. The warm light threw his shadow out long in front of him, stretching it towards the pale stone garrison a short distance away on a hill.

He focused on the squat two storey building that stood in the centre of a circular defensive wall and willed his portal. Power rippled over him and cool darkness followed it, a split second of infinite night that evaporated to reveal the arched wooden gate of the stronghold he and the others were to call home for the foreseeable future.

Bleu looked back in the direction of the landing zone, one of the few places in the kingdom where those teleporting into it could enter. It was closer than he remembered, and he would have been concerned if they had been tracking any species who could use the portal pathways into the elf realm, but they weren’t. Dragons didn’t have the ability to teleport.

He had never heard of them using the gates either, a method that allowed fae species such as shifters to enter Hell or travel around it.

No. If the female dragon attacked them, she would do so from the air, and that meant coming over the mountains to the rear of the old garrison. She would have to cross the First Realm.

Bleu looked towards it. He would send word to the demons, asking them to look out for dragons.

The sound of metal clashing pulled his focus away from the numerous smaller duties he needed to perform as part of his mission.

A grunt and growl followed it.

Bleu huffed and gritted his teeth, praying to the gods for patience.

Someone was sparring.

He banged his right fist on the huge arched door and waited. After a few seconds, it creaked open and Fynn appeared in view, grinning from ear to ear. It wobbled a little as he looked at Bleu, and Bleu pinned him with an ice-cold glare meant to freeze the damned thing off his face.

Dacian and Leif were the ones battling it out in the courtyard then. Bleu had seen them spar before and it had been less of a fight with weapons and more of a battle of wills.

A battle that had gone on far too long, neither willing to admit defeat.

Despite the difference in their builds, Dacian and Leif were too well matched, both skilled warriors with centuries of experience under their belts.

Both stubborn bastards too.

He couldn’t afford to have this sparring match end as the last one he had witnessed had—with Leif sporting broken ribs and a fractured collarbone, and Dacian sitting on his backside with his tibia jutting out of his left leg.

Fynn drummed his fingers against the throwing knives strapped on both sides of his ribs over his black armour. The nervous twitch only grew in speed as Bleu slid him a black look meant to convey how annoyed he was that they had gone against one of his orders.

The one he thought he had hammered into their thick skulls with enough force to make it stick.

No one sparred, because heading into the dragon realm when injured was a death sentence and they couldn’t delay the mission to wait for anyone to heal.

Bleu shot him another glare and then strode across the pale smooth flagstones towards the central building, and the two idiots going at it just outside it. He issued the command to his armour as he walked. The tiny scales rushed up his arms from the bands around his wrist and down his body, covering him just as his mortal clothes disappeared, sent away via his portal to his apartment in the main castle of the kingdom. Anything he owned, he could teleport.