The Tied: Possessive Gods, Book Three Read online

  “Fine?”

  “Let me out of here.”

  He walks to the very same door Triton comes and goes through, but when he opens it, it does not lead to Undersea. It opens out onto a great blue sky. I stand in the depths of my dungeon and I look out into a vast emptiness before turning my head back to look at him.

  “Is this supposed to be a joke?”

  “Not at all,” Ned smirks.

  “This is the fucking sky.”

  “It is,” he agrees.

  “Well, what am I supposed to do from here? This is just as bad as the prison. Worse, really. I can walk around down here, but I can’t fl…yyyyyy!”

  I scream the word, because Ned just shoved me. Hard.

  I tumble through the clouds, my hair streaming around my face as I fall and fall.

  “Fucking assshollllee!” I scream as I plummet.

  “Why don’t you open your wings?”

  His voice comes to me from nearby. I can’t see him. I don’t think he’s here. I think he’s back inside my head, saying very stupid things. Wings. I can’t open my wings. I can’t…

  FWOMP!

  My wings unfold, stretching impossibly wide in an instant. I look at them in surprise, then curl my head around to look at the rest of my body.

  I appear to be a dragon.

  A great, big, golden dragon, sailing through the skies of Okeanus. I am no longer falling. I am soaring. The wind slips beneath my wings, holding me aloft as I let out a cry of triumph, which emerges as a fiery screech.

  It has always been said that I am the daughter of Helios, the sun, and my sister Raine is of Ragnar, he who defends Yggdrasil where the dragon sleeps. But we are twins. We were born from the mixture of their seed, and it would seem there is more than a little of that dragon in me.

  I knew I had a hidden power. All this time, I knew it. Nobody believed me, but now that I consider it, I have felt the stirrings of this great beast inside me for a long time.

  Other people made me afraid. They looked through their eyes and they told me what they saw, and I was stupid enough to believe them. They could not see this majesty, and this power. They could only see the superficial beauty of a young woman. And so I have spent my life afraid, not knowing that all along, I was the thing to be feared.

  I cannot spend long in smug reflection. The skies are full of the drones of Entity, and when I look down, I do not see the world I once knew. The war has left the landscape of Okeanus scarred. I see signs of battle everywhere I look. Down at the site of what remains of the golden palace, I see my family bunched up behind Helios. They are trying to close the barrier through which Entity’s drones are still pouring. It looks like they are succeeding. Raine is holding forth against the drones, her shielding ability keeping them at bay, but I can tell the interference of their attack is slowing Helios and weakening them all.

  I have never before felt pity for my family. I have never seen how frail they truly are. There is no creature, no deity which can fight forever, and they have been fighting as long as I have been away.

  But the battle just changed. I’m here now.

  I sweep down over the drone mass, charging through the little gnat-like pests and sending them tumbling out of the sky. As soon as I do that, I see Helios’ beam strengthen, the golden shaft which is mending the breach in the barrier becoming instantly more effective.

  This is going to work. We are going to seal Okeanus again. But there is still the matter of the drones which already penetrated the shield. My first pass caught them off guard. But they quickly identify me as the major threat and they come on in a great wave, swarming toward me as I lead them away from my family, and away from the breach in the barrier.

  I feel power surging through me, tooth and claw and wing. I have become a great attractor. I do not know if the drones are attacking me, or if they cannot help being pulled toward me. What I do know, is that above me, the barrier between Okeanus and the human world is being sealed by the will of the gods. Spared from attack, they are all pouring their energies into restoring the great shield.

  I can fly fast, but not faster than the damnable mechanical wings. The drones reach me and begin their attack with what feels like hot bites. I am swarmed by the things. Every remaining drone on the planet seems to have come with one aim in mind: to bring me down.

  11

  Triton

  “There’s a dragon!” Swimmingsley bursts through the door to my chamber of commerce. “There’s a dragon!”

  “There hasn’t been a dragon in eternity,” I say, signing the latest ordinances around opening hours. It is not common protocol for young courtiers to come into my presence without being announced or at the very least, knocking and performing a courtly bow. I will have to address Swimmingsley’s alarming lack of protocol with his father. There has been far too much acting out by the youth of this court of late.

  “There’s is definitely a dragon sir. It emerged from the sky. It is flying around in circles. I was just up on the rocks when it appeared.”

  “Swimmingsley…” I sigh, putting my squid ink pen down. “The dragons have all been imprisoned beneath the legendary tree, Yggdrasil.”

  “He’s telling the truth.”

  That’s a voice I have not heard in a very long time. It is a voice I hoped to never hear again. I look up to see the biggest bastard who should not be on Okeanus standing in front of me.

  “Ned.”

  The escapee smiles. His expression alone is enough to rile anybody of good mind and sense.

  “It’s been a long time, Triton.”

  “How are you here?”

  “I’m well. How are you? Oh, that’s not what you asked.”

  He smiles with an easy grin, and I feel a hollow sinking sensation in the pit of my gut. Nothing good has ever happened when Ned makes an appearance.

  “I thought you were incarcerated.”

  “I have a tendency not to stay incarcerated,” he says, twirling a ring with a key hanging off it from his finger.

  “Who let you out?”

  “You did,” he smiles. “When you incarcerated your girlfriend in my prison, you had to open the door to do it. It broke the seals on the spell and let me free. I owe you one, big buddy.”

  “I forgot you were down there. If you touched her…”

  “I didn’t touch a hair on her head,” he says. “Or a hair anywhere else on her anatomy, for that matter.”

  “So she’s still down there?”

  “Not really.”

  “Sir,” Swimmingsley repeats. “The dragon is…”

  “Oh hell. Oh no. No. No. No….”

  I have never made a quicker journey to the surface in all my life. Just as I am about to breach the surface, a shadow passes over the water in the form of wings and a long tail. I lift my head above the waves, stare upward and see that yes, there is a great golden dragon doing battle in the sky. I know immediately where that dragon came from, and who she is.

  “LUCY!” I roar her name to the sky, but she cannot hear me over her own primal cries which fill the world with their righteous fury.

  She looks nothing like her former self, but I would recognize my lover if she were a sack of potatoes. That golden beast in the sky is her. She must have more of Ragnar in her than anybody suspected. More of Ragnar than Ragnar himself. The ability to take a dragon’s form is not common. It is a rare feat, even for a god. And even rarer for a demigoddess.

  At first I feel pride watching her. She is stunning. She is powerful, and majestic. She was also right. All along she had something inside her, a capacity to do battle with the greatest evil Okeanus has ever seen.

  I was wrong to keep her captive. I saw the exterior of her sweet form and missed the dragon slumbering within. She is going to be incredibly smug when this is over, and she will have every right to be.

  Her fire is pure gold. It burns through the sky in a fantastic plume, turning Entity’s drones into cinders. Ash falls from the sky and lands in my waters, turnin
g the waves black. My ocean absorbs all the pains of the world, first the blood of the fallen, and now the fire ash. I could be swimming in a sea of entrails and not care. All that matters is Lucy. She has transcended her limited form. She has become all she insisted she always was.

  How did I miss the fact that a dragon was lurking inside my princess captive? I need to know her more deeply. I need to love her more thoroughly. And I vow to myself that I will do both those things as soon as I have Lucy back in my arms.

  Moments later, that hope is all but dashed. Her incredible form is utterly swarmed with the drones of that monster. Entity is throwing all its remaining resources at her, leaving nothing behind. Her flames work to slay the drones when they are at a distance, but once they have closed the gap, she has no defense against them. They cling to her body like a rash of barnacles, each of them mounting a vicious attack. I watch in horror as she begins to come apart. They are devouring her in the sky and there is nothing anyone can do. My realm is of the water. I have no influence in the sky. I cannot reach her to help her. This is my worst nightmare, compounded many times over.

  Having finally gathered his strength from sealing the barrier, Helios attempts to ride to save Lucy. His chariot is a great golden globe moving through the sky. His armored horses flash with fire and fury as they go to the aid of the princess.

  But he is too late. Lucy defeats the drones herself, but at great cost. In a great flash of golden fire emanating from every scale of her body. She becomes supernova, and for a moment there are two suns in the sky of Okeanus.

  Then she fades.

  And she falls.

  She is no longer a dragon. She has used an eternity of her godhead in a single battle. Lucy is nothing more than a broken human falling from the sky, perhaps already dead. She falls for what seems like forever, her body limp as it tumbles through the heavens.

  I could not stop her from leaving.

  I could not save her from Entity.

  But I can break her fall.

  I rise from the crest of a wave to take her weight as it is delivered by cruel gravity, and I catch her in my arms before my ocean can claim her as it has claimed so many warrior souls before.

  Helios has turned his chariot toward me. I know her family wishes to reclaim her, but she already gave herself for them. Now, I will take her for myself.

  As we descend through the waters, she does not move in my arms. I sense no life in her at all. Her wounds are horrific, to her legs especially. I do not see how she will ever walk again. Every bit of her energy has been depleted.

  Some gods last an eternity. Others go out in a blaze of glory. I never wanted to see Lucy this way. I feared it every time she defied me, when she chanced the dark and when she obliterated it with her light.

  There is very little left of the woman I love, but I will do anything, give anything, pay any price to save her.

  I have to get her back home, to the place she should have been all along. Beside me. In my bed. I swim to Undersea with Lucy in my arms, her blood turning the water pink with her life essence. That is the human part of her, the simple meat she relies upon to exist. I loathe how fragile it is. Something this precious should be made of stronger material. She should be eternal, as I am.

  But she’s not. She was made fragile by her mother’s flesh, by the humanity which turned on her and did this to her. Lucy is half-human, and it is that half which betrays her divinity.

  “I need the doctor! Now!”

  It does not take long for the physician to arrive. He examines her swiftly and binds her wounds. He treats the weakness of her meat, but in the end she lies quiet and still. If she were mortal, she would already be dead, but Lucy has always been more than mortal.

  “She’s dying,” the doctor tells me what I already know. “The form she took — the dragon? It took everything from her. To assume a form as great as that is not easy even for a full-blooded god. For her to do it was nothing less than a miracle. Every bit of divinity has been stripped from her. There is just the faintest glimmer left, but it is dwindling.”

  I am barely listening to him. I know it already. I just hoped that he would tell me something different, and that reality would not be so ruthless. I will never forget how Lucy looked in her single flight, how powerful she was. And I will never stop regretting that my actions allowed her to do it. I would rather all Okeanus were burned to a crisp than lose her.

  “Lucy…” I cup her face in my hands and feel how cold she is. The fire which has burned inside her from the moment I met her has been quenched, and now the waters of my realm sap the residual heat from her. “Lucy, please. Come back to me. Live.”

  “If pointing at dying things and telling them to live worked, that would be a tactic worth trying. But it doesn’t. So it’s not.”

  I didn’t want to hear his voice the first time I heard it. I want to hear it even less now. Ned has intruded where he did not belong. He has done the unspeakable. He has cost me the love of my eternal life.

  My eyes roll black, and all the impulses to bring death I have repressed over the years rise to the surface in a single desire.

  “YOU!”

  I launch myself at him, teeth bared and suddenly sharp. I will tear him apart. I will bleed him into nothingness. He will die along with Lucy, and I do not think I will ever stop killing.

  “Easy, tiger shark!” Ned laughs as my teeth meet his flesh.

  He dares laugh at me in the midst of the deepest pain I have felt this side of eternity. I was already on the verge of unspeakable violence. His laugh puts me over the edge. By all that is good in the universe, I will have his head displayed on a pike at the entrance of my realm. I swear it.

  The cold blooded predatory nature of the shark flows through me. I draw his blood and it is sweet, but it does not stop him laughing. I hit him and I tear at him, my teeth finding his flesh, my fist finding his face, and still he laughs. He doesn't even try to fight back. He allows me to knock him to the ground and beat him until I grow tired and confused. I step back and stand over him, panting with furious exertion as if I too were mortal.

  Ned rubs his hand over his face. It comes away coated with his blood.

  “Good,” he says. “You’ve done what you needed to do.”

  “What I needed to do was save Lucy. I’ve done nothing but waste a few of her precious last breaths on you. Begone, Ned. When she has passed, I will come for you and I will give you the death of the gods. There will be no more imprisonment. I will end you.”

  He is still half-giggling, driven crazy by millennia of solitude, perhaps. Or… no. This is how he always was. Reckless. Dangerous. Destructive. That is why we confined him and then forgot about him.

  “Alright,” he says, standing up. “Enough fucking around and having fun. Let’s save this girl.”

  “Save her?”

  “Take my blood,” he says. “Mix it with your own. My blood will restore the dragon spirit inside her, at least enough to support life. And yours…”

  What he is suggesting is the closest thing to blasphemy I have ever heard. But it might work. Though, if it does, it will come at a cost to her.

  “My blood will make her as my people are. She will grow a tail instead of legs. She will be forever bound to the ocean, imprisoned forever.”

  “Nothing is easy,” Ned smiles, his blood running over his lips, teeth, and chin. “But you don’t have many options, Triton. She has minutes left to live. Will you save her even though it means leaving her in limited mortal form? Or will you let her die a perfect death?”

  12

  Lucy

  I open my eyes, stretch my arms and swish my tail.

  Wait…

  I swish my tail?

  Yes. That is definitely my tail. Swishy swishy. It has golden scales and the cutest fin at the end and…

  “You’re awake!” Triton sweeps me into his arms. “You are alive and awake and…”

  I can hear the supreme relief in his voice. For a long and blessed moment,
I can’t remember or think why he would be so excited that I am alive. Why wouldn’t I be alive?

  Then it comes back, a little at at time, but already far too much.

  “I was a dragon…”

  “Briefly, yes.”

  “Is Entity….”

  “Defeated? Yes.”

  “And I was injured…

  “Very badly, yes.”

  “And now…” I swish my tail.

  “You were saved from death,” Triton explains gently. “But there were parts of your physical form too badly wounded to save. So you have been given the form of a mermaid.”

  “Am I still anatomical?”

  Triton looks confused for a brief moment, then smiles. “Yes, you are still fully anatomical, though you may have to bend over rather than spread…”

  A throat is cleared. Several throats actually, because we are not as alone as I first thought. Triton has a way of filling the room with his presence to the exclusion of all others, and this moment is no exception.

  He moves aside and I see my family there. My mother. Helios. Ragnar. Raine. Tanuk.

  “Where is the little one?”

  “Fortunately, she’s safely out of range of that particular conversation,” my sister smiles. Then she does something she has never done in all the years we have been sisters. She runs for me and hugs me with all her might.

  “I have a tail,” I announce when she releases me long enough for me to breathe.

  “You always were the fashionable one of the two of us,” she smiles. There are tears in her eyes. There are tears in everybody’s eyes, including mine, as my family comes forward and embraces me one by one.

  I feel so loved, and I love them so much in return. There is much I want to say to them, but there’s even more I don’t know how to say.

  “I’m also a dragon,” I add.

  “Not. Quite.”

  That’s a voice that doesn’t belong here.

  “Ned!” Ragnar growls the name. “Shouldn’t you be in prison?”

  “It’s okay. He’s not real. He’s my brain.”

  “He is not your brain. He is one of the most dangerous gods on this planet. The only one we ever saw fit to imprison. You were the reason she became dragon, weren’t you, Ned.”