Mated by The Alpha Dragon: The Exalted Dragons (Book 3) Read online

  “You could’ve just said you loved her, you know. It would’ve expressed the same thing,” he responded sarcastically.

  “Love is an amplification, an intertwining of all the other pulses that make all the other emotions, so it’s only fair we speak of it dramatically that we not forget that the essence of love is to be breathless and taken away by it,” I said while I jumped after him onto the first boulder of rocks in the river.

  He was still bent on one knee, recovering from the jump when I landed on both my feet and made the next jump.

  “Your legs are strong,” he shouted. “You must run a lot.”

  “I just keep my eyes on the next move.”

  “Might wanna keep them on the current one,” he said. “You don’t wanna die thinking of a moment that will never come, do you?”

  “Why do you think of death so much?” I asked him.

  “It’s the only truth we know, isn’t it?” he replied.

  “That’s one way to romanticize death, but isn’t life as much of a truth as death is? Isn’t love, too?” I asked him, starting to enjoy the conversation with the mysterious man.

  “Life and love are uncertainties. Death is the one and only certainty. We are all going to die, but I’m not sure any of those maggots have lived or loved a single moment that passed,” he said loudly while his arms stretched at all the men crossing the river around us.

  I took a moment of silence to contemplate what he told me. It made me wonder. But more than wonder, it made me feel blessed. Unlike all the others around me, I had a purpose. I was devoted to finding Elise and not to the king. So, while my mind was always occupied with thoughts of finding her, their minds were occupied with the past, with the homes they would never return to.

  We crossed the river and entered the forest at the break of noon. All the animals fled when we entered.

  I learned that the man’s name was Seth and that he was one of the hunters who brought the animals back to the king’s castle.

  He told me that he used to steal most of the cattle and keep them for himself. He stayed in a cave up one of the mountains that overlooked both the castle and the village.

  When the sun came down, the Hawks told us to stop and light fires. Some of the men went to hunt, and the rest stayed to start the fires. I went with Seth and some other men, and we caught three deer that Seth killed on his own.

  The man was faster than any deer, and his reflexes were unlike any other man I had ever seen. When we went back and sat by the fires, he and I sat away from all the men and talked.

  “Does your body ever change when you are angry?” I asked him, feeling comfortable enough to ask yet aware that I would never confess my secret to him.

  “You mean like yours does?” he asked me with a smirk.

  I hesitated. I didn’t know how to respond to that. I looked at him and laughed it off.

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “I told you I lived on the mountains. I see everyone and everything. I know you wander by the valleys and that you turn into a dragon and fall on your face. Who do you think brought you up that day you fell?” he told me and left me speechless.

  I was probably in delirium when I woke up the night he was speaking of. When Bernard was killed, I fell but I never wondered how I made my way up again.

  “You have a gift, Theo,” he told me, breaking the silence. “God knows I only feel safe now because I know your power exceeds any danger that we might face out there.”

  “It could be a curse,” I told him. “It took me a long time of controlling it before I believed it might be something more than a curse.”

  “If you have a benevolent purpose. This power you have will help you achieve it, and if your purpose is dark, nothing will stop you either. What’s your purpose?” he asked me.

  “I want to find her and bring her home,” I nearly shouted.

  “I know about that, but what about our dear old Harold? You don’t want to take that one out?” he said laughing.

  “Sh!” I was afraid we would be heard. “I can’t kill a man and certainly not one whose goodness or evil I can’t judge.”

  “You’re wise. I’ll give you that. But you’d be a fool if you think that anything is good about him. The man is evil, and I won’t speak of what he does or will do. You’ll see for yourself,” his voice went down to a whisper.

  “I surely did already,” I smiled.

  “How so?” he asked me.

  “There’s no need to talk about it,” I responded, feeling the heaviness of my heart start to tickle my folded knees.

  “Are you afraid of the pain of remembering?” he asked me.

  “I remember it every day and night. I just never talk about my pains. I’m selfish with them. I like keeping them to myself,” I told him.

  “Well, if that’s so, I’ll tell you my pains. Maybe you’d relate, and only then would we have both spoken of our pains. You don’t need to say a word,” he said.

  Chapter Nine

  Elise

  Speaking about your pain doesn’t really help you release it. Maybe it helps you face it, but never does pain end at mere expression. And maybe that is why I chose to keep all my feelings to myself and live somewhere where I cannot be found.

  It was hauntingly depressing. The moment I found myself with the desert sun ahead of me and the village behind me, I sighed deeply, as if I could release the pain through the air that escaped my lungs. That illusion didn’t last. I found myself doubting my decision to leave, turning around and walking until I remembered the reason I left, which was to keep Matilda and Theo safe from what was growing inside of me.

  I don’t know what could had happened if I had returned at any point, but I guess I’ll never know. I was too young to be making such a decision on my own—a decision to just take off and leave the ones that made me feel whole after my mother left.

  Moving from one village to the other was the one thing that I kept my mind set on. I tried not to get close to anyone. I learned better than to get attached. I knew myself. The moment that I would let anyone close to me, I wouldn’t be able to hide anything from them and would eventually have to tell them about what I really was.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was more of a monster than I was human. Because the moments that I was in my human form, the dragon’s emotions stayed, lingering in my consciousness. It was like having a constant reminder of what I could turn to any moment, forcing me to keep everything to myself.

  I thought of Theo more than my skin felt the weather, but when time rolled on, the memory of him was more like an image, not changing like everything else around me.

  Still, there were mornings where I would watch the setting sun and see a silhouette approaching. Sometimes the silhouette would be on a horse and sometimes it would loom in the shape of Theo, running to rescue me from my solitude. When the nights would come, I would stay late until the moon found itself the perfect quarter in the sky and set in it. I would close my eyes and dream. Only in those dreams were the images of Theo changing. It was only then when the moonlight would be dripping on my eyelids that I would see him older than how I remembered him.

  By then, I began being able to control myself. It was just enough to make sure that the people I met would not provoke the beast out of me. But I still considered what I had as a devil within me. I always blamed my dragon form for making me leave.

  But sooner or later, that idea in my head had to change, and when it did, it was unexpected. Even though I had vowed to not get close to a long conversation with anyone, there was the one person I talked to—the man I could credit for bringing me closer to peace with that darker side of me.

  Chapter Ten

  Theo

  I opened my heart and ears to listen to Seth’s heart-wrenching story. It turned out the man had more rage within him than I had gathered throughout the years. Everything that he lived for had been taken away from him, one way or another.

  A long time ago, he had a wife an
d a daughter. They lived somewhere in our village until he was called on by the king to lead the hunters of the castle. He stayed there for longer than he promised his wife and daughter. When he went back to the village, he found both his wife and daughter were gone. He never knew what happened to them.

  It was nothing but fate that put me there on that night, by the fires, talking to the man who turned out to be the father of my one and only love, Elise.

  I didn’t make the connection that night, so we slept on the grass at night, both drenched in dreams of loved ones, and it just happened to be that the same angel, Elise, was in both of our dreams.

  The next morning, we marched on for hours that seemed to be endless. There were carriages on the other side that were waiting for us. We got into the carriages, and the Hawks said we were heading toward central Europe.

  They gave us swords, and axes were given to the heavily built men. I had told Seth that I could never kill a man, but when we were attacked at the borders of the town we entered, I had to shed the blood of many.

  I hated myself every time I swung my sword at a man. Yet, I still tried not to kill. I shed a lot of blood, I only would attack with the hand of the sword just to knock them down. I couldn’t take it upon myself to even scar the face of another man.

  But eventually I had to. The first time was a complete accident. We had entered a village that seemed deserted. The cottages were made of palms and wood. The wind blew mightily and cold as the sun was setting.

  Seth was walking ahead of me, looking inside every cottage with his sword pushing the doors open. The village was set on the bottom of a range of hills that surrounded it, making the winds that crashed into it only a sound and a slight breeze of coolness.

  I heard stones rolling down the hill, and at once I realized that the silence was only a mask. The marching down the hills followed the rolling of the stones, and armed men came rattling down like thunder upon us.

  Amid the fighting, I saw Seth surrounded by three men, and yet he managed to fight them all at once. When I brought down the man I was brawling, my eyes rolled toward Seth and he was on the ground, with the two remaining men preparing to make their swords a part of his heart. I ran toward him, and my mind didn’t think twice. I found myself beheading the two men in what seemed to be an eternity but turned out to be a blink of an eye.

  “Finally,” Seth said as I pulled his arm. “It took me seeing the reaper for you to send someone to him.”

  “Does it really take one to feel this way to be able to kill another man?” I asked him while looking at the graveyard that we were about to leave behind.

  “Feel what way?” he asked me, not understanding my vague romanticism of that eerie scene.

  “I had to dehumanize the men to be able to kill them. I had to think of them as killers who deserved to die. I had to believe it seconds before my sword burst through the arteries of his neck,” I told him, feeling disgusted with the sight of the dead bodies.

  I remembered the smell of decaying animal skin that was right outside of our house back in the village. The dead bodies lying around this village were soon to become like that animal skin, and the thought of that killed me.

  I couldn’t help but also think of how I had to think of the men before killing them. I knew I was becoming what I loathed. I was becoming a killer.

  Still, all those things helped with the rage that was building up within me. I was starting to feel my power grow more with every moment of war that we had to go through.

  The king was far behind us, sending his Hawks from far behind to guide us to where to go and stay behind. Whenever we would empty a village or town from its men, he would enter the graveyard with his Hawks and collect all that could be used back home.

  Or maybe he was looking for something specific. I couldn’t tell. I was so caught up with being on the fronts that I couldn’t look behind me or think of what went on there.

  After several towns that we broke to pieces, there came the village that I would never forget. It was the most beautiful of all villages, too huge to be called a village but too dark to be a town.

  There were trees surrounding it and growing far into the core of the village. Purple roses grew everywhere around the village and inside of it. Some of them were even glowing bright on the roofs of the cottages.

  I had a feeling rise in me as I set foot into the village. The people there were peaceful and mostly women. Perhaps we had slaughtered their men somewhere on the path to that village and we were completely unaware of it.

  Everything in that village suddenly reminded me of Elise. I could see her eyes in every heart of every rose. I felt the exact same feeling I felt when I dreamed of her, that certain closeness that made me believe that our souls were entwined and our bodies longed for one another.

  But while I remained in contemplation of her, Seth had suddenly disappeared. He wasn’t standing next to me anymore. I looked behind me, and he was being dragged by one of the Hawks who came rushing to the village on horses.

  He wasn’t conscious, and I ran to the Hawk and grabbed his shoulder from behind.

  “Where are you taking him?” I asked, while trying to make eye contact with the man.

  He wouldn’t respond, and that was when the first blink of rage visited my body. I knew something eerie was cooking under the unclear skies, and my heart told me that I was closer to Elise than I thought.

  “Tell me where are you taking him,” I demanded an answer, unable to confine my rage.

  The Hawk turned around and, with the back of his axe, smacked my forehead. I was knocked to the ground. Everything became a blur. The Hawk walked away with Seth, and all the men at the front were drawn to stand behind and wait for the king’s carriage to arrive.

  The sounds were starting to also become hazy for me. I couldn’t see what was happening. All I knew was that something was wrong, and for the moment, all the wrong was in the dysfunctions of my own mind.

  I had to hide somewhere before the king’s carriage arrived or before the Hawks saw me and took me away. I crawled behind one of the cottages that concealed by a boulder of rocks by the hill.

  I waited and waited, all while seeing a blur of women hiding and many children crying. The king’s carriage rolled to the center of the village. He stepped out, his cape draping behind him and his Hawks surrounding him.

  They walked and roamed around, looking into every house. They came close to finding me when they were searching the cottage that I hid behind. My feet pushed a stone and made a sound that the Hawks heard. I quickly hid myself behind the boulder of rocks before they could find me.

  Little did I know that the next cottage they searched was the one they came to look for. When the Hawks walked out of the cottage, a woman was in their arms. The king was standing outside, and the moment the woman was out, he bent on one knee and grabbed her hand to kiss it.

  I couldn’t see the woman’s face, but I heard her voice when she shouted.

  “Let me go,” she said, “and get your nasty lips off my hands.”

  Then came the sound of a slap on a face, and that was when the blur in my eyes began to sharpen. I tried to zoom in with my eyes and look closer at what was happening. All I could see was the reddening of the king’s cheeks. I thought the slap had fallen on the woman’s face, but it was the other way around. She had slapped the king, and that was a much greater sin than mentioning his name.

  The woman was about to be killed by his Hawks, their axes hovering in the air above her head.

  “Stop!” shouted the king. “I like them provoking me.”

  “You disgust me,” the woman said, and that was when her voice started to ring loud in my recovering ears and head.

  It was my beloved Elise. Suddenly all the strength in my body began to collect on the edges of my spine. I had found her. My heart burst into many pieces that rejoiced at the sight of her ruby-red hair.

  Chapter Eleven

  Theo

  “Scour the village, destroy anything
that comes your way,” the king hailed and grabbed Elise by the cheeks, showing her face to the Hawks, “and if you find a woman more beautiful than her, bring her to my carriage.”

  My skin began to crawl because all the rage that I had buried within me began to scream. I was being eaten by my anger and my need to save her from his wretched grin.

  I had to do something, and every cell of my body was telling me to move. But the fear within me was rising way before the anger. I was afraid of losing her again right after I found her, and when I realized that I would lose her to the king or to death, I shivered.

  First, came the protruding of my spine. My legs grew larger and bent at the knees. The cottage next to me fell to pieces as I grew into it. Even the boulder of rocks was crumbling as my back hit it hard.

  The Hawks noticed me, and they came running at my sight. I didn’t even try to fight them—I was too consumed in the turning of my own body. As my spine grew longer and my neck rose to fit above it, I glimpsed the Hawks flying around me as my whole body quivered and my arms flailed.

  The king rushed to his carriage, and Elise was taken on board. When my skin turned scaly red and the claws emerged from my fingers, I began moving toward the carriage. More of the king’s Hawks were coming my way. They were as tall as my knees were at that moment, and I shook them off with my feet and arms along the way.

  When I reached the king’s carriage, it was fleeing fast. I had to be careful not to squash it under my feet. I stood above it between my legs. I finally split the carriage from the horses and lifted it up to my eye level.

  Without me even speaking a word, Elise escaped from the carriage and set her foot on my huge hands. I lifted her up and looked deep into her eyes. I felt like she recognized who I was, but something was different about her. She looked pale, her face seemed weaker than minutes before when she stood by the king. Her eyes were closing and her knees were buckling.