I’m never groggy. A warrior had to be able to go from a dead sleep to on his feet fighting without missing a beat.
So he fought the dark that wanted to keep him under and pushed his way up. The first thing to hit his senses was the beeping of machines. Then the feel of a bed. The sheets soft on his skin. Soft was wrong. Why was soft wrong?
He frowned as he peeled his eyes open.
To light.
Warm light that followed the seams where the rock walls of the room he was in met the ceiling.
I’m in a dragon mountain.
That much was clear. Not his room, though. Sure, his was barely personal, just a place to sleep and sometimes eat, but it wasn’t this sparse.
And nothing beeped in there.
Asher turned his head slowly, wincing at the way that made the room sway like palm trees on an island.
Palm trees.
He frowned harder.
Something about an island.
The sight of machines at his bedside interrupted that thought. Machines that were monitoring…
Me.
Hooked up to him and measuring heart rate and blood pressure and so on. An I.V. line trailed down to his arm. Another line leading under the covers. That explained the slightly uncomfortable pressure in his dick.
Not the fun kind.
“You’re awake!” a gravely male voice said with…Was that relief underpinning the unusually dead steady tone?
Ladon.
His king.
His friend.
A sound of a chair scraping back across rock, and then a scarred face with dragon blue eyes hovered over him.
“You fucking catheterized me?” Asher growled.
Rather than take offense, Ladon grinned. “Technically I didn’t. Fallon did the dirty work.”
Fallon? The slowly clearing fog in his brain told him something had gone terribly wrong. He just couldn’t remember what.
He gritted his teeth, searching the blankness that was his memories.
Ladon grinned. “Nice to have you back with the living, brother.”
How long had he not been with the living?
“What happened?”
“What do you remember last?” Ladon asked.
Asher tried the think, but it tweaked the ache in his head to do that. The fog was more of a mist now, but still slowing him down. “Meeting with Meilin,” he said slowly. “Is that where we are?”