Page 100 of Fae Champion

But here he was.Alive. Thin and unkempt, gagged and tied with those same glowing chains.

The fire in his eyes was stoked.

Itraged.

Whatever the queen had ordered done to him in the fae dungeon, it hadn’t broken him, though I had no doubt she’d tried her best to devastate the man whose sole mission was to protect the creatures she so despised. Dragon shifters possessed advanced healing that erased the evidence that might have otherwise remained of his treatment in the queen’s prison.

Saffron, however…

After several weeks, a dragonling as young as he should have grown at least a foot taller. He hadn’t. Indeed, he appeared even smaller than before, as if he’d shrunk in on himself in a futile attempt to become invisible and evade what pain the queen sentenced him to for no reason other than being born as what he was.

The last of his kind.

Nestled among the Nightguard Mountains, there’d been several dragons that were the sole remaining specimens of their breed. Each one of them was precious, and the dragon shifters defended them with their dying breaths, honored to do so.

Saffron’s scales were ordinarily a brilliant golden yellow that looked like pure gold when they reflected the light. In the afternoon sunshine filtering through the large windows lining one side of the hall, the youngling’s scales were a dull ochre, and patches of them were entirely absent, exposing the tender pink flesh beneath. His back was riddled with straight lines as if from a whip, where fresh scales had grown back in, still smaller and softer than the others around them. The scales around his front legs were rubbedpainfully raw around the chains, and a muzzle that shone with that same unholy black clamped shut his mouth.

Saffron cowered beside Xeno, curling inward to protect the softness of his belly, his eyes endlessly sad when they used to shine with joyful mischief.

I growled like a full-grown dragon?—

No, that hadn’t been me. My fury hadn’t yet bubbled over, rapidly mounting to uncontainable levels.

It had been Rush. He’d sounded so much like the shifters I’d grown up with that I wouldn’t have known the difference if he’d been standing in the middle of Nightguard.

But the first to speak wasn’t either of us, or even West, Ryder, or Hiroshi, who appeared equally murderous, or Xeno, whose eyes had gone still—too still, revealing the killer he could be when forced.

“Sundo? Bandel?” asked one of the newly arrived pygmy ogres in an oddly singsong voice as he took in the four pieces of what had likely been his friends. “Why…?” He trailed off, and I found myself empathizing with the creature who was as much a pawn of the queen’s as any of the rest of us, probably more so since she’d surely take full advantage of their apparent dimwittedness.

“What … happened, queenie?” he asked while rubbing at his bulging belly with a free hand, the other clutching Xeno’s and Saffron’s chains.

The monarch glanced at him, staringblankly for several moments, her visage entirely free of sympathy. Then, “The girl killed them.”

“I didn’t,” I protested right away, even as both ogres shifted their massive bodies to face me. “I swear, I didn’t. The queen’s lying to you.”

They didn’t even seem to hear me, both baring their teeth, sizing me up as if I were late lunch or an early dinner.

“We eat, queenie?” the second asked.

“Yes, eat queenie,” I answered for her. It was a lame attempt at misdirection, but I couldn’t determine exactly how dense they were, and anything that might save us now was worth a try.

But the queen only chortled. “Not yet, Gorko. Maybe later. But don’t worry, either way she’s going to die.”

Gorko belched then rumbled. His pal lifted one foot, then the other, before planting them both menacingly and licking his lips.

“Rush is in line to kill her first,” the queen said, her attention back on the drake of Amarantos. “And if he doesn’t do it, then you can kill him, her, and all their friends.”

“Oh, goooody, goody, goody,” said Ogre Two, again raising one leg and then the other. “Yummy, yummy, yummy.”

Everything about the queen and her plan was so ghastly that I couldn’t even summon nausea or fear at the thought of running through the pygmy ogres’ digestive systems. I was numb, I decided, I had to be. Awoman could only take so many death threats before tuning out the real implications of them.

“So, Rush, you either kill her and spare yourself and all your friends, or you defy my order and get both sets of your friends killed, and then I kill her myself.”

She flicked a look at the ogres. “Or let Gorko and Cambo take you all apart, piece by slow piece.”

“Yes, queenie, yes,” Cambo trilled. “Cambo hungry.”

“I know you are,” the queen said, her eyes on Rush alone. “You always are. Maybe we’ll even invite some of your brothers to join the feast. There’ll be a lot of meat.”

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