Page 38 of The Emerald Dragon Prince
The almost comically indignant question came fromKing Freslik himself, who had awaken from whatever slumber Nazeing had ordered him into. Freslik stumbled forward as if still groggy, glaring at Nazeing as he did. Whether he was fully aware of the battle in the Great Hall or not, he ignored it and marched straight up to Nazeing.
“Go back to sleep, old man,” Nazeing snapped at him.
“Old man?” Freslik shouted incredulously. “I am a king! I amtheking. Neither you nor anyone else will ever replace me.”
“You are a worm,” Nazeing spit at him. “You aren’t worthy of my attention.”
Nazeing threw out a hand as if pushing Freslik aside, but Freslik didn’t budge. Nazeing did a double-take and turned back to the furious man, throwing an arm out at him and trying again to dismiss him with magic. Once again, whatever spell he’d cast had no effect.
With a shock, I suddenly realized why. The protective spell that the omega princes were concentrating so hard on extended to their father as well. Their father, who was as evil as a man could be, who had made their lives miserable and would have hurt them even more if Argus hadn’t restrained him. The princes could have used their magic to snap the man in half, but instead, some shred of compassion had compelled them to shield their father from Nazeing’s magic.
“No!” Nazeing shouted furiously, whipping away from Freslik to find the source of interference. His gaze landed immediately on the omega princes and he roared at them. “I will not have the victory and the power that is rightfully mine stolen by a group of useless whelps!”
Nazeing surged toward the omegas. Several things happened at once. I launched into action, determined to block Nazeing’s path. I wasn’t the only one who moved,though. Freslik lunged at Nazeing as well, drawing a long dagger with a serrated blade from the folds of his robe.
“This is my kingdom!” Freslik growled. “Mine!”
Nazeing had turned his back on Freslik in his efforts to attack the omega princes. He was an easy target for Freslik, who raised his hand and drove the dagger hard into Nazeing’s back.
For a sorcerer like Nazeing, the blow should have been simple to deflect and he should have been able to heal the wound as quickly as it had been made. Instead, Nazeing screamed in pain and fury, throwing his arms wide and his head back as if he’d been struck by lightning.
Lightning was an apt analogy. Freslik felt it as well. He couldn’t seem to let go of the dagger, which was lodged nearly to the hilt in Nazeing’s back. He shook and hummed, and within a few seconds, not only had all the color drained from his face, his eyes rolled back in his head. Then he began to smoke.
“What’s happening?” Rumi shouted, rushing to me and grasping my arm.
I had no idea, but I had a guess. “The blade must be enchanted,” I said. “It must be capable of neutralizing and killing someone with magic.”
“But where did my father get it?”
I sucked in a breath as the most likely answer to that question struck me. Nazeing had probably created the dagger himself and given it to Freslik to use against me and my brothers, and Osric as well. But as Nazeing shuddered in the throes of death and began to shake as well, the irony of it all was apparent. After all his efforts to grab power and overthrow the natural order, Nazeing had been the instrument of his own demise.
I grimaced as the two evil men, Nazeing and Freslik,who had just destroyed each other in their power-grasping, crumpled to the ground in a smoking, putrid heap. That was how evil ended more often than not. It destroyed itself.
A shriek split the air a moment later, and I glanced up quickly to find not one, but five glittering dragons circling the ceiling of the Great Hall. The soldiers who still battled throughout the room stopped and looked up in wonder and fear.
“Dragons!” somebody shouted.
The battle was over in an instant. Freslik’s men tried to run for the exits, but Osric’s men stopped them and took their weapons.
“It’s about time you lot showed up,” I called up to my brothers as they circled above.
“Azurus!” Misha cried out, reaching for Azurus’s glittering, blue form above him.
“Gildur, get down from there!” Selle laughed a moment later.
As my brothers descended and resumed their human forms, rushing to their mates and taking them into their arms, I turned to find Rumi.
My mate had stepped cautiously forward and crouched beside his father’s still-smoking form, likely checking to see if he was truly dead. When I approached enough to rest a hand on his shoulder, Rumi glanced up at me and nodded gravely, then stood. I pulled my mate into my arms, hugging him tightly and vowing to myself that I would never let him out of my sight again.
“That bastard omega cast a spell over us,” Rufus growled as I led Rumi back to the expanded circle of his brothers and mine. “Then he locked us in that closet over there.”
“He locked it with magic,” Gildur explained. “Whateverbroke the spell that had us so confused didn’t unlock the door.”
“Nazeing wasn’t savvy enough to block our magic, though,” Diamant said. “We made a doorway into the magical world to escape, then popped right back into the castle through another one.”
“We would have gotten here sooner,” Argus said, as unflappable as if the entire battle that had just taken place was a minor inconvenience, “but the castle is swarming with baffled soldiers and newly rescued noblemen and merchants.”
“It’s chaos,” Azurus added, hugging Misha tightly.
