Page 66 of Prince of Storms
My hand slid down his back. I recoiled as I felt the bumpy, jagged outline of a gaping wound. “Oh, my god. Tor!” I wiggled out of his grip, turning him around so I could get a look at it.
“I’ll be okay,” he said. “Tired. Sore for a bit, but it’s nothing to worry about.”
“Like hell, it’s not! Tor, this is the size of my fist and two inches deep. You’re bleeding like crazy. You’ll die if we don’t get this taken care of right away.”
“Hush,” he said, pressing a finger to my lips. “Listen to me, Mia. I’m not like you, remember? I’ll heal from things that would kill a human. I’ve suffered worse than what the Vorgan did to me.”
“Vorgan.” I repeated the word. I’d heard it before. But where?
“Yes, that was a Vorgan,” he replied tautly. “The same creature my sister used to kill so many people when I was younger. And now it’s killed again.”
“What?” I gasped.
“Tempest and the other dragons who came through yesterday,” he said tightly. “It got them in their sleep.”
“Oh, god,” I whispered, hand over my mouth. “Ty?”
“Badly wounded, but he’ll survive. He made it to my room to wake me and tell me what happened. That was when I discovered it had you.”
“How did you find me?” I asked.
Tor bent over and scooped me up into his arms. I let him that time, careful not to press my hands into the hole in his back. It boggled my mind that that was not a major wound to him.
“The Vorgans give off a residue. It feels like walking through a cold fog. It led me to the Rift, which I saw my sister had activated to bring you through. After that, there’s only one place it could have been going. The mountain under Storm Keep, where they live, deep, deep down.”
We were walking now.
“So, you mean that we’re …?”
“Yes,” Tor said, wings sprouting from his back as he lifted us into the sky and up through the tunnel. “We’re not on Earth anymore. We’re in the dragon realm, the land of the storm clan. My clan.”
We burst out from the mountain and around the peak, giving me my first look at the castle Tor had grown up in.
“Welcome to my home,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-One
Mia
“We’re not on Earth,” I repeated, staring down at the collection of circular towers and curved walls, sloped funnel-like roofs and oddly diamond-shaped windows. “We’re not on Earth.”
“No. You’re in the air.”
I slowly turned my head until I could stare Tor directly in his perfectly pale gray eyes. “Really?”
He smiled. The effect wasn’tquiteas powerful on me as it normally was, given his face was bruised. He had a puffy circle around his left eye that was quickly darkening, several cuts and abrasions across his cheeks, and his opposite cheek bore a long, ugly-looking gouge that trailed dried blood down to his neck.
But he was brimming with laughter, and the happiness was easy to see despite the disfigurement. And that made my heart race just a little bit faster. It definitely had nothing to do with the fact we were high in the air and the only thing stopping me from falling to my death were his arms.
“I thought it was funny,” he said. “It got you to stop going down your path of freaking out, didn’t it?”
“I wasn’t going to freak out.”
“Liar,” he accused, staring right back at me. “You were plunging down that route, and we both know it.”
“I …”
“You’re right. Itwouldbe totally justified to do so,” he said, his face softening. “And I am so sorry it had to happen this way. I didn’t want your first real experience here to be like this. I had hoped to fly you here on my back so that you could experience the joy of soaring high through the clouds and seeing my homeland in all its glory in a peaceful way.”
