Page 84 of Captured By the Dragon Warlord
“It’s Dalsor…he’s…oh!” She skids to a halt, eyeing the two Dalsors Driok and I hold. “It’s not him. It’s Drex. These are…I don’t know what they are, under some sort of mind control…but it’s Drex you want. He’s been using Dalsor and who knows how many others,” she says breathlessly.
I look at Driok. He flings the second Dalsor at me.
“Got to get back to my sector,” he snarls. “This has gone on long enough.”
He turns, his tail shifted like mine, and thumps away through the smoke.
I have hold of both warriors as Dante lands. I shove the pair at him.
“Deal with these,but don’t kill them,”I order.
Dante sniffs at the pair and wrinkles his nose, recoiling from them with a growl. “I do not want these warriors.” He attempts to push them back on me.
The pair are not trying to escape. In fact they’re passive in a way I also dislike. I scent them like Dante and also instantly dislike their scent. It’s artificial and wrong.
“What the nev is going on here?” I growl at the pair, but they are silent.
“I think they’re not…Sarkarnii…anymore,” Scarlett says. “Look at their eyes.”
I grab Dalsor and pull him to me. He is passive, strange to the touch, his scales almost brittle under my claws. I grasp his head and glare at him.
Something flashes back at me, something inorganic…something of a machine not a Sarkarnii.
I want to fling him away from me. I don’t want to be close in any way to this thing which was once Dalsor. He makes my skin itch worse than the need to shed. I know instantly what Dante doesn’t like, but I can’t say exactly what.
“Not Sarkarnii,” I rasp.
Dante shudders in a way I’ve never seen before. The king of mayhem can be excitable, he can be dangerous, refusing to back down from a fight more than any warrior I’ve ever dealt with, but he is not scared of anything.
“Not my fight,” he growls.
“This is every Sarkarnii’s fight,” I respond, dropping Dalsor and grasping Dante’s shoulder.
His shifted wings flex. He doesn’t look me in the eye.
“This is our fight for survival, like the one we fought when we first came through the wormhole,” I tell him. “The one which changed us, which took our females but made us stronger.”
“Your shift?”
“My shift is my strength.” I look over at my mate, my beautiful Scarlett who has given me so much more than I could have possibly imagined. My rut, my desire, my reason for being. If I always have to shift to be with her then it is no hardship.
My clan and I are way beyond our shift being a hardship. It is what makes us who we are. It is not something we should have ever been ashamed of.
“Being a Sarkarnii is our strength.” I stare at Dante. He lifts his lips to reveal his fangs, reminding me in such a sudden flash I nearly reel back from him, I need to claim my mate. I need my venom in her blood and her blood in my mouth. “It is who we are and nothing can beat us, not even the universe.”
Dante shivers again, blinking hard at me as if I am the last Sarkarnii he will ever see. His thoughts, tumultuous at best, incoherent at worst, swirl through me like a fog, as if I’m absorbing them from him, even though I have no intention of doing so.
I cannot control thoughts, I cannot control Sarkarnii, even if Dante needs to calm the nev down and focus.
“Calm the nev down and focus,” he murmurs.
“What?” I glance over at Scarlett as my blood spikes with heat.
“Calm the nev down and focus.”
She looks at me as Dante repeats the words.
“You mean that?” I give him a brief shake, and his eyes, somewhat glassy, meet mine.
