I keep my mouth closed as Damianos escorts me to the two thrones, and by the time I turn around to sit, someone’s closed the door between us and the noisy ballroom. This throne room must be completely soundproof. As loud as that DJ was, I can’t hear even a hint of bass line through the walls.
The other dragons, I notice, have gathered before us in three neat rows. Almost like a pre-agreed upon military formation.
It strikes me as extremely formal until we sit down. That’s when they all immediately start hissing and screeching in their incomprehensible—at least to me—dragon language.
But Damianos ends all that screeching with a mere raise of his hand. “If you wish to put questions to your queen, you will speak English so that she may understand you,” he commands.
Confused face emoji, so all that hissing and screeching was questions? For me?
“You are not her voice in all things?” a dragon in African robes asks. He has the same accent as Damianos. Vaguely old worldly and technically unplaceable.
“She is willing to entertain your questions, while I am not,” Damianos answers.
My mate’s a total bad-ass, I note admiringly. But again, what questions?
I remember how Other Damianos confessed that he’d been upset to be fated to a wolf back when he first kidnapped me. Had this Damianos led me straight into a meeting with a bunch of dragon supremacists? Unwittingly. Or maybe on purpose?
I will free myself from these chains…and when I do, I will no longer be afraid of hurting you.
Could I have been wrong about all the progress we’d been making this past week? The prospect chills me to the bone.
And the chill only grows colder when the guy in African robes steps forward, and asks me, “Of course, we drakkon are well versed in your history. We are, after all, the ones who created you. But have you any idea of our history, New Queen?”
I cut my eyes to the side, then give it my best guess. “Well, you know my version’s a little hodge-podge. But if I have it right. It was something like, one of your scientists came here back in the ice age. Created us to be your hunting dogs. Got all PETA-attached to us and the humans, so he decided to blow up your planet. Basically, exiled you here. Kind of a dick move. But yay, we got to live.”
“That summary, while grammatically unfortunate, is more or less correct,” he concedes. “I wonder if you are also aware of the plot perpetrated by the king who came before this one. The one who gave us false hope of going through the matching portals to find a mate from time past. The one who manipulated our final battle with your species so that we were left not only with a reduced number but no hope of using the matching portal to find the mates he had promised us. I believe this Betrayer King is now mated to your twin sister. Is that correct?”
I clear my throat and fiddle with my sleeve. “Yeah, that’s true,” I admit. I’m not sure where this is going, but I’m pretty certain I won’t like where it ends up.
“So you are aware of the Betrayer King,” African Robes says with a solemn nod. He goes to stand beside a man wearing wide-sleeved red, black, and gold robes. It reminds me of one of those Chinese dramas where some poor woman gets blasted back into time to fall in love with a prince from one of China’s imperial dynasties.
“This worthy male is originally our mission’s Lead Engineer,” African Robes informs me. “Are you also aware that for the hundreds of years since your brother-in-law’s great betrayal, this male has spent innumerable hours at matching portals all over the world? He has toiled through human wars and plagues while waiting for technology to catch up. All so that he could finally find a way to fulfill the Betrayer King’s original promise that we should all be granted mates. Were you aware of that?”
“I heard you were all trying to see if you could time travel to get your fated mate on, but no I didn’t quite know how much work went into it.”
“Hmm, does that mean that you also weren’t aware that just when our Lead Field Engineer completed the phase of the project before the initial test runs would be required, your own mate shut the fating portal project down. Apparently, he did this because he had impregnated you.”
I glance at Damianos. “Wait, you did what?”
“The Alternative Timeline Damianos seems to have caused a lot of upset while I was imprisoned,” he answers, somehow still looking bored.
Oh… Like Clyde, it seems Other Damianos left a few things out when he told me he’d abandoned the project to go back in time and make it so that Mercury didn’t blow up. Something like a hundred of his fellow exiles who wouldn’t be getting mates because of that one decision.