Rake My Lust (Dragons of Blood and Bone #3)

25. Decrypt

25

DECRYPT

B jorn, Strom, and L?rke are half-shifted into their dragons as they rush into the gaming room with the club’s bouncers, hauling Mikkel and me apart. We’re roaring at the interruption; swiping at them with our own talons, we try to take a chunk out of necks with our teeth as our joined powers go wild at the dragons now trying to separate us.

Though Mikkel and I fight, roar, and thrash that we could not finish our Bloodbond, L?rke is subduing her brother with her indomitable boa-constricting power now, her dragon’s aura spread wide to combat his massive magic. Bjorn and Strom secure me the old-fashioned way, with their powerful arms around my neck and waist, even as they inundate me with their magics through our bonds.

Trying to get me to calm my shit—and separate my power from Mikkel’s.

I’m choking out with Bjorn’s big arm around my neck, fighting so hard to get back to Mikkel. He’s fallen to the floor, constrained in L?rke’s magic now as she bests her brother’s drake with her own incredible drakaina .

Rigid, Mikkel’s not struggling anymore, as if he’s already agreed it’s the best thing for him. I’m still fighting, but my thrashing is waning as both my mates’ power and scents inundate me now.

Strom whispering dark, calm things into me from his Bone Magic, his lips at my ear.

Bjorn holds me fast as he grounds my power into his big, strong body. I reel, lightheaded now, as his thick arm cinches around my neck. It’s only then that my inner Bloodwalker power finally gives up. As if it knows Mikkel and I are not ready to mate yet, thanks to our human reticence, my power snarls one last time, then dissipates.

I feel it as the two magics that live inside me separate to fight another day, flowing back from my deep braid with Mikkel, as well. My bright drakaina and my dark drake aren’t about to give up on the matter, though; I know that very well now as they both stare at me with glittering, furious eyes from deep inside.

They’re going to make me face this, one way or another. Because Aesa’s Truthstone is right, as it rushes waves of brimstone through my veins and hums pointedly on my chest. Mikkel and I should be Bloodmates.

We only have to figure out what to do with our human problems.

It’s a deep conundrum, as everyone finally settles. As I cease thrashing in Bjorn’s and Strom’s arms, the metaphysics in the room calming, their iron grip on me dissipates. They’re still holding me, still preventing me from lunging back to Mikkel if I change my mind.

But my drakes are actually holding me now, rather than subduing me. Bjorn and Strom cradle me as they straighten my dress and my half-pulled back braids so I’m not bare cookies to the wind anymore, with my thong gone and all The Chartreuse’s bouncers looking on.

At last, Mikkel stirs upon the ground. Blinking his dark lashes, he inhales like he’s just woken back up to the world. He looks at me, just looks at me, and that one simple contact has me raging all over again inside. I have better control of it now, however, with both my drakes touching me.

Plus, Mikkel is at a suitable distance now, at least seven feet away. It’s a distance I can maintain, at least, with both my drakes beside me.

As I realize, I can never be left alone with him again.

I come back to myself now as I realize the deep pickle I almost put myself and my two drakes in, nearly taking Mikkel Thorsen into our Bloodbond. I see L?rke get it, too, as she scowls at me now with pure hate for almost taking her brother away from her.

She’s just as mad at Mikkel that he almost let it happen. As he pushes up to sitting on the floor now, taking deep breaths and winding his elbows around his knees, I watch L?rke shake her head. As Mikkel’s aura finally clears of his dragon, he closes his eyes a long moment. When he opens them again, his beast is nowhere in his eyes.

Only the brisk businessman remaining.

“You may go. Thank you for your prompt attendance,” he says to all the bouncers, as they lurk around us, ready. They glance at each other, but at L?rke’s nod, they take their leave with fists to their hearts.

Silence envelops us for a long moment; it’s only then I realize Strom has our small lockbox with all its magically downsized items from Unhaemmerten gripped in one hand, retrieved from Emil’s hotel.

“Mikkel? Are you alright?” L?rke is all concern for her twin, though I can still feel her simmering with wrath for me. She is only love for her brother now, however, as she helps him stand from the floor.

Retrieving a red silk scarf from a coat tree nearby, she is quick as she wraps it around his waist, tying up his ripped-open pants. It’s almost a prude gesture from someone who’s a dragon. Normally, dragons don’t care about being naked around each other; we’re shapeshifters, and with it comes a certain amount of nudity, each time we shift.

But L?rke is clearly taking no chances, as she hides the most important part of her brother’s nakedness from me. As if feeling what I’m thinking, since part of L?rke’s power is mind-oriented, though not nearly as strong as her brother’s, she glances at me. Her look is not just furious towards me anymore, but complicated. It’s as if she understands what Mikkel and I are going through right now.

Like maybe she once had to turn away a true mate in order to continue her business partnership.

It adds a layer of complication I didn’t expect, as everyone stands around, staring at each other. When L?rke’s eyes suddenly flick to Strom with longing again—and he returns her glance, complex—shock takes me to realize she may have once felt that deep mate bond with my very own Second Drake.

It adds even further complication to the mix, as Bjorn clears his throat. His big rumble of a growl is like waterfalls pummeling through me as it clears the air of sex, lust, and mates. He gestures at the lockbox in Strom’s hand, breaking our tension as he gets us all back on-track.

“We brought that. Time to take a look?” Bjorn rumbles now as everyone glances at the lockbox.

“I would relish some diversion after all that.” Mikkel chuckles as he flashes his big devil-may-care grin now, even though that red sash around his waist and his currently bare chest make him look more like a pirate than ever before.

But his lean, strong muscles are beautifully shaped, his tall proportions and nice shoulders a perfect balance. He sees me ogling him, unable to take my eyes away from the ornate, Danish-style tattooing I see curling up over his left shoulder and decorating his heart.

I completely missed them before, in my drakaina’s rage for sex to seal our Bloodbond. It’s a beautiful tattoo; like raiding ships with a sea-monster dragon in the ocean, it flows over his shoulder with water, scales, and wind like a living thing. It’s only tattooed in black and red, rather than Strom’s far more colorful designs in red and gold and blue. But I know it has some sort of warding ability as I feel magic emanate from it.

Its power unknown.

“Before we look at your documents, however…” With a wry but pl eased smile that I’m ogling him now, Mikkel turns to a tall mahogany bureau set in one wall. Opening a drawer, he takes out a crisp white shirt and a new pair of tawny slacks, stepping into the pants commando like Strom often does. In a trice, he’s dressed, everything about his lovely body neatly tucked away. It saddens me, even as I feel relief that I’m no longer tempted by his nakedness.

Though he glances at me as he returns with the red sash—tying it around his hips.

I know it’s a joke for me, because I’ve compared him so often to a pirate. He grins at me and waggles his dark eyebrows; I snort and roll my eyes, and the air seems to clear between us. Our dragons still want to fuck and take full bites out of each other while they’re at it. But the people inside us are calming again, finding something more lighthearted about our situation, and it helps.

As Mikkel gestures to a large dining table in the Victorian gaming room now, inviting us to set our box upon it, we do. Strom moves forward, placing his lockbox on the table, then returns it to its original steamer trunk size with a charm. As he waves his hands and magic all over the box now, to undo the complex locking wards he’s put on it, it’s suddenly open.

Strom is pulling out all the scrolls, codices, and vellums we’ve not been able to translate yet, leaving the other ceremonial items in the box. As the documents come out, Mikkel’s, and even L?rke’s, eyes go wide. They both briefly peer inside the box to see what else we’ve got, but finding the other items have no magical signature, they return to the documents, spread out now on the table.

The Thorsen twins circle our documents like a pair of sharks—they devour the texts with their eyes now, as if they’re something delicious to eat. Bjorn, Strom, and I let them, as they think. As Mikkel starts pointing at certain runes and designs on the papers, L?rke nods—and I realize they are communicating mind-to-mind.

They go on a long while; Bjorn, Strom, and I are left standing around, blinking to stay awake in the very late hour, as the twins work to decipher our scrolls.

At last, they look at us—and I know the decrypting is done.

“We have your cypher figured out.” Mikkel beams at us, his dark eyes shining. “It differed somewhat from the ancient Bone Magic cypher L?rke and I know; we had to take a little time to figure out this new pattern, though it was similar to the one we know. The same cypher is used in all your documents, though they’re written in four unique styles of text. We’ll be able to sit down and translate them fully now; it shouldn’t take but a few hours until morning. If you three would like to return to your Hotel to sleep, we can alert you when we’re done?—”

“We’ll stay here.” Bjorn is succinct as he eyeballs Mikkel.

“Of course,” he says with a gentlemanly nod, understanding how precious these items are to us.

As we sit on the chaises now, Mikkel rings for his service to get some midnight meals for us. Our drinks he pours himself, from a little decanter of whiskey that smells divine and tastes even better, as he hands them around. L?rke surprises me by heading over to the armoire and fishing around in one drawer. She returns to me, slipping a little wad of something lacy into my hand as she bumps my shoulder.

“Bathroom is over there.” She nods her chin at a paneled door set into the wall, gilded with a teensy sign that says toilette . My eyebrows lift as I feel the lace in my hand and realize it’s underwear. L?rke nods at the door again.

I dip my chin to her in thanks, and go.

I take a moment to be alone now, as I sit on the toilet and pee, then don the new underwear L?rke’s given me. They’re beige and lacy, tasteful but elegant; I can tell they cost a pretty penny, probably from some exclusive lingerie maker here in Copenhagen.

The thong fits me to a T, and relief fills me to no longer be bare down below in a room full of drakes. It’s interesting that L?rke knew just what would make me feel better right now, when I didn’t even know myself. I love my drakes, and I like to fuck, but everything feels too amped up right now with Mikkel out there and Strom’s and Bjorn’s big egos in the mix.

And my own drakaina, roaring to get back into Mikkel’s coils.

It’s funny how much protection a thin scrap of lace can provide, as I fix my braids and comb out my loose rear locks with a lovely gilded comb sitting on a gold tray of toiletries in the bathroom. Everyone looks at me as I emerge—though L?rke surprises me by moving over and threading her arm through mine like a sister.

She escorts me back to the big table as the drakes make way. As if she understands how nice it is to have another drakaina in the room, she sticks to me like glue now as she cinches me to her side.

L?rke is almost protective of me now, as Mikkel looks up and flashes me a smile, then goes back to his translating. He’s got a yellow legal pad open before him, and an expensive black pen in his left hand. He makes the strangest hash-marked notes that I can’t imagine are even close to language, unless it’s early twentieth century secretarial shorthand.

Then I realize it’s some kind of secret language, developed by the twins. L?rke isn’t writing anything down. She’s looking at the text to translate, before I feel her pass information back and forth with Mikkel mind-to-mind. As he chicken-scratches their combined translation down, she flicks her eyes to a laptop they’ve opened on the table and the writing fills right in.

It’s a fascinating process, as the twins catalogue and translate our documents. Even though I’m beyond tired now from everything we’ve done today, and that near-mating with Mikkel, I find I only eat sparingly.

Because my attention is pinned to the twins, as they sort everything out. Strom’s is, as well. He’s the only one of us who can even come close to reading what was already in these ancient Bone Mage scrolls; as the twins decipher, he sometimes nods, or exclaims ha! as they put everything together.

It’s a long process, and I feel it’s nearly sunrise before everything is done. At last, as L?rke fills one last sentence in on the document they’re looking at, she closes her eyes, rubbing her temples as if dispelling a headache.

Mikkel heaves a deep breath as he sets his pen down, then leans back in his chair, cracking his knuckles and stretching his back. He arches like a cat, making the most of his lean, long form as he twists and rises from his seat. His grace is so fluid and fast, I almost miss him rising.

Until he’s standing before us, beaming at me.

“Well, it’s finished. You have a fascinating set of documents here. Though L?rke and I translated them, we can’t make heads or tails of most of them. One document is a genealogy scroll, and wasn’t actually written in code, just an old Bone Magic dialect. And most of the documents read like recipes—add a thimbleful of this, and a pinch of that… and voila! Magic.”

“The woman who wrote these did masterful work.” L?rke comes to us, having drifted away from my side in the past hours as she worked with Mikkel. “She was an ingenious inventor with Blood Dragon magic. All of her runic designs, spell recipes, and such are completely unique—not things Mikkel and I have seen replicated anywhere, down through the centuries. She was a Bloodwalker; she worked with Blood and Bone magic, both. And she wove them together in brilliant, and almost insane ways… to create what she did.”

“The Black Dragon,” I say, as we finally get a new lead on that monstrosity, grateful for the twins’ help.

“She called it The Dragon of All Souls .” Mikkel lifts an eyebrow at me now. “Because it took several souls to help her create it.”

“Explain,” Bjorn says with a dark frown.

“See here.” L?rke indicates a certain passage on one vellum from a codex now, then the corresponding text on the computer as she scrolls back a bit. “This passage talks about the donation of many souls, to create the Dragon , then goes on to catalogue the magical process by which that was done. From your ancestor’s words, Mikkel and I understand those initial drakes and drakainas who were chosen to create the Dragon donated themselves to it, to give it life.”

“Donated, how?” Strom asks now as he raises an eyebrow at L?rke, realizing as I do that the process of creating the Black Dragon was a bit more sinister than we imagined.

“Bodies, hearts, and souls.” Mikkel jumps in now as he taps on the scroll. “She’s pretty clear right here that the rituals she devised accepted and imbued her new creation with the blood, bones, and souls of those who were chosen. They freely gave their lives; offered themselves up as sacrifices to the thing she was creating. To give it their flesh, blood, and life… melding All Souls into one—inside the beast.”

“Holy shit.” I blink, as a dark sensation floods me to know what my ancestor was doing when she created that thing. “That’s like… Frankensteining a dragon. Only using not just the flesh, bones, and blood of what was donated to create it, but taking their souls, as well.”

“Binding them into the creature.” L?rke nods as her fierce gaze holds me. “So their souls would never return to the Ancestors, but be stuck in that thing, powering it.”

“Forever.” I breathe now, horrified at what my ancestor did. I finally understand why she repented so much when it went amok, and tried to kill it. “Those souls she bound into the creature would never return to our people. They would never cross the Veil into the Void and return to the Ancestors, who are their true home. They would be in limbo forever.”

“Or at least, until that thing could be put down. At last,” Bjorn growls, fierce.

“We owe it to them to break the cycle. Those lost souls trapped inside the creature…” Strom says now as he ponders this new, horrific development. “We’re not just protecting our people from that thing now, trying to bring it down, but we have a duty to those who went before. Those who didn’t know they would be trapped in that thing for all eternity. And suffer—endlessly.”

“Apparently, they knew what they were in for.” Mikkel clears his throat now as he taps another section of the scroll. “She says plainly here that she informed each one of them of their eternal soul’s destiny before accepting them as a donor for her Dragon.”

“And they did it anyway,” I say now, horrified. “Gods. How awful was this war of the ancients, that all those Bone Mages would agree to put their eternal souls in limbo forever, just to stop what was happening?”

“Terrible, from all our ancestors’ stories,” L?rke says now, her voice quiet. “The Bone Mages were being wiped out completely, so they did something even more complete… to have a chance at fighting back.”

“Except the Black Dragon got away from them and began to wipe everybody out.” Bjorn snorts now, caustic. “How many Bone Mages committed their souls to this thing?”

“Thirteen,” Mikkel says at once. “Though… there was the possibility for an additional five, if things ever went badly.”

“The Black Dragon Five,” I say, as that part of the story makes sense now. “They created the creature and wielded it with their Thirteen donated souls already inside it. They kept room somehow for their own magic, though… if things ever began to go wrong.”

“Like a failsafe.” Strom frowns. “In case they ever lost control of it.”

“Which they did,” Bjorn grumps, as he crosses his arms over his chest. “From the information we’ve gotten so far, it sounds like the Five fought it, but they lost to it after it gained its own mind and will. Aesa and her group finally brought it down—the original Black Dragon Knights. Though it took nearly all their lives to do it.”

“A deep conundrum.” Mikkel’s gaze pins me. “But how does this information help you track it or bring it down?”

“I don’t know yet.” I chew my lip as I ponder everything we’ve discovered, thanks to the twin’s help. I hold out my phone now to L?rke. “Can you download everything you’ve translated and put it on this?”

“I’ll do you one better.” Leaning over, L?rke taps through a few screens on her laptop, then hits enter. At once, my phone dings as a text message pops up on it with a link. “Magically bioencrypted link.” She glances at me with a tight smile. “The three of you will have to scan your biometrics and magic on this phone app to unlock it,” another link dings through as she sends it, “and it’ll take all three of you to do it. But you can access the document anywhere, as long as you three are together. You’re welcome.”

“Thanks,” I say now, impressed by L?rke’s security measures.

A life I once led, in my position as head of security at the Red Letter Hotel Paris.

“So. We’ve decrypted your little project for you to read through at your leisure.” Mikkel faces us, clapping his hands briskly. “Now it’s time for some turnabout is fair play . Rikyava, I do believe you and I already tried to connect to get my memories back through your silver stone and it was disastrous. I suggest L?rke try now, so we can get our missing memories returned. And then we’ll fuck up this red-headed woman who banished them from us. Probably Alfhild… though we’re uncertain about that still. Shall we get started?”

As Mikkel’s dark gaze pins me, and L?rke looks at me as well, I know it’s going to be a very long night. Because I can feel with my dragon senses that the night is over and the sun is already rising, somewhere beyond the club’s vaults.

But Mikkel and L?rke are creatures of the night; they probably don’t even wake until the sun sets. This is all par for the course for them, staying up until sunrise. For me and my mates, however, it’s going to be an endless night. I nod, then gesture us back to the couches.

Ready to get started, though I have no idea what’s going to happen next.