“The word on the street is that you are a spy,” the prince continued.
“Where’d you hear that,” the prisoner asked.
“Cillean and his Right Hand are some of my most trusted people. The vampires have always gotten along with the dragons, and Cillean was the first king to support my father taking over the power of all creatures magical even though that office had long been held by the elves and their kind. I trust him absolutely. You, however, have the most suspicious back story of meeting my Alyss according to what Jackie has heard, and I naturally can’t trust someone who just happens to appear at exactly the right time to worm into her life. Obviously I’ve doubted you from the beginning. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?” He stood with his shoulder resting against the doorway, arms loosely crossed as a cocky grin lit his face looking down at the boy still sprawled on the floor.
Darien rolled his eyes. He took a knee and struggled to stand further, turning his face away to hide his embarrassment as he carefully dusted off his knees and backside until he was satisfied all traces of being knocked over had been cleared away. He finally did a deliberate dusting of his hands and stood straight to look the guy in the eyes. “You are so far behind. I don’t know how my being on The Great Road North somehow made your vamp think I was a spy for my kind, but you are completely wrong. I was running away from my kind after they had betrayed me and I was going North to make contact with the Alchemists who have also rebelled against the elders of my people. I’m working against the wizards, not for them,” he added.
“Uh huh. And you’ve never been an agent working for the domed city at any point?”
Darien grinned. “That’s a good question. I was a spy for them, yes. I stayed with Alyss and I tattled on every insignificant thing about her life- what was the harm? She’s the most mundane human I’ve ever met.” His face softened at the thought of her. Then he shrugged. “When I refused to support them in their rebellion plans which would doubtlessly end either in genocide of the other magical races or perhaps in mass enslavement of the mundane humans, they decided to throw me under the bus and use my previous work for them to pin the whole affair on me as a scapegoat.”
Aeron waited, and then flapped his wrist at the guy. “Okay, I’m listening, feel free to go on explaining these rebellion plans to me.”
The wizard gave a cheeky smirk. “I’ll certainly be glad to. If you asked your blood suckers you would have learned that I was planning to come to you after getting a few allies in my court to spill the beans anyways. Of course I may be so stressed by my change in circumstances that I’ve become forgetful, but I feel confident that if I were granted pardon for my previous work and the prince’s seal for safe passage through the lands then I think that would soothe my worries and help keep my memory clear.”
The prince frowned. “I don’t generally respond well to blackmail.”
The human just shrugged. “I’ve lost the only protection I had in this world and I was stopped by your goons before I could reach the only other people I feel sure would help me at all. Now all I have left now is what I know, so I’m definitely not going to give that away for free,” Darien responded. “Besides, for you to be here interrogating me you must somehow be involved in the whole locking me up thing. That helped persuade me to be a little difficult to you.”
Aeron growled, the sound stretching and morphing to the animalistic roar his other form was capable of. The wizard boy just looked him dead on with a bland face, determined to show no reaction. The two looked at each other, sizing up the other, and then stuck out their hands for a handshake.
“They’re planning to force the Ghostworld and Earth to be combined as one place again, and use the chaos and the mundane’s fear to destroy the most powerful of the other races- especially the dragon clans and your father- and enslave the mundane humans,” he said.
The prince frowned at him. “Who is ‘they’?”
The teen grinned again. “Isn’t it obvious who hates you the most? The wizards of course.”
Aeron shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. There are very few wizards, maybe just two hundred. They wouldn’t survive such a war. I know the elders have gotten weak, mentally and magically and even in their strength, but I didn’t think they had become fully stupid yet. Even if they teamed up with the witches they would have a mere five hundred. I have a whole kingdom I could easily crush them with. There has to be something else you didn’t say.”
Darien bared his teeth and gave a hyena cackle. “I thought it was obvious. The wizards are working with their main ally- your brother. At this point every mundane human on the original Earth and every weird creature in this realm are doomed.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Preview of Family Inflamed
PS The Dragon Bites is available for sale now at most ebook distributors as well as kgwilkie.com, which is a great place to go to stay up to date on the latest releases in the Shadeworld series and all her other books.
Read below for a quick sneak peek at one of her other books.
Family Inflamed
You could say my family is a seething nest of snakes all wrapped up in ourselves and pitched so we are hurtling towards the sun. Obviously I’m not the problem.
