Dragon 6 Chapter 25 (Patreon)

I woke up with a groan.

“There he is.” Helena patted my face. “Wake up. We have questions.”

I cracked open an eye to see all of them standing around me amid the jungle. “Yeah, what questions?”

“We were all absorbed into the plant thing and came out into an area all together, but you weren’t there. Then the walls collapsed on us, and we were all brought out here with you. At first, I thought we were being punished for little miss stabby over here going to town.” Polydora shot Helena a look, but seemed to get no apology from the nephilim.

I held my head, feeling hungover. “Makes sense.”

“Well, it doesn’t to us. What the hell happened in there?” Trina put her hands on her hips.

“I… I think I made a deal with the devil,” I replied as Evelyn helped me to a sitting position. Her every touch was suddenly sending a blaze of pleasure through my nerves, different than anything before.

That nectar had done a number on me.

“What was the deal?” Maeve crossed her arms.

“Your mother apparently took power from something she shouldn’t have, and now The Dreamer is trying to kill her so that the balance is restored. For your mother to be allowed to live, we have to break the bond between her and something in the Underworld.”

Maeve hissed. “That is not good.”

“Understatement. It is bad enough that The Dreamer was trying to kill her.” I shook my head, wondering how to tell them the rest of the deal.

“There’s more.” Trina frowned at me.

“Yeah. She wants me to mate Summer and Ikta to keep the balance among the fae.” I paused and waited, but they all looked at me strangely. “Think what happens if I start giving Maeve and Evelyn dragon daughters that join the Winter fae’s front lines.” Which was far more likely now that I’d had a sip of that nectar. Though, I was going to keep that bit quiet for now.

“Oh.” All of them but Helena started to understand.

“So, you are going to run around claiming more.” The nephilim rolled her eyes, but I could see a little pang of jealousy behind them.

“First, we need to deal with Winter’s connection to the Underworld. And we’re going to go to T for some guidance. Which means a lot of traveling and time.… unless…” I felt a headache coming on as I realized my best option.

“Unless what?” Regina asked.

I rubbed at my forehead. “Unless I ask for help from a certain fae queen that happens to be really great about getting around. Ikta,” I clarified for everyone present.

Maeve’s eyes went wide. “Is that wise?”

“It's my best shot to get this done and not piss off all my beautiful mates for missing a wedding.” I sighed. “Come on.” I got moving.

Ikta had a penchant for showing up when I least needed her. Maybe she’d finally show up when I did.

We passed a pool of nymphs and I stopped. “Hello, nymphs, I’m Zach Pendragon and I’m looking for Ikta, The Spider Queen. Any idea where I might find her?”

When they turned to look at me, I felt like I was falling into their soulful eyes. I had to forcibly pull my mind back in place.

“No. But if you join us, I’m sure one of us could go run and get her,” the nymph said sweetly.

Helena grunted. “Like they offered a way to The Dreamer. They’ll do anything for a little roll in the gold.”

“Oh, you are using the term now?” Poly teased Helena.

“It’s catchy.” She crossed her arms defensively.

Rather than join the nymphs, I continued on. Ikta was well connected to them, and I just hoped that if I paused at each of the nymph pools to spread the word, Ikta would find me sooner or later.

***

We walked for about an hour, passing messages among the nymphs. Until, when I stopped a pool of nymphs, Ikta was ‘casually’ among them.

“Oh, my sweet Dragon King, have you come to enjoy the fruits of the Wilds?” She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

“As a matter of fact, I have.” My words made Ikta do a double take, and her brows pinch together before a wave of magic passed over my group.

“You are real.” She sounded surprised.

I sat down near her pool. “Real, and I come with an offer. I’d like for you to mate with me.”

Ikta got serious and pulled herself out of the pool. Her dress parted down the front, showing off her two pale mounds and her purple dress dripped down to the ground.

I evaluated her differently than before. She’d always been an adversary, or at least, somebody I couldn’t trust. And she was definitely crazy and unpredictable.

But now, as I began to consider her a future mate, it shifted things a bit. I took her in with a different frame of mind. And my body couldn’t help but notice her stunning beauty. She swayed out of the water, her dress trailing behind her.

She eyed me, seeming to try to figure out what I was up to with my statements. She didn’t know about my deal with The Dreamer, and I could use that to my advantage.

“I need your help to travel quickly to Philly, and then elsewhere. The Dreamer gave me a task in order to free Winter. I know there is little you want from me other than my whelps, so I am here to bargain,” I laid out what I wanted.

“A month of you, me, and a pool full of nymphs,” Ikta replied quickly with a smile that both enticed and sent a shiver down my spine.

“Two weeks of me, you, and a pool full of your nymphs, at the time of my choosing within the next… let’s say a year and a half?” I smiled internally, the two coinciding well. “And in return, you will help me travel as I need it.” I offered something that was well within my existing deal with The Dreamer.

My girls were oddly quiet behind me, waiting for me to strike this deal on my own.

“I am the Queen of the Wilds, not someone to be at your beck and call,” Ikta huffed, but she didn’t say ‘no’. “Every time you call for my help, I get…” She tapped her lips in thought. “I get another day of your choosing.”

I blew out a breath as if she was asking a lot from me, but I’d expected her to push much harder. She was closer to accepting than I’d anticipated. “You know as well as I do that given a few days in a pool with you and some nymphs, I will likely end up marking all of you. And any I knock up will likely stick with me longer and get more time anyway.”

“The world needs lots of dragons.” Ikta nodded along with my words. “Your seed will be very strong to make many. Besides, if you attract nymphs like that, you’ll need your own place. They will likely fill the roles of servants; it is just their nature.”

“Their nature?” I frowned and looked over at Evelyn for confirmation.

The nymph shrugged. “We have none of the ambition that consumes humans and fae. We simply want to share pleasure and have children. Don’t judge us by your standards.”

With all of the strangeness in the paranormal world, I was surprised to find I accepted her statement as truth. “Okay.” I turned back to Ikta. “You have a deal.” I held out my hand.

Ikta grinned wide and grabbed my hand quickly, holding my forearm with the other. “Then it’s a deal. Where do you want to go?” Her touch sent tingles through me.

“To a nursing home in Philly. Once we’re there, we will go wherever T tells us to go, but it will be within the Underworld,” I explained.

Ikta’s grin faded a bit. “The Underworld? Why? I can only bring you to the entrance if you know where it is.”

“Because Winter apparently got some power from there, and we need to sever its connection to her. Otherwise, The Dreamer will continue to attempt to kill her.”

Ikta waffled her head for a moment. “Fine. Picture the nursing home.”

I thought about the place where T lived, and she put a hand to my head before her fingers drew a circle in the air. The circle expanded right into the parking lot, just behind the shrubs.

“Come on.” I didn’t have time to deal with the risk she just posed by opening a portal in the city.

“Bye! We look forward to you joining us.” The nymphs in the pool waved their fingers at me.

Marching through the portal, the others came behind me quickly and we walked into the parking lot and into the nursing home.

“Oh wow. More cosplayers,” the nurse commented, looking at Helena and Maeve who were not hiding their natures at present.

Trina coughed and shot both of them a look.

Evelyn, however, was a drop-dead sexy assistant once again. “Yes, the convention this week is great. But I thought I’d stop in to visit my grandfather.”

I went with the cover up she provided, happy to not deal with more questions. “We know the way.”

“Just sign in.” The nurse paid us no more attention as I scribbled down a fake name on the booklet and continued through the nursing home.

T’s room was like any other. I knocked before opening it.

“Who?” He turned from the TV, sitting in a rocker.

T looked like an old man with one foot in the grave. He had bushy eyebrows that nearly hid his eyes and long, white hair. His skin was so pale, I wasn’t sure what color it had been originally. And he wore a baggy robe that hid what I expected was an almost skeletal frame.

But T was tall. As he stood, he towered over the group, save for me.

“If it isn’t my favorite customer.” He pulled out a pair of scissors. “Come to get your haircut?”

“No.”

“Nails trimmed?” He pulled out some clippers.

“No. I need some help. We need to go to the Underworld. I was told you had some relation to it.” I tried to hurry everything along, not feeling the need to explain it all.

The rest of our group had piled into the room behind me, and it was feeling more than a little cramped.

T groaned and sat back down. Though, I figured it was all an act. The man was made immortal when he became a lich.

“I would rather not go back there.”

“At least take us?” I asked.

T’s brows pinched down, but otherwise, there was no movement from him. “Do you know why I became a lich?”

“Because the Church had invaded your lands, and you wanted to screw them over,” I restated what I knew. I remembered the story from Morgana of his sweep through Spain to take down the Church.

“No,” T snapped. “Because I was a fool wanting more power to sate my anger. The Underworld is not a place to stroll casually. More so, the location is guarded.”

Given all the Greek lore, I threw out, “By a three-headed dog?”

“Precisely.” T nodded. “A very powerful and immortal three-headed dog. And not just the un-aging kind of immortality. It will never die; its soul will just continue to escape the land of the dead.”

“Ah,” I said swallowing. “So, how did you do it?”

“Guile and trickery of course. But even then, I did not venture more than a little beyond the gates of the Underworld.” He pulled back his sleeve to show off that he was nothing but skin and bones. “For that, I paid a dear cost for power. But I used that power to save my people, so I do not regret it. Why would you venture there?”

I sighed. “To save the Winter Queen—”

“Fool,” T spat. “She wouldn’t do the same for you.”

I looked towards Maeve who gave a grudging shrug. And I knew he was right. Winter had already left me once to die.

“I’m doing it to save Maeve from having to take the Winter Throne,” I admitted my real reason. “And apparently, my father is down there waiting for me.”

T nodded slowly. “Bahamut is waiting for you?” There was a spark of interest in his eyes.

“According to The Dreamer,” I added. I was working with a lot of half information, but it would just have to be enough. And I trusted T. He’d come through for me before.

“Fine. Come. And don’t tell my daughter that I left. She worries too much.” He pushed himself up out of the rocker.

“Where are we going?” I gestured to Ikta to make a portal.

“Southern tip of Spain. Gibraltar, better known as the Pillars of Hercules, once upon a time.” He stood before the Spider Queen with a frown as his eyes glowed an eerie green. He gazed down at her. “I don’t know you.”

“Before your time.” Ikta grinned. “Young boy.”

T guffawed and then broke out into a full belly laugh. “I haven’t met someone who could call me that in a very long time.”

“This is Ikta, the Spider Queen and Queen of the Fae Wilds,” I introduced her.

She bowed with a flourish as a portal ripped open in front of T’s door. “As you please, my future husband.”

T’s brows rose, and I shrugged it off, stepping through the portal.

Salty air hit my nose first as we stood atop a grassy plain that ended in sheer cliffs, battered by the ocean waves.

The air horn of a tanker blared, and I realized that we were among civilization. To one side of us was a massive harbor and a town wrapped around it, and on the other side was a large city.

“The Underworld is hidden here?” I asked, looking around and feeling like if it was, it would have been found by humanity already.

“Yes, though it is a bit of a climb.” T pointed down the side that held the harbor.

“Can’t Ikta just portal us down there?” I asked.

The Spider Queen wrinkled her nose. “I can get you to the entrance, but no farther. My portals step through Faerie, which touches this plane, but not the Underworld.”

“Down there then. I think.” T squinted at the area.

“Great, a senile, old man leading the way. I’m sure nothing could go wrong,” Helena scowled at T.

“Oh look, a pent-up angel. Don’t bend a wing when you hit that oversized ego of yours,” T snapped back. Just because T was old, didn’t mean he’d lost his wits.

Evelyn held a hand to her mouth as she tried to stop herself from laughing.

“Yo-you.” Helena failed to come up with a retort, and Ikta was already stepping through the next portal.

We all hurried to get away from the angry nephilim.

“You are going to pay for that one,” she promised, seeming to feel the need to say something.

“This way. And maybe you should stuff those wings away. We are going pretty close to that port after all. The blue skin, you two, too.” He looked back at our group and raised an eyebrow at Regina’s outfit, but he made no comment.

Maeve put on a necklace and her skin turned pale, her ears hid themselves under her long silver hair. “Wise.”

“That I am,” T chuckled as he led us through the woods to the base of the cliff. He moved along the side, occasionally poking a few rocks here or there as he moved.

Ikta stepped up close to me. “Does he really know where it is?”

“I heard that,” T grumbled. “It has been a few years. I just have to…” He pried a rock off the cliff, and it tumbled to the ground.

There was nothing behind the rock, but when it hit the ground, it fell right through, causing an illusion to waver and break. Suddenly, we were faced with a hole in the ground.

“There it is.” He smiled. “Be careful on your way down.”

I leaned over the hole, waiting to hear the rock hit the bottom, but no sound returned.

I grew more anxious with every passing moment; nothing echoed back.

“How far down does it go?” I asked.

“We’ll be climbing down for a while. Be careful of the hand holds; they aren’t always very firm.”