The Jarl snaps his fingers—and a Bloodlance of his own spontaneous make thrusts right through Mikkel’s right eye. I feel Mikkel’s scream; I feel how he shifts down fast to heal it with everything he’s got left.
Still, the view I see from that eye is filmy and indistinct as I find myself down on my knees in my knot of drakes, my hand clapped to my eye as I shriek and shriek, as well. Because somehow, that last Bloodlance of the Jarl’s speared not just Mikkel—but went right through his power and flesh, into our Bloodbond.
I got the brunt of it, as I fight to see now through my own watering eyes. I blink away hard tears as the Jarl of Copenhagen leans in, staring deeply into Mikkel’s eyes now. Jarl Alexander Christensen looks beyond my Bloodmate—seeing me, somehow, on the other side of our connection.
And smiling the most terrible, cat-got-the-cream smile I’ve ever seen.
“Dungeons.” Jarl Christensen snaps his fingers as he points to both Mikkel and the unconscious Lærke. “Let his Bloodwalker come to me to get him back. And if you do not, Bloodwalker,” he addresses me now, as he seizes Mikkel’s defiant chin in his iron-strong fingers, “I will execute them both, these unruly Thorsen twins. You have three days. And trust me… I will make their lives a living hell for every extra minute they spend in my palace, for their presumption in attacking me. Come and steal them back, if you can. But if you cannot… then their lives end, and not before I make them suffer.”
As Jarl Christensen snaps his fingers again, I feel one lastBloodlance skewer Mikkel right through the gut. Then he’s out, fully unconscious, as terror like I’ve never known shudders all through me.
Because I know what a demon of a dragon like the Jarl of Copenhagen will do to Lærke and my mate, and I also know that every extra minute we delay in rescuing them will cost them.
Far more than they’d ever hoped to pay.
20
REMEMBER
Time is not on our side as Bjorn, Ström, Baldur, and I roar through Copenhagen at night on our Ducatis. Though the midnight city in the Twilight Realm is beautiful, I can’t enjoy it, as we dodge and weave through the brightly lit Blood Dragon old town now, heading towards our destination.
We’ve barely finalized a plan with Emil Beck a half hour ago, to get Mikkel and Lærke back from Jarl Alexander Christensen. We’ve hardly rested or eaten all day, working in shifts to round up the twins’ scattered people and summon Emil’s own allies for an attack.
An attack can’t happen, however, unless we can get into Amalienborg Palace, the Jarl’s personal residence. And that’s far from easy, as we zoom through the city’s southeastern center tonight, on a mission.
As we roar along the nighttime cobbled streets, all of us are blazes of furious intent, zipping on our crotch rockets through the tight twists and turns. We’ve left our belongings and the lockbox of items fromUnhaemmertenback at Emil’s hotel, well-guarded inside one of his vaults, because we need to be fast and unencumbered tonight as we give the Jarl of Copenhagen an attack he won’t soon forget.
Our plan includes an attack, though that part’s just a ruse. The actual mission is to get quickly and quietly into the deepest dungeons of the palace, where Mikkel and Lærke are most likely being held.
And get them the fuck out—as Emil mounts a front-door distraction the Jarl won’t be able to ignore.
There’s just one problem we have to navigate first, however; the legacy of the heinous, and now quite dead, Alfhild Fey. After talking to Ström, who told us Alfhild had her own ways of getting into the Jarl’s palace, secret ways she would use to steal powerful items from him from time to time, we knew this would be the center of our plan.
Tonight, we have to get in through Alfhild’s secret ways, get Mikkel and Lærke, then get the fuck out by her same secret passages as Emil hammers the palace’s front, distracting the Jarl and all his guards.
We’re hot on the trail of where we need to go now to get our vicious Thorsens back. Because like hell am I leaving them in the Copenhagen Jarl’s clutches, as I feel Mikkel get skewered anew by the latest terrible lance of pain as his guards torture him.
Mikkel’s been through hell over the past twelve hours, as his captors ruin him and make him writhe. The Jarl’s not even doing it; he doesn’t care that he’s caught the Thorsens and doesn’t need to gloat.
He’s simply letting his underlings do their worst to my mate and his sister, making sure they keep Mikkel and Lærke barely alive. And I will not rest until I get them back—both of them.
I set my jaw against more searing pain now, ripping right through my own body, thanks to Mikkel’s and my connection. It’s not as strong as what the Jarl did as he thrust that Bloodlance right through Mikkel’s eye to get at me. But it’s enough, as I feel Mikkel get hit now, bludgeoned by merciless Bloodwinds and even fists, as his guards gloat and laugh, punishing him.
He’s trussed up to the catacomb’s ceiling in magic-dampening manacles; Mikkel can’t shift up into his dragon or use his poison. His captors are reveling in it now as they hit him again, making him spit blood.
The only hope we’ve got in this terrible situation is that Lærke shifted up fast the moment they got her down to the dungeons. She sensed her own manacles as the guards tried to clap them on her wrists and ankles; they had a previous set on her from her capture, but they weren’t enough to hold her magnificent power, as she shifted up with an incredible display of magic into her white and green drakaina.
Roaring, she’d spewed caustic acid everywhere she looked. It’s perhaps the only thing that saved her from the worst rape and torture of her life, as she lies coiled up now and seething in the dungeon.
Rabid with wrath.
The guards have erected a thick wall of spiked Bloodwind and Bloodlances between her and Mikkel now; though she keeps spitting volley after volley of poison at the magical wall surrounding her, and hurling her body-snaring magic at the guards over and over, it has no effect, as the twenty guards in their dungeon make sure her containment stays in place.
She can’t reach Mikkel. And though the wrathful Lærke isn’t able to be touched by the guards right now as her dragon, they can touch her twin to punish her for her insubordination.
They’re making Mikkel pay double, as one guard hammers a Bloodlance right through his groin and Mikkel screams. He passes out and I see no more; only pray that he can somehow heal all the damage, as I rev my Ducati to the max and harden my heart against Copenhagen’s Jarl.
Who is going to pay for all of this—with his death.
