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Chapter 0724
My father''s voice trailed off at that point. He dropped his head a bit, as though the memories pained him to recount.
"We shared secrets with one another," he said. "Secrets that no one else—not even your mother, Nina-ever discovered."
"But it all went south, didn''t it?" Enzo whispered.
Aldric nodded slowly. "M had a small tribe of her kin; thest of her kind. It was my job to protect them in exchange for M''s expertise. And I failed."
M burst into Aldric''s chambers, the doors swinging outwards in front of her. Her hair was wild, and her eyes glowed like two emeralds. Aldric had gotten used to the dragon''s frazzled appearance, and he went to wave her away.
"I''ll speak with you in a moment"
"No." She stormed forward and mmed her fists on the table, causing Aldric''s werewolf council to jump in unison. Fire flickered on her fingertips; without a word, the others got up and scurried out of the room in fear of the dragon''s strength.
"What the hell, M?" Aldric rose from his chair once they were alone. Another one of M''s episodes, perhaps, he thought. But no-when he saw the tears in her eyes for the first time in twenty years, he knew that something was terribly wrong.
For the first time since Aldric had known M, she sobbed. Openly.
"They killed them all," she said through her choked screams. "I went back to the vige, and they''re all dead. They fucking killed them, Aldric."
"Who?" Aldric ran around the table to meet her. He reached for her shoulders, but she pulled away with a fierce snarl.
"The poachers. And I''ll fucking kill them, too."
The sun was high in the sky by now, but Enzo and I hardly felt the passage of time. My father traced his finger around the rim of his whiskey ss as he spoke.
"Those poachers had been a problem for years," he exined. "Seeing as there were so few dragons left, their scales and especially their eggs-caught quite the price on the market. We staved them off as much as we could, but their undergroundworks ran deep. They got her kin in the end. M would have been killed, too, had she not been visiting my estate."
"So you failed in your end of the deal," I said slowly and deliberately.
Aldric swallowed. "I did. I gotzy, too full of pride. I thought that with the threat of my men on the horizon, the poachers would leave them alone. But they just got better at hiding themselves."
There was a long pause before my father continued. "She kept true to her word," he whispered. "She killed everyst one of those poachers. She found their hideout and spread her fires through the caves in which they hid."
"The obsidian pce," I whispered. "She created it when she burned them all."
"Indeed she did." My father stood and crossed over to the window yet again. "I still remember exactly what she said that day, while the mountain was still smoldering: "Their grave shall be my throne, Aldric. And I shall turn this mountain into my horrid kingdom.""
"And she did just that, didn''t she?" Enzo murmured. "She turned that entire mountain into a ce of unimaginable monstrosities."
Aldric nodded solemnly. "It certainly seems so. I remember watching her walk into that cave mouth, into the fire, and... and I didn''t stop her," he whispered, his voice catching in his throat. "I just let her go. I didn''t even know if she would live."
"So you left her to die?" I asked.
"I did." My father swallowed hard and took a big swig of his whiskey. "And there hasn''t been a day I didn''t regret it. Over the years, I heard whispers of a dragon queen gone mad off the noxious fumes inside the mountain, but..."
"But you never went to her. Not even once." I was standing now without even realizing it. "And now she''s out there with a cult following her every whim."
My father was silent for some time, his hand gripping his whiskey ss so tightly that his knuckles turned white. Then, finally, he knocked back the rest of the amber liquid and mmed his ss down on the windowsill.
"This is my fault," he said. "But I intend to end her reign of terror. And I''d like to recruit the New Peacekeepers for this cause."