Wrong Bond: Your Omega Is Driving Me Crazy novel · Chapter 3 of 32
Chapter 3: The Gate
Linden claims Hoard Law to the riders' faces and Ivor shifts and melts the road with one jet of fire; then Linden's bond mark splits and bleeds.
Ivor came out of the hoard-hall pulling his braid over his shoulder.
He hadn't put on a shirt.
There were scars down both his forearms, old pale burns.
"Stay inside," he said.
"No."
"That wasn't a question."
"They're shouting for me." Linden pulled the coat tighter. "If I hide in your bedroom, every wolf in Blackmere will say I'm hiding in your bedroom."
Ivor looked at him for a long second.
"You care what wolves say?"
"I care what they say about my Hollow."
Ivor sighed through his nose.
A little smoke came out with it.
"Fine," he said. "Walk beside me. Not in front."
The gate stood open, the way it always did.
Below it, the road dropped away in a long white curve between the rocks.
Six riders sat their horses in the snow.
Linden knew every one of them.
He had cooked for them for three years. He'd stitched the big one's scalp after a dog fight.
That one was the man who'd shouted.
He grinned when he saw Linden.
"There he is," the rider said. "The Alpha's laundry."
The others laughed.
Linden's face burned.
He walked out onto the top step and kept his chin up.
"I'm not coming down," he said.
"You'll come down if we drag you down."
"You can't. I claimed the Hoard Law last night." Linden made his voice carry. "I walked into the dragon's hall on my own feet, and he accepted me. I belong to Grayle Peak now. No clan can take me out of it."
There was a beat of silence.
Then all six of them laughed so hard their horses danced.
"The Hoard Law," the big one wheezed. "It's a kits' story, fox."
"It's the oldest law in the Northmark."
"It's a bedtime story." He pointed his riding crop at Ivor. "And that's a skinny old man with goat horns who hasn't come down this mountain in ten years. The Alpha says the dragon's half dead. Says he couldn't light a candle."
Beside Linden, Ivor didn't move.
"Last chance," Ivor said mildly. "Turn your horses around."
"Or what, grandfather?"
Ivor sighed again.
"Step back, Linden," he said.
He'd never said Linden's name before.
Linden didn't know he knew it.
Linden stepped back.
Ivor walked down two steps, into the open, and rolled his shoulders.
Then he wasn't a man anymore.
It happened.
His back went up and up, and his arms went long, and the silver of his hair spread out and hardened into scales.
Wings cracked open.
The horses screamed.
The dragon was the size of Blackmere's great hall.
His scales were silver-grey, dull at the edges.
His gold eyes were the same eyes.
He swung his head down toward the riders.
The big one's crop fell into the snow.
Ivor opened his jaws.
Linden felt the heat before he saw it, a dry blast that stung his face from forty feet away.
Then the fire came.
It wasn't red.
It was gold, a single roaring jet as thick as a tree trunk, and Ivor put it straight down the middle of the road.
The snow didn't melt.
It vanished.
The road beneath it ran like wax and glowed orange, a river of molten rock between the riders and the gate.
Every horse bolted at once.
The riders didn't even try to hold them.
Linden watched six Blackmere wolves go down the mountain at a flat gallop, clinging on, one of them without a saddle.
He laughed.
He couldn't help it.
It came up out of him, loud and ugly, and he clapped his hand over his mouth.
The dragon turned his head and looked at him with one huge gold eye.
Then he shrank.
It took longer than going up.
When it was done, Ivor was kneeling on the step in the snow, bare to the waist, breathing hard.
His shoulders were shaking.
Linden ran down to him.
"Are you hurt?"
"No." Ivor pushed himself up with one hand. "Old. Stiff. Cold."
His skin was grey under the brown, and there was sweat on his temples in the freezing air.
Linden put the coat back around his shoulders.
Ivor let him.
"You laughed," Ivor said.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Nobody's laughed up here in ten years." He looked down the road at the glowing scar he'd made. "They'll tell Osric I'm not dead after all."
"Good."
"Not good. Now he'll be angry instead of smug."
"He's always angry."
Ivor almost smiled.
The cook was standing in the gate with a ladle in her hand.
The stableman was behind her holding a pitchfork.
"Well," the cook said. "That's the road gone till spring."
"They can climb," Ivor said.
"They won't."
They went back inside, the three of them grumbling about the road and the cold and the horses, and Linden walking a little behind, giddy.
Six riders had come to drag him home.
They had left on their knees, more or less.
Halfway down the long corridor, the back of Linden's neck went wet.
He touched it.
His fingers came away red.
The mark Osric had put on him three years ago had split open down the middle.
Blood was running under his collar.
A renounced mark was supposed to fester for weeks before it broke.
It hadn't been two days.
The corridor tipped sideways.
The last thing Linden saw was Ivor turning, and the gold in his eyes going wide.
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