Her Dragon Captor (Her Dragon King Duet Book 1): 50 Loving States, North Dakota Pt. 1 Read online

  Her Dragon Captor (Book 1 of the HER DRAGON KING Duet)

  50 Loving States, North Dakota, Pt. 1

  Theodora Taylor

  Contents

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  Part I

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part III

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Also by Theodora Taylor

  About the Author

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  Part I

  “Come they will under Freya’s purple lights in the five-and-thirty winter of our Fenris not yet. An enemy who will kill many of our wolves and give final harm to Olafr’s human. And will they the future of our fenrir and his queen take.”

  ―Sorceress Bera, Her Viking Wolves

  Prologue

  They came underneath a violet sky of dancing lights, winged shadows converging from every direction. Later this collision of charged particles cast off from the sun and the earth’s gaseous atmosphere would come to be known as aurora borealis or the Northern Lights.

  The future etymology of the upright primates mattered little to Damianos back then. But for the rest of his life he would recall how appropriate this plasmatic solar windstorm seemed. How utterly dramatic a background it was for the wrong they would right that morn.

  He and the other drakkon set down in the agreed upon assembling space, a wide expanse of land on the south side of a mountain. The mountain stood between them and the village his horde planned to attack, gargantuan and intimidating. Damianos supposed the sight of it alone might have been enough to turn back their weaker enemies.

  The south face of the mountain was covered in glittering ice and inclined so steeply, the path up could almost be described as vertical. And there weren’t many alternatives to surmounting the monstrous marriage of rock and earth. An angry sea crashed formidable waves into one side the mountain. A dense forest filled with the heat signatures of all manner of predators, stretching as far as even a drakkon eye could see.

  Indeed, the North Wolves had positioned their seat of power well. They’d surrounded themselves with a natural fortress of mountain, forest, and sea. The mountains and forest were nearly insurmountable, while the sea allowed the village’s wolf mutations to easily spot an incoming fleet of enemy ships, well before they had the chance to storm their shores.

  A lesser army would have given up without a fight.

  Fortunately their horde had wings. What was impossible for the second most advanced species on this planet was but a bit of work for them.

  Damianos was the first to arrive but the last to land. He circled above, waiting until there were no more incoming drakkon on the horizon before setting down himself.

  All the world’s drakkon had been called forth to wage this battle, but Damianos picked his father from the others in the horde easily. Only three dark blue drakkon were left in their species after their numbers were so tragically reduced by the Terrible Destroyer. Those remaining drakkon were his father, the Royal Overlord; his cousin, who everyone continued to refer to as the new king several millennia after his unexpected assumption of power, and himself. The Royal Overlord always arrived early and the new king, Damianos noted with one scan of the gathered forces, had not yet shown up.

  He was late. Again.

  It had been the new king’s idea to use one of the Royal Geneticist’s fating portals to take them to a time before the destruction of their planet. The plan had met with great cheer and instant agreement. Yet, after securing their agreement to wage attacks on several North Wolves villages in order to find one of these fating portals, the new king of the drakkon had barely been in contact.

  Damianos was not surprised the new king had failed to show up this morn. Their king had achieved his current position through unexpected inheritance. Before that, he was the prince his brother had ordered Damianos and his father to assassinate, so as to erase any competition for the throne.

  After their planet’s destruction by the Royal Geneticist, the remaining drakkon had let his younger brother assume the mantle. That choice, the Royal Overlord pointed out to his son had been lazy and based purely in tradition. It certainly had nothing to do with any performance metrics. If those had been taken into account, the other drakkon would certainly have chosen Damianos as their new king. For none better exemplified the superiority of their race than his son, a drakkon who’d been named to the most venerable position of Royal Huntmaster when he was little more than a millennia old.

  Before his undeserved ascension, the new king had held two titles: Second Prince and, for the purposes of their mission, Royal Fate Maker. The second title only meant that the former Second Prince was a fating portal specialist, someone who’d spent more time writing lab reports than leading. And that was before he disappeared for many solar rotations, not showing up again until shortly after their planet was destroyed.

  The Royal Fate Maker was no great hunter. Nor was he strong or particularly intelligent outside of his chosen field. And as far as Damianos could discern, the new king had no talent for execution.

  But his cousin and his cousin alone possessed the knowledge required to pass the horde through fating portals that had not been originally assigned to their race. This meant Damianos and the rest of the drakkon would fight this day. And the new king would most likely show up toward the end of battle to issue orders, regarding the portals that he’d hypothesized could issue the members of their castaway horde to the most sexually compatible drakki from their destroyed planet.

  If only our initial plan to assassinate that mostly useless puppet had worked, Damianos thought to himself as his father started delivering mission notes in the new king’s absence. Yes, they’d all be stuck here on this useless planet for the rest of their lives, but Damianos would be the one in charge. Not his unworthy cousin.

  However, this was not the time for emotion. He extinguished those resentful thoughts and did his best to keep his frustration from showing in his flame.

  As his father had told him so often, only strategy and patience would win the throne.

  “We could not have asked for better conditions,” his father declared to the horde in the old language. “This particular tribe of the Terrible Destroyer’s wolf mutations refers to the solar event happening above us as Freya’s lights. They believe they are a sign from one of the gods they created to entertain themselves around their fires. A call for all North Wolves to go forth and mate. For this reason, claiming the village will be the easiest part of our mission. During this time, they divert much of thei
r energy to feasting, drink, and fornication. Most likely they will be so deep in their silly celebrations, the entire village will burn to the ground before it occurs to their warriors to put their penises and plates away, so that they might fight back.”

  Damianos and the other drakkon all exhaled steam with derisive grunts.

  After thousands of years of being stranded on this water planet, they’d all observed how obsessed the upright primates were with food and sex. Drakkon only mated to procreate. And while drakkon had enjoyed hunting on this game planet before their own home was destroyed, eating was considered no more than a required ingestion of needed nutrients.

  However, the upright primates seemed to think of little else, and those two activities were often the impetus for their species’ greatest successes and downfalls alike. And after making his home in the southern Greek peninsula overseen by the Roman Empire for the last few centuries, Damianos had no trouble believing that their horde would find the warriors in the midst of an orgy of feasting and sex, just as his father predicted.

  “Perhaps we should only have a small advance team of warriors attack the village,” Damianos suggested. He flickered his flame, as if the idea was just now occurring to him and hadn’t been discussed with his father the previous night.

  “This is a good idea, Royal Huntmaster,” his father answered, using his son’s formal title and flickering his own flame with surprised delight. “There is no reason to waste our energy with a full battalion.”

  Or share the glory, Damianos silently noted before choosing five other drakkon to accompany him into battle. “The rest will hold their position in the air, in case reinforcements are needed, which they will not be,” he told the horde.

  “We must wait for the new king to approve this strategy,” Hwedo, the Lead Researcher pointed out. He was a dragon of the deepest red and liked to do everything, including choosing their leader, by the old rules. “Don’t you agree, Royal Overlord?”

  The red drakkon’s point played so perfectly into his father’s plan, Damianos had to wonder if it was a sincere question, or if his father had also held a secret conversation with their fussiest comrade last eve.

  “Yes, I agree,” his father answered, his flame burning with benevolent good will. Damianos couldn’t help but admire his father in this moment. Impatience and rage often caused Damianos to lose control of his fire. But his father held his with a firm grip of carefully curated heat signatures. “We shall wait for the king’s arrival and hope he approves of my son’s proposed plan.”

  And so they waited. And waited

  “It is now well past the mutation’s mating hours,” his father observed when their waiting reached the near dawn hour. “We might very well lose the surprise advantage if we don’t attack now. Can we all agree to let my son lead us into battle in place of the former prince.”

  Damianos inwardly commended his father’s use of titles. He used his son’s most intimate designation to remind the other drakkon of his illustrious connection to their mission leader. At the same time, he reminded them of the mere title the new king had held when they’d first arrived on this water planet.

  He’d been just another team member before his older brother, the real King of Drakkon died in the Royal Geneticist’s planet-destroying terrorist attack. A mere fating portal engineer, who’d been officially sent, but more like secretly exiled, to this planet. His mission had been to help construct a fertility portal system for the wolf mutations the Royal Geneticist had created to serve as their hunting dogs.

  Of course, the other drakkon had no idea that Damianos and his father had been secretly assigned the task of killing the king’s younger brother, thus assuring he never returned to their home planet. But somewhere deep inside their flames, they had to understand who the true leaders were meant to be. The Royal Overlord and the Royal Huntmaster, not the missing king.

  It went without saying that the gathered drakkon would all assent to his father’s proposal.

  At least Damianos assumed it did. Unlike his father, he’d never cared for these shows of democracy.

  The fact was it had already been decided that he, the Royal Huntmaster, would command a small squad of drakkon in battle with the wolf mutations. As the fiercest hunter in their horde, who had trained countless wolf mutations and anthros to obey him, he was obviously the best suited to lead the charge. Who cared whether the other drakkon agreed or not? Their spoken accord changed nothing about how events would unfold that morn.

  To prove how little their assent mattered, Damianos launched himself into the sky before any of the drakkon could answer yay or nay. Even if the others continued to stupidly cling to a bloodline order that mattered little now that their numbers had been whittled down from six figures to a mere three, Damianos knew who the true king of the drakkon was.

  Damianos thought of those moments before that battle often since that time. The memories of drakkon are photographic and exact. When he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could once again feel the wind rushing past his scales as he sailed over the mountain. He could still hear the beat of wings behind him. His would-be subjects rushing to catch up.

  He’d been so certain of his place in the world before that battle. He had known without a doubt that he, not his worthless cousin the former prince, would be named King of Drakkon after that day.

  And he’d been right in his prediction.

  Unfortunately, his father had been wrong in his.

  The wolf mutations were not engaged in their mindless sex and feast acts when they descended upon the village.

  They had been armed. And expecting the drakkon who descended upon them.

  The drakkon had been betrayed once again. This time by their new king, who for reasons Damianos still did not understand had allied with the wolf mutations, after sending his own drakkon subjects into a battle that would end in many of their deaths.

  After uncovering the new king’s betrayal, Damianos would indeed become the King of Drakkon. But his father fell that day, his life cut thousands of years short by the sword of the oldest North Wolves prince. And soon after, Damianos was attacked by the youngest wolf prince. By the time Damianos recovered and moved to exact his revenge on his father’s killer, both princes and their sister had disappeared through the fating portals.

  They’d used the drakkon’s own fertility technology to escape his wrath. His rage burned as hot as the forest he set to flame after their departure.

  Then it began to burn cold.

  When he was alive, his father had often scolded Damianos about his impatience and his inability to manage his flame. “If you wish to assume your rightful place as King of Drakkon, you must learn to control that temper of yours.”

  Damianos had tried and failed so many times to honor his father’s directions to manage his flame wisely prior to that tragic day. Ironically, revering his father after his death was how Damianos finally learned patience.

  He bided his time through the following centuries. Torturing the Betrayer King endlessly as he waited for the wolf mutations who’d gotten away to reappear. He knew it was only a matter of patience. For a wolf mutation’s lifespan is but a speck of time in comparison to a drakkon’s.

  Thus he waited. And waited. And waited some more. Carts gave way to cars which gave way to drones. The upright primates’ villages became cities, one of which was located on Mars. And there was talk of going even further now. To the next solar system.

  For their former food now believed they were worthy of forming civilizations on other planets. What hubris. But still Damianos waited.

  Until one day both wolf prince brothers showed up in the North American territories. The fating portal had sent them both to the same mate, with whom they bore two girls. This only made his plans for revenge that much sweeter.

  The only thing better than taking the lives of the two brothers responsible for his father’s death would be also taking the lives of their mate and twin daughters for whom they had crossed centuries to un
ite with.

  But the sister had yet to join them, and the revenge would not be complete without her.

  So proving himself worthy of his father, he continued to wait. His father’s killers grew older as did their daughters. Perhaps they would bear children he would also end before their grandfather’s eyes. Both his desire and thirst for blood grew greater with each rotation of the planet around the sun.

  And then one beautiful day, while standing upon the balcony of his Greek estate, he received the message for which he’d been waiting hundreds of years.

  The sister, Myrna, had arrived at the exact right time. Just as the Ao Quong, the mission’s Lead Field Engineer made a promising breakthrough in his many-century studies of the fating portals Damianos had acquired by one means or another all over the world.

  It would seem that they would soon be able to enact the original plan without the Betrayer King’s help after all.

  After he visited his grisly revenge upon the family responsible for his father’s demise, he would use the Idaho fating portal to travel back in time to the planet The Royal Geneticist destroyed.

  His plan?

  Become King of Drakkon once more. And as for the precocious, over-fertile anthrohominids who’d overrun this planet—he would return them to their rightful state as food for their drakkon hunts.