A sudden movement above made her freeze in fear. Her first instinct was to dive below the waves, but she remembered just in time that Heath couldn’t flee to safety that way. With a gasp of relief, she realized that the dragon swooping toward them was Reka. He and his father must have delayed the others somehow because no other forms followed him.
“Heath!” Reka cried, pulling up just above the water line. “Is he alive?”
Merletta nodded. “He’s conscious, but he’s hurt.”
“I will take him to safety,” Reka said, the water rippling under the beat of his powerful wings. “It’s not him they wish to destroy. Flee, Merletta, while you still can. If you remain in Valoria, they will come for you.”
“No, wait.” Heath struggled in Merletta’s grip, but Reka’s talons were already closing around him. “Merletta—”
Merletta didn’t let him finish. “Take him,” she told Reka, relinquishing her hold. She didn’t even stay to see the dragon take off. Turning away from Heath’s helplessly outstretched hand, she dove below the surface and swam as hard as she could toward home.
Chapter Thirty-One
Heath moaned as he rolled over, awareness returning in patches. He was lying on his side on a hard surface. Stinging pain still lanced across his back, and the wind whipped against his face. He could taste salt in the air.
He’d just flown from somewhere with Reka. His memory wasn’t total blackness, but everything was a little hazy.
A burst of flames, the rushing terror of a fall, sudden suffocation, a flash of scales.
“Reka,” he groaned. “Where have you brought me? Where’s Merletta?”
“I’ve brought you to a secluded spot of coastline,” responded his friend’s gravelly voice. “And as far as I am aware, Merletta is fleeing through the water toward her home.”
Heath pushed himself into a sitting position, cradling his pounding head in his hands. “But the triple kingdoms aren’t safe for her,” he protested. “She can’t go back there.”
“Are they more dangerous than the home of my colony?” Reka asked dryly. “Where half the inhabitants feel a compulsion to reduce her to ash on sight?”
Heath peered up at the dragon. “Why? Why do they hate mermaids so much?”
Reka let out a gusty, smoky sigh. “It is a long tale. One I had not even heard when first I laid eyes on Merletta.”
Heath didn’t push for more answers straight away. His head was throbbing viciously, but he forced himself to focus. The awareness of Merletta that always sat at the back of his mind expanded outward to fill his vision. She was, as Reka had said, swimming hard. She looked exhausted and terrified. But at least she was alive.
“How long since we left Wyvern Islands?” he asked groggily.
“An hour, perhaps two,” Reka said carelessly. “Once I was sure we were not being pursued, I flew slowly, out of concern for your injuries. The bleeding seems to have slowed, but your back is in a sad state.”
“Never mind my back,” Heath said shortly.
But the dragon’s words did remind him of the disastrous circumstances he’d fled in order to pursue Merletta to Wyvern Islands. For a moment he hovered, uncertain. If Reka flew straight over the water, they would easily catch up to Merletta. He had to bring her back. She would get herself killed if she went to the triple kingdoms. If she even made it there, that was—it was a treacherous journey across the open ocean for a solitary mermaid. She wasn’t even armed.
On the other hand…his family tugged at his mind, igniting his guilt over the way he’d ignored everything these past few months. Did Laura even know her children were about to be taken away from her? What would be the consequences of his defiance of King Matlock, and his humiliating public punishment?
“I need to go home,” he said reluctantly. “Back to Bexley Manor.”
“Very well.”
In his usual delightful way, Reka asked no questions. He just lifted Heath gently in his talons, taking to the sky much more slowly than usual. Even so, agony ripped across Heath’s wounds as they sped through the air.
Relief washed over him when Bexley Manor finally came into view. Within minutes, Reka set him down in the courtyard, and Heath let himself drop to his knees. The dragon’s approach had sparked a flurry of activity from passing servants, and soon Heath found himself engulfed not only by his mother, but his grandmother.
“Grandmother?” he said, confused, as they helped him inside out of the brisk air. “Aren’t you in Bryford?”
He stumbled as he spoke. Now that the flight was over, and his destination reached, he hardly had the strength to keep moving. The open wounds on his back felt like they were on fire, and every inch of him throbbed from his painful fall from the cliff into the water. His head was spinning, and it was with relief that he felt stronger arms go around him, and let himself slump.
“You’re in a state.” It wasn’t his father’s voice, as Heath had expected, but his grandfather’s, vibrating with an anger he’d never heard from the older man.
“We came straight here when you disappeared with that dragon of yours,” Heath’s grandmother explained, her voice tight. “We didn’t know where else to look for you, and we thought your family needed to be told what had happened.”