Free Twin Passions: 3 by Lora Leigh Page B

their innermost thoughts with a magick too weak to aid them at the moment anyway.
    Torran closed his eyes and placed his forearm over them once again with a snarl of fury as Rhydan cursed the dragon. Because there was nothing they could do to stop the invasion, no way to counter the magick that slipped through their minds.
    When it was over, Torran lowered his arm and stared up at the cavernous ceiling, gaze narrowed, his awareness of his brother’s curses still drifting through his senses.
    “Leave off the curses you call down from your bedamned Sentinel Select.” Garron’s blasphemy had them both staring at him in surprise now.
    The mockery that filled the dragon was far less threatening now, but the superiority was enough to make Torran wish the dragon had just turned them into baked Wizards rather than mere weakened ones.
    “Your Guardians of the Lands are no less conniving than their ancestors were,” Garron sighed as he crossed his massive arms—forelegs? Torran wasn’t certain which—over his chest and regarded them with eyes that glittered no less with that blood-red hue of death and rage.
    “What mean you, dragon?” It was Rhydan who dared to voice the question with a growl of anger.
    “What mean I?” The smile that curled about the dragon’s lips was one of sarcasm and certain knowledge. “I mean, my erstwhile Wizards, that it was the Veressi who caused the Sorceresses to run across ice-capped mountains and fiery lakes to escape the Wizards a millennium ago. And now they send you to near certain death at this time in their efforts to once again steal the freedoms of women whose strength and purity of heart will always outshine their less-than-pure, much-too-darkened magicks.”
    “Our Guardians are no practitioners of dark magick, dragon.” Torran forced himself to sit up at this insult. “Neither the gods nor the magick of the land itself would allow such a travesty.”
    Garron rolled his eyes at the protest. “Your Wizards are manipulating dracas without honor—”
    If he’d intended to say more, he hadn’t the chance. Without fanfare, with no flames, no steam, no hisses or crackles of scales, the Veressi arrived.
    One moment the cavern was free of the heavy magick the Veressi carried with them, and the next moment, it filled the stone-enclosed area with stifling force.
    “Garron, do you not tire of baiting us?” Was it Ruine or Raize? Only the gods could tell the two apart for certain.
    “Never, Ruine,” Garron drawled with mockery as thick as the frightful magick the two possessed as he evidently had no problem identifying them. “Where is my Queen Amoria and her heir?”
    “Safe.”
    Steam issued from nostrils that suddenly flared larger and eyes glittered like orbs of fire as the dragon rose by several feet. A fierce and blazing magick filled the creature, suddenly heavier, more stifling than at any time the Veressi had displayed their rage.
    “Should we leave?” Ruine questioned.
    There was no mockery. No threat. It was a simple question based on the threat the dragon displayed.
    “Think you can escape me?” Garron hissed between clenched, sharpened teeth. “Even the gods cannot hide from me.”
    “Yet you have not found your queen nor your heir,” Raize pointed out as he leaned against the wall. “Neither answer to your call, nor can you sense their magick.”
    Garron’s chuckle wasn’t a sound of amusement. “And only the gods can shelter a presence so well. Tell me, Wizards, what did the dark one Dar’el promise you in exchange for your treason against the Select?”
    The tension that filled the Veressi was nothing less than a display of the highest offense for the insult Garron had paid them.
    “Or what did the Select warn us would pass should we not do as they bid?” Ruine asked as both Torran and Rhydan came to instant alert and Garron seemed to still with a sudden shocking alertness.
    Magick clashed with magick in a silent battle as Garron suddenly focused on