Free Where Sleeping Dragons Lie (Skeleton Key) by Cristina Rayne, Skeleton Key

to crumble after another crash shook the walls around them. Briana let
go of the key and cried out in alarm as she began to fall down into a huge
crack that had formed between the stones under her right foot. Taron grabbed
her left arm and jerked her back flush against his front.
    “Turn it now !” he
shouted.
    Briana grabbed for the
skeleton head sticking out of the lock and gave it a sharp turn, half-afraid
that she would break it. A loud click sounded out amidst the cracking
and rumbling of the castle being demolished around them by a rampaging stone
dragon, echoing louder than was natural. It was a reverberation she swore she
could feel in her very bones.
    Then Taron all but
shoved her against the door just as she turned the doorknob, his body heavy at
her back, and before she knew what was happening, they were both falling
forward onto a red and black woven rug littered with strange symbols, Taron
landing onto her back.
    Her head swimming with a
sense of vertigo, Briana tried to make sense of her surroundings. Her first
instinct was to panic. Crap, did the key not work? Her next was to panic for a
completely different reason. What if the key did work?
    She had never intended
to follow Taron across the threshold into his world. In fact, she had never
even gotten past the thought of opening the portal, much less how she expected
to get back home from a country she had entered without a passport or going
through customs.
    Briana instantly froze
when the blade of a sword appeared mere inches from her nose and a deep voice
spat out a string of unintelligible words above her, angrily. Then Taron was
shouting urgently near her ear in some weird, guttural language, and suddenly
her vision was flooded by several pairs of darkly-clothed legs rushing towards
them.
    “Taron!” she cried out
in alarm, wondering what the hell was going on, wondering if she was about to
die.
    The weight on her back
vanished, and Briana suddenly found herself in Taron’s arms again, her back
pressing into his front. His arms were steel bands around her waist as though
he was afraid she was going to dash away.
    “It’s all right,” he
said into her hair just as she finally got a good look at her surroundings.
    Briana gasped as she
realized that they were in a dimly lit room with gray, stone walls. The only
illumination came from a series of blazing torches that cast shadows over the
bed they encircled, as well as over the bodies of at least a couple dozen
black-haired men and women dressed in identical black tunics with thick red
threading along the cuffs and seams that were surrounding Taron and her. Most
held swords, but a few were aiming a wooden, crossbow-like weapon directly at
them.
    “Uh—what part of this
picture is all right?” she hissed.
    “Everything,” Taron
replied in a strange tone. Then he let out a joyous whoop before she could even
open her mouth to reply and tightened his arms around her in a back-breaking
hug. “After two centuries of exile, I’m finally home .”

CHAPTER TEN
     
     
    Briana had known before
she craned her neck over her shoulder so fast that her neck popped loudly that
she was completely and utterly screwed.
    The staircase that
descended into an eerie gloom from the threshold of the door she and Taron had
just fallen through just confirmed it, if not the fact that an unnerving
silence had replaced the sound of a castle being destroyed by a pissed off
stone dragon. She could hear her own breathing more keenly than she ever could
before, short, gasping, and panicky, while her heart was beating fast
enough to send her into cardiac arrest.
    Shit .
    “It’s there, right?” she
whispered. “The key—it’s still there in the keyhole, right?”
    She felt Taron stiffen
against her, before he gave her another squeeze around the middle, this one
reassuring. “It is.”
    Briana let out the
breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and sagged with relief in his arms.
The key was still there. Maybe she