The Adversary: A Novella of the Elder Races Read online

  From New York Times bestselling author Thea Harrison comes the explosive conclusion to The Unseen!

  When Dragos and Pia move to the Other land of Rhyacia, they hope starting a new life will bring safety and freedom to their family, especially their young baby, Niall. And at first their new home seems perfect… but looks are deceiving.

  Beneath Rhyacia’s idyllic façade an ancient, malevolent force lurks, waiting for the right opportunity to break free of its cage. When that opportunity comes, it strikes with devastating accuracy.

  While Dragos has never backed down from a fight, he’s also never encountered an enemy like this one before. How can he fight a foe who doesn’t have a body? A foe who can invade and turn his own mind against him?

  How can Dragos protect his family, when at any moment one of them may become the enemy?

  As Dragos and Pia race against time to fight this unseen menace, they must also acknowledge a terrifying truth—when anyone can become the enemy, no one can be trusted.

  An adversary who can trap the dragon poses a threat to everyone in Rhyacia, and that means no one is safe…

  *** This book does NOT end on a cliffhanger ***

  The Adversary

  Thea Harrison

  The Adversary

  Copyright © 2021 by Teddy Harrison LLC

  ISBN 13: 978-1-947046-33-7

  Kindle Edition

  Cover design by Beti Bup at BetiBup33 Studio Design

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced, scanned or distributed in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Table of Contents

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Look for these titles from Thea Harrison

  Prologue

  (from The Unseen)

  “Your husband is dead,” the imposter spat. His nose had been bloodied and droplets sprayed Pia’s face.

  She didn’t flinch. Instead she leaned closer and stared into his eyes. “If my husband is dead,” she said, “then I have nothing to lose, do I?”

  He started to laugh then convulsed. Briefly—oh so briefly—hot gold flashed in his eyes. Dragos snarled telepathically, Do what you need to do.

  The next minute, Dragos was gone again, and the creature who glared back at her had eyes of amber. It hurt so bad to see him so briefly, yet at the same time triumph swelled. Somehow, somewhere, her mate was still in there.

  And she would do whatever she needed to get him back.

  “This is going to suck really badly for you,” she told the imposter. “Because my husband’s body is incredibly strong, and he can survive a lot of abuse.” Standing, she avoided looking at Liam. She said to the sentinels who ringed them, “Question him. Do whatever it takes.”

  Then she walked away. They moved to close the gap behind her, and Dragos disappeared from view.

  Chapter One

  Walking away from her mate was the hardest thing Pia had ever done. He was still there inside his body, trapped by someone—some thing—that was in there with him.

  Her hands shook and her vision blurred. Onlookers stood scattered in clumps across the beach, staring with fear and puzzlement written across their faces. She couldn’t look at any of them.

  Then something happened behind her. No doubt the sentinels were obeying her order, because Dragos let out a muffled groan.

  No. That wasn’t Dragos. It was the imposter, the thief of everything.

  It wasn’t Dragos.

  But, oh gods, it sure sounded like him.

  The Wyr were two-natured, human—or at least human-like—and animal, and the animal that lived inside her turned savage, clawing at her to whirl and attack those who dared threaten and hurt her mate. It didn’t understand logic or strategy, or that Dragos was presently infected by a dangerous entity.

  After a brief struggle for control, she broke and ran as fast as she could away from the scene.

  Eva called out from behind her. “Pia—”

  “Not now!” In case anyone chose to disregard her, she picked up speed until she flew across the sand.

  Soon she left the lights and sounds of the people behind, and the moon lit her way. There were winged Wyr who were faster than Pia when they took to the air, but nothing on land could catch her when she put her heart and soul into it—as she did now, trying to outrun the horror of that muffled groan.

  She had no idea where her baby had been taken. Niall had been hidden away for his own safety, along with the other children in the settlement.

  She had no idea how to help her mate. All she could do was run while her heart felt like it was tearing into pieces. When she was far enough away from everybody, she turned from the beach and plunged into the forest. There, surrounded by intense solitude, she burst out of her human form and let her animal take control as it tried to outrace a reality that felt like a mortal wound.

  Finally, exhaustion helped quench the instincts raging through her body, allowing rational thought to surface again.

  Get yourself under control, fool, she told herself. He’s not dead. Where there’s life, there’s hope. You can get him back. You will get him back.

  She stumbled to a halt at the edge of an empty, moonlit clearing, head hung low and sides heaving.

  This wasn’t the lowest part of her life. She’d been desperate and overcome with despair more than once. But this ranked pretty far down there, and if she wasn’t quite as despairing as she had been at other difficult times, the terror of the present moment more than made up for it.

  Multiple voices sounded nearby, their clarion tones sculpted by a foreign language.

  Panic slammed her. Nobody had ever discovered her in her Wyr form before. Startled into rearing, she looked around wildly for the threat. All her life she had been so careful. She could have sworn she’d been careful this time, but she must have miscalculated badly.

  The clearing was no longer empty. A strange creature stood several yards away. It stood as tall as Dragos but was far more slender, and it was so radiant that Pia had to squint to look at it. It was winged—not just with two wings but with many that swirled around its figure like white, undulating flames—and its eyes were piercing with unearthly radiance.

  All the sick horror from the day fell away, to be replaced with wonder. Even though she had never seen a creature like this with such clarity before, she recognized it immediately.

  It had to be one of the creatures that had been haunting the settlement, nicknamed the unseen. No longer barely perceived or translucent, this one was fully present and as grounded in the clearing as she was. Was it really a seraph, one of the mythical creatures that Bel had described from Elven lore?

  Her fight or flight imperative tried to take control again. Nobody but Dragos, Liam and Niall, and the gryphons had ever seen her in her Wyr form. There were others who knew wha
t kind of creature she was, far too many others for keeping such a dangerous secret safe, and she knew that sometimes that fact kept Dragos up at night.

  But nobody else had actually seen her.

  Despite her impulse to bolt from the clearing, the creature’s noble, inhuman face seemed so… what was the word? Not gentle. It seemed too stern to be gentle. But it did seem, somehow, to be kind, and Pia’s panic couldn’t quite take hold.

  It spoke, and multiple voices sounded clear like deep bells rung from a high mountain. While she couldn’t understand the language, all the voices said the same thing.

  It walked toward her, sweeping its many wings back and holding out empty hands as if in offering or in supplication. Even though its posture was non-aggressive, she took a wary step back. It looked like it might want to….

  To pet her?

  Umm, that would be a hard pass. She was no tame pet to meekly succumb to a stranger’s ministrations. With a snort, Pia lowered her horn in warning. The creature approached more slowly and softened its speech. How could so many voices come from a single throat? She stamped the ground and retreated further.

  It stopped advancing. Then several shining arcs dropped to the ground like meteorites, and more of the radiant creatures landed in the clearing. Suddenly there were too many for Pia to confront while feeling so exposed in her Wyr form.

  She tore into her human form at top speed. As she solidified from the shapeshift, she opened her mouth to ask the creatures if, by any odd chance, they understood American English, but when her human gaze cleared, she stood alone in an empty, moonlit clearing.

  Spinning, she checked every direction, but the shining creatures had vanished.

  Why would they disappear when they had just arrived? Glancing at the clear night sky, she walked cautiously over to where the first creature had last stood. Something invisible brushed along her arm, and she flung out both hands as she leaped back.

  Was it still here? If so, why couldn’t she see it like she had before?

  “Who are you, and what do you want—and why did you disappear?” she asked. “Can you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She heard nothing but the whispering of wind in the trees.

  The whispering…

  She strained to listen harder. Was that whispering far-off multiple voices, calling out in a foreign language?

  The moonlit clearing darkened. She looked up.

  The shape of a massive dragon blotted out the moon’s pale glow. Relief and joy rushed up her body, as if she had been a darkened candle and fire had set her alight.

  “Dragos!” she screamed, jumping and waving. “Down here!”

  Dragos’s eyesight was so keen he could spot a mouse from high in the air, but he had to be looking for it. She wasn’t sure how that would translate to the intense shadows in a woodland scene at night. How could she catch his attention?

  Dragos! She shouted telepathically.

  Silence.

  Sharp edges cut at her thinking. Why couldn’t he hear her and respond?

  Was that even Dragos?

  Even as she realized it couldn’t be Dragos—her first reaction had been based solely on adrenaline-fueled hope and not reality—the dragon tilted into a wide turn. As his giant wings drove down, moonlight gleamed on massive white wings.

  Disappointment hammered down, even as a certain kind of relief welled.

  Not Dragos, then, but Liam.

  She rubbed her face and fell back to the sickened wondering if this latest catastrophe would really be the end of them. But this colossal, deadly creature was her firstborn boy, and she couldn’t help but be glad that Liam was no longer around to witness whatever the sentinels were doing to his father’s body.

  As she struggled with conflicting emotions, the white dragon floated low over the trees, dropped with precision into the clearing a safe distance away, and shapeshifted into a human male who raced over to her.

  Liam had inherited Dragos’s dragon form and tall, powerful build, along with Pia’s blond hair, blue eyes, and smoother, more graceful features. The result was a strikingly handsome young man. His shadowed features were sharp with concern. “Mom!”

  She rushed to meet him. His hands came down on her shoulders, and she threw her arms around his neck. “I’m all right.” The lie was so outrageous she discovered she could say it quite calmly. “It’s okay.”

  He hugged her tight. “I didn’t know what to think when Eva said you ran off.”

  “I wasn’t in control of my Wyr side. I had to leave before I did something stupid.” His clean, familiar scent hit every mom button in her body, flooding her with feel-good chemicals. Despite herself, she relaxed a bit and leaned back to take a good look at him. Stress and worry etched his features and made him look harder, older. “How are things going back there?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Once we got… him… subdued, Graydon and Rune made me step away.”

  That made her feel a little better about leaving so abruptly. “He’s your dad. That’s what they should have done. It’s what I would have done if I’d been more in control of myself and able to hang around.”

  His well-shaped mouth acquired a stubborn line she knew very well. “If I have any hope of leading a demesne successfully, I need to be involved with the tough decisions and difficult scenarios. But Rune said this wasn’t the time to push it.”

  Was that regret or relief? His expression was too complex to decipher, and with a small pang she realized the simplicity from Liam’s childhood was gone.

  She forced herself to concentrate on the present. “It’s going to be hard enough for them to do what they have to do without having to worry about how you’re handling it. They’re close to him too.”

  His arms tightened around her. “I know. That’s why it didn’t feel right to walk away. They should have the support of someone at their back. But right now nothing feels right, so I did as Rune asked and stepped away.” His shadowed blue gaze focused on her. “What can I do for you?”

  She lifted one shoulder while she did an internal check on the streaks of panic that had been running for hours like wildfire along the edges of her mind. Yep, they were still there.

  But running away wasn’t going to help evict the entity that had possessed Dragos, and they had no guarantee that—that… (say the damn word, even if it’s only in your mind)… torture would force the entity to reveal any of its secrets or relinquish its hold on him.

  “I need to go back,” she said. “I wasn’t in control before, but running away isn’t going to free Dragos or fix anything.” After an adrenaline-fueled day, her thinking felt frustrating and sluggish. She forced herself to concentrate point by point. “Niall’s okay. All the children are in a safe place. I don’t know where they were taken, and that bothers me. I can’t picture where he is or who’s looking after him. But none of that is rational.”

  “Let’s find out when we return,” he said. “I would also feel better if we knew where the little stinker was.”

  She squeezed his hand as she bit her lip. “Hard as this is, I have to say no. I can’t stand back and let other people fight for Dragos’s life. Can you?”

  Fire flashed in his gaze. For a moment he looked intensely dragony, hard and ruthless and entirely predatory. “No.”

  “Right.” She gave him a grim nod. “But that decision comes with risk. If that thing in Dragos manages to break the restraints we’ve placed on it, one way it could hurt us badly is if it found out how to go after our children.”

  It was his turn to study her. It felt odd to have her son give her such a candid assessment. Not that long ago, he had been prone to chewing through his diapers when he turned into his dragon form.

  But she lifted her chin and accepted his scrutiny. She had just seriously slid off the rails, and she wasn’t entirely certain she had made it wholly back onto the track. Maybe having somebody scrutinize her decisions and behavior wasn’t such a bad idea.

  He heaved
a sigh. “I don’t like it, but I agree.”

  “So we go back. We find out if the sentinels have made any progress, and if they haven’t….” Her voice trailed away as she remembered the terrible sound Dragos had made.

  Liam’s hands found their way to her shoulders again. He replied in a very steady voice, “We have to assume they haven’t. Mom, it hasn’t been very long.”

  “I know. We should assume they haven’t gotten anywhere yet.” Her own voice shook. Goddammit, Giovanni, pull yourself together. Don’t fall apart in front of your own son. More strongly, she said, “We need to get a team together and go back into that hellhole to see what we can find out.”

  He frowned. “You mean the one you and dad went into when the sinkholes appeared, under the construction site for the music hall?”

  “Yes. That’s where Dragos got—hell, Liam, this sounds like something out of The Exorcist, but I don’t know what else to call it. That’s where he was possessed.” Her eyes narrowed as she thought back. “I think there might be something in that space our intruder didn’t want anybody to find. He made a point of posting a guard around the hole to keep people out. It was the first thing he did when he came out of the hole.”

  His attention sharpened. “What did he say, exactly?”

  She tried to summon up the exact words but drew a blank. “I don’t remember. I was too busy reeling with shock and trying to figure out what to do. But I remember he didn’t want anybody going down there. Our intruder is not a philanthropic guy. He made it sound like the site isn’t safe—which of course it isn’t—but I don’t think he would give a damn if anybody fell down the hole and got themselves killed. If we’re going to defeat him, we need to find out why he wanted to keep people away and to learn everything else we can about him, and that means taking a team of our best magic users down to inspect the scene.”

  “Okay,” Liam said. “We’ve got a plan. It’ll be good to have something useful to do.”