The crowd broke into cheers. Tobias met Sabrina’s eyes and gave her a small smile, which she returned but hid under the guise of thanking Aldrich. He took it all in, the flowers, the dress, the crown. He wanted to remember her like this always. She was something out of a dream.
A dream that turned into a nightmare when the screams started.
Chapter Thirty-One
Blood sprayed across Tobias’s face as bullets showered the coven. He dropped to the floor. Five enormous men with semiautomatic weapons had charged into the ballroom from one of the tunnels.
Vampires tumbled like bowling pins around him. From what Tobias knew of vampires, bullets couldn’t ordinarily hurt them, but these must have been enchanted because the vampires that fell stayed down. The crowd rushed for the exits. Vampires pushed and shoved to escape, but there were too many and nowhere to go.
A team of security personnel, some of them Tobias was sure were human, had formed a wall around Sabrina and her father. They’d all drawn their guns and were firing back at the gunmen. One attacker took a bullet to the head and dropped like a rock. Another was hit in the shoulder. More bullets flew and a security guard toppled.
“Stop!” Sabrina yelled from behind the wall of bodies. “What do you want?”
The bullets stopped. Tobias watched as a man roughly the size of a semitruck and smelling strongly of wolf stepped between the fallen bodies. The wolf who had stabbed Sabrina was behind him. All wolves, Tobias could tell now. Their scent was unmistakable. The remaining team of four parted and Tristan swaggered into the great hall from the tunnel at the rear of the Star, taking his position at the front of the group. The coven broke out in murmurs and shouted accusations.
Now Tobias understood why the vampires weren’t getting up. Tristan must have coated the bullets with the same solution he’d used on the dagger that stabbed Sabrina. What had Raven called it? Keetridge Solution. His hands balled into fists. He knew what this was. It called up his darkest memories. Scenes of Marius’s head rolling across the floor of the Obsidian Palace filled his mind. This was a coup and Sabrina was the target.
The greasy-looking male gestured with his hands and the wolves cleared a large circle for him, dragging dead and dying vampires from the space. “I challenge you, Sabrina, for Lamia Coven.”
“If you want to challenge me, Tristan, challenge me. Call off your dogs. Fight me one-on-one.”
“No! He’s too strong,” her father yelled.
Tobias ground his teeth.
Tristan raised his hand and the wolves stepped back and lowered their guns. “Then you accept my challenge.” He laughed. “Somehow I thought this would be harder.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Sabrina looked down on Tristan from her place on the dais and saw nothing but haughty rage in her fellow vampire. He’d planned this. The traitor had fraternized with their enemies to try to have her killed, and now that she was master and he had broken from the coven, he was challenging her for her role.
The crowd of security guards in front of her parted and she stepped forward, her vampire instincts raging when she saw the dead. These were her people. Immortals. Tristan could have used regular bullets. He’d coated them with Keetridge Solution to inflict maximum hurt on her and her father. He’d wanted to shake her, to wreck her human side so badly she wouldn’t put up a fight.
She removed her crown and placed it on the red velvet pillow. Tristan grinned and stared at it. If he’d been a cartoon, his tongue might have extended to the floor and his eyes bulged from their sockets. Infidel. Traitor. He had no idea the monster he’d awakened in her.
She kicked off her shoes, then looked down at her dress. Impossible to fight in. Fisting her skirt, she tore. A female vampire cried out and a rumble of voices passed through the crowd. The expensive floor-length gown was reduced to a miniskirt.
Picking up the ceremonial dagger beside her crown, she held it up. With a raised eyebrow, she silently regarded Tristan. Would he agree to daggers?
“I accept.” Tristan drew a dagger from his boot. “My personal favorite.”
Sabrina nodded. Without further delay, she sprang into the circle, baring her teeth and lowering herself into a fighting stance. The growl that ripped from her lungs was something feral. A delicious drop of Tristan’s fear rained down on her emotional grid.
“Tristan, if you think this is going to be easy, you don’t know me,” she said, making her voice as smooth and sultry as she could. Come hither, boy. Let me slay you.
“Bring it on, human.”
She attacked, leaping forward and thrusting the blade underhand at Tristan’s gut. He spun out of the way of her blow and stabbed at her back. So predictable. She dodged. He missed. Sabrina leaped straight up, landing behind him and kicking him squarely in the ass.
Tristan stumbled forward. That was the tang of surprise she felt in her bones. Oh yes. She could read him like a book. He regained his footing, squared low, and attacked again, his arms out like he planned to bear-hug her. She remembered this move from training with her father. Tristan planned to stab at her right side, then catch her with his free hand when she tried to dodge left.
But Sabrina had practiced this dozens of times. When he stabbed from the right, she did not react, instead catching his wrist in a vampire-strong grip and slicing her dagger across his cheek. She planted a foot in his chest and kicked him away from her.
She wanted to cheer. Tristan’s emotions had become a jumble of fear and anger. He’d underestimated her. And she was about to hand him his ass.
Her coven closed in, their faces poking out from the tunnels again to watch the fight.
Tristan ran his fingers through the blood on his cheek. “You fucking bitch!”
He rushed her again, head-on, his arm coming high and stabbing downward, toward her face. She sidestepped a fraction of an inch. A swift flash of her blade and she’d sliced open his other cheek.
Tristan whirled, sweeping her legs. She fell hard, gracefully somersaulted backward and landed on her feet, dagger at the ready. She raised her hand and beckoned him forward with her fingers.
With something close to a roar he rushed her, stabbing fast and low. Sabrina blocked the jab, gripped his wrist, and rolled him over her back, using his own momentum to slam him into the floor. There was a pop as his wrist dislocated. Tristan’s dagger went flying. He cursed.
Sabrina landed her knee in his gut with all the force she could muster. She cast her own dagger aside and held Tristan down by the throat, her nails digging in. Now there was nothing but fear on her emotional dashboard. She felt it worming in her gut. His fear.
The hall grew completely silent. She glanced up at her father who stared down his nose at Tristan, his expression cold as ice. And then her eyes found Tobias. He gave her a subtle nod.
“You lose,” Sabrina said through her teeth.
Tristan opened his mouth to say something else, but she refused to give him the chance. Her fist punched through his rib cage. When her hand retracted, she was holding his heart.
Her father always said that the only time violence was the answer was when you wanted the question to never be asked again. She stood from Tristan’s body and thrust the heart above her head. Slowly she turned in place, her bare feet leaving bloody footsteps in front of Tristan’s body.
The coven exploded into cheers of victory. “Sabrina. Sabrina. Sabrina.” They chanted her name. She cast the heart aside where it rolled to a stop on the concrete.
All at once Sabrina noticed one of the wolves who’d helped Tristan raise his gun. She growled.
“This is for the Racine pack!” He pulled the trigger.
Before Sabrina could react, a massive wall of white scales crashed between her and the wolf, and the roar that filled the tunnels was louder than the gunfire.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tobias tore from his own skin faster than he’d ever shifted before. He was temporarily blinded by searing pain, turned inside out by his own force of wil
l. The dragon burst through, his scaled body and barbed tail brushing Sabrina aside and taking the brunt of the shower of bullets that sprang from the wolf’s gun. If he was hit, he didn’t feel it.
He punched his wings out to fill the hall, turned on the wolf, and roared.
Vampires scattered, but his beast was smart enough to know exactly how to protect Sabrina. Bullets bounced harmlessly off his scales as he faced the largest wolf and made a choice. He could burn the wretch or tear him to pieces. Burning was too kind. His teeth snapped and his talons shredded the werewolf into strips of meat. Ignoring the screams and gunfire, he coiled on his next victim. He wouldn’t stop until he knew his mate was safe.
Sabrina had never seen anything as beautiful as Tobias’s dragon. When he’d shifted before at the museum, she hadn’t had a chance to really appreciate him. She’d been blinded by pain and suffering the effects of the Keetridge Solution. But now, as her father wrapped his arms around her and drew her back into the tunnel that led to his chambers, she saw him in all his glory. He was silvery white, like freshly fallen snow, with scales that reflected blue when the light hit them the right way. Long and lean, he snaked through their attackers, his massive talons clicking on the concrete as bullets bounced off his scales. Vampires scattered around him, their screams echoing through the great hall.
When he turned, she saw his heart. Sapphire blue, the same color as his ring. It shone through his scales, surrounded by the glowing red of two fiery lungs.
“Oh my goddess,” her father said once he’d succeeded in wrestling her into the shelter of the tunnel. “Where did you find him, Sabrina?”
She glanced back at her father, whose eyes were glittering like it was Christmas morning. She had not expected this reaction from him.
“Aren’t you angry?” she asked. “I’m mated to a shifter!”
He laughed. “Angry?” He pointed his chin in Tobias’s direction. “He will make you the most powerful master in the world. Look at him. No one will ever challenge you again.”
She did look, and what she saw was fierce. The wolf continued his assault, unloading his weapon directly at the dragon’s heart, but the bullets continued to bounce off Tobias’s scales. The guns the other wolves carried were equally ineffective. Tobias ripped him in two.
Sabrina gasped as the second wolf threw down his ineffective gun and picked up Tristan’s discarded dagger. He lunged forward and stabbed Tobias in the front of his shoulder, no doubt aiming for his heart. The blade sank deep between his scales, but it didn’t slow the dragon down. He released a stream of fire, frying the wolf who’d stabbed him and sending a plume of heat through the tunnels.
Her father laughed behind her.
“Daddy, this is no time for mirth. Where is Aldrich? If he sees this…”
Her father snorted. “That coward dematerialized for the surface the moment the first bullet was fired.”
“Good. I don’t even want to think about what would happen if one of the Forebears saw this.” Actually, she wished more of her coven had dematerialized when the first shots rang out. It might have saved some lives. But they’d all been caught off guard, and dematerializing took focus.
How dare Tristan bring this death into the coven? She scanned the great hall. The bodies of many vampires lay either dead or injured outside the circle where Tobias fought. She needed to help them.
Thankfully, Tobias was almost done. There was only one wolf left. The one who had stabbed her. The wolf didn’t even try to run. There was nowhere to go. Vampires blocked every exit. With a pump of his wings, Tobias coiled and struck. The bite slashed the wolf in two. There was a pop and a crunch of bone. Tobias dropped the pieces of the corpse to the concrete before flattening them under his taloned foot.
And then there were none. The beast circled, scanning the crowd. Vampires gasped and flinched back into the tunnels as the dragon sniffed and chuffed in their direction. Only when the beast seemed sure that every wolf was dead did it stop and sit like a well-trained dog.
That’s when Sabrina noticed Tristan’s dagger still protruding from his shoulder. She pushed her father’s hands off her. “He needs me.” Rushing to Tobias’s side, she stopped short when he whipped his head around to look at her. She held up her hands. “It’s me. Let me help you.”
His eyes were just as blue as when he was in his human form, although the pupils were narrow slits like a snake’s. He chuffed at her and lowered his head. She ran a hand along the bony protrusions that formed his face and the two horns above his ears.
“Hold still,” she said. Then she grabbed the dagger and pulled. It took several tugs to free it from his flesh and the dragon whimpered. Bright red blood spurted onto her dress. She didn’t care. She pressed her hand over the wound.
“Will it heal if you change back?” she asked. Her saliva could seal a human wound. She doubted it would work on scales.
The dragon blinked, and then his flesh rippled and undulated like the churning sea. Curling in on himself, the beast was in one blink dragon, in the next man. A shimmer of white and blue coasted down Tobias’s skin, and then he looked human again. Human and naked in the center of a ring of gawking vampires.
Calvin strode toward them, a dark, fur-lined cape in his hands and a smile on his face that lit up the room despite the steaming corpses that still marred it. He tossed the cape across Tobias’s shoulders.
“You’re hurt.” Sabrina tried to reapply pressure to the wound.
Tobias bent and dry heaved toward her feet.
“Take him to my chambers,” Calvin said. “I will clean this up and arrange for care for the injured.” Sabrina ushered Tobias out of the room to the echo of her father’s voice shouting orders to the coven.
“Your father didn’t kill me,” Tobias said.
He was too pale. She had to get him somewhere private and stop the bleeding.
“No one was more surprised about that than me. I think… I think he may like you.”
She moved him into the guest bathroom off her father’s foyer and closed the door, then pushed the cape off his shoulders. His blood had flowed through her fingers and left her hand sticky. She rinsed her fingers off in the sink, then wet a washcloth to clean the wound.
Tobias flopped against the wall and sank until his butt hit the floor. He was too pale. She watched his eyes flutter shut.
“Tobias!” Straddling his legs, she knelt, pressing a clean towel to his wound. Her dress was in tatters around her thighs. She thought about taking it off, but it was covered in blood anyway. As much as she’d love to be naked with Tobias, at the moment she couldn’t get distracted.
“Hold on. I have to clean away some of this excess blood before I can seal the wound. If I do it now—” Her eyes flicked to his. “Well, you know what will happen. And I need to keep my head on straight. So many of my people are injured… dead.” Her voice broke.
“I’m sorry.”
She tipped her head. “You did your part to avenge their deaths.” She concentrated on cleaning the wound.
“I haven’t shifted that fast since I was in Paragon. I forgot what it was like.” His eyes met hers again, his lids heavy.
“How did it feel?”
“Like being turned inside out by a strong wind. I’m tired Sabrina. So tired.”
“Hang in there. I’m going to help you. It’s pretty clean. Hold still. I’m going to seal this.” She brought her mouth to his wound and gave it a slow, languid lick. His blood, his flesh, tasted like ambrosia. His scent filled her lungs and sent a throb of need straight to her core. Her fangs dropped. She forced herself to pull away before she did something stupid like feed on him. She couldn’t afford to be passed out on the floor twenty minutes from now. She needed to make sure he was okay and then return to her people. They needed her. She was their master, and they had just experienced a major disaster.
“Your heart is pounding.” His mouth curled into an exhausted grin. “Is that for me?”
“Always.” She eyed the woun
d. It had stopped bleeding and was healing nicely, but she had to quell the urge to give it another lick.
His hands came to rest on her hips, the touch hot through her dress. In a single heartbeat, her position straddling his lap went from one of necessity to feeling too good, too comfortable. She resisted sagging into him.
“Sabrina… You told me it was too dangerous for us to be together. You thought there wasn’t room to be both coven master and to be in love. You told me to leave the city.” He gave a dark laugh and shook his head. “You thought your coven would kill me. I thought I’d never see you again.”
“I know. I believed it. All of it. I was only thinking of you.” She sandwiched his face between her hands. “You were a big reason I did this… became master, I mean. Not the only reason. My people… obviously. But I knew if I wasn’t in charge, you’d be in danger. I guess I underestimated my father.” She chuckled. “He’s an enigma.”
“What do you believe now? Because I can’t continue like this. You are my mate. For me, there can be no other female.”
“I know,” she said. “I feel it.” Her hand pressed over her heart as if she could stop it from leaping out of her chest and running to him. The truth was, she’d bonded with him as well.
He breathed a sigh of relief. He tugged on her hips, sliding her against him. “Say you’re mine. I need to hear it.”
She touched her forehead to his and tried not to weep. “I am yours, and you are mine.”
“Still?”
“Still.”
He grinned, his lips reaching for hers.
She put a hand up. “Hold on, cowboy. You’re healed. You need to go home now. I have to help my coven. I’ll come to you after sunrise and we’ll talk… and things.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I look forward to all the things.” He helped her lift off him and rose to his feet. He was still naked. He retrieved the bloody cloak from the floor and wrapped it tighter around himself. “Take care of your coven. You’re a good leader. I love that about you. I love you, Sabrina.”
Windy City Dragon Page 24