by Isa Hunt
Copyright © 2018 by Isa Hunt - All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
Hunted Dragon
A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance
By: Isa Hunt
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1 – KELLY
CHAPTER 2 – KELLY
CHAPTER 3 – BENOIT
CHAPTER 4 – KELLY
CHAPTER 5 – KELLY
CHAPTER 6 – KELLY
CHAPTER 7 – REX
CHAPTER 8 – PAUL
CHAPTER 9 – KELLY
CHAPTER 10 – KELLY
CHAPTER 11 – SERGEI
CHAPTER 12 – KELLY
CHAPTER 13 – KELLY
CHAPTER 14 – BENOIT
CHAPTER 15 – KELLY
CHAPTER 16 – KELLY
CHAPTER 17 – LI-WUN
CHAPTER 18 – KELLY
CHAPTER 19 – KELLY
About Isa Hunt
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CHAPTER 1 – KELLY
The sensation of being a dragon was simply indescribable. It was still something that felt utterly surreal to me, but unlike the recurring dreams I'd had since I was a little kid, dreams of mountains and fire, this was no dream. This was a reality. I was a dragon shifter, as unbelievable as that was. The size, the power, the intensity . . . and the freedom. I beat my wings harder against the gentle breeze and felt myself rising up through the night sky. I was getting higher and higher, and, strangely enough, the intense fear of heights I'd had most of my life simply vanished, even though I was now hundreds of feet up in the air.
You know what they say about owning it? Well, I was totally owning it now.
Except, while this whole flying thing was coming to me naturally, I wasn’t sure whether landing would come just as naturally.
I also didn't know how long I could hold this dragon form . . . I hadn't thought about that before. I knew how to shift into my dragon form now, and how to shift back into my human form, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had no idea how long I could stay in this form. What if I suddenly lost it, and shifted back into my human form – while five hundred feet above the ground? Flapping my arms wouldn't help one bit.
Through the exhilaration of the feeling of flight, a sudden sensation of panic began to creep into my mind. What if I had to shift? What if I could no longer hold my dragon form? What if I shifted mid-air? I would plummet hundreds of feet to my death!
I realized that as fun as this whole flying thing was, I needed to get back on the ground, pronto.
I turned in the air and flew downwards, going at a fast but not quite breakneck pace. And then, as I was around two hundred feet up, I felt it – a weird sensation that started in the depths of my core, in the marrow of my bones: a shrinking. A shortening.
A change.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
It was happening. I was about to change back into my human form – and I was almost two hundred feet up in the air.
Fly faster, fly faster, faster, faster, come on, come on!
I stretched out my wings fully and aimed my long, dinosaur-like snout at the ground, swooping in a desperate dive to get to the ground as fast as possible. I felt the feeling of shrinking spreading throughout my body, and as much as I willed it to stop, it seemed to be moving through me of its own accord, completely outside of my control.
This was bad. This was really bad.
I felt my scales beginning to retract into my skin, and my limbs began to shorten.
No no no, hold the dragon form, hold it, hold it, hold it!
Now I was a hundred feet up. The ground was looking very, very solid from this height. Solid, cold, unyielding and cruel. If I fell from here, I'd splat on it like an overripe banana.
Ninety feet.
My wings were shrinking into my back and were almost unable to hold me up any longer.
Eighty feet.
I was starting to feel more human than a dragon, even though I was doing my utmost to hold the form.
Seventy feet.
My wings were about to stop working.
Sixty feet.
Someone ran out of the burning wreck of the house below – Paul! He saw me plummeting earthwards and yelled out for the other men – my shifter mates. The others – Benoit and Rex – came charging out behind him.
Fifty feet.
I couldn't hold it any longer. I shifted out of my dragon form, and now I was just a girl again – a girl free-falling from the sky, fifty feet above the ground.
Forty feet.
Paul, Rex and Benoit linked their arms, hoping to catch me. The ground was rushing to meet me at an impossible speed. Sheer terror blasted through my whole body. I was going to die. I was going to die. I was going to die.
I screamed as the force of acceleration tore me toward the ground. I closed my eyes as I prepared for impact.
And then it hit me, a potent force, like being hit by a bus, I imagined – it knocked all of the air out of my lungs . . . But I was alive. I was alive. And when I opened my eyes, gasping for breath, I found that I was in the arms of my three alpha mates, my three lovers.
“We caught you! Man, we caught you!” exclaimed Rex, grinning broadly. “I thought the impact of your body falling from that height was gonna rip our arms out of our sockets, and that you were gonna die, but we did it! You made it!”
They all lowered me down to the ground so that I could catch my breath. Paul glowered at Rex, who was still grinning boyishly.
“You’re a moron,” he snapped. “I knew we were going to catch her, and I knew we were all going to be fine!”
Rex shrugged.
“Easy for you to say, bear-boy when you're almost seven feet tall and can bench press five hundred pounds. But for me, I know physics, and an object of her weight, falling from that height, at an acceleration of—”
“Oh just shut up, Rex,” muttered Benoit, his French accent coloring his speech. “Kelly is safe, and that's all that matters.”
He knelt down next to me and stroked my cheek softly. Silent, gentle, faithful Benoit, the wolf. I had a serious soft spot for him.
“You are okay, Kelly, yes?” he asked, with genuine sympathy and compassion in his voice.
Still trying to catch my breath and unable to speak, I simply nodded.
Paul, the enormous grizzly bear shifter, squatted down next to me and took my hand in his huge paw – well, the paw of a hand. He was in his human form, of course.
“Are you sure you're alright?” he rumbled. “No broken bones, no internal damage? That was a fall from a hell of a height, you know . . . ”
I just shook my head, still unable to speak.
“Does that mean you're okay or not okay?” he asked, looking worried.
I shook my head again, still unable to speak.
“Oh boy, now I'm getting pretty confused,” he mumbled.
Finally, my jaws seem to unlock, and I was able to speak again.
“I'm okay Paul, I'm okay,” I groaned, even though I felt pretty far from okay. “Badly bruised, I'd say . . . but I'll live.”
“Thank God,” murmured Benoit.
“Don't do any more flying, missy,” said Rex with a grin. “At least not until you've learned how to hold your dragon form a lot longer. You know how that old Tom Petty tune goes, right – 'what goes up, must come down,' haha.”
/> Rex, the puma – he was so cocky, continuously cracking jokes, even in the most serious situations. And that could be annoying, but also, I was learning to appreciate it about him.
“Don't worry Rex,” I said, grinning, “I think I've learned my lesson. That was a close one.”
“Way too close,” said Paul, whose tone was utterly serious. “You're the dragon queen, and we can't have you risking your life like that. We've sworn to protect you, and that protection is not only going to be in the form of being your bodyguards, but also in the form of advice that we're going to give you. Advice that you must follow if you're going to stay alive.”
“Well nobody told me not to fly,” I said dryly.
“We were kinda busy, ya know, kicking ass in there,” said Rex. “Which you did a pretty good job of too, I must admit. You're one fierce kitten when you're in your dragon form, Kelly.”
“Help me up, please,” I said. “We need to get dressed, get our stuff and get out of here. This burning house is going to attract all kinds of attention, attention that we probably don't want, right?”
Benoit smiled and helped me up to my feet.
“You are learning fast,” he said. “Good. Come on, let's get dressed and move.”
“I'll get the stuff out of the house. After your little fireworks display,” Rex said to me, “the house is burning well.”
It was true – most of the house was on fire now after I'd pretty much burned it down with my dragon fire, after I'd shifted for the first time after, well, having a four-way with Rex, Paul and Benoit. If anyone had told me a couple of days ago that I would be having group sex with a bunch of guys who could shift forms into animals, and that I would turn into a dragon after doing so – I would have called them nuts.
But here I was, with my mates, the alphas of their respective packs and tribes – a dragon queen. Or so they told me.
Rex's urgency was justified, of course. My captors – former captors, they were all dead now, thanks to me and my alphas – had been keeping me alive so that my nemesis – the usurper Artemis, who had proclaimed himself dragon king, could kill me and drink my blood. For what purpose, I didn't know, but I didn't want to wait until he got here to find out.
Rex soon came running out of the house, with all of our clothes and things.
“We're all gonna smell like smoke until we get new clothes,” he muttered as he handed each of us our clothes. “So you'd better get used to the smell.”
We got dressed hurriedly, and just after I had put my clothes on, we got into the cars and drove off at speed. We were safe . . . for now. Almost as soon as we were on the road, a great feeling of exhaustion came over me. I leaned back in the passenger seat, closed my eyes . . . and was asleep in seconds.
***
I woke to Paul's voice and his strong hand gently shaking my shoulder. It felt as if maybe two minutes had passed.
“Kelly, wake up, come on, get up,” he said gently.
I opened my eyes, blinking against the light; it was daytime, and the sun was high in the sky. We were in a town now.
“Come on, we've been driving for six hours,” he said. “We're gonna get breakfast, get cleaned up and buy some new clothes.”
“Yeah, that sounds good,” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes as I climbed out of the car on shaky legs.
Rex and Benoit were waiting on the sidewalk, and they helped me out of the car. Just as I got out, though, my cellphone started to ring inside my bag. I took it out and saw that the call was coming from an unknown number.
“Should I answer this?” I asked Paul cautiously.
“Yeah, but hang up right away if it seems suspicious.”
I nodded and answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Kelly.”
I almost dropped the phone as shock blasted through my body. It was a voice I hadn't heard for years, the voice of someone I hadn't seen for years, someone who most people thought was dead . . . my brother.
CHAPTER 2 – KELLY
“Jason,” I murmured. “Is it . . . is it really you?”
I felt as if I were speaking to a ghost. Eight years ago, a few months before my mother had died, Jason had walked out of the house one day. I had still been living at home – my grandma's home, she had left it to my mother when she had passed away – with him and my mother. He hadn't taken anything with him; it had been as if he was just going out for a stroll around the neighborhood or something.
He had never returned.
After a lot of frantic phone calls and drives around town, we had filed a missing person report with the cops. They hadn't started taking it seriously until at least three weeks had passed. They then passed the case onto the FBI, and there had been a little segment on Jason on the local news, but that had been it.
We hadn't heard anything at all. Not a scrap of evidence had been found, no witnesses had come forward to say that they'd seen anything, and neither the cops nor the Feds had discovered anything. Everyone just kinda assumed that either he'd gotten mixed up in some sort of criminal activity, and some gangsters had killed him and disposed of his body where nobody would ever find it, or that he'd drowned in a swamp somewhere and been eaten by alligators. Neither scenario was particularly comforting to my mother, as you may imagine.
In fact, I think his disappearance contributed to her death. She'd been sinking into a depression for years, and when Jason disappeared, it just kind of broke her completely. She had never been the same after that, and she just sort of . . . slipped away three years after he had disappeared. It had been like she had just given up on life.
I'd never given up, though. I don't know how, but I always knew that he was alive, somewhere. I just had this hunch, this sixth sense, that told me that my little brother was alive.
And now, now he was speaking to me. He was alive!
“It's me, Kelly,” he said.
I didn't know what to say. I was shocked, utterly and completely shocked and stunned.
“J—, Jason, what . . . why . . . are you . . . where . . . ”
I couldn't put two words together, let alone string a coherent question or sentence together.
“Who is that?” asked Paul, raising his thick eyebrow suspiciously. “What's going on there, Kelly?”
“Jason, oh my God,” I murmured, ignoring Paul. “You're . . . alive, I can't believe this, you're, you're alive!”
“Who's Jason?” asked Rex.
I ignored him too.
“Jason… oh my God, where are you? Where are you?”
“I need your help, Kelly,” he said. From the tone of his voice, it sounded like he was scared – like he was in danger.
“Just, just tell me where you are, Jason, and I'll help you. Just, just tell me where you are, please, please . . . ”
My voice was beginning to crack with emotion now. Waves of intense emotion were rushing through me, and I felt like if I didn't sit down, I was going to pass out.
“Help me Kelly . . . ” murmured Jason. “Please . . . help me.”
“Where are you?” I was almost screaming now. “Jason, where are you?”
“Help me . . . ”
Suddenly, the call ended.
“Jason!” I yelled. “Jason, hello?”
“Who is this Jason guy?” demanded Rex. “Tell us!”
“I . . . I need to sit down,” I murmured. “I have to sit down, help me guys, please.”
The three shifters helped me over to a nearby bench. I slumped down onto it, shaking my head with disbelief and shock.
Benoit sat next to me and took my hand in his, gently massaging it with his deft fingers.
“Kelly,” he said to me, “you must tell us who this Jason is. This sounds serious, and we want to help you.”
I breathed in deeply, trying to compose myself.
“He's my brother,” I muttered.
Gasps of surprise rippled through the three men.
“But I thought you guys knew about my brother?” I said.
“We just didn't know that his name was Jason,” said Benoit. “Of course we knew about him disappearing and everything, driven mad by the blood of the dragon that flowed through his veins. But we didn’t realize that he was still alive.”
“What did he say to you?” asked Rex.
“Just that he needed help,” I said. “He kept saying that. 'Help me, help me.' He didn't say why he needed help though, or where he was.”
“We need to be very careful, very careful now,” said Paul. “This may be a trap.”
“What?” I snapped. “This is my kid brother, my flesh and blood, someone who has been missing for years now, someone who most people think is dead! But he's alive, he's alive! And he needs my help – and there's no way, no way in hell that I'm not going to do everything in my power to help him! Do you understand me?”
“I understand that,” said Paul, raising his hands in a gesture of peace, “and I understand that a ton of pretty intense emotions must be rushing through you right now. Of course. But I'm just saying, don't you think it's a little suspicious that he's calling you now? Right after you were abducted by Jake and his thugs, right after Artemis himself was supposed to have ritually killed you?”
I didn't want to believe that my brother had anything to do with any of that, but when Paul put it like that, it was hard to believe that the timing was a mere coincidence. But I couldn't – and wouldn't – believe that my brother had anything to do with the guys who had abducted me. And Jason needed my help. He was alive, and needed my help – and that was all that mattered.
“I don't know,” I said. “And I don't care. If Jason is alive, I need to help him. I need to do everything in my power to help him.”
“But where is he? And how can you get hold of him?” asked Benoit.
I shrugged, feeling a sudden sense of helplessness.
“I . . . I don't know,” I said. “He didn't say anything. All he said was 'help me.' I . . . I have no idea where he is. But I have to help him. For God's sake, my little brother who has been missing and presumed dead for years is alive! I have to help him, I have to . . . ”