“And this is Lanzo. He’s our enchanter.”
I nodded. Just as I had suspected—a leader, a fighter, and a magician. The perfect combination for a Queen’s Guard.
Rayce’s next words, though, caught me completely off guard.
“And we are all from the Smoak clan.” There was no way to hide my startled reaction. The Smoak clan had been the main force behind usurping my parents’ rulership of the dragonsrealm. I had been taught to avoid them at all costs.
Rayce saw my confusion. “We’re from a faction of the Smoaks who believe Nico never should have taken over.” He gazed intently at me, his own dark brown eyes intense and serious. “There are more and more dragonkin coming around to our point of view every day.”
Draven spoke up. “Especially now that Nico has grown intent on a course of action that will absolutely destroy the realm.”
For the first time, Lanzo spoke up. “If you don’t agree to help us, we’ll all die, too. If we must die, we would rather it be in your service.”
All three of them stood up and formed a half-circle in front of me. Then they dropped to their knees, clapping their fists to their hearts. It was the traditional sign of fealty from dragonkin to their ruler. It was also the first part of the Queen’s Guard’s oath.
I shot to my feet and edged around Rayce. “I can’t.” I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. “I can’t go back. I have a life here. I have hidden that part of me for so long, I don’t think I could access it now. I don’t even think I could shift anymore. I don’t remember how.”
The dragon shifters stood.
“We can’t force you to help us,” Rayce began.
“Damn right you can’t,” I interjected.
Rayce continued as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “But our allegiance remains with you. We abandoned our posts to come here, to find you. If you refuse to help us, we will attempt to dethrone Nico ourselves. But without a clear successor, we are certain to fail.”
“You weren’t listening to anything I just said, were you?”
Lanzo stepped toward me. “None of those objections will dissuade us. We may not be able to convince you, but if we do, I promise we can teach you everything you need to know.” The sparkle I’d seen in his eyes earlier was gone, replaced by a kind of fervent light. “You carry your clan’s strength within you. I could show you how to access it, how to use the magic you hold inside.”
“I could teach you to fight,” Draven said.
“And I would make sure you knew how to deal with court politics,” Rayce added.
“And none of that addresses my core concern, which is that I don’t want to be queen.” I emphasized each word separately as if I were spelling it out slowly for idiots. I took a deep breath and turned brusque, in my best New Yorker fashion. “I’m very sorry, but I can’t help you. Now, will you please leave?”
Rayce gestured subtly, and they all moved toward the door. The alpha turned back, though. “If you change your mind, you can contact us here.”
He pressed a card into my hand, and then they were gone.
Hopefully forever.
Chapter Three
I glanced down at the card Rayce had pressed into my hand. It simply said Queen’s Guard, followed by a phone number.
I won’t be needing that.
I dropped it into the wastebasket under the entry table.
Then I fished it back out and set it carefully in the bowl with my keys.
Just in case.
I spent the rest of the evening doing everything I could to avoid thinking of Rayce, Draven, and Lanzo.
But it took a long time for me to fall asleep that night.
When I first woke up in the middle of the night, I was convinced I was dreaming. By the time I figured out that my dream of intruders was not a dream at all, whoever was breaking into my apartment was already in the living room.
Part of me almost hoped it was the Queen’s Guard dragons because at least I was fairly certain those guys wouldn’t try to hurt me.
Slipping out of bed as quietly as I could, I pulled on a pair of sweatpants over my tank top and boy shorts sleepwear. Luckily, I had shut my bedroom door before I went to bed. Grabbing a sweatshirt off the bench at the foot of the bed, I pulled on my tennis shoes without any socks.
I wasn’t stupid. I was not about to try to fight anyone off. But the fire escape outside my bedroom window wasn’t in the best of shape. The one off the living room window was only a little better. My best bet was to get to the hallway outside the apartment. There was a window there with a newly restored fire escape—the super had been repairing them one at a time, and that was the closest one that was easily usable.
If I’d had to, I would have thrown myself out of a window and hoped to hell I still knew how to sprout wings. But I didn’t want to take that risk if I didn’t have to.
I stepped up beside the door and flattened myself up against the wall, hoping they would walk right past me when they came into the bedroom.
To my surprise, it actually worked. They threw the door open wide and strode in. The two men were in my bedroom and headed toward my bed as I slipped out the door into the living room. I raced out, pausing only long enough to grab my keys—and at the last minute, the card the dragons had left me that evening.
I hit the hallway at almost full speed, dashing to the end to the window and shoving it open. As I clattered down the stairs outside, a commotion behind me alerted me that the intruders had figured out I was gone.
Even when I heard the men above me, following me down the fire escape, I didn’t pause to look up.
Fenwick had instilled that in me from the very beginning. I could almost hear his voice, even now.
When you run, you run fast and hard. Don’t look back. Get to safety first.
The problem was, I didn’t know where safety existed anymore. Once upon a time, I had believed I was safe with Fenwick. But he had not been safe at all—he was ultimately unable to protect even himself.
Since his death, I had pinned my hopes for safety on my ability to hide among the humans. But the Queen’s Guard had found me, and if they did, then who was to say I couldn’t be found easily by anyone at all?
From the second-floor landing, I jumped down and hit the ground running. As a dragon shifter, even one who hadn’t shifted in years, I was stronger and faster than almost any human, so I hoped that would throw off my pursuers. The fact that the intruders were hot on my heels convinced me that even if they were not dragon shifters, they certainly were not human.
I leaned in and added a burst of speed to my running. The whole time, I tried to calculate a way to safety. But I was quickly becoming convinced that there was no way to find someplace safe.
If I could hit the lights of one of the main streets, there would be people around—New York never really slept—but that didn’t mean much at all. The dragonsrealm ran parallel to the human world. And although very few humans had ever figured out how to move between them, almost all dragon shifters could do so at will.
All they have to do is grab me and flash into the dragonsrealm.
Fenwick had always impressed upon me that we weren’t allowed to do that in front of other people. We were supposed to move between worlds in ways that didn’t allow humans to figure out what was going on.
I didn’t know if these shifters chasing me held to the same rules.
But just in case they did, I knew of one place they might be unlikely to try anything.
The human police station.
It wasn’t far from my apartment. I just had to make it to the local precinct. First, though, I had to remember where it was.
I almost made it, too. But I made a wrong turn. Instead of turning down the street that would lead me to the brightly lit entrance, I turned one street too soon—down the one that would also lead to a police station entrance, but the back entrance, the one that was, at night, darker and even more full of shadows than my own street.
Dammit. If I’d had the bre
ath to say it, I would have repeated it three or four times. Instead, I tried to put on more speed. But I was out of energy, unable to do so.
All the way there, I’d heard the pounding footsteps gaining on me. But as soon as I turned down that street, the instant there were no humans around, the footsteps stopped, and I heard the leathery swish of dragon wings.
One of the two men flashed into view in front of me, moving through the dragonsrealm to get to me faster, halfway shifted from his dragon form and folding his wings in around him as he settled to the ground on his human feet.
“You need to come with us,” he said.
I spun around, only to find his companion waiting behind me, his expression just as implacable.
I couldn’t even gasp out my refusal. Despair welled up inside me, circling through my stomach and clenching my heart.
“No,” I finally whispered.
No, my heart agreed.
My voice grew louder. “No.”
I stood there gasping for breath, tears running down my face. I didn’t know how they had found me, but I was not going to allow them to capture me. I spun around and inhaled. I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I knew I couldn’t let them take me.
The only thing I could think to do was attempt to shift. So I began trying to push out my wings, attempting to convince my body to remember what it had been like to fly.
Nothing happened to me, but all the lights up and down the street went out with a pop and a tinkling of glass.
“What the hell?” one of my pursuers said.
“Dude, grab her,” the other one commanded.
This time I screamed at the top of my lungs. “No!”
At that moment, a huge wind gusted down the street, swirling dust and debris along with it, slamming into the two men who had followed me, hitting them hard and lifting them up by the wings they had just popped out, pushing them back down the street, away from me.
Miraculously, I was left untouched, the wind serving only to swirl my hair around me.
The dragon shifters slid past me, then all the way down the to the end of the street. And when they tried to pursue me again, they were knocked over by the wind.
I didn’t wait to find out what they would do. I turned and ran to the police station. With any luck, there would be enough people around to keep them from following me inside.
And if there aren’t? a tiny voice inside me whispered.
Well, if there weren’t, I’d have to deal with it later.
Chapter Four
It felt like something of a miracle that when I got into the police station, I still had that card crumpled inside my fist.
I didn’t know exactly what else to do, so I filed a police report about someone breaking into my apartment and chasing me. I knew the NYPD would never catch the guys, but it gave me something to do while I waited for Rayce, Draven, and Lanzo to show up—the very first thing I’d done when I started talking to one of the officers was ask for a chance to call my friends.
The officer I spoke to sent a unit over to check out my apartment. Those officers radioed in to let him know that yes, it looked like my place been broken into.
I sat at a desk in a big room in the precinct, surrounded by people coming and going. The officer I’d been speaking to leaned toward me, running a hand over his short-cut hair. “The patrol officers who checked the place out said it looked like it had been tossed—like someone had been searching through it for something specific. You have any idea what that might be?”
I frowned and blinked. “Searching my apartment? No idea at all.” I shook my head. “I don’t own anything valuable.”
Apparently, I sounded believable—and the few belongings I had in my apartment would certainly support my claim.
It was the technical truth. I didn’t own the valuable item I suspected they were searching for.
But I was certain they’d trashed my apartment in search of the Queen’s Diadem—the traditional crown of the dragonsrealm.
It had been in my possession—more or less—since I was five years old. According to Fenwick, when they discovered Nico’s treachery, my mother had ripped the Diadem off her head, shoved it at him, and ordered him to get me and keep it and me safe.
I knew exactly where that crown was. It was in a safety deposit box in the Bank of New York City, midtown branch. There never been any indication that the shifters who had killed Fenwick had gotten him to confess to where it might be, so I hadn’t bothered to move it. I’d always been listed as one of the owners. I simply kept up the payments after Fenwick’s murder.
But it sounded like whatever Nico was up to these days was causing a lot of dragonkin to consider rebellion.
And the Queen’s Diadem wasn’t simply a symbol of rulership. It was also the setting for the Dragon heartstone—a blood-red gem that tradition claimed connected the ruler of dragonsrealm to the very blood of the land.
It definitely carried some kind of magic. Fenwick had insisted we complete the necessary rituals to pass the Diadem’s power to me when we learned of the certainty of my parents’ deaths. I would never forget the way it had zapped me, like an electrical shock that wound through my body, burying itself in every part of me.
I had no idea what else it could do, but I was certain that if he could get his hands on it, Nico could cement his role as king.
And if anyone else got hold of it, they might be able to make a credible play for the throne.
Even though I was the heir.
But I don’t want to be queen, I reminded myself.
I was still considering whether or not to tell my self-appointed Queen’s Guard about the Diadem when they showed up at the precinct, much sooner than I expected.
I realized as Rayce made his way toward me, followed by the other two dragon shifters, that their arrival made me feel safer than I had since Fenwick’s death.
Part of me wanted to shake that feeling off, to assert my independence and go back to living my life all by myself.
But another part of me was willing to admit that the last ten years had been hard. I had been on my own since I was not quite seventeen, constantly looking over my shoulder, half expecting someone to pop out of the shadows and grab me.
Now that two shifters had actually tried that, I was glad to have these three dragons in my court. So to speak.
I don’t want to be queen.
When they reached me, Rayce dropped to one knee in front of me, taking both my hands in his. “Are you okay?”
I was surprised to realize I was shaking. It was as if their presence allowed me to feel the reaction I was having to the night’s events.
“They broke into my home. Chased me, tried to—” I was shaking too hard by then to finish the sentence.
Rayce leaned forward and enfolded me in his arms, half-standing to wrap me up in the comfort he offered. “It’s okay. You’re safe now,” he murmured. He propped his hip on the armrest of the chair I sat in and stroked my hair with one hand until I quit shivering.
When I had calmed down some, he glanced up at Officer Smith, who still sat at his desk. “Do you need her for anything else? Or can we take her home with us?”
“I just need Ms. O’Neill’s signature on a couple of forms, and we will be done,” the officer assured us.
“I can’t go home,” I almost wailed. “The lock is broken, I think.”
“We have a hotel room,” Rayce reassured me. “You’re welcome to stay with us.”
A hotel room, while not necessarily my first choice, might be my safest option at the moment. And being surrounded by three enormous dragon shifters definitely was.
I nodded, and when Officer Smith brought them over, I signed the report with a shaky hand without even reading it.
“We need to decide what to do,” I said to Rayce as we walked out the precinct door and into the Manhattan night.
“Yes. But not until tomorrow. Tonight, you need to sleep.”
I wasn’t sure that would make me feel b
etter, but I was also too tired to care.
“Do we need to take a taxi?” I asked.
“No,” Lanzo said. “We just need to wait until there aren’t so many people around.”
So we continued walking down the sidewalk until we had to skirt some bushes outside a building. That stretch of sidewalk fell into a shadow, and as we stepped into it, all three men took my arms and moved us through the dragonsrealm for just a few moments—long enough for them to use it as a shortcut to their hotel room.
I’d almost forgotten how convenient that form of travel could be.
We landed in the middle of the room, and they all folded their wings back in, turning to look at me expectantly.
“What?” I asked suspiciously.
“You can’t stay in New York any longer,” Rayce announced. “It’s not safe. And there’s nowhere else to hide. If the dragonking’s men can track you down in Manhattan—if we can track you down in Manhattan—then you are no longer safe.”
He didn’t say anything I hadn’t already been thinking, but it still felt like he’s punched me in the stomach.
“Fine.” I blinked back tears. “I’ll join your crusade. But I get to say goodbye to all my New York friends first.”
Chapter Five
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. After Rayce bundled me into the bathroom with an oversized T-shirt and instructions to get ready for bed, I heard them arguing out in the room.
“She can’t simply wander around New York City saying goodbye to her friends,” Lanzo argued.
“Not without at least one of us ending up killing someone, almost certainly,” Draven said in his deep voice.
“We can’t allow it,” Lanzo said firmly.
“We have to,” Rayce interjected in a measured tone. “If we don’t, it’s likely she’ll never forgive us. And we have to be there with her when she takes back the throne. Both for her sake and for the sake of all dragonkin.”
Falling for Shifters: A Limited Edition Autumn Shifters Collection Page 10