Rage shot through Cadence, and she shoved the woman to one side. The woman pressed back against the nest and blasted ice at Cadence, and Cadence didn’t dare fire back at her, because she was standing right in front of her dragonlings.
“Want some more?” the woman sneered.
“Enjoy breathing while you still can,” Cadence said furiously.
Then she directed a glare at Humphrey. “How could you possibly think that you would get away with this?” she demanded. “The Elders will have you killed.”
“Not if I control dragon fertility,” Humphrey said calmly. “Dr. Hamill and I are working together on this. I will get to say whose clutch lives. I will get to say which infertile dragons may finally get to conceive. Besides, it’s not like you’re going to tell them about this. You’re going to sign a document that states that you agree to be my mate, and that you nullify your marriage to Orion, and you are going to leave here with me today and never see him again, or your dragonlings will die.”
“Orion would never agree to letting you take me or his children. He already told you that.”
“If he wants his dragonlings to survive, he’ll have no choice. I can legally claim the ice dragonlings, at least, and I assure you, things won’t go well for them if I don’t get my way. You know, there are Elders who want to have grandlings. I can promise them successful hatchings. They’re not going to investigate too thoroughly.”
There was a loud thumping sound on the door.
The security guard hurried over and stood in front of it as the doctors glanced at each other uneasily. Humphrey’s man joined him.
Humphrey grabbed the scroll and shoved it at Cadence.
“Sign it,” Humphrey said quickly.
The thud sounded louder.
“What’s that noise?” Cadence demanded. She glanced at the door; it was starting to glow.
Humphrey let out a scream of rage.
“I am going to kill one of your dragonlings now!” he shouted. “And another one every five seconds until you sign!”
“Wait!” the blonde woman cried out. “You didn’t say anything about murder. I can’t let you do that. I could go to jail for it – I’d be an accessory.”
“Not if you’re dead,” Humphrey snarled. He let out a blast of ice at the woman, who didn’t have a chance to shift and protect herself; her entire body froze solid in an instant. Her mouth was frozen open in a silent scream, and she slowly tipped over and shattered on the hard floor.
As she fell, Cadence took advantage of the distraction to hurl herself between Humphrey and her nest.
“Move, you bitch!” Humphrey grabbed her by the arm. As he did, one of the dragonlings let out a surprisingly strong blast of flame, burning his arm. He screamed in pain and jerked back. The door melted into a pool of glowing slag, and Orion and his men rushed through.
Cadence frantically pushed the dragonlings to the back of the room, and shielded them with her body. They squeaked furiously behind her – dragonling attempts at roars, as their fledgling instincts told them to fight the man threatening their mother and their clan. Her heart swelled with protective love for them, and icy scales crackled up her arms and steely blue claws curved from her fingertips. She knew her eyes were a fierce ice blue.
Orion and his men had dragonfire in their eyes. They stormed across the room, stopping when they came face-to-face with Humphrey and his goon. The two doctors stood a couple of paces back, but they held their ground – Orion would have to go through them to get to Cadence and his dragonlings. And he would. He would have blasted mountains to the ground for them.
But they couldn’t go dragon here. The room was lined with incubators, and inside them fragile, precious dragon eggs. As much as he wanted to watch Humphrey scream as he was consumed by fire, he and his men couldn’t risk shifting.
Humphrey narrowed his eyes, wondering why Orion was hesitating – then he barked a laugh as he understood. “Weak,” he sneered.
But it was doctor Hamill who made the first move. He barged forward, meaning to shoulder his opponent to the ground. For a human facing down a group of dragons he was brave – or foolhardy. Maybe it was arrogance that made him think he could possibly win. Certainly it was a misjudgment to choose to attack Alcott. His obvious age and his twisted leg said he was an easy target. The stream of fire he spat at the doctor, so hot it left glowing after-images on Cadence’s retinas, said otherwise.
There was little left but the smell of burning flesh and a mess of swirling ash that settled thickly on the spotless floor.
Then it was dragon on dragon.
Humphrey and Orion met in a blur of limbs, their eyes gone dragon, their skin rippling with scales. Orion landed a solid punch to the older man’s face, and he shook his head, droplets of bright blood splattering from his nose. Where it touched the floor, it crystallized into red-white ice.
They backed off and circled each other. Then Orion let out a massive burst of flame that rolled toward Humphrey, a blossoming plume of orange and black. Humphrey countered with a frigid cloud that flashed into steam as it met the fire.
Nikolai was grappling with Humphrey’s hired muscle, his fingers wrapped tightly around the man’s wrists. Where his fingers indented the thug’s skin, it blistered and reddened. Nikolai’s cheek was marked with an unwholesome-looking bloom of grayish frostbite. The man attempted to throw Nikolai, leading with his hip – some kind of martial arts move – but Nikolai wrapped his arm around the man’s throat as he turned. He braced his neck from behind as he twisted his head sharply. There was a sickening crack, and the thug slumped to the ground, his neck broken.
Dr. Kowalski cowered in the corner. Alcott stood over her, smoke wisping gently from his nostrils as if to remind her that should he wish to, he could vaporize her, leaving her as nothing more than a settling cloud of soot. Her face was a ghastly parchment color and she looked as if she might vomit. The whites of her still-human eyes were visible as she gazed up into Alcott’s contemptuous, implacable face. Not just a monstrous excuse for a mother, but a coward as well, his expression said. And when his eyes briefly flickered to Cadence, crackling with frost and fury as she guarded her dragonlings, his eyes briefly softened with approval.
Her attention was snatched back to Orion as he seized Humphrey bodily and slammed him to the floor. Humphrey’s breath left his body on a feeble icy grunt that would have shamed a dragonling. He held up his hands as though trying to shield himself from the inferno he knew was coming.
Orion flamed him, the center of his fire as blue-white as a welding torch, as intense as his rage. Waves of orange and red washed over the defeated ice dragon, and his scream was, mercifully, brief.
Orion didn’t stop until a beeping alarm on one of the incubators indicated that the temperature of the whole room had risen by several degrees – he wouldn’t risk harming the eggs. And besides, there was nothing left of Humphrey but a charcoal shell that glittered here and there with the frosty white and iridescent blue of an ice dragon’s scales.
Cadence briefly closed her eyes, and allowed her claws to retract and her scales to melt back into her skin. She turned to the nest, reaching down to soothe her brand new dragonlings.
“Are you all right?” Orion husked, rushing to her side.
“I’m fine now that my babies are safe. How did you get away from the guards?” Cadence asked, cradling a tiny ice dragonling in her arms. The dragon snuggled up against her and made a purring sound as Cadence stroked its soft scales. Orion had his arm protectively slung around her; she was still shaking.
“I knew there was trouble as soon as we saw the guards outside,” Orion said. “They were all ice dragons – I recognized a few of them from our previous visits, but some of the ice dragons were wearing fire dragon uniforms.”
Orion picked up a fire dragonling and stroked its head, and it blinked up at him happily and burped out a tiny spurt of fire.
“That’s what was bothering me about them. I couldn’t put my finger on it,”
Cadence said.
“I told Nikolai, and as soon as that door shut behind us, he and the other men subdued the guards and then we just all joined in and melted the doors down.”
Dr. Kowalski rushed up to them. “You will protect me,” she said desperately. “I can help you have more babies. I can ensure that your hatchlings survive every time.”
Cadence let out a carefully directed blast of ice, enough to freeze Dr. Kowalski’s hair, and coat her face with frost, but not enough to kill her. Dr. Kowalski staggered back.
“The Dragon Elders will take over the clinic, and use the technology for the good of all dragons,” Orion said to her. “As for you, you’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.”
Then he hugged Cadence to him. “And now, I’m going to take my family home,” he said, and planted a tender kiss on his dragonling’s scaly head.
Epilogue
Orion was able to put his legal skills to good use when Humphrey’s clan tried to claim the two ice dragonlings from Cadence’s hatchlings. It turned out that when the Elders had created the law five hundred years earlier, they’d written it in such a way that it had been assumed that a dragon would have either all ice or all fire dragonlings. The law was written in such an unclear fashion that Orion was not only able to argue that all the hatchlings should remain with his clan, but was able to get the law overturned.
Dr. Hamill’s clinic was taken over by the Elders, who made the formerly private clinic public, and subject to continuous monitoring. It turned out that Cadence’s blood was so fertile because of her wolf shifter ancestry; something about hybrid vigor, which Cadence didn’t really understand. However, it helped steer their research. Their experiments with a serum made from Cadence’s blood showed an enormous amount of promise in helping infertile dragons to conceive. Laetitia’s daughter was finally well on her way to delivering a healthy clutch of dragonlings – three, in fact.
The fire and ice dragons continued to fight, but with much less venom then they had in the past. Darlene even helped to plan a baby shower for Laetitia’s grandlings. Of course, she also froze Laetitia’s half of the tourist booth into an ice cube when Laetitia had the nerve to tell a group of visitors that South Lyndvale had better restaurants, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Orion and Cadence made their bedroom into a giant nursery, with four cribs. No nannies for them; they were strictly hands on.
In a visit to the Garrison nursery, Daisy and Ryker got a quick education in the raising of a dragonling.
“Do you actually have cages on top of your cribs?” Daisy said to Cadence. “And why are there bars on the window?”
“Look,” Cadence said, pointing at Estelle, her ice dragonling daughter. Estelle flapped her tiny wings and rose a foot off the ground before landing on the soft carpeting with a thud. She let out a dismayed squeak and looked around in confusion.
Orion knelt down beside her and stroked her head. She shifted back into human baby form and reached for him, and he scooped her up in his arms.
“Good. Lord. They can fly already?” Daisy gasped, clutching at Jasper, who was watching the dragonlings with an expression of fascination. “And I thought I had problems with Jasper shifting and chasing the cat. Oh, and marking the furniture.”
“That’s my boy,” Ryker grinned proudly.
“In my day, we didn’t use carpeting,” Cynthia snorted. “We let them fall right on the stone floor. How else are they going to learn?” She was sitting across the room from them, trying to persuade fire dragonling Donavan not to set the tapestry on fire.
“In her day, dinosaurs roamed the Earth,” Cadence whispered in Daisy’s ear. Daisy strangled on a snort of laughter.
“What was that?” Cynthia asked suspiciously.
“I said that I don’t want them to hurt themselves when they fall to Earth,” Cadence called out to her.
“I’m on to you,” Cynthia said, but then she looked down at her grandson and her lips curled in a tiny smile.
Fire and ice dragonlings Katherine and Lucas both flapped their wings, made it a foot into the air, and then rammed into each other. They fell onto the carpet and sat there indignantly icing and flaming at each other with tiny puffs of snowflakes and flame. At the same time, Jasper managed to set the tapestry on fire, and Cynthia jumped to her feet and began beating out the flames with her hands.
“A little help here!” Cynthia called out with annoyance.
“Oh, looks to me like you’ve got it, mother,” Orion said with a grin curling his lips.
“Four of them. Four! It’s total chaos!” Daisy marveled.
“It’s a good chaos,” Cadence said with a smile, and she walked over to help Cynthia put out the fire.
THE END
Dating A Dragon (The Mating Game Book 2) Page 11