by Emma Alisyn
Dragon Bewitched
A Clan Dragon Romance
Emma Alisyn
Copyright © 2018 by Emma Alisyn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover Design by Willsin Rowe
Proofreading by Michelle’s Edits
Thank you to my alpha team for your hard work getting this story publish ready!
Tiffani Rippy
Karen Fisher
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
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1
Donato flew home from the city council meeting, chest itching as he restrained the urge to burn something down. His rumbling roar alerted the two-leggers below to the state of his temper, and various persons whom once upon a time would have been lunch tilted their heads up to watch as his shadow darkened the streets. Some time in his cave would do him good, the womb-like darkness allowing him to rest his mind while nestled in the comfort of his mountain. Lazaros still slept—which was highly unfair. It was his decade to act as head of Clan and sit on the city council. But no, he’d gone into seclusion after their sister had died, leaving Donato to raise an infant niece alone with only his three younger brothers in attendance. No more sister. No more matriarch.
Which was the reason he was heading to his two-legged house, because it was time for Kayla’s bus to arrive, and he was already fifteen minutes late. Not that she couldn’t let herself in at the age of seventeen, but he needed to be there to debrief her. Dinner would be late, which meant she would probably talk him into pizza. His snout crinkled. Pizza. What an indignity. But her human side reigned, and though she’d shifted for the first time two years ago, she was shamefully indifferent to the thrill of hunting down a fat deer and guzzling it while fresh.
Poor girl. He blamed his sister in his darker moments, but Iona had paid for marrying a human with her life in a silly accident that killed her only because she had actually mated the human . . . and told no one. Donato’s grief was still a stone in his chest.
He set down on the front lawn, and his front door opened, three males walking out. Donato sat back on his haunches, eyeing them warily as the eldest of the three approached.
“Brother, we need to talk,” Marcello said.
He hated those words.
Fortunately, Kayla texted a message that she would be home late because she had track practice—which put Donato in a better mood because that meant he could proceed with tonight’s dinner plans. His brothers watched him as he moved about the kitchen, the familiar movements doing much to soothe his ruffled nerves.
It was time someone else took the council seat. He needed a few decades of peace and quiet, and the current influx of humans into the shifter ruled city was causing unforeseen issues. But he could have told them it always worked like that. Shifters and humans just didn’t mix well. It could be done in small doses, but only a fool opened the floodgates and just allowed them in willy-nilly.
“Okay,” he said finally to the three males sitting quietly at his kitchen bar. “Talk.”
“The jewels aren’t working,” Marcello said. “None of us have found mates here. It’s been twenty years, it’s time to move on.”
Donato grated zucchini, setting it aside when done to dice onions and garlic, and then dithered over whether to use gruyere or a plebeian cheddar. He considered Marcello’s statement. Marcello had never like the idea of settling in a mixed-species town, but had endured it so Kayla could have a settled upbringing. He made this sacrifice even though he had little use for two-leggers, and his manner was gruff when in a good mood.
Donato turned to his youngest brother. The reasonable one. “Do you agree, Leandros?”
Leandros, curly haired and sparkling eyed, was the most complacent of them all. In fact, he was the one Donato sent when outreach to humans was required. With his charming smile and mild manner, the females seemed to adore him and human men relaxed in his presence. Donato attempted to adopt a similar manner, but it didn’t quite work.
“Kayla is only seventeen,” Leandros said finally. “And she can’t fly long distances.”
Dracaena were volatile, and no one quite knew how she would turn out with the human blood added in. If she’d had her mother . . . but she didn’t, so they’d chosen to raise her in an unorthodox for dragons fashion. Around people. It worked for the North American dragons, why not for them, too, even if his Clan had only flown to this continent a century ago?
“She’s almost human,” Isaai growled. His voice matched a harsh face, and even harsher, uncompromising attitude. If Marcello didn’t like the idea of a mixed species town, he’d at least gone along with it gracefully. Isaai had spent the last two decades bitching and moaning and threatening to burn the whole city down. “It’s disgraceful. She should be in flight training, not in a two-legger school learning . . . economics.”
Leandros rolled his eyes. “The same subject that helps Donato make money, so we’re all able to live independently wealthy? That two-legger learning?”
“All I need are the skies and fresh game. You soft cattle—”
“The North American dragons—” Marcello began.
“Are barely even dragons,” Isaai snapped. “They have flightless among them. That’s how weak their genes have become. Is that what we want for our Clan?”
Donato hissed at him. “Kayla can shift. She is not weak.” She was like a daughter to him, he wouldn’t tolerate anyone, not even his own brother, disparaging her.
“He didn’t mean Kayla,” Marcello said, and glared at Isaai. “He’s just an ass who barely knows how to communicate properly.”
“Do you want to meet me in the sky and teach me about proper communication?”
Donato removed his glasses and rubbed his forehead. “That’s enough, dragonlings.”
“We’re off topic,” Leandros said. “Jewels, remember?”
Marcello gave Isaai once last, final look, then took up the strand of the original conversation. “Our mates aren’t here, Donato. We have to leave.”
One of the jewels in question nestled against his chest, a mostly forgotten bit of cold, shiny rock that didn’t mean to him what it used to. He had Kayla now, and even if he sometimes still yearned for a mate and dragonlings to fill his cave, his adopted daughter filled a large part of his heart.
“We have to accept they may be faulty,” Marcello added.
“Never trust a witch,” Isaai said, and crossed his arms, turning to stare moodily at a wall.
“Aleka was trustwort
hy,” Leandros said. “It just isn’t time.”
Donato regarded his brothers. “So, you’re not all in agreement? I won’t make a decision until you are.” As Clan leader, it was his right to overrule them all if he chose, but he’d never worked like that. They would bring him a concern, their unified opinion on how he should handle it, and then he would decide. But if they were not all in agreement, Donato would do nothing.
The three remained silent.
“I want my jewel to warm as well,” he said. “We were told that we would find mates in this city, and that the jewels would burn bright in their presence. We weren’t told when, or who. We have to be patient, at least until Kayla is fully grown, and then we can reconvene on the matter.”
“I want to go home,” Isaai said.
“We all go, or we all stay. That was the promise we made. We don’t break up the clan. We find mates, we have dragonlings, we make the Clan what it once was.”
Isaai stood, moments later the slamming of the front door rattled the house.
“That went well,” Marcello said. “Meeting adjourned.”
Jezamine brushed her teeth and rechecked the wards around her house as part of her bedtime routine. She couldn’t sleep, not even for a day, considering the precious contents she hid inside the house. Not just her son, but the book. Always the damn book.
Her fingers touched the silver charm around her neck for a moment, a nearly subconscious habit these days. Her coven might think she had no right to take it away from their ancestral lands, but it belonged to her, passed down from Aleka herself, one of the great Witches of the nineteenth century. It did not belong to the coven, she reminded herself, suppressing a twinge of guilt. Her mother had warned her years ago that the coven leadership was slowly crumbling. The choice they’d made for her husband was proof. Jezamine’s wishes had been ignored, and she’d been matched to a warlock who’d only wanted her for her bloodlines, and to get his hands on the spells contained.
Over her flaming body.
It was time to knuckle down on Joshua’s training. She’d sensed a rapid maturation in the last few months. Pleased, she hadn’t questioned too deeply the cause other than just the normal process of growing up, turning nineteen, entering a college bridge program.
Who was she trying to fool, though? They’d been in one spot for three years. Felicity Falls had seemed the perfect place to rest, to settle. An experimental city run by an all shifter council, it was a mix of different species as well as a human enclave. Every resident was vetted, and placed in the quarter corresponding to their race. She lived in a neighborhood of witches with a few humans mixed in. Mostly spouses, stepchildren, partners of witches and warlocks . . . and nearly all of them unaffiliated with a coven. Though, technically, they were the Felicity Falls coven. But no witch moved to this city because she wanted life in the traditional structure of a coven.
The phone rang downstairs, and she ignored it, entering her bedroom and pulling up the local news on her laptop. Not the real news, but the entertainment style news.
“. . . Donato and Kayla Caruso attended the father-daughter charity ball hosted by the Horse Lords to benefit aid to the New Mexico equine shifter enclave . . . .”
She muted the sound and picked up her cell, googling the event. Images popped up of the various city officials, socialites, prominent supnats who were, in general, living far above her pay grade, all in fancy dress at a downtown hotel. Donato and Kayla Caruso were among the city's beautiful people and not only because they were tall, dark haired, stunning examples of supnat beauty, but because they were dragons. Jezamine zoomed in on his picture for a moment, studying the chiseled features and glittering eyes underneath trademark eyeglasses. Even in a tux, his hair was disheveled. His body language while escorting his daughter protective. In another life, he might have been a male she’d find attractive, but dating and relationships were out of the question.
Jezamine scrolled through a few more pics of gowns, then signed off and padded downstairs to make a cup of herbal tea. The phone rang again as she sipped. No one she wanted to talk to would be calling this time of night. It was rude. Frowning, she left the kitchen to turn off the ringer, and immediately noticed the little light on the handset was not flashing.
Jezamine stilled, adjusted her hearing, and realized the ringing was in her head, psychic. She slammed down her personal shields, loosened because she was in her home, and immediately began a sweep inside her wards. Someone must have planted a bug while she was gone. But how?
No . . . the only way to have gotten through her wards to plant a bug was if they’d done it while she was here, maybe working in the garage, and her wards were down. It took her thirty minutes, but she located the tiny, non-sentient spell designed to give the caster the tiniest inroad into her home. She destroyed it, and realized she’d gotten complacent. It was a pain in the ass to lower and raise the wards every time the mailman came, or Instacart, or Shifter Express.
If she’d answered the ‘call’ . . . . She closed her eyes against the anger. So, it was time to prepare for a fight. This was her home now. Joshua was old enough.
Time for a strategic last stand.
2
“Dad.”
Donato grunted. This soufflé would not defeat him. The timing had been off last time, and Kayla hadn’t laughed at him. He would only get that reprieve once, though.
“I’m pregnant.”
“Funny,” he said, peering in the oven.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what Josh said. Before all the cussing. Though to be fair, he was only worried what his mom would say. I guess she’s been a little stressed out lately.”
Kayla’s abnormally even tone of voice finally registered in his ears. He still didn’t believe her, though, so he took his creations out of the oven and set them on the cooling rack before turning to his seventeen-year-old niece and pinning her with a piercing stare.
“Okay, I get it. Did I miss Nail Night?” They went twice a month to have their hands and feet done, Kayla usually opting for something outrageous and anti-fashionable while he stuck with a sedate mani-pedi combo. When she’d gone through her Goth phase, she’d talked him into black polish and even eyeliner. He’d receive several interesting propositions that week, and not all from women.
She just stared at him, dark eyes unblinking.
Humoring her, Donato inhaled, taking in her scent. It was still erratic owing to her developing dracaena nature, especially with the half human blood muddying the waters, but it had begun to stabilize over the last year, signaling that in another three she would be a fully formed adult dracaena. She didn’t smell human, anyway, despite her father’s genes.
Donato froze. There . . . was a change. A hormonal shift that around a female’s monthly time was usually just a whiff before it faded. But now it was stronger.
“Please tell me you’re joking,” he said.
She crossed her arms. “I’ve been telling you for years I wanted a brother or sister.” She tried to smile, signaling it was a shitty attempt at humor.
“Josh, you said?” he asked in a pleasant, mildly interested tone.
She took a step back, then caught herself. “Uh . . . did I say Josh? I meant Kyle.”
“Sounds like a human boy to me,” he crooned, walking around the island to approach her. “Sounds like . . . dinner.”
“Daaaaaad. You can’t roast my boyfriend.”
“Since when do you have a boyfriend?”
She didn’t flinch, proving both her courage as well as the number of times he’d roared at her through the house. His daughter knew he would never harm her, though. But no dragon could help roaring when upset. It just wasn’t in their nature.
Kayla scowled. “I’m almost eighteen.”
“And that’s supposed to mean something to me? I’m three hundred and twenty six!”
She rolled her eyes. “Which is why a pregnant seventeen-year-old girl should be no biggie. It's not like we’re broke. You’re rich as Croesus.
Hey, grandpa. It’ll be okay, I promise.”
She was trying to soothe him. He did need to take a seat, however, because the heat from the oven was causing him to feel faint. Kayla led him to a stool, hand making soothing circles on his back.
“You’re sexually active? We had this discussion.” He’d spared no punches. After the technical aspects, he’d gone through all the potential physiological repercussions—not many, considering her dragon blood—and then discussed pregnancy. He’d been honest with her, hadn’t tried to perpetrate the myth that a baby would exactly ruin her life, but it would bring the reality of adulthood crashing down sooner than she might desire.
Wait . . . some male had taken his daughter without his permission. Taken what belonged to him.
“Uh . . . Dad? Calm down? Your nostrils are smoking. You’ll ruin the soufflés. They can’t take the extra heat.”
She was grasping for straws. “I’ll burn his house down,” he growled.
“And then my baby will be without a father. And you’d only roast his mother, and she’s a very sweet woman.”
“This is not okay, Kayla.”
She paused, moved into his line of sight. “Do you want me to leave, Dad?”
“What?” Donato took a deep breath, closing his eyes. He’d have to tamp his nature down, the outrage that another male had encroached on his territory. Reproduction was normal, especially between a young, fertile couple. He remembered the days when females gave birth much, much younger. It was frowned on in the current century, but like she said . . . no biggie. Right?