Shifter Origins (Series-Starter Shifter Variety Packs Book 1)

by Aimee Easterling

  Chapter 10

  For one agonizing moment after the Lord Dragon appeared by her side, Fee couldn’t gather enough breath to move. The dragon—her dragon—was terrifyingly beautiful in the flesh. He was head and shoulders taller than herself, his muscular bulk so tremendous it bordered on the sublime. His dark eyes pierced hers and his rich marshmallow aroma intoxicated her senses. Worse, the entirety of his human form was wreathed in a magnetic forest of flickering flames.

  The fire must have been what pushed her over the edge. That’s the only way Fee could explain forgetting who she was and why she was present in enemy territory. Forgetting Malachi’s hard fists and the desperate poverty of the people who shared her underground home.

  Instead, she’d clutched the dragon’s shoulders for stability as she half-climbed his body to claim the offered lips with her own. She hummed into his mouth and twined fingers through raven locks as she collapsed into the satisfying heat of crackling flames.

  Although, to be fair, it wasn’t pure physical attraction that moved her. Instead, Fee’s actions were an acceptance of the conclusion that had been trickling into her brain all morning long.

  Mason was the closest thing she’d ever seen to pure good on two feet. Despite the dreary picture her father had painted of the magic-less majority bowing down beneath a dragon’s overbearing thumb, the inhabitants of the Sunsphere weren’t terrified and imprisoned lackeys. If anything, that particular description more aptly applied to her own compatriots who walked with bent shoulders beneath Malachi’s gimlet gaze.

  Knowing that Mason nurtured such trust and happiness in his community, Fee allowed herself to be drawn by his magnificent fire. She sank into their shared kiss and luxuriated into the burning fingers that caressed her shoulders and neck. For a long moment, in fact, she even forgot their joining was being witnessed by a rather embarrassing audience—Mason’s plant-loving foster mother.

  Only when cold air licked at her bared midriff did Fee glance down and see her secret revealed. Then breath fled as she read the words moving across the cell phone’s illuminated screen.

  “Last call,” Malachi had typed. Her father’s impatience echoed through the air, his anger sharp in the eight small letters.

  He wouldn’t.

  But Fee’s fingers were already fumbling frantically to tap out a reply. Because deep down inside, she knew that her father really would. He would punish a daughter who disobeyed his orders, even if that rebellion was as minor as a delayed check-in. He would set off this bomb in the wrong part of the Aerie out of pure spite.

  He would extinguish his only daughter’s life, considering the gesture an acceptable loss in the pursuit of his overarching goal.

  Knowing she had mere seconds to change Malachi’s decision, terror made fingers clumsy as they slid across the slick surface. Then words changed to numbers as Fee failed at her task.

  2:00, 1:59, 1:58.

  It was already almost too late.

  “Turn it off,” Mason demanded.

  For an instant, her father’s harsh voice filled her mind in counterpoint. This was Fee’s final chance to force Mason’s hand. She could dart aside and grab the dragon’s mother, threaten Sarah with the knife swiped from a third-floor drawer. After sensing protective passion smoldering beneath Mason’s skin during that mind-altering kiss, Fee knew her companion would do anything to save his mother’s life.

  But instead, she looked away, unable to meet the intensity of her companion’s gaze. “I can’t,” she breathed.

  1:55, 1:54: 1:53.

  For three long seconds, Lord Dragon stared at her, pain and disappointment evident in his gaze. Then he turned his back, those joyous flames a distant memory as he barked orders at the older woman watching with cocked head from the opposite side of a hydroponics bench.

  “Evacuate everyone,” he demanded. Then, despite the time limit, he waited for Sarah to reach the down staircase before grabbing Fee’s arm and pulling her up the stairs leading in the opposite direction. Seconds later, they stepped together onto the open platform that made up the Sunsphere’s roof.

  Wind snatched away what little breath Fee had managed to regain and she gasped at the cold. The wintry gust bit into her skin, whipping a strand of hair into her mouth and tearing her eyes.

  “Can you at least take it off?” her dragon asked quietly. Mason should have been livid with rage. But instead, he was far more patient than rapidly disappearing numbers on the cell-phone screen gave him reason to be.

  Fee forced air through a tightened windpipe and nodded. “Yes, but it’ll take time.”

  “Hopefully less than one minute and forty seconds of time,” Mason countered. She thought there was a hint of a smile on his hard face, but then the man was gone and a massive dragon stood on the open platform in his place.

  If Mason had been enticing in his human form, he was now entrancing. By rights, a dragon should have grabbed Fee around her waist and gripped her painfully as he launched himself away from the people he loved. But, instead, the Lord Dragon himself stood stock still as if she had reason to be scared of him rather than vice versa. Didn’t he realize Fee was strapped skin to wires with explosives?

  Well, if Mason wasn’t going to grab her, then it was up to Fee to find her own way aboard the only available transportation on offer. Because sometime between waking in a marshmallow-scented bed and discovering that her father considered her expendable, Fee had decided to do everything in her power to rescue the defenseless innocents below. Now, without hesitating, she gave herself a leg up via the dragon’s bent elbow then created handholds out of one curved scale after another as she scrambled atop Mason’s back.

  Flames opened out around them like the petals of a flower. No, those weren’t flames, they were wings. Sails of fire that carried the two aloft while enfolding Fee in the most profound feeling of safety she’d ever experienced.

  It wasn’t an entirely smooth ascent, though. Instead, the abrupt motion of the dragon’s launch nearly tossed Fee from her perch. But Mason’s tail bumped her back into place in the valley separating shoulders from neck, preventing her from plummeting to an untimely death.

  0:58, 0:57, 0:56.

  While Fee had been figuring out how to board a dragon, the cell phone had already breached the final minute of its countdown. Time seemed to expand and contract all at once, each instant lasting an eternity but also whipping past as quickly as the wind flew by her face.

  Hurry up, Fee reminded herself.

  She had work to do if she wanted to experience another toe-curling kiss with the human equivalent of her draconic steed. So she ignored both dizzying earth rushing by beneath unshod feet and fingers aching from their death grip around the dragon’s massive neck. Instead, she pried one hand loose with an effort and stuffed bare toes into jagged cracks between heated dragon scales. Then, after hesitating only an instant, she relinquished her second handhold as well.

  Fee knew she should have been terrified to ride hands-free on a dragon with ticking explosives strapped around her waist. But instead, her original fear fled as fire magic consumed her. Opening her mouth, she whooped with delight...and was nearly startled from her aerial perch as the massive dragon beneath her mirrored the cry.

  Mason’s bellow of sound and flame, unlike her own, served a utilitarian purpose. Down in the swirling mass of snow beneath massive dragon belly, other fliers launched themselves from the summit of towers clustered along the river’s nearest bank. Three dark specks grew as they arrowed upward to join the dragon to whom she clung, and Fee knew she was soon fated to meet the other shifters who called the Aerie home.

  0:39, 0:38, 0:37.

  Okay, enough sightseeing. It was time to prevent the catastrophe her father had set into motion. And, really, the effort shouldn’t be so hard.

  After all, Fee rather than Malachi had placed the device around her waist in the first place. Fee rather than Malachi had been the one to pore over books late at night, deciphering wiring diagrams as she cradl
ed her mug of steaming chamomile tea and ached for missing sleep.

  When it came right down to it, the puzzle was merely a matter of disentangling threads of copper and teasing them back out the way they’d come in. It was as simple as pulling loose just the right wire and leaving the entirety deactivated, a harmless hunk of metal and plastic.

  Okay, so there was also one small failsafe to consider, the fact that removing the cell phone from its cradle or pressing a single button would cause the bomb to detonate prematurely.

  But even that trigger wasn’t the cause of the sinking sensation in the pit of Fee’s stomach. No, it was a second fleeting glance earthward that turned an exhilarating ride into a journey through hell. And not because of a fear of heights either.

  Because back in their underground tunnels, Fee had taken her father’s words as fact. She was to be the invader, the sole warrior bringing fire-mage battle to the heart of the dragons’ domain.

  Now she realized that Malachi had been lying about her purpose in the Aerie just as he’d lied about everything else. Even from this distance, she easily recognized the canary jacket of Malachi’s second-in-command as the man crept through the tangle of winter-sleepy Green below. And once she focused on the glow of gold, she could pick out a handful...no a score...of soldiers stealthily stalking through the plant-covered city in the minor mage’s wake.

  The conclusion was gut-wrenching and obvious all at once. Fee hadn’t been her father’s carefully trained assassin. No, as she took in the scene arrayed beneath her, she realized she’d never been anything other than bait.

  Chapter 11

  Evacuate the humans to the tunnels. Mason flashed the frequently practiced but never before used code to his brothers, ultraviolet pigments in his scales changing to match the pattern they’d developed during a misspent youth. In reply, Zane immediately peeled out of formation, shifting even as he landed on the Riverview’s roof then sprinting for the stairs to carry out the Lord Dragon’s orders.

  With both sets of towers taken care of, that left only the bomb itself to defuse. Cold air bit into Mason’s hide as he turned away from the houseboats arrayed across Golden Reservoir. The west, in contrast, was a Green stronghold, a spot where Fee could drop the explosives without harming human life.

  Heading established, Mason twisted his neck backward to check on his precious cargo. Despite a clear understanding that the redhead had come to the Aerie with the intent to do harm, his belly immediately filled with peaceful embers as he watched his treasure work.

  Long tresses whipped around her face while pellets of ice settled into the gap between collar and skin. But Fee was so engrossed in her task that she noticed neither wind, cold, nor the fact that she was currently perched on a dragon’s moving back.

  So much like Sam. Mason couldn’t count the number of times he’d walked in on his brother intent upon a sea of engineering drawings, how many times he’d slipped a plate of food onto the corner of Sam’s desk only to return hours later to find the offering still untouched.

  Instinctively, Mason shied away from the memory...but then he slowly eased back toward an image that emanated warm nostalgia rather than the usual flame-quenching guilt. His chest expanded as his fire grew. And for the first time since Sam’s premature death, a reminder of his twin sent Mason soaring higher into the cloud-filled sky rather than plummeting toward the grasping plants below.

  But the moment of tranquility was short-lived. Even as the dragon watched, his treasure’s chin tilted earthward and her hands went abruptly still. Then she peered toward Mason’s face, her already pale skin now so ashen that the dragon was terrified she’d lose her grip and fall down, down, down toward the perennially hungry Green.

  Immediately, he whipped his own head forward, berating himself for startling a human who wasn’t accustomed to staring into a dragon’s gargantuan eyes. Fee was so small in comparison to his true form, her body so nearly weightless that he could barely feel human thighs squeezing the saddle of draconic neck as his passenger clung on for dear life. No wonder she’d been startled.

  Maybe Fee can relax now that she’s not gazing into eyeballs as large as she is tall....

  Except his passenger didn’t relax. Instead, her muscles tensed further and her fists started pounding a staccato against hard-edged scales.

  The pummeling didn’t hurt, but it did provoke Mason to glance backward one more time in an effort to assess the situation. “...Dangerous men!” his rider was saying, words barely audible as she yelled against the roar of the whipping wind.

  But her hand signal was easier to understand. His treasure had lost her focus on the bomb and was pointing east and down, back toward the towers from which they’d come.

  At first, Mason saw nothing but swaying trees and falling snow. Then, at long last, a bright yellow jacket glinted into view.

  Once color alerted him to location, impending danger quickly became apparent. Here, there, and everywhere, the forest swayed with movement as humans passed underneath. The invaders were scattered at first but soon coalesced into a circle around the undefended buildings he and his brothers had so recently left behind.

  Enemies. Mason whipped his tail up to loop protectively around his treasure’s waist. He knew the gesture was frightening for a human unused to dragon-riding, but he couldn’t risk the woman falling off as he dove directly for his dangerous prey.

  Because prey they were. At any other time, the Lord Dragon might have given the invaders benefit of the doubt, might have asked questions before assuming malevolent intent despite the men’s unusual actions. After all, supplicants knew they could arrive openly and make their requests at the public docks. So why bother creeping toward the towers through the danger of the Green?

  Mason knew better than anyone how dragons could frighten humans out of their good sense. Still, his treasure had recognized something about these men. Why else would she have turned from tunnel-vision engineer into terrified girl at the drop of a hat? And from the way she now leaned forward, fingers tense as they clung to the gaps between scales, Fee knew the humans below were up to no good.

  Which meant Mason was equally confident of the same. Thrusting swirling eddies of snow aside with beating wings, he roared out a warning as he gathered flame inside himself to prepare for attack. The initial goal would be to capture the secretive humans without loss of life. But he wouldn’t risk the safety of his people to do so, not when a hot tear whipped away from his treasure’s cheek and sizzled harmlessly against his flame-riddled hide.

  Then an even less familiar sensation captured his attention. The vibration worked its way through his treasure’s leg and into his skin, and for a soul-shattering moment the dragon thought his rider was shaking with terror. Only when he risked another glance backward did he realize the tingle had instead emanated from the chiming of a silenced phone.

  The invaders were so close to the Aerie by this point that Mason’s rage threatened to turn him into a ball of formless fire. Yet he managed to squash the impulse and hover above their heads, watching as Fee reached toward the cell phone with shaking fingers.

  “Hello?” she said at last, one finger swiping to accept the call. But she hadn’t removed the device from its holster, and her legs squeezed against his neck so hard that she must have expected the bomb to blow them both to smithereens as soon as she touched the screen.

  Nothing happened, though. Instead, the only explosion was the pounding within Mason’s chest that sped up to match the pulse of the woman once more clinging to his neck with her one free hand.

  “Is the dragon listening?” a male voice asked, not bothering to greet Fee by name. Instantly, flame within Mason’s belly channeled itself into intent focus. This was the true enemy, the man who had sent an honorable but bruised mage into the Aerie with an incendiary device strapped around her huggable waist. This was the man Mason was meant to find and kill.

  “I’m not sure if he can hear...” Fee started.

  Mason might have been tempte
d to see how much information he could glean by pretending not to notice the conversation taking place on his back. But his treasure’s voice shook and his fire rose up again, refusing to accept her pain.

  Roaring, the Lord Dragon made his presence known.

  And as his bellow faded away, the air descended into silence broken only by the beating of massive wings. Two brothers had formed up at his flanks while invaders below gave up on stealth and began running toward their goal as fast as puny human feet could carry them.

  But the Lord Dragon was willing to wait. Because he was stalking a far more important enemy now. One who wasn’t close enough to see or fight.

  Or was he?

  “Look east,” came that insidious male voice. Together, Mason and Fee swiveled to glance toward the reservoir that connected the Aerie to the larger outside world. At this time of year, the smooth-surfaced water was sparsely populated, the haven no longer quite so necessary to protect people from Green encroachment. Still, there were more than a dozen boats currently peppering the surface, each representing several human lives buoyed up by the rivers that Sam’s genius had helped to dam.

  But surely that wasn’t what the enemy wanted Mason to see?

  Then magenta light flared from the massive embankment that held back the flow of two rivers. A lone human figure stood atop the weir, his index finger pointing down to the right, down to the left, then to a dozen other spots along the tremendous face of the dam.

  From his current distance, Mason could barely make out specks where the man gestured. But when a burst of violet turned into a gushing flow of water, his brain quickly filled in the blanks.

  Fee’s bomb was the least of the Aerie’s worries. Because if this man destroyed the upstream dam and released reservoir waters to gush down into the Aerie’s valley, then every human currently hiding beneath Sunsphere and Riverview would drown.