Alpha: An Urban Fantasy Novel (War of the Alphas Book 3)

by SM Reine

  Her heart skipped a beat. “I didn’t transform on the last moon. I don’t know why you think you can help me change.”

  “We’re better than other shifters,” Melchior said. “We aren’t subject to the moon. I’ll show you what life can be like if you surrender to me, to the change, to the magic that flows through us.” His fingers slid down her belly, slipped along the hem of her jeans, dipped behind the button. Deirdre shut her eyes, lost in the sensation of his hot skin against hers.

  He was the consort of the unseelie queen. Stark’s former brother-in-arms and current mortal enemy. If there was anyone that Deirdre shouldn’t have been attracted to, it was Melchior. But she couldn’t seem to convince her body that it shouldn’t burn along with his.

  “Stop talking and show me how to change,” Deirdre said.

  “You’re so impatient.”

  “That’s because I’m beyond freezing. I hate the cold.”

  “You don’t have to allow the cold to take you,” Melchior said. “You can dominate it. Bathe yourself in warmth.”

  “And the change?” she asked.

  “Are you in a hurry?” he murmured against the side of her neck. His lips were the texture of snakeskin. There was nothing soft or human about them. It felt like being seduced by something alien to the Earth, something that shouldn’t have existed. His tongue darted out to flick against her flesh, warm and dry.

  “Yeah,” Deirdre said. “You promised you’d show me how to change, but all I’m hearing so far is a lot of talk.”

  “All right.” His hands slid under her arms, lifting them to either side. She spread her fingers out. The cold wind licked through them like the wind through feathers that she didn’t yet have. “Bring the fire.”

  “I can’t always summon that power,” Deirdre said. “It only works sometimes.”

  “That’s because you haven’t embraced your anger. The sidhe are creatures of passion. That’s why we love tactile experiences like sex, and why we mate so much more readily than most shifters.” He breathed that last word down her neck, making chills ripple over her spine. “We aren’t fed by sex the way many of the unseelie are, though. We are fed by anger.”

  Deirdre had plenty of that.

  “Change,” Melchior whispered.

  The command resonated through her marrow and reached the power hiding within. The power that she had never been able to touch before. That dormant side of her being that had always been as remote as the moon itself.

  Change.

  Stark had tried to use compulsion on Deirdre before, but it had never felt like this.

  She could ignore Melchior as easily as she could stop breathing.

  “Use your anger, fuel the fire, and change,” he urged. “Think of everything that Everton Stark has done to you. Think of the way you’ve suffered at his hands, and the way your friends have suffered.”

  Deirdre thought back to the first time she had met Stark, when he bumped into her on the sidewalk and ordered her to kill.

  She hadn’t succumbed, but another shifter had. Colin Burgh had immediately ripped the head off of a woman, crushed it against the wall, spilled her brains on the sidewalk. He would have killed a little girl too, if Deirdre hadn’t stopped him.

  Stark had brought Andrew into the pack and then let him die. He had ordered his last Beta, Sancho, to battle witches in a fight he couldn’t win, and Sancho had died for it.

  He had forced her to fight Niamh, her best friend. And maybe that was why Niamh had turned on her.

  Worst of all, Stark had made her shoot Gage in the head.

  The dragon was still whispering, hissing venomous words deep into her soul. “Don’t you hate him?”

  She did hate him. She hated him and feared him and wanted him to die.

  And Deirdre wasn’t certain that she could live without Stark anymore.

  His vision. His drive.

  She needed that.

  “Don’t lose the anger,” Melchior said. “Hold on to it.”

  Deirdre shut her eyes and focused on the burn. She wasn’t certain that it was anger. The emotion was so much more complex than that.

  Whatever it was, it blossomed within her like a lotus turning to the sun. She was the heat that shimmered over the savannah. She was the thermals high in the sky on the hottest summer days. She was the sunbaked sand, the golden rays of light that burned white in the sky, the sun itself.

  She was a firebird.

  “Yes,” Melchior said.

  His voice was the only thing grounding her to reality, surreal as it was. That one word made her open her eyes.

  Her skin was on fire.

  She sucked in a gasp, momentarily convinced that she was going to combust like Chadwick Hawfinch had.

  “Ignore the fear. You need the anger. Rein it in, Deirdre. Make it your own.”

  Deirdre was beyond control now that the flames erupted from her skin, flaring into feathers that were each like the leap of a candle’s fire. She was covered in it.

  She burned, but she didn’t melt.

  She wasn’t a candle. She was the fire itself.

  Melchior unbuttoned the flannel shirt she had borrowed from Stark, pushing it over her shoulders. His rough skin skimmed along her ribcage, the curve of her breasts, the undersides of her arms.

  He undressed her completely and stepped back, giving Deirdre room to change.

  Her body twisted. Her ribs slid under the skin, restructuring and shrinking. The skin on Deirdre’s legs thickened, toughened. Her toes merged and extended.

  A beak thrust from her jaw, pushing her human teeth away. The fragments of bone fell to the snow. It should have hurt—it looked painful, seeing all her molars scattered on the ground in front of her—but all she felt was a strange numbness.

  All the flaming feathers tingled pleasantly, as though it were an itch she had been dying to scratch for a decade, finally fading.

  When she spread her arms wide, they were no longer arms. They were broad wings. They caught the wind like a kite, and she was so light that it felt like the slightest breeze could take her feet off of the ground.

  She turned to look at Melchior.

  He was changing, too. Where Deirdre was something feathery, he was a great and terrible lizard, with broad wings similar to a bat’s. His thick tail glimmered jewel-bright. Heavy fangs hung over his jaw, and smoldering eyes watched her.

  Melchior had become his dragon form. His head reared above the portal leading back into the ley lines, which haloed him in dark energy.

  At another time, she would have gazed at him in all the awe he deserved. He was a dragon. An actual dragon. The kind of thing that she had doodled on her schoolbooks when she grew bored with reality.

  But now Deirdre was glorious, too.

  For the first time, she understood what all her shifter friends had talked about over the years—how their animal form was as natural to them as their human body, the pain-that-was-not that swept through her when they shifted, the acuity of the senses. Her eyes were so sharp that she could see a bead of ice glistening on a tree miles away.

  It didn’t feel strange to her.

  She had come home.

  If only Daddy could see me now.

  Melchior settled back on his haunches, muscles rippling under his beaded flesh. He was as large as a ship. A human could have ridden him, if they’d dared approach such a fearsome beast. But there was still something distinctly Melchior about the creature—the look in his eyes, the arrogance in the tilt of his head, the uplift of his wings.

  He challenged her in silence.

  And then he flapped his wings and took to the air.

  Deirdre’s feathers whipped around her, beaten by the stirring of wind. She flickered and guttered like a campfire in a storm. Her flesh underneath the feathers wasn’t made of skin, but the smoldering of coals.

  She was magic. She was fire.

  She was a phoenix.

  Instinctively, Deirdre knew how to angle her limbs so that she would ca
tch the air, working with the currents to lift herself rather than exerting her strength.

  Deirdre was light as the flames themselves, without substance or weight, but she still felt perilously dizzy as she took off from the ground. The trees and the portal receded underneath her. There was nothing but the chilly kiss of ice on the wind, the brush of clouds through her heated feathers.

  She was flying.

  Melchior swirled through the air above her, his scales glimmering as he twisted in sinuous lines. He swooped and darted over the forest.

  Deirdre gave chase.

  She followed the tip of his spiked tail, stretching her beak forward as if to snap at it. She bit the air only inches away from him. Gage would have loved to see that—he hadn’t hesitated to pull a werewolf’s tail, and he’d have laughed at the sight of Deirdre snapping at a dragon.

  Melchior was too fast for her to catch him, though. He was also agile for a creature of his size. He danced through the wind, showing her the paths she should take through the clouds, and she trailed him in breathless pursuit.

  The forested hills vanished, succumbing to black ocean. The waves were frozen in frothy arcs. It looked like winter had seized the world in the midst of a storm, immortalizing the furious churn in ice. But it was glossy and reflective as a mirror—the most serene destruction that Deirdre had ever seen.

  She soared over the ocean of glass, and for the first time, she saw herself.

  She didn’t look like any living bird she had seen before. She was the offspring of a hawk and a heron, a lanky predator, fast and sleek. She looked exotic. Her plumage was a shocking contrast to the cold, oppressive blue of the Winter Court.

  Deirdre had only seen birds like her in history books—the etchings on the walls of the pyramids, like the god Horus.

  She wasn’t an animal. She was legend in the flesh.

  If she’d had the ability, she would have laughed with the joy of discovery, but all that came from her throat was music. Her voice chimed over the frozen Winter Court.

  Melchior looped around her. He smoldered orange-bright, fire gathering in his chest.

  He spewed a column of flame into the clouds.

  Deirdre allowed the fire to spill from her outstretched wings in a smaller echo of Melchior’s power. It was exhausting to shoot off even that much fire. Exhausting, and satisfying.

  Melchior’s flame reflected off of something other than the glassy ocean waves. There were dark vertical surfaces out on the water, too—crystal spires and stalagmites of frozen saltwater.

  The queen’s castle.

  Deirdre flamed again, momentarily illuminating the only sign of civilization in the Winter Court. It was a cruel, frightening building, with a long bridge of ice leading back to the forest. Walking on that path with human feet would have been scary. There was nothing to keep people from slipping and plummeting to their death in the frozen ocean below.

  She wanted to get a better look, but it was too far away, and she was drained by the change. She could feel the phoenix powers slipping away from her.

  It was hard to stay angry when she felt so much joy.

  Deirdre didn’t want to stop flying. She never wanted to leave the sky. But she wasn’t stupid enough to cling to her phoenix form when it was sliding away from her, and she didn’t want to find out if she could survive a fall from that height straight onto ice.

  She spiraled toward the top of the nearest hill. It wasn’t where she’d entered through the ley lines, but Deirdre didn’t think she could get back where she started without Melchior’s help.

  The fatigue grew exponentially. Her whole body shook in the frozen wind.

  Deirdre’s feet were already reshaping again by the time she hit the snow.

  The flames fell away from her, exposing unmarked human flesh, making long black hair flutter around her shoulders.

  She collapsed to human knees and just barely caught herself on human hands.

  Melchior thudded into the hill behind her. Muffled pops told her that he was changing, too.

  She didn’t care enough to watch.

  Deirdre stared up at the black sky, tears burning her eyes.

  She had flown. She had really flown.

  Melchior sank to his knees beside her. “It could be like that all the time.” The snow was melting around them, turning into a liquid slurry, exposing hardened soil underneath. “We could blaze through the night together, dominating everything that falls below us.”

  She barely heard him.

  I flew.

  He dragged her toward him, plastering Deirdre against his chest. She settled onto his lap with her knees on either side of his thighs.

  It was only then that she became aware of how naked they both were.

  Shifters had to be comfortable with nudity by virtue of their nature. They could move from one body into another, but they couldn’t take clothes along with them. It simply wasn’t part of the magic.

  Deirdre was used to others being naked around her. But she’d never been naked like that herself. In group showers, yes. While changing around other girls in the dorms—yes. But naked because she had shifted? Naked with a man?

  That was another experience entirely.

  Melchior’s manhood rested heavily between his thighs, engorged with anticipation. Like every other part of the dragon, it was impressive. She’d have been lying to herself if she tried to think otherwise.

  No wonder the queen had made him consort.

  “That was amazing,” Deirdre said. “I don’t…” She couldn’t find her words. She swallowed hard.

  “Think of it, Deirdre,” Melchior said. “The two of us together—no walls, no shackles, no limits. Only sky.”

  With the last word, he kissed her. His serpentine tongue darted into her mouth. Deirdre folded against him, unwilling to resist. The fire of the phoenix still blazed through her. She was as bright and hot as the dragon. Just as powerful a shifter. No longer an Omega.

  She could feel the weight of him between her legs, pushing against the most intimate parts of her body, where nobody had been since Gage.

  What would Gage have thought if he could see her now? Straddling the consort of the unseelie queen in a frozen forest, burning with him, letting his hands rove over her body? Melchior acquainted himself with every inch of her thighs and weighed her breasts in his palms and rolled the nipples between forefinger and thumb.

  It wasn’t the thought of Gage that stopped her.

  Deirdre pulled away from Melchior, breaking their kiss. “What will you do if you win the election?”

  “You want to talk politics at a time like this?” he asked, demonstrating exactly what he meant by pulling her hips flush against his, allowing her to feel his hardness.

  She didn’t exactly want to talk politics, but she knew she wasn’t screwing him until they got a few things straight. “What’s the Winter Court got planned for gaeans on Earth?”

  “No wonder Ever likes you,” Melchior said. “You’re as aroused by ideology as he is.” His thumb slipped against the bud of heat at her core, and Deirdre bit back a groan.

  She was tempted to throw caution to the wind and enjoy the seduction the dragon offered. It would have been so much easier than thinking. Melchior’s tongue stroked confidently against hers, and she could only imagine how that would feel on more sensitive parts. But she made herself stop kissing him again.

  “What will you do with the OPA?” Deirdre asked.

  “I can’t believe you want me to articulate a platform before I can have sex with you.”

  “Is there something wrong with a little ideology? The world needs more visionaries.”

  “You want to know what Rhiannon will do with power?” Melchior lifted his fingers to his mouth and sucked on them, smiling at her taste. “She’ll blast America with winter and kill everyone. Then she will expand from America to conquer the angels and demons.”

  She gaped at him. “But why? What do you get out of that?”

  “Ever loves a
ll shifters. Rhiannon hates him, so she hates shifters, too. She’ll take what he loves from him and prove once and for all that she’s the stronger of the two. Rhiannon and I are united in our loathing of Ever, you see. Our mating has far less to do with the desire to be in charge of the Winter Court and much more to do with vengeance.” Melchior shrugged. “Naturally.”

  Deirdre climbed off of Melchior. Her urge to surrender to him was as effectively doused as if she’d jumped into the frozen ocean. “We’re not doing this.” Her feet left burned imprints on the ground so distinct that she could make out the shape of her toes.

  “You keep telling me ‘no’ like you think that’s an option.” His eyes smoldered with internal light. “I want to know what it means to mate with someone whose fire burns like mine. You saw what we did to Original Sin. By mating, we could flatten this forest and scald the earth.”

  “Mating? We really aren’t doing that.”

  “Think of the life I’m offering you. In my arms, you’ll be safe from the wars to come. You would be my favorite concubine. I would take very good care of you.”

  She snorted. “Concubine?”

  “Consorts and kings don’t have girlfriends.”

  “The unseelie are so screwed up,” Deirdre said. It wasn’t fair that this was the man who had helped her change, bringing Deirdre into the sky for the first time. Damn, but she wished she’d gotten to share that experience with someone she actually liked. “I’m going back to Earth. We’re done here.”

  “You’re not returning to Earth, my little heron. I told you that Rhiannon’s sent an assassin tailored to slaughter a phoenix like you. If you go back, you’ll die permanently. And I don’t plan on letting that happen.” He advanced on her, forcing her to back into one of the trees.

  “Why would I be safer here?” Deirdre asked.

  “Because Rhiannon won’t let the assassin into the Winter Court. It knows no master. It will kill anyone in its path, and she’s much too smart to allow it into her realm. As long as you’re here, you’re safe.” He extended a hand toward Deirdre. “You can stay with me willingly, or you can stay in shackles.”

  Staying as his concubine would mean she was safe from the assassin, solitary confinement in an OPA detention center, and Stark’s murderous moods.