by Riley Storm
“But what about the factory?” she moaned.
“If Plymouth Falls needs jobs,” he said. “Then I’ll bring them jobs. Me. Aaric Drakon. My family founded this town. We’ll look after it if it’s suffering.”
“Um. Okay,” she said, not sure what else to say to that. “Thank you?”
“It’s my responsibility, there’s no need to thank me.”
Olivia was starting to realize there was a lot more to Aaric than the arrogant exterior she’d thought at first, or the extreme good looks. There was a heart in there, someone who cared. Not just about her, though she was starting to get that impression, but also about the town.
What other layers did he possess?
“What do we do now?” she wanted to know. “I mean, after the shower.”
Aaric didn’t respond at first, walking them down hallways, most of them dimly lit. Doors passed on either side, the walls in between filled with portraits, paintings, statues and carvings.
“Does Drakon mean dragon?” she asked after the twentieth image of a dragon.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It does. We…uh, we like them.”
“I can see that.” She laughed. “I have a friend who likes unicorns. Her place looks like yours. I mean, much smaller of course, and no dragons. But lots of unicorns. Lots. She’s a bit kooky. Should I be worried about you?”
What a question to ask while he’s got you naked, in his arms.
“Uh, no. I’m pretty sure I’ve got it all together,” he said. “But if you see anything, let me know.”
“Anything out of the ordinary?” she asked as they stopped in front of door that looked no different than all the others.
“Yes,” he said, pushing open the door to reveal a brightly lit room with other doors and openings branching off from it.
“Like, being all mysterious and saying you’re going to “handle” four tough bad guys all on your own? ‘Cause that’s not exactly ordinary. Most people call the police for that.”
“I’m not most people,” Aaric rumbled, bringing her into the bathroom.
“Yeah, I’m picking up on that,” she agreed, looking around at the brightly lit room and its gorgeous white tile marbled with black throughout. It looked expensive.
“Hopefully in a good way,” Aaric teased, walking them straight into the shower.
“This shower could fit ten people in it,” she said, taking a seat on a bench in one corner of the glass-walled enclosure in the middle of the room.
“I like space,” Aaric chuckled, punching some controls on the far wall.
Water sputtered and began falling from a third of the ceiling. She looked up, noting that if he wanted, over half the area of the shower could be a falling rain-shower.
“This is amazing,” she said, walking under the perfectly warmed water, feeling it wash away more than just dirt and the evidence of their earlier activity. It also swept away her stress. She was safe here, she knew. With Aaric.
“What are we going to do after?” she wanted to know as he started to scrub her body down. She jerked in surprise at first, but then let him work. After all, he’d already seen everything. May as well let him clean what he’d gotten dirty.
“You’re going to stay here,” he said, giving her ass a playful smack. “I’ll handle it.”
“Here,” she said. “You want me to stay here, in your house. Your massive, empty, castle of a house.”
“A keep,” he corrected. “Castles are bigger.”
“Right,” she drawled. “’Cause that definitely makes it better.”
They shared a brief laugh, but Aaric sobered. “Yes. I want you to stay here. Where it’s safe.”
“I see.” Olivia bit her lip, but then nodded. “Okay, fine. I’ll stay.”
It was weird, she realized. For the first time she could remember, they weren’t actively going after one another, with jabs or insults, disdain or rudeness. They were talking, working together. As a team.
What does that mean, I wonder?
21
“You’re really in it now,” he muttered, waving at the rear-view mirror as he pulled out of the underground parking garage.
He watched the image of Olivia, now clad in an oversized sweatshirt and matching pants, receding in the little rectangular mirror.
The road sloped upward and he lost himself in the drive, trying to ignore the mess he was busy creating.
You’re supposed to be out there looking for your mate. You need a mate, if you’re going to awaken any of the others. Parre isn’t long for this world, which means the fate of awakening all the dragons to face whatever is coming rests on my shoulders.
His shoulders. They were broad, but that was a lot of responsibility to put on a dragon who was, in human terms, in his late thirties at most.
As if to demonstrate how unready he was to be thrust into a position of authority, instead of doing his duty toward his House and finding his mate, Aaric was busy gallivanting around with an—admittedly gorgeous and fun—real estate agent.
“Not only that, you promised you’d build a factory here, bringing jobs. What are you thinking!” he moaned.
Going after the guys from some South American gangsters’ “company” who were threatening her and her assistant was one thing. Aaric hadn’t been joking around when he said those types weren’t welcome in Plymouth Falls. This was a job more suited to the wolves, but they weren’t aware of it, and they most certainly were not aware of him.
Not yet, at least. The other Houses would know the dragons had returned. None of them had recognized him at Leblanc the other night, the restaurant that catered heavily to shifter clientele, even though they didn’t know it.
Why would they know me? I’ve been asleep for a century. All the Canis and Ursa who I knew back then are dead.
Soon, though, that would change. He would present himself as a Lord of House Draconis at the coronation ceremony for the new Canis King in a few short days, and then the fun would truly begin. He cracked a smile at the imagined shock of the assembled personage of both House Ursa and Canis, all of whom would be in attendance.
Aaric loved a good surprise.
Until then, he had his own issues to deal with.
In the morning. Starting in the morning, I will find my mate. I can’t waste any more time.
Thinking of Olivia as a waste of time wasn’t polite, but it was true. He needed to find his mate, and soon. He couldn’t stay occupied with her thoroughly delightful self. Not anymore. His House demanded he put it before everything else.
First, though, he would ensure she was not only safe, but that she would continue to be safe. Which meant dealing with four armed men. Four humans were nothing for a dragon like Aaric. He could wipe the floor with them without breaking a sweat.
The issue would be the secretary. Assistant. Whatever. The second would be the office itself. Aaric was going to have to act like he was a human. Work at human speed. Human strength.
And preferably without demolishing the entire office building while he was at it.
I’m not that clumsy, he thought, remembering Olivia’s plea to please not destroy everything. As if she could know about the newspaper factory…
It had been one incident. One clumsy incident, a swipe of his tail without looking during a wild night out to celebrate the end of the war with the mages over a century before. Just before the dragons had gone to sleep, the danger to the world averted for a time.
Just like they had gone to sleep after the vampires had been killed, over sixteen hundred years earlier, though that had only last a hundred and fifty years before the war between the shifters and mages had gone “live”, so to speak.
“What a mess,” he muttered, remembering his history. Always, there was something.
First, it had been the vampires masquerading as the Roman Senate, ruling the Emperors from behind the scenes, expanding their empire across the world. At one point, their grip on the human and paranormal worlds had been absolute. None threatened
them, not even the mighty faery Queens.
Then the shifters had arrived. Aaric hadn’t been there for that, of course. He’d been born much later. But they had appeared in the hundreds, then thousands, all within the span of a few years. Aaric knew little of their origins. He suspected even the leaders of the various shifter Houses didn’t know as much as he did. The dragons were different like that; with their massively elongated lifespans, far more knowledge was passed down.
He drifted his vehicle through a wide left-hand turn, out onto the two-laned highway that would take him back into Plymouth Falls. Rubber screeched, the engine roared, and then he took off, accelerating quickly. His mind returned to the past.
The shifters, he knew, had not been born. Not at first, at least, though they had been in subsequent generations. No, those first few years, the shifters had been created. That was all Aaric knew, but it was more than the wolves or bears, or their minor counterparts all remembered. They assumed they had just been born.
But they were wrong.
None of the records he knew of said who or what had created them, but they all agreed that it wasn’t natural.
So, the shifters had ended the vampires’ hold on the world, eliminating every last one of them. They’d thought the world saved, and so the dragons had retreated into their sleep. But a century and a half later, the human mages and the shifters had gone to war, both trying to step into the power void left by the absence of the vampires.
Once more, the dragons had been awakened and they had fought the mages for fifteen hundred years, until the early twentieth century. Then, at a place called Novarupta on the Iberian Peninsula, things had come to a head. Massive forces of shifters had battled the strongest of the mages.
The landscape had been torn up, fires everywhere. Bodies had lain strewn across the battlefield as the shifters pressed their attacks home. Aaric could still remember it now. Dodging the blasts of deadly blue magic that would kill anything they touched.
He and his other kin—those of the dragons like him—had soared over the battlefield, raining fire down upon all those below who defied them. Mages by the score had evaporated as the white fire touched them, instantly incinerating them.
To his left, Morath had been too slow to dodge, and a lance of blue magic impaled him, the mighty dragon falling from the sky.
Then the ground had shifted and hurled itself up at the dragons. The entire mountainside erupted in fire as the mages tried one last attempt to win. They had awoken the sleeping volcano, and now molten lava spit high into the air and flowed down the broken landscape.
It had nearly worked. Nearly. But the dragons, with their land-bound allies, had managed to escape the attack, and had eliminated the last of the mages on the battlefield. The war was over. They could sleep once more.
Now I’m awake again. Something else threatens this world, threatens its stability, and I am needed.
Aaric’s mind had wandered far, but it returned now to the point that had spurred his trip down nostalgia lane. He feared what it was, but more so, he feared facing it alone. There were wiser, stronger dragons sleeping underneath Drakon Keep. Once they were awake, he wouldn’t have to be the one doing this alone.
He would have help. Just like tonight, he would help Olivia.
The miles passed under his tires at a frantic pace. At this time of night, he had nothing to fear from police, and so he raced across the ground as fast as he was comfortable, taking corners at speeds most humans would pale at.
Soon, the buildings of Plymouth Falls appeared and he slowed his breakneck pace slightly. There was little traffic, and he reached the lone building that housed Olivia’s office. The lights were still on, and two SUV’s were parked out front, along with a small white hatchback.
Aaric’s sportscar came to a stop, the red of his Lamborghini Huracan clashing intensely with the black of the intimidating SUV’s. He’d chosen this car because he felt the color matched his intentions for the night.
There would be blood.
He exited the gull-wing door, closing it behind him as he noted movement in both the vehicles. So, they did leave some sentries outside after all.
That upped the total to six men sent to intimidate Olivia. That was a lot of manpower to dedicate to a simple real-estate agent who had failed to secure a property. Who was this guy, and why did he want it so badly?
“Hey, you. Stop.”
Aaric arched an eyebrow at one of the men getting out of the vehicle. His brow was as thick as his arms, and probably his brain as well. This was one was a pure muscle hire, then. A quick glanced showed his compatriot to be of the same breed. Intimidation.
Well, two could play that game.
“Boys,” Aaric said, stepping toward them. “I heard you were looking for me.”
“Who the hell are you?” one of them wanted to know, his hand hovering near his waistband, obviously ready to grab for a gun.
Aaric would have to prevent that from happening. Plymouth Falls was a peaceful town. Gunshots were not common and would immediately bring a police presence.
“I’m the guy,” he said, arms wide, big grin on his face as he sauntered toward the two thugs.
“The guy? What guy? We don’t know no guy.”
The broken English grated on Aaric’s nerves. If he could learn the language in six months, then there was no excuse for these punks.
“The guy you wanted to see. The reason you’re here,” he said, gesturing at the office.
“How do you know why we’re here?” the secondary grunt asked, seemingly clueless.
Enough of this.
Aaric paused to look around, ensuring nobody was in sight. It was clear.
“Sorry you came all this way for nothing,” he rumbled, then darted forward.
The lead thug-for-hire had little time to react before Aaric was on him. His hand found the pistol and with a flash of dragon muscles, he crushed the barrel. A “light” tap on the man’s groin had him writhing on the ground, where an accidental foot to the jaw as Aaric pivoted knocked him out cold.
“Night night,” he whispered as his other fist blew past the second man’s upraised arms and cracked him right above his nose.
Aaric watched the eyes rolled up, and then he caught the man before he fell back onto his head. Casually, he opened the door to the SUV and tossed him in. The first victim followed a second later, his face landing in number two’s crotch.
Suppressing a giggle, Aaric walked up to the office and opened the door.
“I’m here,” he called out. “You wanted to see me?”
There was a shuffling of feet, and then four men appeared out of the door on his left. Aaric frowned as they came out and arrayed themselves against him. There was something off about them. Something he couldn’t quite place.
“Have we met before?” he asked, thinking furiously.
There was no response. Aaric blinked several times. Then he stepped twice over to the right. Almost as one, the faces moved to watch him.
What the hell is going on here? He was creeped out by the way they were acting. Still none of them had spoken.
“What do you want?” One of them spoke now. His voice was…strained? As if it was being forced out against his will.
Aaric took a moment, sizing up the four men inside the office. Unlike the two outside, these four did not have the look of hired muscle. They, in fact, looked like normal men. Dressed all the same, with the same hard, slightly blank look on their faces.
His senses were screaming at him that something was going on here. Were they from his world, instead of the humans? Was that why the other two had been left outside? Because they weren’t part of this group.
There was very little on the planet that could challenge a dragon shifter solo. Some of the Faery Lords. The Faery Queens. An elf warrior master, perhaps, though they never ventured forth from their realm. A few other creatures from the depths of the other realms. The list was short.
It grew quite a lot larger when th
e odds were four against one, however, and Aaric kept his guard up. He had no idea what he was facing, or who, and it bothered him.
“Go home,” Aaric said. “Leave this town, and never return. It’s under my protection, is that understood? You aren’t welcome here.”
The four heads tilted nearly simultaneously.
“Okay, that’s just creeping me out,” he said, pointing at them. “Go, now. Before you get hurt.”
“We’re not leaving without the property.”
“Why does everyone care about this damn property so much,” he growled. “It works perfectly for what I’m doing. I don’t feel like selling it, especially now you’re acting like this to try and get it. That’s reason enough for me to just not sell. I don’t know what you see in it, but too bad, so sad. You were too late. Now be a good loser and screw off.”
Before he got the last word out, the four were advancing. Aaric prepared himself for a fight, feeling the powers of his dragon flowing through him, though he didn’t draw upon them yet.
The nearest of the quartet reached him, his movements becoming surer of themselves as he dropped into a martial arts stance and flowed past, the four trying to split around him like a river around a stone, to come at him from four angles.
Frowning at the uniformity to their movements, Aaric tried once more to puzzle out what was going on. If he’d run across them on the streets, he’d have said they didn’t know one another. Their dress was different, their hairstyles, facial hair. Even the way they had held themselves before attacking spoke of different backgrounds.
Yet here they are, working as one to fight me. What’s going on?
Aaric ducked below two punches and then slipped between them with a burst of speed no human could match. A kick nearly caught him, however, and he brought an arm up to protect his head. The foot impacted upon it, and dragon-bone hardened skin popped to the surface.
The bone shattered. Aaric felt it explode under the impact. He knew it had happened. But the owner of the leg simply withdrew it and balanced himself on one leg. No wince, no cry out of pain. Absolutely no reaction whatsoever.