Table of Contents
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Dragonsteel
Shadowsword’s Harem Book One
Rebecca Baelfire
Contents
Copyright
Note to Readers
Prologue
1. The Scent of Magic
2. Wolves and Dragonspawn
3. Breaking Rules
4. The Dragonlord Kyas
5. A Normal Life
6. Compromise
7. A Boy, a Wolf, and a Dragon
8. Rebellion
9. The Return of Kyas Danshar
10. Turncoat
11. A Silver Lining
12. Wanting
13. Last Resort
14. Bombshell
Epilogue
Glossary
Copyright © 2018 Rebecca Baelfire, all rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Please purchase only authorized editions of this book, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials.
Cover by Rebecca Baelfire
Cover images courtesy of DepositPhotos
There are those of you who have waited for years
for the day when you would see this story come to life in its true form.
Today is that day.
Enjoy.
Note to Readers
For those of you who are interested, there is a glossary at the back of this book that provides proper pronunciations of names and terms. It is not necessary to read the glossary first in order to understand the story, but for those who wish to do so, please use the link in the Table of Contents.
Between all things opposite, there exists a Shadow.
Darkness and Light work in tandem, War and Peace play cause and effect, Oppression and Equality converge.
These elements coexist in a delicate balance, never one without the other.
In a prophecy, there is mention of a woman who will stand where the two sides collide, bringing harmony through discord.
She is an equalizer.
She is a weapon.
She is the Shadowsword.
—from The Shadowsword Journals: Before The Coming,
written by Panatrin Algoran, First Warrior of the Warriors of the Shadow,
based upon the scriptures from The Book of Her Prophecies by Ngtara, Fae of Fren,
Guardian of the Sword of Sarconis
Prologue
Adam’s Promise
New York, August 1992
I awoke in the darkness to nothing but pain.
How long had I been out? Minutes? Hours? I couldn’t tell.
The memory of the horror my wife had gone through rolled through my mind, piercing the haze of agony throbbing from my broken left arm. A knife stabbing, her screams shattering the night. My first instinct was to leap up and find her, but I forced myself to lie still. Listening to the silence. Listening for the sounds of intruders.
For the men who had attacked her and nearly killed me.
Hearing nothing, I cradled my bad arm, jerked upright and looked around our night-darkened bedroom. The house lay still and silent, yet the memory of the nightmare that had demolished our lives earlier rang in my head as if the men were still there.
Men who were not men.
“Amasynth?” I called out.
Silence. I peered into the darkness.
Moonlight turned the New York City skyline to a silvery banner of glass and steel outside the window. Just out of reach of the moon’s rays that cast beams across the floor, my wife lay crumpled by the bed, unmoving. Dread slithered through me at the stillness of her form, the whiteness of her face like bleached bone.
Please, no.
“Amasynth.” I leaped up and knelt at her side, pulling her with one hand across my lap.
A shuttering breath left her, and her eyelids fluttered. Between her lids I caught sight of two slits of light, like blue glowing flames.
My heart leaped. Unable to move my broken arm, I cradled her head with my good arm. Cursing those animals. The dragon scum who’d swept into our house and beaten us both to within an inch of our lives. I shuddered at the memory of their superhuman strength, their almost demonic voices raised in loathing and hatred. The way one of them, with hair the color of blood, had pummeled and kicked the both of us while his three cronies held us down. Then they’d broken my arm to force me to tell them where our daughter was. I hadn’t told them a thing. Bastards.
“Amasynth. Come on, come back to me, baby.” I shook her in an awkward one-armed grip.
Her eyes opened, sharp and supernatural and filled with pain.
“Adam. My love. Our daughter…” She struggled for breath, lungs sounding watery. Blood soaked the front of her silken nightgown where they’d stabbed her still round belly. It pooled on the pristine white carpet, staining it crimson. The blood smudged the front of my shirt, but I didn’t care.
“She’s fine, sweetheart.” My voice broke at hearing the adoration in Amasynth’s voice. Adoration I didn’t deserve. Why hadn’t I been able to protect her? “The baby’s fine.”
Faintly, the soft, satisfied gurgle of a baby drifted from down the hall, confirming my words. How had our daughter stayed quiet during the attack, and how had those monsters not found and killed her? My wife’s magic. She must have used one of her spells to hide and keep the baby silent.
Amasynth’s chest rose and fell on ragged breaths. She didn’t seem to see me. “Adam…protect...”
“Amasynth, stay with me. You hear me? You’re going to be ok.”
“Listen to me. Our daughter is too important. You must protect...” Her chest gave a violent shudder. My heart threatened to shatter. Her words sounded too much like giving up.
“Amasynth! Damn it, don’t you leave me, woman. Don’t you dare.”
“Never let them find her. Our daughter is…” She swallowed.
My brows shot up. “What? Why? What is she?”
“She is…” Her eyelids fluttered shut, her chest gave one final rattle, and then her head fell back.
“Shit. No. Come on. Come back.” I clutched her in my one-armed embrace with bone-breaking intensity, but she didn’t move. I howled like an animal in the darkness, the sound ripped out of me. Barely a year we’d had to build a life together for our newborn daughter, for each other, and she was gone. Taken away from me.
By them.
I rocked like a madman.
Our daughter cried out, a single distressed scream. I shivered, getting the feeling the baby had sensed her mother dying, felt her leave this world as if a bond had just been severed between them.
I don’t even remember letting my wife’s body go, but the next instant I was in my daughter’s bedroom, picking her up from her crib with my good arm. No matter what I did, she cried on.
Missing her mother. Her anguish tore me up inside, echoing my own.
Our daughter is…what? What had Amasynth been about to say? The ominous sound of those words, the urgency in my wife’s voice, would haunt me for years to come.
Closing my eyes, I swayed with my daughter, trying to comfort her. I pushed down my hatred for the men who killed her mother, shoving it way down deep where it couldn’t break me. I couldn’t surrender to my own misery. I had to focus, had to protect my daughter from the mon
sters who hunted us. We only had each other now.
“My little Helena. You’re safe.” I cooed into her ear, and she eventually quieted enough for me to put her down.
Over the next few minutes, I did my best to immobilize my arm to prevent further damage. Downing a fistful of Aspirin, then using strips of torn clothing and a tight shirt, I bound my left arm tightly to my side. How fortunate for me that the Dragonlords had broken my non-dominant arm. I concealed my bloodied pajamas under my favorite trench coat, then threw the rest of my clothes and other essentials into garbage bags. Amasynth—being the neat freak she was—had the baby bag fully packed and ready to go at the door. I tossed everything into the cargo space of my late model Chevy Blazer and locked the rear hatch closed. Then I buckled the baby into her car seat. I didn’t bother to lock up the house.
I wanted to do right by Amasynth, to bury her properly or hide the evidence somehow, but there was no time. The police would find her eventually, but when they did, I’d have to deal with it when the time came. The Dragonlords would be hunting us, she’d said. The longer I stayed, the more danger Helena was in.
In the truck, once I had the engine running, I turned to the baby and smoothed her downy black hair, as black as her mother’s, away from her small forehead. Then I kissed the top of her head and quashed the misery that threatened to swallow me whole.
“I will protect our daughter with my life, Amasynth.” I whispered the promise into the night. “No one is ever going to hurt her.”
Chapter 1
The Scent of Magic
Twenty-six years later…
By the time I’d pulled up to the crime scene, it was almost four in the morning and already crawling with cops.
No less than five officers moved about the blue crime-scene tent erected in a small field of grain off the shoulder of the road where I parked. A hundred and fifty yards away, directly across the field, an identical tent had been pitched. Five minutes from the scene, I smelled it. The scent of death. It permeated the air, sickly sweet and cloying; something that, once you smelled it, you never forgot it.
Damn it. During the whole twenty-minute drive out here to the westernmost end of Allentown, I’d been hoping this would be another false alarm, another case that would have no connection to my father. I’d be out of here and back at Hunter’s place within a few hours. So much for that.
I shut off the Blazer and reached for my boot to check the Glock in my ankle holster. I froze with my hand on the pistol’s solid grip. Awareness of something familiar flickered at the edges of my consciousness. Something dark. Evil. Like drops of unseen ice crystals landing on my skin, it caused the hairs on my arms to stand on end and made me feel like I’d walked into a snow bank. Every sense hummed with its presence until I could almost taste it, as strong as the smell of a dead man’s blood that filled the air out here.
Magic.
If one could have said magic had a smell, then every source smelled different, like an olfactory fingerprint. In this case, whatever had been here, its magical scent reminded me of rotting meat. Like a hound left lying dead in the sun for hours, except, whatever it was, it was still alive.
Or it had been when it had attacked here.
Fuck. I’d smelled this thing before a handful of times in my twenty-six years, and it was always the same. Wherever it appeared, death followed.
Some of the officers on the scene glanced over at me, obviously wondering why I still sat in my vehicle. Adjusting my pant leg, I climbed out onto the rain-soaked asphalt and locked the door. I tossed my dark braid over my shoulder and walked over to the officer making his way toward me.
The early morning drizzle had stopped, but late summer humidity still clogged the western Pennsylvania air. Puddles of muddy water dotted the blacktop.
Outside the vehicle, the scent of blood and magic nearly overpowered me, and I put my hand over my nose. The magic touched every hair on my body, slick like oil left on the skin.
I shuddered.
I put out my hand for the officer. He shook it, and for an instant, images flashed through my mind. Little more than color and sound, they passed through my thoughts in a blur, but I thought I saw a scantily clad woman on a dirty, flea-ridden bed.
Usually, I wore gloves to prevent the skin-on-skin contact that allowed me to see such things, but I never knew when what I saw in a person’s head might solve a case.
“Claire Jones. I’m the animal expert Chief Lawson sent in.” I was careful to use the title the police chief and I had agreed on, instead of my real job as a monster hunter. I hated the cover name I used, but its plainness was meant to avoid attention. Even if I could have risked using my real name, Helena—pronounced not in the traditional way, but as Hel-LAY-na—stood out too much.
“Thanks for getting here so quickly, Miss Jones. I’m Officer Rob Winslow.”
I offered him a smile, noticing the uncertain way he looked me over. He appeared a few years younger than me, still new enough to the force to want to impress. I had the sense he was trying to figure out if I was his superior since I wasn’t a cop.
“The chief said you guys had an animal attack out here,” I said as we made our way toward the crime scene.
The officer visibly relaxed. “Yeah. The body’s over here.” He nodded toward the tent.
“Just the one victim?”
“Yes. Officer Pete Garrison.”
I glanced over at the second tent. “What’s that over there? A second crime scene?”
“That’s his vehicle.”
I widened my eyes at him. Why was the body the length of football field away from his vehicle?
Taking in the scene again, I thought of my father and my gut clenched. My last memories of him, of the day he’d gone missing—now seven years ago—scraped away at my focus, and I shoved them down hard. Scenes like these always reminded me of him.
When we got closer to the body, before the others had noticed me, Rob leaned in enough that the cheap perfume that wafted off him made my nose twitch. It smelled old, from last night probably, too faint for anyone but someone with my senses to pick up on. A wedding ring glinted on his finger, yet the perfume smacked of street corners and illicit sex.
A philanderer. Any respect I had for this rookie cop plummeted like a stone.
“Watch yourself, ma’am.” He put a hand on my shoulder, stopping me from getting closer to the scene. “It’s a nasty one.”
A grin spread across my face, and I glanced at him, stifling the disgust at being addressed as ma’am. He reeked of male protectiveness, almost as strong as that perfume.
Aaaaand, down sank his stocks a little more. “Is that so?”
Clearly, he’d noticed the hint of sarcasm there because he dropped his arms. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
We ducked under the yellow crime scene tape that had been erected around the field. He introduced me to the other officers. One of them, an older officer he’d named Steve Haskal and introduced as the lead detective on the case, raised a brow at me. “You’re the one the chief sent? You’re the Ghostbuster?”
Not one of the men moved aside to let me through; in fact, it looked like they’d formed a tighter circle around the tent. Skepticism lined every face.
“Don’t worry, boys, just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I’ll faint at the sight of blood.”
Coughs and uncomfortable looks passed between them, but the men backed away, letting me enter the tent. “Suit yourself,” Haskel muttered.
As soon as I pulled the flap of the tent aside and peered in, I almost turned away.
Sprawled on his back, eyes staring sightlessly at the roof of the tent, the body of Officer Garrison lay on a patch of grass soaked with blood. The front of his black uniform shirt had been ripped to shreds. Long, wide claw marks made bloody tracks on his chest under the tears. A slash cut across his abdomen, spilling his guts onto the grass. Worse, his throat hadn’t been merely bitten. It had been torn out, as if a large set of jaws had clamped
down around it and ripped it away so that he was nearly decapitated.
You’re getting more violent by the year, aren’t you? Squatting beside the body, I covered my nose and mouth before I’d thought about it, blinking eyes that watered. “Wow.”
“Are you okay, Miss Jones?” Rob bent beside me and touched my shirt sleeve. “We can get the chief to send someone else out here.”
Great. Just what I needed, the testosterone squad thinking I was going to lose my lunch. Thing was, I wasn’t covering my nose and mouth because of the smell of death or blood that filled the air. It was the other smell. The almost-scent of dark, rotten magic so strong it made my eyes sting and raised gooseflesh on my arms.
When I’d told Hunter I was coming here, I’d told him to stay out of it. Now I wish I hadn’t. Would he smell what I smelled out here? Being what he was, I bet he could have told me things about this case even I couldn’t see.
Ignoring Rob, I looked Officer Garrison over. His straight-brimmed Sam Brown hat lay at the edge of the tent, ten feet away, as if it had flown off when he’d hit the ground. His asp was still buckled at his hip, and his sidearm lay a few feet from his badly scratched hand.
“He didn’t fire his weapon, but he was holding it when he was attacked.” I spoke more to myself than to those around me. “And the safety is still engaged.”
“What did this?” Detective Haskal asked. I turned my head to see him standing inside the tent. “The guys say a wolf, but those claw marks are too big to be a wolf.”
Mentally, I went over what Haskel would have been told about the case. After Chief Lawson had called me for help, he’d have given Haskal and his men a different version of events than he’d given me over the phone.
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