The van came to a stop. Dakota’s gaze flicked to the scene outside her window. They had stopped in an alley. Outside the windshield, a metal door stood off to the side. It was on the side of a dark, gray stone building. The woman gripped Dakota’s arm and the man that had been in front of her slid her door open. The woman shoved her out the door.
Now was the time. She had to get them to argue. It was her only chance to get away. If she could escape them, there would be no war. She might not have her study abroad program anymore, but at that moment, the war seemed a whole lot more pressing.
That and her life. That was important, too.
“How do you know he isn’t a dragon, too? Raph seemed to listen to him pretty well.” Dakota nodded to Wilson as he walked ahead of them.
The woman paused. Dakota watched her eyes rise to meet the man that now held Dakota’s other arm. There was a whole silent conversation that passed between them that Dakota missed out on. She hoped that her words had struck home. She hoped that he would listen to his partner.
The woman’s grip on her arm lightened. Dakota shifted her weight on her feet, ready to run.
“Why would another dragon help you guys the way that Raph did? Isn’t there some sort of hierarchy within their families?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “What if he’s Raph’s relative? Father? Uncle? Why do they want you working for them?”
The woman’s hand fell away and Dakota took the chance to run. Only, the man held on tighter. She fell forward. Her cheek hit the pavement. Her ears rang from the impact. No. She wasn’t done yet. She rolled so that her body faced the man before kicking out at him. Her foot connected with his groin and she could jerk her arm from his grip.
Dakota scrambled to her feet.
Something hit her in the shoulder. It burned, white hot pain coursing across her vision. She fell forward. When she tried to push herself up, her left arm refused to comply. It wobbled beneath her weight and the white-hot pain filled her again.
Feet appeared in the corner of her vision. A pair of dark red pumps kicked her prone body. The pain flared again. The red-haired woman knelt beside Dakota’s form so that they were face to face.
“Did you think we were that stupid? That we would believe your ploy?”
Dakota waited for fear and panic to take over, but, instead, she felt a well of anger begin to burn. She turned her head to glare at the woman. Despite the resolve in the woman’s stance, Dakota could see the question burning in her eyes. The woman working with them no longer followed blindly. Maybe she wasn’t an ally in all of this, but she would never complicity follow again.
When they grabbed Dakota by her arms to drag her to her feet, a blinding pain filled her shoulder. It made her cry out until the man slapped a gloved hand over her mouth. She’d been shot. It was an odd feeling that she had never expected to feel in her life. Once she stumbled to her feet, her torso burned, the shoulder at the very center of it. Her arm hung uselessly at her side when the woman let it go.
Dakota tried to move the fingers of the useless arm, hoping that it was only shock that made the whole appendage numb and not something more permanent. She choked back a sob. Dead was also a lot more permanent.
How was she going to get out of this? Her life was already ruined, everything she’d worked for thrown to the wind. She was now associated with dragons no matter what happened from here on out. Regardless of the lost study abroad program, no museum was going to hire her, either believing her to be a head case or a liability. The Guardians had let slip that she was the mate of one of the Welsh dragons.
Wesley’s mate.
She didn’t know what that meant for her just then.
Glaring at the ground, Dakota’s mind worked over the possibilities of how this might end for her, trying to decide which of them was the most acceptable. Her despair was almost so overwhelming that she was tempted to settle for the fate the Guardians had planned for her. It was only the burning rage that was nestled inside of her chest that kept that thought at bay.
She would fight. She would live.
Chapter Fifteen
Wes roared, so loud that the trees shook with his anger and pain. Far below him, his mother drove her small car toward his parents’ territory within Snowdonia. Dakota’s pain filled him and fed his anger. The beast thrashed its long tail. It knew that they needed to go to Dakota, laws be damned. She was their mate, their only chance at happiness in their long life. She was going to die without him.
He knew it. The realization felt like a pile of rocks sitting heavy in his stomach. Yet, all he could do was fly over the territory he was chained to. Wes knew what kind of trouble he would face if he left the territory before the channels were opened to him, but he worried that it would be too late.
When his parents’ sprawling cottage came into view, he let the form of his beast fall away. The beast did not want to give up control just yet. It wanted to keep its threatening form to crush those that were hurting his mate. Wes reminded his beast that he would need speech to talk to their father and his beast gave way. Human feet slammed into the ground and the earth gave way beneath him.
His mother climbed out of her car, mouth open to yell at him until she saw the look in his eyes. She quickly snapped her mouth shut and turned a grim expression toward the cottage. An angry man appeared in the cottage doorway. Fists clenched at his sides, the man was well over six feet tall. His dark red hair was growing white around his sideburns, but no one would have dared to look him in the face and call him an old man. Shockingly blue eyes scanned his wife to make sure she was safe before they narrowed and turned to his son.
Wes was struggling to reign himself in, his breathing coming heavy. His hand curled into tense claws, every muscle in his body aching with the potential for violence. His father’s gaze falling on him cut through the madness in his mind like a hot knife. For a second, Wes had clarity. The beast pulled back and his eyes shifted back to steely blue. His body let go of some of the tension that filled him and dropped to one knee before his sire, letting his head fall toward the ground.
Honor was the only thing that bound their society. It was the unspoken law that allowed them to survive. Wes’s father stood at the very top of that power. While it granted Wes a good deal of power for himself, it meant the lines that he walked were much narrower. For Wes to lose face would be for his father to lose face, and that would destroy what his father had built.
Never before had Wes wanted to challenge it. The longer he stayed down on one knee, silence hanging in the air all around them, the more his rage rebounded. His shoulder ached and he knew it was no pain of his own that he was feeling. No, what he felt was Dakota’s pain. Someone had hurt her and he could not be there.
“What the hell is going on?” his father’s voice growled.
“Shove your attitude somewhere the sun doesn’t shine, darling.” His mother rounded her car to stand between her husband and her son. “Wes found himself a mate and if we don’t move soon, I fear something will happen to her. She’s one of ours now and we can’t afford to waste time.”
Wes looked up through his hair. Drystan Taniff looked from his wife to his son. The beast inside of Wes fed him a nearly all-consuming rage. The beast’s tail thumped and the ground behind him cracked.
“Put a silver binding on him,” his father growled.
Wes shot up from where he knelt. “Don’t you dare.”
The older man closed the space between them until his face was nose to nose with his son’s. He spoke through clenched teeth. “I have a few calls to make. I cannot have you destroying everything in your path before we get off this territory. In order to live as free as we are, there are rules that we must follow. Let me do what I can before you ruin us all.”
Wes growled, a rumble thrummed through his chest before he could pull it back. His father searched his eyes for a long moment. No doubt, he saw the gold of his beast swirl back toward the forefront.
“Go.” Wes spoke through clenched teeth. �
�Do what you have to.”
Drystan nodded. He turned to his wife. “Call Gareth and Cameron. They’re going to help us.”
Wes knew that his cousins weren’t being called in to help find Dakota. They were being called in to prevent Wes from doing anything stupid while he searched for his mate. Feeling the unending restlessness that coursed through him the longer he sat still, he understood his father’s precautions. Maybe Drystan understood better than he thought, he knew what it was like to have an impulsive mate that liked to get herself into uncertain situations such as bringing students to the edge of the Snowdonia territories.
Wes wanted to give in to his beast and let the change take him so that he would be prepared to fight if it came to it. Instead, his mother returned with the silver arm band that his father had demanded. She slipped it up his forearm and he felt the beast recede into the back of his mind. It helped to clarify his mind, but it also cleared another path.
He could feel Dakota’s terror and anger like a knife, one that cut right into his heart. She needed him.
Now.
***
Dakota sat in the cold metal chair that the Guardians had provided for her. A metal cuff chained her to the chair. As the Guardians talked amongst themselves about the ways that they should kill her, she tested her cuff. Her wrist burned from trying to slip it over her hand. It was too tight for that, she decided. Thankfully, Dakota realized that the chair wasn’t attached to the floor.
If she had to, she could grab the chair and run. Of course, it would be cumbersome, but it was better than sitting where she was. They had patched up her bleeding shoulder. It hadn’t been a bullet that had hit her, but a not so tiny electrical dart that had punctured her muscle and rendered her arm useless. Once they removed it and she had time, the feeling slowly returned to her arm.
Listening to the Guardians talk of her death was draining her spirits little by little. If they succeeded in their plan, Dakota would never feel Wesley’s touch again. It startled her to think of how badly she would miss something that only just came into her life. She poked and prodded the new ache inside of her that came from the realization of loss, loss of the way that Wes made sure she was happy, loss of the laughter she could have shared with him, loss of a relationship she had previously turned her back on.
Did he know that she was in trouble? Probably not. There was no way that he could know, she reminded herself. Wes would be at the tower, working in his small forge. He wouldn’t know what happened until it was too late.
She raised her eyes to glare at Wilson. She couldn’t let this happen. She’d been working so hard to have a future that she wanted, but had eschewed some of the things that would make her the happiest like love. She didn’t know if she loved Wesley. They had only just met, mates or not. Still, she knew that the chance was there and that she was going to fight for it as hard as she’d fought for everything else in her life.
Letting her head fall back, she looked out the warehouse window while she tried to devise a plan. She had not been expecting to see a face looking back at her, let alone the female professor from school. The woman’s face split into a shark-like smile when their eyes met. The woman pointed into the sky and Dakota followed to find four, massive red bodies flying through the air.
Dragons.
That was a lot of back up for just her. Relief was an odd feeling when looking up at dragons twice the size of tour buses.
Dakota nodded and looked back at her captors. Apparently, they had decided on something while she had been looking out the window at the incoming dragons, because Wilson was coming over to her. He looked down at her with a sneer twisting his lips.
“The public can’t know we had anything to do with your death, no matter how helpful it is to them in the end,” he said as he crouched beside her with a clammy hand on her knee. “It has to look like you killed yourself to avoid being taken captive by your dragon. The good news about that is you now get to choose how you die. There are several options for you to choose from.”
Dakota didn’t respond. Instead, she spat in the man’s face. Her wet spittle splattered in his eye. She watched his jaw clench with anger. He didn’t hit her or even yell. Slowly, he reached up and wiped it away. Dakota tensed.
The squeak of an old window broke the tension. Wilson looked up in surprise as a small canister flew arched over their heads. People screamed all around her. The tiny canister bounced across the concrete floor before hissing and emitting a stream of colored smoke. Red smoke filled the warehouse across from Dakota. It obscured the other Guardians in the room.
Taking advantage of the distraction, she shot up from her seat, grabbing the chair in the process, and swung it at the man’s legs. The hard metal hit his knee and she watched it buckle beneath him. He gritted his teeth and reached for the weapon at his hip. Dakota felt the surge of fear fill her, remembering how it felt last time they’d shot her, and she brought the chair around again. This time it connected with his temple. He fell over in a heap.
Behind her, a door creaked open and the woman’s face appeared again. She motioned for Dakota to follow. Carrying the chair she was currently using as a weapon, Dakota darted forward. The woman’s face grew familiar in a different way as she came closer. Now, she could see the resemblance between the professor and her dragon man.
As soon as Dakota burst into the open air, the woman slammed the door shut. Red smoke trickled out of the open window of the warehouse behind her. She turned back to the woman beside her.
“Thank you,” she breathed. “You’re related to the dragons. Aren’t you?”
The professor nodded with a smile on her lips. She reached back and grabbed a pair of large pliers from the bag at her hip. The pliers snapped through the chain of the cuffs at her wrist.
“What else do you have in that magic bag?” Dakota felt the exhaustion of constant fear setting in. She was safe.
The world shook beneath her feet. She looked up, her heart pounding. The body of a white dragon crashed into one of the red dragons above. Dakota felt her stomach turn. The white dragon’s teeth clamped around the red dragon’s neck, it’s clawed feet sinking into the red scales. The two bodies sank in the air, the red dragon unable to beat his wings in the white dragon’s grasp. She knew exactly who was fighting above her.
Wes and Raph.
Chapter Sixteen
Distantly, Dakota and the professor heard the squealing of cars halting as their passengers stared up into the sky. Wes twisted in Raph’s taloned grasp, but he couldn’t break free. Two of the other dragons touched the ground with human feet at the end of the alley. When the Guardians spilled out of the warehouse, the two unfamiliar dragons were waiting for them. They were blurs of muscle and red hair as the dragons rushed the Guardians. The fight on the ground ended quickly once the Guardians were disarmed. Their weapons skittered across the paved ground.
She didn’t have time to concern herself with the fight on the ground. She was more concerned with Wes. The white dragon had to be Raph, she knew it in her bones. He hated the red dragons and Dakota didn’t realize at first. As she watched the second red dragon enter the fray, she remembered the story of Dinas Emrys that Wes had told her.
The red dragons had chased the white dragon from the Snowdonia territory centuries before. Raph must have thought that their home was his. Starting a war between the red dragons and the Guardians would give the Guardians a reason to exterminate the territory. Then, it would be free for Raph and any other white dragons to move in.
“We have to stop them,” Dakota said to the professor. “The Guardians want the dragons to break the law. They want a reason to attack your family.”
The professor squeezed her arm. “My husband made a few calls. He and his are in the right and no one can argue otherwise. Don’t worry so much, child.”
Even as she told her not to worry, the woman lifted her eyes to the sky, her lips pressed together. That was her family up there, being attacked by the white dragon. Wes let loose a
roar that shook the buildings around her. Her heart gave one, hard thump. His head twisted backward and his giant jaw clamped down the white dragon’s wing.
Like a dog with a toy, he shook his head and pulled. The leathery expanse of the white wing gave way beneath his teeth. The second red dragon lashed out to bite into the other white wing. The white dragon narrowly avoided the attack, pulling his wing into his body. The two, fighting beasts crashed into the ground. The two women clung to each other to keep standing. Ahead of them, the second dragon tucked his wings into his body. He dove toward the ground.
Dakota rushed forward, feeling her shoulder burn. Her eyes fell on the weapons that had been forgotten on the ground. She ducked down as she passed, grabbing the horrid stun gun she’d been shot with earlier. Behind her, the professor shouted, but she ignored the calls. She had no idea what she was doing, but she knew that she had to do something.
Gruff hands caught her by the arm. She hissed in pain as the wound on her shoulder pulled. Dakota was spun around and brought eye to eye with a red headed dragon man. His auburn hair was pulled back from his face, tucked behind his ears. His brows pushed his icy-blue eyes into a glare and his jaw was tight as he spoke through his teeth.
“We did not risk everything for you to run out into a fight and get yourself killed.” His grip on her arm wasn’t tight, she noted. “Do you think that little gun can stop a dragon? Do you think you can avoid shooting my cousin?”
“It won’t matter if you let Raph kill him, either.” She jerked her arm out through the weak point in his grip and ducked under the incoming grasp of his other hand.
The dragon man screamed at her as she rushed forward, but the second dragon pulled him back. Dakota didn’t hear what his friend said, but it kept him from running after her.
The fighting dragon shifters were killing one another. Her Wesley was one of those dragons. The thought of it made her stomach roll. She burst into a small intersection. Cars had been stopped in all directions. People gathered on the sidewalk, pointing and shouting at the dragons fighting in the center of the road. Raph’s back had crashed into a number of empty cars, but he still clung onto Wesley’s body, using him as a living shield. The second red dragon pulled up from his dive, avoiding Wesley’s red belly.
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