Dragon's Rogue

by Anastasia Wilde

  He was roaring in anger, but he didn’t let her go.

  Zane could hear the thunderous shouting in his head. THIEF! THIEF! GIVE ME THE SEAL! The fury in Thorne’s mind was overwhelming—a churning lava flow of possessiveness and rage and desire.

  Even if Rebel could hear him, the way Blaze heard Zane, she probably couldn’t understand a thing he was saying.

  Zane’s dragon roared, telling Thorne to stand down, but Thorne was beyond hearing him. His eyes were glowing red-gold, and his human side had been totally obliterated.

  “What’s wrong with him?” asked Blaze.

  Treasure fever, Zane said. When part of their hoard is lost or stolen, some dragons get so obsessed with it that it completely takes them over. They go berserk and lose control until they get it back.

  “But the Seals aren’t part of his hoard,” Blaze said.

  Would you like to tell his dragon that? Because I’m not having much luck here.

  Thorne gave another roar, this time at Blaze and Zane. MINE! LEAVE US OR DIE! He sent a gout of fire shooting towards them.

  Zane whipped Blaze into his dragon arms and turned her away from it, shielding her from the flames. Then he breathed in, taking the fire inside his own body to keep it from burning her—or the house.

  Furious, his dragon trumpeted a challenge. HOW DARE YOU FLAME MY MATE!

  LEAVE US! Thorne shouted back, his eyes whirling with red. He shook Rebel. GIVE ME THE SEAL! MINE!

  He flapped his wings, trying to carry her away. Blaze cast the same stasis spell she’d used on Jean-Claude’s balcony, trying to stop him. It didn’t freeze him the way it had then, but it did slow him down enough to keep his wings from getting him aloft. He thudded back down to the ground, bellowing in frustration.

  God. It was like dealing with an addict hopped up on PCP—nothing stopped him, and there was no way to make him see sense.

  Tyr arrowed in from the direction of town, and Zane Changed to make room for him on the roof. Tempest isn’t at the store, Tyr said. It’s closed. I think she’s here. If Thorne hurts her, I’ll—

  At that moment there was a loud ‘crack,’ and a blue fireball about the size of a golf ball shot from the back porch, just missing Thorne. Tempest strode down the porch stairs, carrying a huge glowing revolver in both hands. She stopped at the bottom of the steps and aimed the gun at Thorne.

  “Put my sister down right now, or the next one’s going straight in your heart.”

  Thorne’s head snaked around, eyes whirling, and he swiped at Tempest with his razor-sharp claws.

  Tempest pulled the trigger, and a second blue fireball shot out of the gun and slammed into Thorne’s chest.

  Chapter 31

  Thorne was knocked backward several feet. Blaze watched in horror as a dark hole opened in his chest, burning blue fire at the edges and dripping blood. He howled, a gout of flame shooting into the air, and he dropped Rebel, who rolled away from him.

  Her stasis spell had slipped away. Thorne’s dragon form seemed to resist magic more strongly than his human form, and she was still weak. Another wave of dizziness rolled over her and she had to grab on to Zane until her head cleared.

  Thorne snapped his teeth at Tempest. With an outraged roar, Tyr leaped off the roof, still in dragon form, his claws outstretched to attack Thorne.

  Thorne’s barbed tail whipped around and slammed into Tyr, knocking him sideways into a maple tree. Rebel had managed to make it over to Tempest and crawl to her feet. Thorne lunged at them and Tempest fired again. Thorne ducked his head just in time and the magic bullet went past, almost hitting Tyr.

  Zane jumped off the roof, yelling at Tempest. “Don’t shoot!” Rebel whipped around and went into a fighting crouch, knife at the ready.

  Thorne darted his head at Tempest, his mouth opening wide to show sharp, wicked, six-inch teeth. Tyr landed on Thorne’s back, raking his claws into it.

  Zane raced to get in between Thorne and the women, yelling at his brothers. Blaze could do nothing but watch, her heart in her throat. Those teeth could bite Tempest in half, and right now Thorne didn’t seem to care who he hurt.

  Then Tempest, the shy, nervous girl who could barely talk to Blaze in her shop, hauled off and smacked Thorne’s dragon on the side of the nose with her gun. “Stop that!” she demanded. “Don’t you dare hurt my sister.” Her voice seemed to reverberate through the yard, and she began to glow with a faint golden light.

  She glared around her. “All of you, just stop it right now!”

  Blaze felt a blast of power surge out of Tempest. Astoundingly, all the dragons froze. Tyr turned human and dropped to the ground, staring.

  Blaze jumped off the roof, using a small levitation spell to give herself a soft landing. She was still weak, though, and the impact jarred her from head to toe.

  Thorne was growling, his head weaving back and forth slightly and his eyes whirling with that eerie red light, but at least he wasn’t attacking.

  What had Tempest done? Blaze had sensed no witch power in her when she visited the shop, but she’d frozen three dragons in their tracks.

  She walked up behind the sisters. Immediately, they trained their weapons on her—Tempest with the Colt and Rebel with the knife.

  Zane growled.

  “It’s okay,” Blaze said to him.

  “No, it’s not,” Rebel snarled. “You attack us with dragons, you don’t get to say it’s okay.”

  Oh, hell. This was a hot damn mess. And nothing she said was going to make it any better. “Sorry,” she said. “My name is Blaze McKenna. We met the other day, in your store? I looked different.”

  Rebel gave her a sharp look. “And this is your idea of a social call? Get the hell out of here before my sister shoots you, and take your dragons with you.”

  Thorne made a pained, strangled sound.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t think I can. At least, not while Thorne is having a meltdown.” She gave a deep sigh. “We need to talk.”

  It took some serious persuading to get Rebel and Tempest to hear them out. Finally, though, they were all sitting in plastic chairs on the porch. Rebel and Tempest were on one side, Rebel with her feet propped up on the railing and the gun in her lap, and Tempest clutching her notebook and pen in a death grip. The power and authority she’d radiated a little while ago had faded, and she was just a shy, anxious young woman with frizzy hair and a dragon t-shirt over her yoga pants.

  Blue dragons, Blaze noticed.

  She and Tyr were sitting across from the sisters. Thorne’s temper seemed to have riled Zane up as well, and he was pacing back and forth behind their chairs. Thorne, still a dragon, was doing his pacing in the backyard, favoring his front leg where Rebel had stabbed him, blood oozing slowly from the wound on his chest. He never took his eyes off Rebel.

  “Is he okay?” Tempest asked for the fourth time. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.” Her pen hand kept twitching, as if she wanted to write in her notebook and was just barely stopping herself.

  “He should be all right,” Zane said. “It depends what kind of spells are on that gun.”

  He looked expectantly at Rebel.

  “Oh, so now I’m supposed to tell you so you can neutralize my only weapon? Do I look like an idiot?” she snapped.

  “Are you sure he’s not badly hurt?” Tempest sounded anxious now.

  Rebel slammed her feet to the porch floor, making it shake. “They sent a dragon to fucking attack us! And you’re worried you hurt it?”

  Tyr said to Tempest, “Honestly, Thorne wouldn’t hurt your sister.”

  “He’d only kidnap me,” Rebel snarled. “That’s fine, though. Everybody thinks kidnapping’s okay.”

  “We did come to stop him,” Zane pointed out.

  “Oh, is that what that was?” Rebel said. “Nice job. Maybe you should have tried smacking him on the nose with a magic Colt.”

  A rueful smile tilted the corner of Tyr’s mouth. “I’ll keep it in mind for the future.”

  Tempest
shifted her attention to him. “You’re Tyr,” she said. “You come in my store sometimes and talk about legends and fairy tales. And now you’re a dragon. Dragons are real and you didn’t tell me. You just let me…”

  She trailed off, and Blaze wondered what she had been about to say.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Tyr said. “We can’t just go around revealing ourselves to humans.”

  “And yet—” Rebel gestured toward Thorne.

  “Well, obviously,” Zane said, “he’s not supposed to be doing that.” He still sounded angry, and Blaze wasn’t sure why he couldn’t calm down.

  Tempest fixed her eyes on Thorne. “He’s so beautiful.”

  He was. His midnight-blue scales caught the light, making him shimmer like he was covered in sapphires. They shaded to deep purple on his underbody, almost black.

  Rebel said flatly, “Stop admiring him. He wants to eat you.”

  Before she could stop herself, Blaze murmured, “He wants to eat you.”

  Zane glared at her, his expression saying, ‘not helping.’ “No, he doesn’t,” he said. “He thinks you have an important artifact—one that should belong to us.”

  Rebel turned to him, surprised. “That idol? I thought you had that.” She shifted her attention to Blaze. “You took it last night. I saw you grab it before the doors blew.”

  “Not the idol,” Tyr said. He described the Seals to Rebel. “Have you ever seen anything like that? Or anything with one of those symbols?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Dragonflies, dolphins and phoenixes? Can you be a little more vague? There’s only about a zillion art pieces in the world with one of those animals on it somewhere.” She tilted her chair back, toying with her Colt. “More to the point, even if I had seen your Seals, why should I help you?”

  “Maybe to save a couple million lives?” In quick, sharp sentences, Zane told her about Vyrkos and the Guardians. It wasn’t helping that he still seemed angry. It was like Thorne’s ‘treasure fever’ was rubbing off on him.

  Blaze could tell Rebel was still skeptical, but Tempest was listening intently.

  When he was finished, Tempest said softly, “But what makes you think Rebel has these Seals? She didn’t steal them.”

  She was speaking directly to Tyr. Blaze saw him meet her eyes, and it was like a spark flashed between them. Tyr’s face softened, and Tempest’s hand went reflexively to her chest.

  Blaze felt that same place in her own chest get warm—the part that seemed to glow every time Zane touched her. The gold necklace he’d given her vibrated in response.

  Tyr leaned forward in his seat. Without taking his eyes off Tempest, he told the story of Maia, Corwyn and Arkyld.

  When he was finished, there was silence. Then Rebel said slowly, “So… you’re trying to tell me that you think I’m one of these Three Mates of Destiny with a magical Seal in my back pocket?”

  “Actually, both of you are,” Tyr said. “And Blaze. The Rogue, the Rebel, and the Storm.”

  Rebel stared across the porch at the trio of lunatics facing her.

  “You’re insane,” she told them flatly. “I don’t have any Seal, and I don’t believe any of this shit.”

  “I do,” Tempest said quietly. She was looking down at her notebook.

  Of course she did. Rebel loved her sister, but she believed in all kinds of things that weren’t necessarily real.

  Except when they were. She looked at the midnight-blue dragon in her backyard.

  Okay, that was real. But that didn’t mean either of them was a legendary figure out of a fairy tale. It was ridiculous. She looked around the porch again. “Do any of you seriously think two normal human women are going to drop everything and just let themselves be carried off by dragons? What have you been smoking?”

  She looked at Zane, who had his hands possessively on the back of Blaze’s chair, and then at the way Tyr was looking at Tempest. Then she looked at the one that had grabbed her. “And to top it all off, you’re trying to palm the crazy one off on me? No thank you.”

  “I don’t think it’s any of our choice,” Tempest said.

  Rebel turned to Blaze. “And you’re going along with this?”

  There was a long silence. Zane’s face was impassive, but Rebel could see him holding his breath, waiting for her answer. So, even with the two of them, it seemed this whole mating thing was not a done deal.

  “I want to talk to you,” Rebel said to Blaze. “Alone.”

  Chapter 32

  Rebel ushered Blaze off the porch and took her off to the side, where they could be private but she could still keep an eye on all the wackos.

  Then she faced the woman who she’d believed was a dark sorceress. She wasn’t so sure now—the shit that had gone down last night had made her less sure who were the bad guys and who were the worse guys in this scenario.

  And now the rabid dragon was confusing her all over again.

  Then there was this completely unbelievable fairy tale about hidden dragons awakening and mates of destiny, and she was supposed to let herself be captured by a nutcase dragon and taken away to be ravished by him so that she could get Stockholm Syndrome and give him an artifact she didn’t even have? Or go get it for him?

  It was insane.

  And yet, Tempest believed it.

  Most people wouldn’t think that was anything to go by. Tempest had been dragon fangirling since she was a little girl. Proof that dragons actually existed—and were here in this world—was like someone dropping most kids into a swimming pool full of chocolate and saying, ‘knock yourself out, babe.’

  But Tempest saw things other people didn’t see, and knew things she had no possible way of knowing. She’d always been that way.

  All Rebel knew was that a few days ago McKenna had been hunting for the guy who broke into her house—this Zane person—and now suddenly she was his partner in all this craziness. And from the looks of it, maybe his partner in bed, too.

  Had she really gone freely into this, or was it some kind of dragon compulsion magic? She didn’t seem scared of him, but on the other hand she looked like hell—dark circles under her eyes, and moving slowly, like she was exhausted.

  Rebel took control of the conversation before the sorceress could open her mouth. “First of all, I hate rogue witches and sorcerers and I don’t work with them. Second, do you really believe all this shit?”

  McKenna bit her lip. “I believe Vyrkos is real. I’ve seen his tomb, and I’ve seen the evidence that the magic that holds it shut is breaking down. And if that’s true, I need to do whatever I can to help.”

  “Even uproot your entire life and be a captive mate for a dragon?”

  McKenna snapped, “My life is already uprooted. My house is trashed and I can’t go home, thanks to you bringing the coven down on me. What the hell was that about? Couldn’t you feel how evil that idol is? It still has all of them in its power, and they haven’t even touched it for ten years. That’s how dangerous it is. And you saw what Silas was doing to that poor man, using his body and letting the magic eat him alive.”

  Rebel winced at that. Jack. She’d been trying to find him all day, and he’d vanished. For all she knew he was dead.

  McKenna was still talking. “They’re going to use the idol to wake Vyrkos, for God’s sake. Are you really going to let that happen?”

  Rebel said, “They told me you were a rogue who’d stolen it from them—that you were the one hurting people with it.”

  The witch gave a mirthless laugh. “I sure as hell stole it from them. I used to be part of that coven—I was born into it. Silas—the sorcerer who was working through the animation spell—used the idol to destroy it. It took over everyone I cared about and either killed them, or turned them into monsters. My family. My parents. Do you have any idea what that’s like, to lose everyone you care about?”

  Rebel glanced over at Tempest. She knew. They both knew. They’d lost their parents, and Rebel would die before she let anyone hurt Tempest.
/>   McKenna wasn’t waiting for an answer. “I took the idol and ran. So yeah, by coven law I’m a rogue. Ask me if I care.”

  Rebel was starting to have a little more respect for the McKenna woman—assuming she was telling the truth.

  Blaze said, “Look, we need to find those Seals. I don’t know if everything in the story is true, but the three of us did show up just as Vyrkos was awakening. The Rogue, the Rebel and the Storm.” She gestured to each of them in turn. “Would it kill you to try to help us?”

  Rebel said, “You know the fact that we’re clueless about the Seals is a big hole in this theory, don’t you?”

  McKenna rolled her eyes. “We’re not idiots, of course we do. But that’s not a reason to stop looking.” She paused, then added, “They can pay.”

  Now that was the first thing she’d heard today that made sense. Rebel said, “I thought they were supposed to seduce us into working for free.” She saw McKenna’s eyes wander to Zane, who was now out in the yard trying to talk some sense into the crazy dragon. Who was still looking at Rebel, his whirling red eyes reminding her of Jack’s boss. Turner.

  It should have been creepy, if not downright terrifying. But she found herself feeling almost sorry for the damned dragon.

  She crushed that feeling right down. Soft-heartedness towards crazy guys—dragon or not—never led anywhere good. She’d had a moment of soft-heartedness for Jack Harper, and look where that had landed her.

  McKenna was watching the guys too, but her eyes were on the man. Zane. Damn, the witch had feelings for him. It was all over her face. “You know he could be using some kind of mind-altering magic to suck you in, don’t you?” she said.

  McKenna jerked her gaze back to Rebel. She said, “Look, can you just come to the lair and see the evidence? Whether or not the Destined Mates story is true, we have to find some way to stop Vyrkos from rising, and to break the link between the coven and the idol. Knowing what they’re doing, you can’t still be on their side.”