Gathering Darkness: A Paranormal Romance Collection

by Anna Zaires

  Repeatedly. With a brick.

  Ris though, didn’t appear to have the same issues as the rest of his kind. Duke transferred his attention back to the man in front of him. He’d snapped back to the present, as far as Duke could tell anyway. He’d focused on the future and then come back without any wandering through last week. Sharp. Focused. Professional. He took the guy’s hand and shook firmly. Perhaps he wouldn’t turn out so bad after all.

  Ris grinned. “Glad you didn’t take the other option and punch me in the face. Bricks hurt.”

  That startled a snort from Duke. “Come on, that had to have been a lucky guess.”

  The man just shrugged. “Not really. Sometimes it’s all about seeing a little way into the future.” He nodded towards a small pile of bricks at the side of the roof. “And removing all possible weapons.”

  “Right.” Iliona clapped her hands together, getting their attention. “Since we’ve made our introductions, and no one seems in imminent danger of punching anyone else, shall we look at the matter in hand?”

  ***

  “Arrrgh! Fucking idiots!”

  Chase swore, rattling off a curse dirty enough to make her former comrades on the Queen’s guard blush. Where the hell had those two come from? Two big-as-hell male dragons gate-crashing Sellers’ little ritual had so not been on her plan for today.

  She’d been so close.

  The ritual had just started but that hadn’t mattered. It had been close enough for her to almost see the structure of the spell Sellers planned to use. She’d only needed a few more seconds.... Then those damn dragons had burst into the party and shot the whole thing to the seventh hell.

  Chase snarled and kicked at a pile of junk. Stalking through the abandoned drainage tunnels under the city she headed back to her ‘master’s’ lair.

  Lair.

  What a freaking idiot. A bit of royal dragon blood and the cretin thought he was a dragon himself. A Dragos of all bloody things. What a fucking joke. The best thing about it? He seemed to think it was something special, rather than the second-rate joke the spell had been conceived as in the first place. A ‘gift’ to some ancient king or other who wanted to feel as powerful as a Dragon-Mage. In other words, another fucking idiot. The world, present and past, was full of them.

  Her lip curled and she stomped onward. She didn’t carry a torch, didn’t need to. A creature of darkness, she was Chase Nightborne, daughter of Nevaris Stormcaller, Seventh Level Warrior-Mage and the Queen’s Bodyguard, and the day she needed a torch to see in the dark was the day they laid her to rest.

  She snorted to herself. Yeah, right. Bodyguard to a queen who had died centuries ago, she’d failed to protect the one thing she had been entrusted with. The Queen’s daughter.

  Instead of waking to a new world full of promise that the royal child could grow up in without fear, Chase had woken to pain: a collar around her throat and the baby in a cage. Her companions, the other dragons entrusted along with her to protect the child were gone. Empty spaces or heaps of rubble were all that remained. Until she’d met the two males who had stopped Sellers she’d thought the two of them were the last of their kind.

  Crouched by Baby’s cage, she’d been intent on the marks Sellers made in the witching, her body taut as she waited. Ready to leap into action as soon as she saw the key to his spells. Once she had the key, Sellers was done for. Even with his Dragos enchantment, and the control collar around her throat, he wasn’t powerful enough yet to stop her calling on the witching. She could undo everything he’d wrought with a few words, rip his throat out and save the woman Sellers planned to kill to cement his power. All in all, a good day’s work.

  But the two dragons had shown up and all hell had broken loose. The Dragos had commanded her and she’d been forced to fight. Not with the full lethality she could bring to bear, but more than enough to satisfy Sellers that he still controlled her. She’d had to let one go because his mate, Sellers’ captive, fell. Without wings the woman was dead, and Chase couldn’t do that to another dragon, not even if it blew her cover to hell.

  She sighed and raked a hand through her hair. Where had the males come from? Who were they…what family? She and the other guards should have been all that remained after this long. How could they have not known of another bloodline?

  Even deep in slumber, she’d been aware of the world around them as the ages passed. Most of her mind had slept but a small part of it had drifted, picking up and settling in a human mind at random. Buried deep within, she’d watched and experienced life. Learning all she needed to know to blend in when the time came to wake. The perfect cover.

  So where had they come from? A frown creased her brow as she walked. Perhaps Shadow-dragons had begun to re-emerge from the dormant lines now that they were no longer hunted? Over the years as she’d slept, watching from the concealment of a human mind, her race had slipped into myth and legend, until no one believed they’d ever existed.

  Right now though the two dragons would have been the perfect allies. If they weren’t young and ill-disciplined pain-in-the-ass males. That one was as hot as hell and started a low hum in the center of her chest, one she’d never thought she’d feel, which just pissed her off even more.

  Chase snarled again, the deep growl emanating from her human throat. She looped her fingers under the collar around her neck and yanked. Pain flared through her body, causing her to grit her teeth so hard it surprised her that they didn’t break off. The cheap leather looked thin, something a creature like her should be able to snap without a thought, but magic bound it. That control collar was the only reason she hadn’t turned the horrible little human into a smoking pile of ash.

  “Fucking cretin,” she snarled, turning a corner and almost tripping over one of the many homeless beings that sought shelter in these tunnels.

  “Move it along, friend,” she advised as what looked like a pile of blankets scuttled away. The stench rising off them was both pungent and non-human. Some sort of Fae but she didn’t bother to work out what. “Red Caps make it out this far. You wouldn’t want to get in their way.”

  As expected, the pile of blankets squeaked and ran off down the tunnels the way Chase had come. No one in their right mind wanted to get in the way of the Red Caps. Murderous little bastards always needed to keep their hats wet. With blood. Fresh blood. Most people weren’t so keen on donating, so they just took what they wanted, violently, and since they ran in packs, the majority of their victims didn’t stand a chance.

  Stagnant water splashed up her boots. Deeper in the tunnels, it was damp and dark. Rubble and debris from various cave-ins over the years made the passage difficult at times. She paused at one of the access shafts that led to the lower levels. Warding sigils inscribed into the walls around her sensed her presence and sparked, casting an eerie glow over the curved walls. They were part of the warning system encircling Sellers’ lair.

  She stood on the top step and studied them. The guy was a cretin, but a clever one, she’d give him that. Who else would have thought to put a control collar on her before she woke from the slumber that had kept her from the world for thousands of years? Putting it on her when she was awake was a non-starter. She’d wouldn’t have needed her claws. With her magic she could have torn him apart with a single word. She was just fortunate that the collar had left her the ability to shift at will. As long as Sellers allowed it, anyway. She wasn’t a fool, he’d only allowed her to keep her ability to shift because it suited him.

  With a sigh she let go of her physical form and dissolved into shadow to slink along the wall and deeper into the tunnels. This time was so different from the one she remembered, and she hated everything about it. Except maybe ice-cream and coffee.

  Barely corporeal, she raced along in the darkness, manifesting a claw here and there to dig into the wall and hasten her progress. She didn’t care if she bust a brick or left marks on the walls. Not like maintenance would to be on her case. The place had been abandoned before Sellers had
moved in and it showed.

  Reaching the entrance to the lair, she coiled in the darkness around the door. Her vision drifted between the veils of reality, showing her both the natural cavern as it was and then with the illusion cast by the Dragos. Expensive furniture spread haphazardly around the cavern, sat on the rock and mud floor rather than the smooth marble Sellers thought he’d conjured. Water had seeped up into the fine fabrics in an ever widening march of ruin. Priceless paintings hung at angles on rock walls, and two dragon statues guarded the doorway, precious jewels sparkling in their wings.

  Sellers himself swaggered around the cavern, totally fooled by the illusion. The idiot didn’t realize that he hadn’t changed the cavern into a super villain lair like those in the spy films he watched on repeat, but had instead fallen for his own illusion. She chuffed in the back of her throat. Typical human. No creature with an ounce of paranormal blood in their veins would be fooled for an instant.

  “Chase!”

  Sellers bellow caught her attention. Great, he’d spotted her in the darkness. She tried to resist the pull from the collar around her neck as she shrank back into the shadows. Teeth clenched, she dug her claws into the softness of the decayed brickwork under the Dragos’ illusion and fought the urge to do as he bid.

  Sweat broke out along her back, the small beads of fluid the first sign off her manifestation as the compulsion wrought by the collar forced her back into corporeal form. The sharp stink of rage and frustration, her own, filled her nose and she peeled away from the wall to drop down and land lightly in the doorway. Somewhere between falling and landing, she shrugged off her dragon form, the shift to human as instinctive as breathing.

  Rising to her full height of five feet nothing she fixed him with a haughty stare. Sometimes it wasn’t what you had, but what you did with it that mattered. She might be short on stature but Chase had more than enough attitude and balls to give even the Queen’s Champions a run for their money.

  Funny that. For all their swagger and bullshit about not needing Chase along to look after Baby, she’d been the only one in the group who survived through the years.

  She shook the thought off. She had no idea what had happened to the others. Natural disaster maybe? A rockslide would have easily buried one or two, shattering their dormant forms into a million pieces. Treasure hunters were also a possibility. The idiots had shifted to dormant in their full dragon forms, the resulting statue-like forms majestic and so fucking obvious. Only Chase had part shifted, reforming herself into an indistinct mound of rock around Baby’s bed, hiding both herself and the Royal dragonet.

  “Where have you been?” Sellers demanded, twisting the heavy pendant on the chain around his neck.

  Chase’s eyes narrowed as drew closer to the odious man. The pendant controlled her collar. She wanted to reach out and tear the damn thing from his neck, and shove it right where the sun didn’t shine. Her fingers tensed and clenched at her sides as she held the talons that wanted to erupt from her human skin within.

  But she couldn’t touch him, the magic on the collar too great. It wasn’t dragon-magic. That would have been too easy. Any dragon-wrought spell she could have negated with a click of her fingers. Her gaze settled on the symbols etched into the heavy silver setting of the pendant. Familiar symbols. Warden symbols. Wardens had helped the other races hunt her kind to the point of extinction. They’d forced her best friend and queen to send her only child to sleep beneath the earth, in the hope of waking in a better world. Look how well that one had turned out.

  She reached the warlock, her last steps as slow as she could make them. Sellers’ face was purple with rage, the color an ugly contrast with the gold of his be-spelled eyes. This was his ‘dragos’ form, another element of the spell but it was little more than an illusion. He wore it with pride as ‘proof’ of his superiority. Illusion or not, Chase hoped he bit off his own fucking tongue with the pretend fangs.

  “I said, where have you been?” His hand shot out and grabbed her around the back of the neck, cruel fingers grinding the vertebrae as he yanked her almost off her feet.

  “I called you. Did you kill them? The other dragons? Did you get the woman?” He looked eagerly past her, as though somehow she could hide an unconscious woman in her back pocket.

  “No. The two males were too powerful. I couldn’t get to her. Barely escaped with my life,” she whined, injecting a pathetic, cowed note in her voice. It was total bullshit. As ill-trained as the males were, she could have taken them. Not with brute strength admittedly, but with her wits and training, she could easily have outsmarted them.

  “Shit.” He threw her from him. She stumbled, pain flaring as her knees hit the uneven cavern floor. “What the fuck do I keep you around for, huh? If you can’t handle a simple job?”

  He surged forward, fist raised. Fuck, this would hurt. Closing her eyes, she distanced the connection to her physical body and floated as the sound of fist hitting flesh filled the cavern.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sellers was good, Duke had to give him that. The Croft building had been clean as a damn whistle, the guy’s office giving nothing away other than he was fifty-plus with way too much money to spend. The place screamed the sort of ostentatious elitism that made Duke want to hurl.

  As a dragon, he knew all about hoarding treasure. The thing most people missed though, was that treasure didn’t have to be expensive. The material cost of a thing didn’t make it valuable. What it meant to the collector, how it made them feel, that made it valuable. He liked…stuff. Pretty stuff. Things made of satins and silks. Shirts, underwear, sheets…cushions. He loved the way they felt against his skin, all over. Other places. Since he knew Baron would take the piss for forever and a day, he hid his stash in the spare room, amongst a load of other crap so his brother would never find it.

  Shaking his head, Duke dragged his thoughts away from his treasures, only for his mind to present him with an image of the she-dragon from last night. His mate. Would she have skin like satin? She’d had a voice like silk, a whisper of sensation in his mind as they’d flown and fought. He’d chased her through the night sky, streaks of shadow against midnight until she’d taken refuge in the subway tunnels. Down there his bigger size had hindered him, the more agile female dragon handing him his ass on a plate and then some.

  A grin split his face. She hadn’t killed him, though. She couldn’t. Just as Baron had found his mate, so had he. The she-dragon was his. His mate. Not just another treasure but the treasure. The treasure to end all treasures. The one he’d give up his entire collection for just to have her.

  “This is the place?”

  He directed the question at the woman next to him. Honor’s PA, Lucy, walked and talked human, but she was anything but. She was a fate, some great-great-however-many-greats-granddaughter of one of the original three bitches who liked to fuck with everything and everyone.

  Looking up at the warehouse building, she shivered and nodded, rubbing her hands up her arms. It had taken everything they had, including Duke growling at her, to get her to come here in the first place but since Sellers’ office had proven to be squeaky-clean, it was the only lead they had.

  “Yeah, this is it.”

  Duke nodded and strode forward. The door was unlocked, and slid open easily. He froze, hand on the doorframe and all his senses on alert. Darkness looked back at him from within but as a creature of the night, the shadows could hide no secrets from him. Taking a deep breath, he rolled it over his tongue. Tasting what had gone on here.

  “Just…be careful. They had demons and all sorts in there.”

  Lucy’s voice reached him and he cast a quick look over his shoulder. Ris, the Seer, had insisted on riding shotgun. Since Baron was out of action protecting Honor, Duke had agreed. Especially when he’d seen the no-nonsense way Ris had loaded the Glock in the shoulder holster under his battered leather jacket, and flashed a fistful of warden-inscribed rings. Whatever the Seer was, he loaded for bear. Duke nodded, noting th
e protective arm the other man had around Lucy’s shoulders. Could Fates be killed? If so, would she get a visit from Granny to cut her life-thread?

  “Don’t you worry, sweet-stuff.” His voice grated with the deep notes of his dragon. “They’d need the King of Hell himself to take me on.”

  Turning back around, he stepped into the darkness and dissolved into shadow. The sharp stink of demon blood made him want to gag, but he hadn’t been kidding. A couple of years ago, yeah, he’d have thought twice about taking on a demon but recently his power and ability had rocked it off the charts. Same story with Baron. Now? A demon would be little more than a small snack before the main course.

  With a sinuous movement he wove through the shadows, twisting and turning around the pillars as he checked the place out. It was empty, and looked like it had been for a while. Dampness had wormed deep into the walls, the concrete slick to the touch whenever he manifested a toe long enough to touch down.

  Water dripped in a steady rhythm somewhere farther into the building but he didn’t pay it much attention. Not many things could use water as a medium. A nymph maybe, but he seriously doubted one of Poseidon’s harem would waste time watching him. Jump his bones, yeah. Watch him, no. Not unless he was doing something seriously kinky and they wanted to join in.

  He found the pit Lucy had described with ease. Not difficult with a canine corpse in it. The rotting, fetid smell assaulted him. Wrinkling his nose, he pushed free of the shadows long enough to form a snout and spew forth a gout of flame.

  The smell of burning flesh filled the warehouse for a second before it disappeared as though it had never been, the dog’s remains rendered to a pile of fine ash. A grunt of satisfaction echoed in his throat as he manifested fully and dropped, in human form, from the shadows above the pit.