by Lily Cahill
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Bonus Offer
The Dragon’s Temptation
Chapter One
Felicity
Chapter Two
Damien
Chapter Three
Felicity
Chapter Four
Damien
Chapter Five
Felicity
Chapter Six
Damien
Chapter Seven
Felicity
Chapter Eight
Damien
Chapter Nine
Felicity
Chapter Ten
Damien
Chapter Eleven
Felicity
Chapter Twelve
Damien
Chapter Thirteen
Felicity
The Dragon’s Conquest
Chapter One
Blayze
Chapter Two
Ramona
Chapter Three
Blayze
Chapter Four
Ramona
Chapter Five
Blayze
Chapter Six
Ramona
Chapter Seven
Blayze
Chapter Eight
Ramona
Chapter Nine
Blayze
Chapter Ten
Ramona
The Dragon’s Undoing
Chapter One
Joy
Chapter Two
Vincent
Chapter Three
Joy
Chapter Four
Vincent
Chapter Five
Joy
Chapter Six
Vincent
Chapter Seven
Joy
Chapter Eight
Vincent
Chapter Nine
Joy
Chapter Ten
Vincent
Chapter Eleven
Joy
The Dragon’s Redemption
Chapter One
Marta
Chapter Two
Arryn
Chapter Three
Marta
Chapter Four
Arryn
Chapter Five
Marta
Chapter Six
Arryn
Chapter Seven
Marta
Chapter Eight
Arryn
Chapter Nine
Marta
Chapter Ten
Arryn
Chapter Eleven
Marta
Thanks for reading Kings of the Fire.
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Sneak Peak
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Kay
Chapter Two
Hudson
KINGS OF THE FIRE BOX SET
Lily Cahill
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, are entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Nameless Shameless Women, LLC.
All rights reserved.
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Chapter One
Felicity
FELICITY HEARD THE CRASH OF the back door as someone slammed it shut, followed by a muffled curse. Her eyes moved to the digital clock above the stove, which turned to 11:37 a.m. under her gaze. Well, at least Joy was finally home, even if it was twelve hours after she’d been expected.
All calls to Joy’s cell phone had gone ignored. Only a tragically misspelled text message in the middle of the night—srtop casling im fiiiiiiine—had kept Felicity from marching over to Tania Maxwell’s house at three in morning, demanding to know her little sister’s whereabouts.
Felicity was too old for this. Hell, Joy was too old for this. They’d moved away from New York City to get away from that lifestyle—the partying, the temptation, the clubs where they only had to give their last name to be let behind the velvet ropes. When their maternal aunt, Mable Morningstar, had passed away and left her home to Felicity, she’d thought it was the perfect answer. Augustus had the perfect balance of magical and mortal culture, and while not exactly a metropolis, it had a healthy population and was less than an hour drive from Philadelphia.
Naturally, the first thing Joy had done once they’d settled in was find a pixie with too much time and mead on her hands.
It was true, that old saying. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Joy’s footsteps echoed on the tile floor—at least she was wearing her heels inside the kitchen. Last time Joy had come home hungover she’d tried to walk through without shoes on, and Felicity had had to chase her back outside. The running had made Joy puke in the grass of their backyard.
Felicity would have thought that wearing shoes in an industrial kitchen would have been obvious, but apparently Joy needed to have it spelled out for her. If a customer had seen that—or worse, an inspector found out, then their jointly owned coffee shop, The Witch’s Brew, would have been shut down in seconds flat. Sure, they ran it out of the bottom level of their two story home. That didn’t mean they could treat the business portion of it like they did the apartment they shared upstairs.
Her sister’s hair was a tangled mess of a bun on the top of her head, her tights ripped up her long legs. There was a mysterious stain on the front of her sparkly red mini-dress.
“Did you make coffee yet?” Joy’s voice came out in a groggy whisper, and she coughed and rubbed at her temple.
Felicity glanced back up at the clock. 11:38. “I made it five hours ago. You know, just before I opened the shop for you. Because you weren’t here to open it yourself.”
Joy groaned. “Oh God, seriously? But I don’t work until Friday!”
“It is Friday.”
“I’m so sorry, Lis.” Joy straightened up and tugged her hair out of its holder, letting it tumble down her back. She fiddled with it, trying to smooth it into a more professional-looking pony tail. “I’ll run upstairs and change right now. Ten minutes, and then you can be done for the day.”
A small sliver of guilt wheedled its way inside Felicity’s heart. The nickname, the willingness to step up despite the massive hangover—it was tough to be angry at Joy when she was like this. Penitent, sincere. Her sister was spontaneous and silly; usually, it was part of what made her charming. Sometimes, though, it made everything in Felicity’s life that much harder.
The timer went off on the oven, signaling the fresh batch of scones were finished baking. The morning rush had killed the normal pastry supply, and Felicity had used the lull before lunch to whip up another dozen. Joy grabbed her head at the sound and turned a shade of green.
Felicity sighed. “Don’t worry about it. You can cover for me tomorrow. I’ll get the rest of the day, you just go take a nap or something.”
“That’s a twelve hour shift. When are you planning to eat?”
“I’ll find time!” She shooed her sister away. “Now go. Nap. Be free!”
Joy took a few halting steps back. She looked between the back door and her sister, chewing on her lip as she thought, before turning and clunking out of the kitchen in her too-high heels. There were only two ways to the upstairs apartment the pair of them shared—through a small, locked door in the main dining room that neither of them ever used, and the outside entrance, right next to the kitchen door. Joy’s footsteps were so heavy that, despite the wall separating them, Felic
ity could hear her clomping up the steps.
It would be hours before she emerged again. Joy was an adult—well, in age, at least. She’d turned twenty-four three months earlier, but she still showed no signs of self-sufficiency. For a long time, Felicity had blamed the city. New York never slept, and neither did its many temptations. All night vampire bars, the secret parties the fae held in Central Park—invisible to mortals, but not to Others. Fae magic was strong.
The pair of them had fought constantly, about the partying, the drinking, the recreational drug use that Joy swore was not a habit.
The guys.
Felicity frowned at her scones and tried to pick one up off the baking sheet. A sizzle of heat scorched her fingertips, and she dropped the pastry. It broke open, still oven-hot, crumbling into pieces. She glared at the bits scattered across the tray. Now even the food was betraying her!
It wasn’t that Felicity cared that Joy had been with lots of men. Her sister was young and beautiful, with a pouty mouth and legs that seemed to go on forever. She was the slimmer of the two of them, but not stick thin. Her curves were subtler, and her skin was a perfect, natural dark tan. She was a striking girl, and Felicity loved her.
But she also envied her, just a little. Sure, they’d always made it into the same clubs, but she wasn’t under any illusions as to why she’d been admitted into the VIP section every time. The Valdez name carried a lot of weight, even now, when her family wasn’t in favor with most of the magical community.
Without even realizing she was doing it, Felicity picked up a piece of scone and began to nibble. Whenever Joy had convinced Felicity that they ought to go out together, it had been an awkward exercise in holding up the wall, drinking watered-down liquor, and watching her younger sister dance with seemingly every available man in the room.
Felicity didn’t want every man in the room. But one, maybe—one would have been nice.
She munched down on a blueberry, the flavor bursting across her tongue, and she caught on to what was happening. She was eating. Again. This was why Joy was constantly surrounded by men and Felicity was constantly on the sidelines, watching. She dropped the bite of scone into the trash, frowning at herself. Food wasn’t so much an issue as a source of comfort, and she knew she relied on it to improve her mood. She knew that was why her hips were wide, her thighs thick. Her mother had always told her that she’d never find a man if the only place she ever looked was the pantry. The insult still stung, even though it had been years.
She put thoughts of her mother at the back of her mind. Lots of people didn’t get along with their mothers; it wasn’t exactly an uncommon problem. Sarah Morningstar Valdez was probably doing just fine in New York City, shopping and living her life and definitely not dwelling on her relationship with her daughters. If she didn’t worry about it, why should Felicity?
Holding her hand over the baking sheet, Felicity murmured, “Frio.”
The steam rising from the scones dissipated, and she smiled to herself. A little cooling spell, nothing tricky, but few people could control their magic without the use of some sort of channel—a wand, a ring, a familiar. Felicity had never needed one; even for a Valdez, she was powerful. Especially considering her mother’s side of the family, the Morningstars, were as mortal as they came.
She could control her magic without thinking; it was a part of her, like her heart and her lungs. When she breathed in deep, she could feel it working inside of her, coursing through her veins.
For all that Joy had gotten the body and the beauty, Felicity had gotten the power, and whenever she heard her mother’s voice a little too loudly in her head, she liked to remind herself that that was the better end of the deal.
The faint tinkling of a bell signaled someone coming in the front door. Felicity turned to flick off the oven, and moved around the island in the middle of the room to the sink. She washed and dried her hands and then stepped back out front.
The Witch’s Brew was her pride and joy, her baby, her everything. When she and Joy had moved to Augustus—or, as Joy liked to call it, the middle-of-nowhere—Felicity had fallen in love with the space. She’d sold Auntie Mabel’s house and used the profits for a down payment. The family would have given them money for something bigger, something grander, but she’d sworn to herself she wouldn’t go back to them again, wouldn’t request their help. Not after what had happened last year, after Joy’s accident. She and Joy could make it on their own. They were going to be Morningstars now.
The dining room windows faced the east, catching the last rays of the morning light before the sun moved completely overhead. The room was bathed in yellow and pleasantly warm, with the front door standing open for air circulation. While the décor was nothing special—assorted tables and chairs that they’d found in thrift stores, old antiques that they’d scavenged from Auntie Mabel’s basement before they’d sold it—but there was something charming and cozy about how mismatched everything looked.
The front counter was cluttered with display cases full of baked goodies and potions, and Joy’s immaculate handwriting on the wall-mounted chalkboard proclaimed yesterday’s specials. Felicity had kept them, rather than face an endless day of everyone asking her what the board said. She always meant to take her time and write neatly, but she didn’t have the patience for it, and no one could ever read anything she wrote—except for Joy, who claimed that it was only because she’d been exposed to her sister’s messy scrawl at a young age.
The place was neat and clean and hers, and Felicity loved it more than anything. She’d come by it honestly, unlike the powerful position she was set to inherit.
Felicity liked many things: she liked good coffee, she liked good food, and she liked good spells and potions. The Witch’s Brew provided all of that plus a cheerful ambiance.
A man approached the counter, tapping at the screen of his smart phone with his thumb. His suit was well-tailored, and he was holding a briefcase. Maybe someone from the law office down the street?
Augustus had all sorts of businesses on the main street that catered to both mortals and Others. The town had been established by the fae in the late 18th century and had acted as a haven for the magically inclined since then. Nowadays, though, the way the mortal world and the Others’ world were so intertwined—history had proved again and again that magic was too big a secret to keep, and when people had fled religious persecution in the old world for the relative freedom of the new, magical freedom had ensued.
The man glanced at the board, frowning. “Pumpkin spice latte?”
The way he said it implied that he was not ordering a pumpkin spice latte. Felicity resisted the urge to drum her fingers on the countertop. Now that he was closer, she could see that he was mortal and handsome, but in a way that was cold, hard. He was pushing forty—not too old, and his body was lean and fit, so he kept himself in good shape. His face was just a bit too tan to be natural, but he didn’t seem the type of person who saw a lot of sunlight. He probably had a tanning potion; the better ones were flawless, but if the witch who made it cut any corners at all, then they tended to make the user look a bit orange.
Felicity cleared her throat. She wasn’t sure how to answer him. “Yes,” she said, shifting her weight on her feet. The door opened and the bell jangled again, but she wasn’t able to look at this new customer. Whoever they were, she hoped they were less annoying than the person in front of her.
“It’s May, not October.” He gave her an impatient look before turning back to his phone and typing something furiously.
“I’m aware,” she said, her voice just edging past polite. She took a deep breath. It wasn’t good business to alienate customers, even mortals who insisted on dyeing themselves Oompa Loompa orange. “I’ve always thought the marketing used on pumpkin-related products to be kind of silly. The idea that scarcity and seasonal coding are the keys to popularity—”
The man snorted. “Sure, sweetheart. Tell me everything you learned in your online business class.”
Shock made her mouth drop open, and for a moment she was too surprised to do anything at all—and then, suddenly, anger flooded her. She snapped her mouth shut, leveling a glare at the man. He didn’t even notice, still staring at the screen of his phone.
“I’ll have you know,” Felicity started.
“Whatever,” the businessman cut her off. “Can I get an Americano to go?”
“No.”
Finally, he looked away from his cell, staring at her in shock. “Excuse me?”
“I will not serve you. Get out of my shop.”
He shoved his phone into his pocket, face going red with rage. Combined with his orange coloring, he looked strange and inhuman. “Now, listen here, you little—”