The Snow Leopard's Christmas Surprise

by Emilia Hartley

  He turned to his mother. “What is wrong with her?”

  The older woman shook her head, lips pressed together. “All I know is that she needs you. Your father is going to have kittens.”

  “He can have all the cats that he wants,” Wes said before shooting up from the couch.

  He was at the truck when his mother appeared beside him. Her time with his father had left her with a lot of inhuman abilities.

  “You need to think this over,” she said. Her hand fell on his arm, her grip tight in warning. “Dragons aren’t allowed off their territories more than one night a month. I’m willing to keep the other night a secret, but if you go running after her right now you could get the whole family in trouble. Wait for your father to open the right channels for you.”

  “What if I don’t have the time? She’s in trouble and I can’t go help her.”

  “She could have just hurt herself. She’s on campus. There are a lot of people to help her if she’s hurt. She could be perfectly fine.”

  Wes sucked in a breath through his nose. He was trying to control himself, despite the growing fear that chilled his bones. Dakota was in trouble and he couldn’t go to her rescue. The heavy feeling rolled around his stomach. He had a feeling that it was much worse than a simple cut or a broken bone.

  He pushed himself up from the couch, unable to keep still anymore. He paced back and forth in his living area. Magic rippled out from him, unable to keep himself under control. The walls shook as his beast thrashed back and forth. His mate was in trouble and he was trapped on the territory.

  He threw his head back and roared. The sound made his mother leave the tower altogether. He followed her outside where there was more room to move. The walls felt constricting and he would tear down each carefully set stone in his frenzy.

  His mother was on her cell phone. When she saw him approach, she held up one finger and shot him a stern look. His beast growled, but backed down from the fiery look in the woman’s eyes. Instead, they turned to the work shed.

  Do something. He had to do something. He had to keep his mind busy. He couldn’t keep worrying about Dakota. He couldn’t bear to think that she was unsafe. She was in trouble. She needed him.

  Wes gripped a piece of metal that had been set aside for a blade and bent it in his hands. He felt his fire warm his hands. He was going to implode if he didn’t do something.

  Soon.

  His beast was going mad. It thrashed inside of his mind, demanding to be let free. Their mate was in trouble and they had to do something about it. They would not fail that woman. They could not.

  ***

  Dakota sat quietly in her seat. She looked around the van at the people escorting her to her own funeral. Beside her sat the secretary that had pulled the blinds down at the moustache man’s request. Her dark red hair was drawn back into a tight bun. Her eyes looked out the window, but her body was still. It said that she was ready to move if Dakota tried anything.

  In the driver’s seat was the man with the ridiculous moustache. Beside him sat another, younger man from the Guardians’ office. The dragon they had been calling Raph, possibly short for Raphael, had been left behind. That gave her some hope. She didn’t forget about the gun the moustache man had pulled on her earlier, though.

  “What made you sign on to the guardians?” Dakota asked the woman beside her.

  The woman turned wide eyes toward her. They quickly narrowed with suspicion. There was no ally to be had in this woman, but she could be distracting if she had to.

  “Why are you fighting against the dragons?”

  “It’s in my blood,” the woman replied. “My family has always protected humanity from things that can level entire towns with their breath. If you weren’t so stupid, you would be afraid of them, too.”

  Dakota laughed, thinking of how tender Wes had been with her. Sure, maybe she was his mate, but neither of them had known that. He hadn’t known it when he saved her from being raped by a human. He hadn’t known it when he insisted that he feed her rumbling belly. Wes was no more a monster than she was. Looking around the van, Dakota knew who the real monsters were.

  “I’m okay with being stupid,” Dakota confessed. “I mean, at least I’m not blind. I’m not letting another dragon order me around when I hate their kind. Doesn’t that seem a little counter intuitive?”

  Dakota watched the woman’s eyes flick to the back of the moustache man’s head for just a second. Her eyes returned to hold Dakota’s stare. Dakota tried to look as innocent as possible, like she was truly as stupid at the woman thought her to be.

  “He is nothing more than an informant. He sniffed you out for us, did he not?”

  Dakota frowned at the memory. “What does he get from that? Do you pay him? Or, does he get a free pass to walk among humanity, where he can really hurt people?”

  Maybe she couldn’t play stupid after all. It didn’t really suit her anyway. The woman’s eyes darkened. Dakota knew that this woman didn’t like Raph’s presence any more than she did. She had hit the nail on the head. But, she wasn’t going to get an ally out of her as the mate of a dragon. The best she could do was create dissent among them.

  Then what could she do? The woman would be angry with her male counter parts. Dakota could see to that. But, what purpose did it serve? If she could get them to argue after the van stopped, then maybe she could make a break for it. There was the minor problem of the man’s gun. If he had one, did the rest of them have a weapon, too?

  Would they shoot her wherever they were taking her? That was a stupid question, she told herself. She had watched a few too many police procedurals with her mother. She knew that they meant to kill her anyway. Would they make her death look like a dragon had killed her to rile up not only Wes, but the human community of Bangor?

  She rubbed her hands over her face, trying to organize her thoughts. Her mind felt like a mess. She couldn’t think straight enough to formulate a plan. To be fair this wasn’t a situation she ever thought she would be in. The pamphlet had simply stated that students that fraternized with the dragons were to be sent home. It didn’t say that she might become the mate of one of them. It didn’t say that the Guardians might use you to start a Dragon Human war.

  The school really needed to update its pamphlet, she thought.

  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.