by Eva Chase
I could have been a hell of a lot more badass as a dragon, but the one thing I wouldn’t be was stealthy. Not to mention it wouldn’t do us much good if I burned out my limited shifting energy tramping through the woods and then had to do the actual fighting as a human.
Orion should have reached the rogues’ camp last night. The plan was for him to tell them that we’d be passing along this stretch of road this morning—that we’d planned to slip away during the wee hours to avoid notice. They’d think they were coming right down to the road to ambush us there. But they’d run right into our ambush before they had a chance to see they’d been misled.
At least, that was how it was supposed to go. Assuming Orion came through and didn’t just throw in his lot with the rogues. He’d seemed determined to follow my plan when I’d talked to him before he left, but also a little browbeaten. Maybe once he’d gotten farther away from my and his alpha’s authority, he’d decided to take his chances with people who hadn’t locked him up and drugged him. Even if they were murderers.
I really hoped I’d been right about him, though.
West slowed at the top of the hill. He walked to the crest where the ground slanted down again and glanced back at us. This was where we’d planned to stop.
Aaron dove from the sky, leaving his sister on sentry duty. He shifted as he reached the ground and made a graceful landing on both human feet.
“There’s movement a few miles off,” he said. “I’d guess they’ll be here in half an hour or so. We should spread out downwind so they don’t catch our scent before we’re ready to spring.”
I nodded. The other animals drifted back into the trees. I followed, staying by Nate’s side. I was going to have to hang farther back than the others, because my smell wouldn’t blend into the natural landscape as well.
There might be a few downsides to being the rarest type of shifter around. But I did mean to use my unique skills to my best advantage.
When Nate stopped, with a dip of his head toward me, I ran my fingers into his thick grizzly fur and pressed my face to his shoulder. He nuzzled me back.
Back on the estate, while we’d been making our final plans, Nate had tried to convince me I should sit the battle out. He’d made it through about half a sentence before I’d laughed and given him my best dragon stare. There’d been no arguments after that.
The kin who’d died had been my kin too. And I wasn’t going to stand by while the rogues who’d destroyed their lives and my family’s were still walking free.
I turned and reached for the tree we’d stopped beside. The best thing about being a dragon was flying. And I’d be damned if I was going to spend any time at all on the ground as soon as I could shift.
I scrambled up the trunk and clambered from branch to branch until I reached the ones too narrow to easily support my weight. Sitting with my back against the trunk, I scanned the forest. I wasn’t quite high enough to see over the canopy, but I had a decent view between the branches around me.
There was Marco’s black jaguar form crouching a few trees to our left. West’s wolf had blended completely into the brush. Aaron made one last swoop through the sky and came to perch on an oak to my right.
A half an hour. We’d burned through at least ten minutes fanning out around the ambush point, I thought. It shouldn’t be that much longer. But it felt like an eternity between every beat of my heart.
A branch cracked, and my pulse leapt, but it was only a sparrow flitting away. Damn regular animals. I resisted the urge to shuffle my feet impatiently against the branch.
Orion knew exactly where we were going to be waiting. He was supposed to lead the rogues right over this hill. If he was keeping his end of the bargain. If not... Alice was still keeping watch. She’d notice if the rogues looked like they were spreading out to try to take us by surprise instead.
The breeze changed course, and new smells filled my nose. Animal smells—and not the familiar ones of the shifters I’d arrived with—mingling with notes of aggression and anticipation.
The rogues were almost here.
I leaned forward on the branch, bracing my hands and feet against the bark. We didn’t want to spring the trap too soon. Let them barge right into the middle of our ring.
Bodies rustled through the underbrush. Faintly, covertly, but in the quiet my sharp ears could pick up the sounds. My muscles tensed.
A small furry form scurried into view below. A muskrat, leading the supposed charge. Our Orion. I sent a silent thank you down to him, and then several more animals emerged between the trees.
Below my perch, Nate let out a grizzly bellow. We all launched ourselves at the rogues.
I ran along the branch and vaulted out into open space. My scales rippled over my body with the rush of the air around me. My wings whipped out, catching that wind. I stretched and snapped my jaws with my emerging fangs, and hurtled down into the fray.
The forest floor was a mess of writhing bodies. A black bear I knew was Thomas was wrestling with a puma. A scarred silver wolf faced off against Marco’s jaguar. Aaron clawed at a huge weasel that tried to smack him out of the sky. And more, all around—a blur of fur and teeth and splashes of blood.
I let a dragon’s roar rip from my throat. The rogues startled, giving my kin their openings. The puma whirled to make a run for it, and I dove, smacking it into a tree trunk with one taloned paw. A coyote stumbled backward and shifted into human form. He made a grab for the gun he’d been carrying wrapped around his narrow waist.
The echoes of long ago shots fired in my family home rang in my ears. Anger flared through me. Oh, no, he didn’t.
I sucked in a breath and spewed out flame—the hot, searing, destructive kind. The coyote shifter yelped. Then he was nothing more than a charred body with a melted lump of metal in his hands.
There’d be others who were carrying weapons they’d meant to bring to their own assault. I swung around, scanning the fray. I had to pick any rogue off who’d come armed. They could hurt us too quickly. My alphas and my kin were too honorable to break their law about using man-made weapons, even when their enemies didn’t care to play fair.
The click of a safety disengaging made my gut lurch. I swiveled and blasted the figure standing amid the trees before I had time to register anything more than her blond hair and the pistol in her hand. A guy who’d sprung into human form nearby fumbled with his own handgun. Before he could aim it, I turned him into charcoal too.
My muscles tingled as I swooped in the other direction. Another human form moved between the foliage at the other end of the clearing— No, wait, that was Orion. I guessed he figured he could defend himself better with size on his side instead of his muskrat teeth and claws. Naked, his hands clenched into fists, he punched a rogue fox shifter that came at him in the muzzle and then leapt out of the way of its snapping teeth.
I slashed my talons downward to knock the fox shifter to the side. As I dropped down to pin her to the ground, another human figure ran at Orion. A human figure clutching a gleaming dagger.
A rasp of protest broke from my throat. Orion spun around, but not quickly enough. The rogue slammed the dagger into his gut, all the way to the hilt.
Orion’s lips parted. His body sagged. Blood gushed down from the wound.
No. Panic spiked through my veins, sharp and cold. I swiped at the guy with the knife, ripping the dagger from his hand and the skin from his arm. But in my distress, I lost my hold on my shift. My dragon’s body crumpled back into my human one.
I stumbled toward Orion. He’d sunk onto his knees and was reeling backward. I caught his shoulders just before his head smacked the ground.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey. Stay with me.” Shifters could heal from a lot. I’d had my chest gouged by a rogue wolf and survived. If the dagger hadn’t been that well aimed—if I could stop the bleeding—
Reddish flecks were already dappling the former guard’s lips. Shit, shit, shit. I clamped my hand around the hilt of the dagger, suppressin
g the flow of blood there, as if that surface wound was really the problem and not the cuts he’d taken on the inside.
Orion shivered and groaned. “Dragon shifter,” he murmured.
“That’s me,” I said brilliantly. “I’m right here. You did good. You did your kin and your alpha proud. You’re a fucking hero, you hear that. So you’d better live long enough to celebrate that with us.”
He gave me a sickly smile. “I’m doing my best. But I don’t think—” He coughed and gasped at the wrench of the blade with the movement of his chest.
“No,” I said, with all the authority I could summon. “As your dragon shifter, I forbid you from dying right now.”
He tried to chuckle, but it came out more like a gurgle. Oh, God, there really wasn’t anything I could do, was there?
“There’s something... didn’t tell you...” His voice was fading.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just—just rest.”
“No. You need... There’s a feline kin. Someone... someone high up in the families. Calling the shots. Allied... with the rogues. They listen to him. The rest of the group—every rogue remaining… Ready to attack all together. You have to...”
His throat worked, and his body spasmed. “Orion!” I cried out, but his eyes had already fogged. “No, no, damn it.”
I could feel it, as much as I wanted to resist what my senses were telling me. He was gone.
I sat back on my heels, my shoulders slumped. Then I flinched around at a thud behind me.
West had just tackled the fox shifter. From their positions, she’d been about to leap at me. His wolf was twice as big as her form. She squirmed and clawed, but she didn’t stand a chance.
And she clearly knew that too. Like so many of the rogues before, she wasn’t letting herself be taken prisoner. West shifted one of his paws to get a better hold on her, and she rammed her neck into his claws.
He jerked back, but it was already too late. He’d severed her throat. With a snarl of disappointment, he sprang off her sagging body.
West looked around at the dwindling fray and shifted into human form. His gaze caught mine. He jerked his chin toward Orion.
“He’s passed?”
I swallowed hard. “It was just—the cut was too deep—it happened so fast. I tried everything I could think of.” My hands, tacky with the muskrat shifter’s blood, clenched in my lap.
West’s eyes dropped to them and rose back to my face. A shadow passed through his expression, from dark to light. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You did.” He paused. “Ren—”
“We’ve got a prisoner!” someone shouted. A panting Thomas hunched over a sinewy body he’d managed to hold in place by the wrists. Alice had pinned the guy’s ankles with her talons, still in eagle form.
“And I’ve got another,” Marco announced, sauntering from amid the trees with a bobcat he held by the scruff of its neck and its restrained hind legs. His fingers tensed as the rogue struggled to break free. Nate shifted and moved to help him.
I pushed myself onto my feet. Too quickly. My legs wobbled, my stomach feeling as if I’d left it behind down by the ground.
West caught me by the shoulders. “Hey,” he said, his voice somehow rough and gentle at the same time. He pulled me into a hug, tucking my head under his chin. We were both naked, but with the image of Orion’s dead body lingering in my head, his blood staining my hands, there was nothing sensual about the embrace. I leaned into the heat of West’s body seeking only comfort, from the mate I’d never expected to offer it.
He stroked his hand over my hair, and my hands slipped against his chest. Shit, I was getting blood all over him. I jerked back, not knowing where to put them. West looked down at himself, the smears of blood over the lean muscles, and shook his head.
“It’s okay,” he said. And then, in more the tone I’d have expected from him. “I expect you’ll make plenty more messes than that before you’re done, Sparks.”
As I made a face at him, Aaron came up beside me. He offered me a strip of moss to wipe my hands. “I think we’ll need your help questioning the captives,” he said. “They don’t seem any more inclined to talk than the other rogues have been.”
Of course. I dragged in a breath and took in the results of our ambush. At least a couple dozen bodies littered the forest floor—all of them, as far as I could tell, rogues, other than Orion. A couple of Nate’s other people were sprawled, having their wounds tended to by their kin, but none of the rest of us had taken a fatal injury. There’d been more rogues in the attack party than I could see around me, though.
“Some of the others got away?” I said.
Nate nodded. “A few cowards ran when they saw the way the battle was going and moved too fast for any of us to catch them. But only a few.”
Damn. I looked at the bobcat and then the rogue pinned on the ground. “You’ve got a choice. You can talk to us now or you can talk in my fire.”
The man on the ground glared at me. The bobcat hissed. Well, I guess that answered that.
“Pour down the flames, and we’ll toss them in,” Marco suggested. “I don’t think they’ll be going anywhere once you’re got them in the hot spot.”
“All right.” I glanced at him. “Orion told me there’s an important feline shifter, one of your kin, who’s been calling at least some of the shots. Making plans with the rogues.”
Marco’s eyes darkened. “Interesting,” he said, an edge creeping into his voice. “Let’s see what these two have to say about that, shall we?”
I closed my eyes, reaching back to my sense of my dragon self. The change came over me more slowly this time, lengthening and expanding, nerves twitching. I’d already exhausted a lot of my energy during the fight. But I had enough to make this interrogation count.
I loomed over the others in the middle of the small grove. My kin moved to clear a space. I focused on the burn tingling at the base of my dragon throat. On my anger at Orion’s death and the other deaths the rogues had caused. On my need to know what else they might have in store for us.
Then I opened my jaws and let the violet flames stream down.
Marco threw the bobcat into the fire first. It shuddered and expanded into a woman’s form, huddled in the midst of the flames. “Who among my kin have you been talking to?” Marco snapped immediately.
“I haven’t spoken to anyone,” the bobcat shifter said in a whimper. “No one tells me anything. I just did my best to help.”
“Are you aware of any allies among the feline kin—or any other kin—that the other rogues have been talking to?” Aaron asked, phrasing his question carefully.
She shook her head. “No one except the one on the disparate kin’s estate. And that one.” She pointed toward Orion. “Much good as he did us.”
“What were you going to do if your plan to ambush us here didn’t work?” Nate said.
“I’m not sure.”
West cleared his throat. “What do you know about the other rogues’ plans?” he put in.
She shivered again, jerking her head away from the blast of my flames, but she couldn’t resist their burn. “There were plans being made around the feline estate,” she gasped out. “I don’t know what. But they were preparing for something big if we failed here.”
Something big. Orion has said the rest of the rogues were prepared to launch a heavy assault. How many of them were left now?
I heaved another stream of flames over the bobcat shifter, ignoring the pinching sensation that was starting to work through my muscles.
“Specifics,” Marco said. “Tell us everything you know about those plans.”
“That is all I know.” Her voice turned into a whimper.
Aaron made a gesture to Nate, maybe realizing that my strength was waning. The bear shifter grabbed the rogue woman and hauled her out of the truth-searing fire.
Thomas and Alice were ready with their captive. The gawky albatross shifter flinched beneath the flames, but he didn’t have any more answers t
o the alpha’s questions than the bobcat shifter had. My throat started to throb. I gestured to my mates, and West shot out one last inquiry.
“Your allies who ran away from this attack—where would they have gone?”
“I’m not sure,” the guy said in a strained voice. “Maybe to meet up with the main group in Florida?”
My flames sputtered out. My shift sputtered out too. I shrank into my human body and immediately launched into a coughing fit. Very smooth.
When I got control of my lungs, Nate’s people were already hauling the two captured rogues away. “What are you going to do with them?” I asked.
“Hold them, drugged, until we decide what punishment they should face.” Nate sighed. “They were only lackeys. I’d banish them—but they were outside the kin already, and look what they got up to.”
Our prisoners hadn’t known enough. I’d gone all the way up a mountain to earn the power of those violet flames, the ones that burned through to the truth. No other dragon shifter before me had claimed Sunridge’s secret. But it still hadn’t been enough to win the day.
“It sounds like as far as they knew the group that’s waiting in Florida, that’s most of them,” I pointed out. “The ‘main group,’ he said. That fits with what Orion told me.”
“So if we can deal with the rogues there, we might have wiped up the rest of the problem,” West filled in. “Which would sound a lot more hopeful if we knew where the hell in Florida they were.”
“Are we still going there?”
“I think that’s the best course of action we have,” Aaron said. “The rogues don’t know what we’ve found out. We should go on to the feline estate, act as if we don’t suspect anything is wrong, and investigate from there.”
“And when I find out which of my kin has been entertaining those lunatics, you’d better believe the fur is going to fly,” Marco said, baring his teeth in a fierce grin.