by Eva Chase
“I’ve had worse,” I said. I nodded to the spatula in his hand. “Are you the one cooking?”
He smiled back. “Hungry? No one’s up yet, not even Marco’s chef. I didn’t want to hassle anyone else on my behalf. Most shifters are more on the nocturnal side, but I’m a bit of an early bird.” His grin widened as if daring me to laugh.
“Ha, ha, Mr. Eagle. I just hope you’re not cooking eggs.”
He brandished the spatula. “Pancakes. Come on. I’d better get back to them before they burn.”
“I definitely cannot be responsible for massacring your pancakes.”
I followed Aaron into the kitchen. He strode straight to the stove where a huge frying pan was sizzling and grabbed another plate from a cupboard. I stopped on the threshold, gaping.
“Wow.” The kitchen was as big as the entire open-concept common space in the apartment I was sharing with Kylie, with stainless steel appliances as far as the eye could see. “Now that’s a kitchen.”
“I don’t think Marco knows how to do anything halfway,” Aaron said. “It’s all-out-luxury, or forget about it.” He flipped the pancakes, sending a fresh waft of that buttery doughy smell to my nose.
My mouth started watering. I ambled up beside him to check whether his handiwork was close to done.
Aaron looked over at me. “Are you feeling more settled now that you’ve had time to think all this through?” His voice came out a little softer than usual, but still with that appealing rasp. My awareness of his presence snapped into focus with a warmth all down my side. We were standing close enough that I could smell him, a salty aquatic scent that reminded me of the ocean. I wanted to lick it off his skin.
Down, girl. Mind out of the gutter.
“Yeah,” I said, my throat suddenly hoarse. Why did every one of these guys have this effect on me? “I guess I was kind of a pain in the ass yesterday, huh?”
Aaron chuckled. “Not at all. It was totally understandable. I like a girl who wants all the facts instead of just accepting whatever she’s told.”
So he liked me then? Oh, why did I even care? But I did. There I was peeking at him through my eyelashes while I tried to figure out the best response to make him laugh again.
“I like a man who has all the facts,” I settled on.
That got me a grin. I’d take it. “Maybe not all of them,” Aaron said. “But I do like to learn as much as I can about our people and our history. The way I see it, the only way you can avoid future mistakes is if you understand your past.”
A sound theory. “That gets harder when you don’t even remember your past,” I muttered.
“I have to think those memories will start to come back now that you’re back in the fold, so to speak. Your mother wouldn’t have wanted you to be cut off from your powers permanently. She must have expected that we’d help you recover them.”
He tossed the pancakes onto the waiting plates, two each, and drizzled them with maple syrup. My hands snatched up the first plate when he offered it to me, but there was one question I had to ask before I stuffed anything in my mouth.
“I still don’t understand—how did my mother let you know to find me? I get that it had something to do with the locket, but other than that...”
Aaron led me out of the kitchen into a dining room that was way too big for the two of us. Fourteen chairs stood around a massive rosewood table. Aaron set his plate down at the foot of the table, but he turned to me instead of sitting. I put down my plate too and leaned my elbow on the top of the chair beside me, waiting for his answer.
“When we’re named alpha, there’s a full ceremony involved.” Aaron held out his left hand, palm up, revealing a scar like a sunburst of lines in the middle of his palm. “This mark ties us to our kin-group, and to the dragons. The moment you opened that locket, whatever magic your mother worked on it activated. I felt it right there, in the middle of my hand, with a sense of direction. But I’d guess any shifter who was closer enough would have been able to feel it. From what I understand, that’s how Marco sent his lieutenant ahead to track you down.”
This time, I let my impulses take over. I took Aaron’s hand in both of mine. “May I?” I said, abruptly breathless. He nodded, his clear blue eyes fixed on my face. I felt it then, with the thump of my pulse.
He might not expect anything from me, but he wanted things. The same kinds of things I found myself wanting when we stood this close together.
I dragged my gaze away from his to his palm. My thumb skimmed across it to trace the lines of his scar. He held still, but the muscles in his arm flexed. The breath he took sounded slightly ragged. I wondered how he’d react if I kissed that spot. Just the thought sent a pulse of heat between my legs.
I swallowed hard and yanked my mind back to our conversation. There was something he’d said...
“You said this mark ties you specifically to the dragons,” I said. “Why? I mean, shouldn’t we have our own alpha or something? Where are the other dragon shifters?” My heart leapt with a sudden hope. Did I have other family—grandparents or cousins or who knew what—that Mom and I had left behind?
Aaron turned his palm over, engulfing my slender hand in his larger one. He traced his thumb over the delicate skin on the back, sending a pleasant shiver up my arm.
“Dragons have always been the rarest of the shifters, as well as the most powerful,” he said, even more quietly than before. Almost reverent. “To the best of our knowledge right now, you might be the last one.”
“The last?” I repeated. The words struck a chord in me, but it was hard to think clearly with his careful thumb sliding back and forth over my skin.
Aaron nodded. “Which is why it was so important to your mother that she protect you. As long as shifters have walked this earth, the dragons among us have played a special role, one no one else can fill.”
“Great. No pressure there.” My laugh came out shaky. “So what exactly does that mean?”
The corner of his lips curled up. “The dragon shifters are the core of all shifter-kind. They unite the kin-groups with one common tie, by taking all four alphas as their mates.”
CHAPTER 8
Ren
AARON’S last comment was not the kind of revelation anyone should drop on a girl before she’s even had breakfast. I stared at him, my fingers closing around his to stop the caress of his thumb—but not letting go. Because even as the shock rippled through me, some part of me leapt to accept the idea.
Yes. They were mine, all of them.
I shook that thought away. “Hold on. Just so I’m clear, you’re saying that if I’m the last dragon shifter there is, my ‘role’ is to hook up with the four of you alphas?”
The corner of Aaron’s lips crooked up. “Not just ‘hook up with.’ The mate-bonds shifters form are lifelong. You’d be partnered with all of us, ‘til death do us part.”
“That seems kind of... greedy, grabbing the four most important”—and hottest, I added silently—“guys around.”
“Like I said, it’s considered right because it unites the four kin-groups. I’ve looked back through the old records, as far back as shifters have kept them, and from what I’ve seen, our community has always worked that way. It’s so natural it’s woven into our beings.”
He paused, studying my expression. His voice dropped to a pitch that sent eager shivers over my skin. “You’ve felt it, haven’t you? That pull toward each of us—the same way we all feel toward you.”
My breath caught. I couldn’t look away from his brilliant blue eyes. I wet my lips, and his gaze dropped to them. Suddenly they felt as hot as if he’d already kissed them.
How could I lie to him when he was looking at me like that?
“I have felt it,” I said. My voice came out in a murmur.
“Then you understand how innate it is. How meant-to-be.”
He raised my hand to press a kiss to my knuckles. The heat of that touch flared down my arm and right through the core of me. I might have ya
nked him into a different sort of kiss if someone hadn’t cleared his throat rather rudely at that exact moment.
I flinched back from Aaron, an embarrassed flush prickling over me. West was standing in the kitchen doorway, his arms crossed in his usual standoffish pose. His dark green eyes glowered at us.
“That might be how it’s worked before, but that doesn’t mean it’s supposed to stay that way forever,” he said in his low, throaty voice.
Aaron rested his hand reassuringly on the small of my back. My embarrassment didn’t stop me from wanting to lean into him.
But the most infuriating thing was that neither that embarrassment nor West’s jerk-ish demeanor stopped the pull drawing me toward the wolf shifter too. Even as I glared back at him, some part of me longed to see that handsome face soften with affection. A few strands of his silvery auburn hair had drifted across his angular cheekbones, and my hand itched to tuck it behind his ear. To linger on his cheek afterward.
I curled my fingers into my palm. Meant to be or not, West clearly wasn’t mooning over me.
“We’ve got more reason to believe the arrangement should stay the same than that it should change,” Aaron said. “That pattern of stability has held the kin-groups in balance for hundreds if not thousands of years.”
“How do we know it’s the arrangement that’s kept us in balance?” West said. “Maybe we’d have been just fine without it too.”
Aaron’s mouth tightened. “That’s a careless perspective to take. Throwing aside all that history could ruin us. Look at how things have gone even in sixteen years without the dragons present.”
West shrugged. “Because we’ve been waiting and waffling, not knowing what to do, not letting ourselves make any decisions. Maybe it’s time. Maybe all it’d take is for us to step up and pick a different path.”
I didn’t feel enough connection to these politics to try to argue on either side. And anyway, my mind had kept spinning with Aaron’s revelation, which was bringing up all sorts of other questions.
“Wait,” I said. “If this is how it always worked, with the dragon shifters and the alphas... My mother must have had four mates, right? One of them would be my father. Is he still—do you know who he is?”
I tried to keep my hopes in check, but excitement bubbled up inside me. Mom had never been willing to say much on the subject of my father, but I’d always wondered. Especially in the seven years since she’d left.
Then I noticed how West’s expression had tensed. Aaron looped his hand right around my waist. “Every dragon shifter has four fathers,” he said. “That’s part of the unique structure of our rulership. A dragon can only be formed from the best qualities of all four kin-alphas: the loyalty of the wolves, the strength of the bears, the cunning of the wildcats, and the grace of the birds of prey. When all is at harmony between a dragon and her mates, a new dragon may be conceived.”
I blinked. “Four dads.” But the solemn note in his voice hadn’t escaped me either. “What happened to them?”
He swallowed audibly. “The alphas before us, the ones who were your mother’s mates, they passed away—passing on the responsibility to us... right before she left.”
I turned to look him in the face. “Sixteen years ago? You must have been awfully young.”
He waved aside my concern with the hand not resting on my waist. “Marco was ten, West and me eleven, and Nate twelve. Old enough that our mentors knew we’d grow into the roles. Every alpha has trusted advisors—the ones already in place worked alongside us almost like regents until we were of age to hold our own.”
So they grew up like that, one generation after the next, dragons and alphas in unison. “You don’t pass being alpha on to your kids,” I said slowly, piecing what he’d said together. “I’m assuming? Do the alphas only mate with a dragon shifter—and only one? All of your kids would be dragon shifters, then?”
“And only one quarter ours,” West put in from behind me.
Aaron frowned at him. “It isn’t that less of us goes into helping make a dragon than any other child. It’s that a dragon child is so much more than any other.” He turned his attention back to me. “You’re right, we don’t pass on rule from parent to child, at least not that way. The alphas before us were your fathers. They picked us from the kin-group because they believed we’d be strong leaders—and the best mates for their daughter.”
I didn’t know how I felt about that. A few minutes ago, I hadn’t known anything about my dad—or dads. I wasn’t ready for them to suddenly be picking out my future partners-for-life.
“So the daughters never have any say in it?”
The corner of Aaron’s lips twitched, I thought with amusement. “Oh, you can have a say. If a dragon feels one or more of her offered mates is unsuitable, she can reject him and wait for the kin-group to propose another. Or... Another shifter can fight to take the role of alpha from the one chosen. If the chosen alpha isn’t strong enough to fend off the attack, then they weren’t worthy of the honor anyway.”
“Is that what happened to the alphas before you?” I said, and then realized that didn’t make sense. If the previous alphas had been challenged and lost, then presumably the disciples they’d chosen would’ve been chucked aside as well. What the hell could have happened to all four of the last guys, all at once?
“No,” Aaron said. His expression shuttered. “That was a more complicated situation. I think it’d be better if we waited to discuss that once more of your memories have returned.”
He obviously took me for a much more patient person than I was. I opened my mouth to push for answers, but West raised his voice at the same moment.
“None of that matters anyway. Those decisions belonged to the old alphas—the ones before us and the ones before them. We’re in charge now. We can make up our own minds about how we do things. And that includes whether we do you.”
The edge in his voice made me grit my teeth. Some mate he was turning out to be. I swiveled around, my eyes narrowing. “Is that how you show the wolf ‘loyalty’ you’re supposed to be known for?”
My jab hit the mark. I could tell from the way his shoulders stiffened. But his voice was firm when he bit out his reply.
“One more on the long list of things you need to learn, Sparks: Loyalty given blindly is worthless. I’m loyal first and always to my kin. To you? I haven’t seen any reason to be so far.”
“Well, you’re not exactly inspiring a whole lot of confidence so far either,” I snapped back.
“All right.” Aaron held up his hands in a gesture for peace. “Let’s table this discussion, all right? This is a strange situation for all of us. We’ve got a lot more getting to know each other to do before anyone decides anything.”
He squeezed my shoulder. “Which is why I’ve been thinking we should see what we can do about activating your powers. Maybe once you have more of your dragon senses at your disposal, you’ll find it easier to follow the path your mother seems to have left for you.”
I jerked my gaze away from West’s, willing my shoulders to come down from around my ears. “Okay. Something to actually do sounds good to me.”
“Good. We’ll eat, and then we’ll see what we can unearth in there.”
His smile settled my nerves a little. But as I pulled out my chair to sit down, the pancake smell trickling into my nose again, something else he’d said earlier twisted around my gut.
You might be the last one.
The last of the dragon shifters. That could only be true if Mom was no longer around. I’d known there might be a permanent reason she couldn’t come back, but I’d never let myself follow that line of thought very far. The alphas had clearly thought it, though.
Maybe she hadn’t come back because she was dead. Because something, wherever she’d gone, had killed her.
CHAPTER 9
Aaron
THE MUSCLES in Serenity’s back flexed under my pressing fingers. I eased my hands in a slow line between her shoulder blades, fig
hting to focus only on the task at hand and not how much I wanted to touch every other part of her as well. She felt like a live wire beneath her silk shirt. So much power bottled in that slim frame. It was breathtaking.
“Picture the wings waiting there, folded tight, longing to unfurl,” I said, keeping my voice quiet and even. I thought of the sensations my own body went through, as the only alpha who knew what it was like to transform into a winged creature. “Immerse yourself in that sensation. Send them the strength they need to break through.”
My dragon shifter grimaced where she was kneeling on the back lawn. Her pale fingers had dug into the long grass. The rising summer sun was baking the yard, creating a warm green smell that mingled with the tartly sweet scent of her body.
“I’m trying,” she said. “I’m trying everything you’re saying. It just doesn’t want to come.” She let out a sound of frustration.
I couldn’t imagine what it was like, having so much power coursing through your veins and not being able to release it. Maybe I was pushing her too hard. The thought made my chest constrict. At least West hadn’t followed us outside. His constant criticism couldn’t be helping things.
“Hey,” I said. I sat down on the grass beside Serenity and slid my fingers up her jaw to turn her face toward me. She looked back at me, frustration shimmering in her amber eyes. Frustration and a heat that deepened when I let my thumb graze her cheek.
God, how could I not answer that longing? The same heat coursed through me. “It’ll be okay,” I told her. “You’ve got a lot of years of lost practice to make up for. It’ll come.”
Then I leaned in and kissed her.
I let my lips brush hers lightly at first. She’d only just found out the full truth about our connection. She hadn’t seemed unwilling, but she hadn’t leapt for joy either. It might be too soon.