by Abigail Owen
She wanted desperately to ask about the South American colonies, since that’s where they were, but managed to swallow the question down.
“Enforcers keep the laws, hunt down those who break them, and act as judge, jury, and often sentencers.”
Sentencers? As in executioners?
“Think Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. Sort of.”
She blinked at yet another pop culture reference. Though dated, it still seemed…odd…coming from Drake. Made him more…human. More real, even than Rune who was only about the dragon world. Except now she had to picture Drake doing normal things, like watching TV and lounging in pajamas.
She almost snorted at that mental image. The man was way too hard for pajamas. So far, he’d slept in underwear or his utility pants or other clothing Rune had provided him, probably for modesty since she was in here constantly. But she’d bet he was normally a buff sleeper. Clothes would annoy him.
She shook off the mental image. “So, you…kill people?” she asked.
“If I have to.”
Like that was no big deal. A sliver of apprehension crept up her spine like a spider. However, at the same time, her traitorous body responded with a growing warmth at her core. Like that edge of menace—a man who would do anything, though she suspected he had his own moral code—was a damn turn-on.
She’d never been into pain or anything like that. Her few boyfriends had been vanilla when it came to sex, and that had seemed to work fine for her. She usually managed to get to the end with satisfactory results, at least.
This was something different, though.
Cami tried not to glance down and see if she was glowing brighter. She lifted her gaze to find Drake watching her with a look that snatched the breath from her throat. Like he’d seen her response, knew her dirty little thoughts, and something in him…liked that response.
The air around them thickened, swirling with a tension that sensitized her skin and coiled her muscles. Only she didn’t want to look away. She wanted to do something really stupid.
Like strip off all her clothes and rub her body against his like a cat in heat.
Like taste him again.
Like wrap her arms around his waist and lay her head against his chest and just listen to his strong, steady heartbeat.
Stupid, stupid things that had no place being in her head after a short period of time and very little conversation, most of which was entirely on her side.
She didn’t know this man. Not really. This was just lust, and perhaps a fascination with a bad boy. How cliché could she get?
Maybe your mate, a small voice whispered.
She gave it the mental brush-off. Rune said be sure. She was so far from sure, it was ridiculous to even contemplate. Maybe this had more to do with how she’d always been drawn to lost causes. She’d cried once when her father had to shoot a gorgeous mountain lion because the animal had a severely fractured leg after one of their donkeys had kicked it.
Granted, the animal, an alpha predator, had been trying to make Cami its next meal and the donkey had got in its way. But still…
That’s what Drake reminded her of. An alpha predator who was broken and lashing out in pain. A creature she shouldn’t go near for fear that it would strike and kill her.
Only, just like she had wanted to do with that cougar, she had to resist the urge to sit beside him, lay his head in her lap, and stroke him to stillness, to peace.
“So.” He crossed his arms, staring out across the room. “Now you know.”
Cami watched him ignore her as if she wasn’t standing right there. “I’m sorry,” she finally murmured.
He jerked his gaze to hers, his typical frown descending. “What for?”
“That this…whatever this is…” She waved at his body. “Has happened to you. Taken you away from your team.”
“I don’t need your pity,” he growled.
Cami snorted. “Pitying you would be like willing an ice cube not to melt in summer sun. A waste of time and energy. This isn’t pity.” More like sympathy, not that he’d like that any better.
The blaring of an alarm pierced the air, shattering the relatively easy rapport they’d fallen into.
“What’s going on?” Cami shouted, her heart pounding.
Drake didn’t answer for a minute, his gaze in the distance. Was he listening for instructions?
“Someone is coming in injured,” he said. “Goret.”
Cami gasped. Immediately she thought of the middle-aged couple here. The only mated pair in the mountain. “Yelena,” she whispered.
The white dragoness had been kind to her. Had explained a lot of things to her and shared her own experiences as a mate.
Cami took off toward the hangar where they’d just come from. She made it just inside the door before a thick arm banded around her waist, pulling her to a stop. “Hold on,” he said into her ear, his chest hot and hard at her back. “He might have trouble landing and you don’t want to be in the way.”
“I don’t see him.” The small sliver of blue sky and white clouds beyond the hooded entrance to the cave was free of any dragons that she could see.
“He’s there.”
“What happened?” she asked.
Could Drake hear that? Was it being relayed?
“A jaguar shifter attacked him when he was still in human form. He was approaching a new mate.”
Heavens above.
She and Drake must’ve been closest to the hangar, because suddenly everyone else arrived in a jumble from various other entrances.
A woman with white-blond hair braided intricately around the crown of her head burst into the room and started to shimmer and waver with her shift. Yelena was going to her mate.
“Don’t, Yelena,” a strained voice hit them all. “You won’t make it in time.” Goret.
All the mates winced as he spoke at full volume, telepathically reaching everyone in the room. Was he too weak to send the message just to his mate?
“Goret,” Yelena whimpered her mate’s name. But she stopped her shift.
“I’ll be there in a second.” Goret seemed hardly able to think the words.
“He won’t make it in time,” Drake muttered, low enough that Cami doubted the others would hear.
She still couldn’t see the dragon.
Then a movement caught her eye. One of what she thought was the clouds moving faster than the others, coming straight at the cave. A cloud that seemed to be raining blood.
“I need you to know something.” Yelena’s voice seemed to echo through the cave grown dead silent as they all stood there helplessly watching. “I need you to know that I’ve loved every day of our lives together.”
Cami watched Yelena with wide eyes, glancing back and forth to Goret. He was so close. Why was she saying this?
“Becoming a dragon shifter made me whole,” Yelena continued. “Becoming your mate made us both—”
“Perfect. We’re perfect together.”
Yelena shut her eyes, holding in her emotions, and Cami started to shake. Were they saying goodbye? That’s what it sounded like.
“Goret is dying,” Drake whispered in her ear. “And Yelena, as his bonded mate, will die with him.”
Pain bombarded Cami’s heart as his words sank through the shock.
Faltering, like a bat flying with a broken wing, Goret aimed for the entrance to the cave. Cami held her breath as he dropped below the floor only to pop back up at the last second. The cream-colored dragon didn’t quite make it. He smashed into the edge with a rumble that shook the ground under her feet, then skidded on his stomach, one wing at a terrible angle, until he came to a halt. He left a smeared trail of blood behind him.
The second he came to a stop, Goret started to shift and Yelena took off at a dead sprint. But it was obvious that death had its fangs sunk
deeply into the white dragon shifter, draining his life away, because his mate grew slower with each agonizing step she took.
“Shit. She won’t make it.” Drake let go of Cami and sprinted after her when no one else in the room did a damn thing, all of them frozen in shock.
He scooped Yelena up and ran with her. At the same time, Goret finished his shift, but lay on the cold, hard rock floor on his belly, one arm outstretched as if reaching for his mate, his eyes trained on her face, even as his expression slackened.
Drake made it to Goret, but as he lay Yelena down, her body went limp. In the same instant, a rattling breath escaped Goret.
Cami turned away, wrapping one arm around her middle, unable to keep watching. They hadn’t made it to each other in time to say goodbye. To hold each other as they both passed through the veil and out of this life.
The quiet sound of sobs rose in the room. The other mates.
For her part, Cami bit back the sobs that threatened to close her throat.
Someone brushed past her, and she lifted her gaze to see Drake through a hazy cloud of tears she refused to let fall.
Without a backward glance, he walked away. Only, for some inexplicable reason, perhaps the rigid set of his shoulders, she knew that he was hurting just as much as all of them. Only he’d do it the way he did everything.
Alone.
Cami glanced over her shoulder at the pair still on the floor, now with others around them. A new determination filled her. She’d come in here to see how difficult it would be to climb down the mountain on her own, take herself back to her family, albeit the slow route home. Except it wasn’t just one mountain and winter was coming.
That option was not viable.
The news she’d gotten in that last call with her parents already had her worried. But witnessing Yelena and Goret’s deaths before they could get to each other only solidified her own thinking. She might be a dragon shifter. But she belonged with her family.
No matter what. She needed to go home. To be there to help them.
Maybe to say a proper goodbye.
Chapter Eight
“You’ve got a problem,” a feminine voice called out.
Rune looked up as Skylar stalked into the security room following her words inside. How she knew to find him here, he had no idea. This was supposed to be Hakan’s shift, but Rune didn’t sleep much these days. He’d sent the red shifter away so he could sit in the dark and stare at the blue glow of the security monitors in front of him and think.
When he’d left the team, he’d deliberately sought out Huojin, Dol, and Chay, the three brothers from the Red Clan who’d gone rogue a few hundred years before. Three men whose reason for going rogue had more to do with the way they’d tried to stand up to Pytheios’s rule and ended up, instead, exiled with targets on their backs. Men he felt might by sympathetic to a cause he left his own team of brothers—not by blood but by life—for.
Tyrek had found him on his own. The old man had pointed Rune in the direction of most of the others—Jiǎ, Hakan, Egan, Goret, and Yelena. Each brought their unique take on why they’d gone rogue, unique skills, and unique challenges. But other than Tyrek, none had been a surprise.
Skylar showing up over a year ago, however, had blown apart Rune’s view of his world and how things had come to be over the last half a millennium.
Her own skills—including a certain stealth—had been an added revelation. How she’d got down the hall without him hearing was starting to piss him the hell off. The woman walked like a damn black dragon shifter, even if she wasn’t one. Silent. Worse maybe, because he still didn’t know if he could trust her.
Not that he had a choice. What and who she was meant he got a chance to give the clans, kings, Alliance, and especially Pytheios, a big fuck you, simply by keeping her here, secret and safe.
“What problem?” he asked.
She pulled out one of the other dilapidated office chairs they’d scrounged from some second or third or fourth hand shop—all Rune’s carefully curated money went to more important things than furnishing this place, especially since he’d always known they’d have to abandon it at some point—and plopped down in it with a gusty sigh. Skylar never bothered to soften news. He’d learned that much about her this year, though she kept to herself mostly. Rune waited for the hammer to drop.
“Cami is about to pull a runner,” she said.
“Shit.”
He should’ve seen this coming. That last call with her parents after breakfast this morning hadn’t gone well. Something about another delay in reconstruction and needing to sell most of their herd because the majority of their grazing lands had been burned all to hell. But the kicker had come at the end of the call, when they’d revealed that her cousin had fallen off a ladder and broken his leg.
He should’ve known when Cami had gone icily calm. Too calm given her attachment to her family.
Skylar nodded as if she’d followed his mental train of thought and agreed. “And I’m going to help her.”
That brought him up out of his chair. “The hell you say.”
Skylar didn’t even bat an eyelash, staring back at him with an insouciance that made him want to shake her.
“You can’t leave,” he growled.
Stealthy or not, whether or not Pytheios knew of her existence, if she poked her head out there, dragon shifters wouldn’t be the only ones coming for her.
Skylar rolled her eyes. “I know that.”
Rune settled back into his chair with a frown. “Then how—”
“It seems I’ve developed my mother’s ability for teleportation.” She winced. “Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I can send others, but not myself. My uncle has been working with me on it, only for short distances, since I can’t bring him back.”
Rune stilled. Tyrek should’ve told him. That could be a handy ability to use. Except that none of his men knew what Skylar was. Phoenix had been thought extinct for five hundred years when the last one perished with her mate. She smelled of smoke, though with a different undercurrent to it, but the men assumed she was another mate under their protection.
Only Tyrek and Rune knew the truth.
Which meant she couldn’t use her gift around anyone but them. Hell, she probably shouldn’t use her gift at all. Too risky.
Rune steepled his fingers under his chin, regarding the woman across from him with narrowed eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Cami’s going to leave no matter what. I understand that kind of loyalty.” Her white-blue eyes darkened to the color of aquamarine ice. “I know the need to protect family. My mother gave her life to protect me like that. To send me here.” She glanced around the room with undisguised disdain.
Rune said nothing, giving her a chance to work through emotions that, up till now, she had yet to show around him.
Skylar cleared her throat, locking those emotions down tight in a blink. “She needs to do this, but I think she should have some kind of protection. Don’t you?”
…
Drake passed outside a door that, according to Rune, belonged to Cami.
It rankled like hell that he’d even paid attention when that piece of info had been pointed out to him. After those ridiculous introductions to the men in the mess hall—men who resented the hell out of him and the feeling was fucking mutual—Drake had stayed away from the common areas, and Cami hadn’t come back to check on him.
Almost of their own accord, his feet slowed as he walked by. Which only stoked his irritation with himself. Why the hell do I even care?
He forced himself to pick up speed, pushing her from his mind to focus on his purpose. To see if he could fly.
He’d sprinted. Holding Yelena to get her to her mate, he hadn’t even thought of how his body shouldn’t be able to. The tingling was barely a thing in o
ne arm now. His legs should’ve given out, or something else. Bloody-fucking-miracle. Too bad it didn’t mean shit.
But if he could fly, he could be…useful.
Which was why he was skulking around this place in the dead of night. Fuck trying this out with an audience. Lumping more humiliation on this attempt was not going to happen. If he ended up a bloody pulp at the bottom of the mountains, they’d find him eventually. At least this would be over.
Moonlight streamed into the hangar, seeming to bring the cold of the snow outside in with it. Drake glared at the beams of white light casting the cavern in shades of grays and blacks. Sneaking this flight in would’ve been easier in total darkness. At least the generator’s constant grating noise would muffle any sounds he made.
Stop fucking around and shift already.
Forcing purpose into his strides, he crossed the room, not glancing at the spot where he’d laid Yelena’s body. Too late. She and her mate died just seconds from getting to each other. They’d followed each other to the grave. He prayed to the gods that they were together in the afterlife.
Drake positioned himself near the edge of the ledge that jutted out from under the cave ceiling, giving himself enough room for his larger form. For the first time, maybe ever, even including his first shift with his parents and older brothers all there to anchor his dragon to his humanity, Drake closed his eyes as he willed his body into the transition.
He wasn’t into relief or giddiness or any of those self-serving emotions, but the release of tension in his gut when he opened his eyes to find his perspective changed after a successful shift came damn close. Before weakness could sneak into his limbs like a thief in the night, he spread his wings wide and leaped from the ledge.
His arm held. A small tingling down the underside, starting in his armpit, but otherwise, full function.
Not useless. Not today at least.
The how was a question he’d need answered eventually. And he didn’t entirely trust the situation to continue. The gods had fucked with him too often to expect a true miracle.