Dragon Born 1: The Shifter's Hoard

by Dante King

  Then I bit the bear shifter.

  Right in the fucking face.

  The bear’s nose gave with a horrifying snapping sound, cleaved right down the middle like a broken wishbone. The shifter reared back in surprise and pain, blood streaming down its cheeks as a wound opened in its forehead.

  I spit out a chunk of bear, watching it sail into the night. “Here, let me cauterize that for you,” I growled, charging up a flame.

  At the last moment, the bear flinched and held up a paw. “Wait! Don’t—”

  Too fucking late, pal.

  The flame attack I’d been too worried about my girls to unleash so close to them arced upward into the night, searing the big man’s forehead. The bear howled in utter agony as burning fur cascaded down my face, tongues of flame lapping across the shifter’s upper body. He cooked, and I cooked him.

  Unlike his fellows, the dragon’s flame wasn’t enough to kill him outright. This shifter felt tougher than the rest, more durable—so I didn’t feel bad about roasting his wounded face until he could no longer fight back.

  Grinning with victory, I flipped the shifter onto his back and hung him halfway out of the window. Smoke poured from his burned upper body, sending a plume into the night like a barbeque.

  “You want me to drop you?” I roared. “Huh?”

  Something had broken inside of the shifter. Already his bear form began to fade, reverting him back to a human body.

  “N-no,” he begged, his voice sounding more like a man’s. “No, please!”

  He was so submissive and beaten that something twisted inside me. I wanted to finish him off, then climb back into the conference room and fuck Soojin and Carli both until I’d had my fill. The bloodlust and carnage sickened my human side, but I couldn’t deny that the bestial part of my nature got off on all this.

  “Then talk,” I said, holding onto his legs with my claws. “The thunderbird. Tallulah Binesi.”

  A humorless laugh left the shifter’s throat. “That bitch got a nasty surprise when she left the Council,” he explained, moaning in pain. “Her portal didn’t lead to the same place as everyone else’s…”

  “Captured?” That was Soojin, who’d crowded into the side of the window following my victory. Both her and Carli stood near me, taut as bowstrings with my triumph. I could smell their arousal, their wetness at watching me destroy an opponent. “That’s a dirty trick, rerouting a teleportation portal like that.”

  “Not too many people in the supernatural realm could pull that off,” Carli added. From the lines on her forehead, she was already composing a mental list of who it could be.

  “Y-yeah, something like that!” Now that he’d been beaten and was hanging out of a window, the bear shifter was almost disgustingly eager to please. “Me and my boys are supposed to provide security for the auction.”

  “Auction?” There was a lot about that statement that didn’t make sense, but I chose to focus on that for now. “What kind of auction?”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” The bear shifter laughed, which turned into choking as blood filled his throat. “They captured the Binesi bitch. They’re going to auction her off to the highest bidder one week from now. Some kind of supernatural soiree, but not like the Council—for the real people in power. The heavy hitters.”

  “Selling a shifter,” Carli hissed, utter disgust in her tone. “That’s an abomination!”

  “A profitable abomination,” Soojin added, seeing my blank look. “If she’s auctioned off as a slave, Tallulah Binesi could be forced to serve one of the shifter clans—or the mages. Or she could be used for breeding experiments. I’ve heard some of the… less moral mages have some ideas about cross-breeding supernatural creatures to increase their powers…”

  I tried to tuck that out of my mind, knowing of my own no-doubt mixed heritage.

  “That’s fucking horrible,” I spat.

  The shifter chuckled ruefully. “The rumor is, they’re going to rip the bitch apart and sell her for parts,” he wheezed, fully human now. “She’s not just an ordinary shifter—she’s legendary. Whatever lets her commune with the thunderbird would be worth a lot of money if someone could rip it out of her…”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “That’s worse than monstrous,” I said, my grip on him tightening. “That’s fucking inhuman! Who are these people, asshole? Who’d dare treat someone like a piece of meat!?”

  “I don’t know,” the shifter confessed, shaking his head piteously. “All that’s above my pay grade. I don’t even know about the parts thing for sure—I just heard it somewhere.”

  I shook him a bit, to remind him of his position and snap him out of his daze. “Tell me where this auction is going to be.”

  The shifter weakly lifted his head. “I don’t know!” He pointed behind me. “We were supposed to get our marching orders here. That’s why we were up here in the first place, to find out where we needed to go to do guard duty.”

  “Fine,” I snarled. “Then tell me who you work for. They were going to contact you, right? Did they have a phone number? An email?”

  Again the shifter shook his head. “They’re supposed to call us,” he said, his voice weakening. “From the conference deck in this room…”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the ruined table, broken to splinters. The deck was somewhere in there, ripped apart in the fight. Fat chance of that happening now, I thought.

  “So what you’re telling me is, you’ve reached the end of your usefulness,” I said, letting one hand free. The shifter tumbled over the side, only my claw around his ankle keeping him from plummeting seventeen stories.

  “No! No please—you can’t do this!”

  “I can’t?” I asked, beginning to enjoy this.

  The bear shifter looked up at me, a smug look twisting on his face. “You kill me, and you’ll get my debts,” he growled, regaining some of his former composure. “I can handle them, but you? You’re a brand new clan, just you and those women! You can’t risk it—”

  “You’re right,” I said, cutting him off. “I can’t.”

  The shifter relaxed.

  “Is what I’d be saying if you only came against me,” I growled, my claws digging into the flesh of his ankle. “But you threatened my girls. And no one, I don’t give a shit who they are, gets to try and hurt my women and live!”

  “Fuck!” the bear shifter spat, his expression collapsing. “No, no please don’t! I’ve told you everything I know!”

  I let go and hit him full in the chest with a burst of telekinesis that rocketed his body out into the open air. Before he started to plummet, I summoned a bunch of small metal shards and used telekinesis to pepper his body with them. Blood misted the air as the shifter tumbled into the darkness, still screaming.

  I stood at the window for a long time, watching him fall. By the time he made it to the roof of the parking deck, he was little more than a speck on the horizon. An ant. A smear.

  “Carli,” I said.

  The Raiju shifter gave a start. “Yes?” she asked, staring up at me in awe.

  “If we bring what’s left of that conference deck back to your hideout,” I said, gesturing at the destroyed table, “do you think you could track down who was going to make that call?”

  I could see her thinking about it.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Are you thinking of going after Tallulah?”

  I was more than thinking about it. I was going to save the legendary thunderbird shifter, before she could be auctioned off as a slave or something even worse.

  And once my team and I brought her out of that auction, and she saw what we were offering, I had no doubt that she’d become the newest member of my clan.

  Chapter 23

  When we last saw the lobby of the Celesta Hotel and Casino, it had been a mad crush of mages and shifters trying to get home. Now, on coming back downstairs, it was a fucking crime scene.

  My eradication of the bear shifters hadn’t gone unnot
iced. Far from it, in fact—what crowd remained in the Celesta had gathered in the parking lot to watch as supernatural police forces converged on the parking garage where the bear shifter boss and his one flunky had landed after being tossed out of a window. They hadn’t found the third yet, laying in a pool of blood back up in the conference room, but it was only a matter of time at this point.

  Then I remembered that shifter bodies disappeared shortly after their death, so maybe they wouldn’t find him. But whoever they were working for would surely find out that someone had taken them out.

  “Shit,” Carli muttered as we stepped out into the night. The lines had dissolved—anyone who’d been alright with waiting had hightailed it once shifters started falling out of the sky. “There’s definitely going to be an investigation surrounding this. Once they find that other shifter upstairs, they’ll start looking for any Council attendees who were upstairs…”

  “What they should be doing,” I said, “is hunting down Tallulah Binesi before she gets sold into slavery. Or worse. I’m guessing we’re going to have to find her ourselves.”

  Both women looked somewhat hesitant. It was clear that the show of power I’d pulled off upstairs thrilled and aroused them—but it also worried them.

  “Are you alright?” Soojin asked, putting a hand on my shoulder. She’d managed to pull her dress back together so well, you almost wouldn’t realize she’d been getting railed on a table just a few minutes ago. “This isn’t going to be like what happened with the Crescent Clan, Derek. I highly doubt anyone is going to formally apologize to us for what you did tonight.”

  I shrugged. “Then fuck ‘em,” I said. “What I did was in self-defense. Those assholes threatened you and Carli—and they sure as shit didn’t try to deescalate the situation once the claws came out.”

  Soojin nodded. “Then perhaps we should tell the authorities,” she said, suggesting a safer course of action. “Tomas Karkosa might still be in the building. If we could explain this to him, get ahead of any rumors that spread around the deaths of these shifters, we might head off any controversy at the pass.”

  I thought that over. “Normally, I would,” I told her, meaning it. “And maybe I still will, but the auction is in a week. We have a bit of time. Let’s figure out whether we can trust the authorities before we go telling them what we heard.”

  “Tallulah Binesi is gonna be sold to the highest bidder,” Carli said, putting a fist in her palm. “You’re damn right, Derek. Fuck ‘em. Let’s go be heroes.”

  I chuckled. “It’s not just about heroics,” I told my harem. Hell, they really were my harem now, weren’t they? These two women were officially part of my clan. “I have every intention of adding that legendary thunderbird to our ranks once we save her. Do either of you have a problem with that?”

  Both Soojin and Carli looked stunned.

  “Tallulah Binesi is very powerful,” Soojin murmured.

  “And hot,” Carli said, looking at me like she was a Taylor Swift fangirl and I’d just suggested adding Nashville’s biggest star to the team. “She’s my fucking idol, Derek. The legendary shifter. If you could get a goddess like that on the team, well… let’s just say I wouldn’t be shy about sharing her with you!”

  All three of us laughed at that.

  “It’s settled, then. We’ll do a bit of digging and figure out if we should tell Tomas Karkosa or anyone else about what we know. Until then, the plan is to rescue Tallulah ourselves,” I said, making my way quickly through the parking lot. I didn’t wait for my girls to catch up—I knew they could handle it.

  These were powerful, independent women. And I just loved owning them, body and soul.

  As we made our way to the parking deck, bypassing the valet station entirely, I let my mind wander. Plenty of topics could have occupied it: the auction, the fight with the bear shifters, or how I was going to explain all of this to my mom. Or even where the hell Mom was right now and what she was doing.

  Instead, I found myself thinking about babies.

  How many times had I finished inside of Carli now without a condom? The Raiju shifter hadn’t been shy about letting me know she wasn’t on birth control—and even less shy about her desire to have my babies. To get bred, in the toe-curlingly hot way she put it.

  I wasn’t sure if Soojin really could detect a shifter’s ovulation, but Carli definitely felt hotter and wetter than usual while I’d railed her over the city skyline. If that was really her most fertile time, did it mean that even now, I’d pumped a future little Derek into Carli’s pussy? Or had I done that back in the limo?

  It made my head swim. At the same time, I’d slowly begun to realize that as Alpha of my own clan, the normal pressures of fatherhood really wouldn’t apply. Knocking up women didn’t have the same cost when you had a dozen of them taking care of each other, after all.

  I glanced at Carli’s taut little tummy as we stepped into the parking deck, trying to imagine what was going on in there.

  I’d better make this clan bigger in a hurry, I thought. Starting with that legendary shifter.

  Our limo driver had apparently had a good Samaritan’s streak. Rather than parking near the exit like everyone else had tried to do, he’d been more than happy to put our vehicle closer to the top of the deck and get away from the crowd. Hopefully, he wasn’t so far up that we’d run into the investigation happening on the parking deck’s roof.

  That could lead to some uncomfortable questions I wasn’t yet ready to answer.

  We’d just made it to the stairs when I noticed someone was following us.

  “Don’t move,” I said, stepping to one side of the stairwell door as it swung shut. A very confused Soojin and Carli stared at me, then twin naughty looks spread across their faces.

  They think I want to fool around in here, I realized.

  Maybe I would have, under normal circumstances. But these weren’t normal circumstances.

  “Why Derek,” Soojin purred, running her fingers through her long, dark hair. “You just had both of us at the same time. Are you hard again already, young man? I suppose the wrath of the Dragon remains unquenched?”

  I shook my head, then put a finger to my lips. “Wait,” I whispered, glancing at the door.

  Both women understood. They slid to the side, crouched in positions of readiness.

  For a few moments, I felt silly, like I’d been making the whole thing up. Then we heard the scraping. Footsteps, following a respectable distance behind the three of us.

  Someone had tracked us out of the Celesta.

  A friend of the shifters, perhaps?

  Or maybe someone who’d seen us kick the shifter’s asses and wanted to turn us in to the authorities.

  Either way, we needed to have a long talk with them.

  The door to the stairwell creaked open. Hesitant footfalls made their way up the first few steps, bypassing us in our hiding spaces entirely. Each step kicked up a small cloud of dust, which was what my eyes focused on because I couldn’t believe the rest of it.

  Our stalker was invisible. Not invisible in the sense of not having a reflection, but completely invisible.

  Soojin’s eyebrows shot all the way to her hairline. Carli’s jaw dropped open, a little whine of disbelief escaping her lips. That noise was apparently enough to make our stalker turn—I felt them give a start on the stairs, rather than saw them.

  I sprang forward, reaching out with my arms outstretched. I had no way of knowing if this interloper was a shifter or mage, though with their invisibility powers I guessed mage. They could have been big or small, or something other than human entirely—I did my best to wrap my arms around them, wrestle them to the ground before they could hurt me or my women.

  As it turned out, the body I grabbed felt suspiciously female.

  “Get off me!” a voice whined as we toppled, landing at the bottom of the few steps the stalker had walked up.

  Something shimmered beneath me, and I found myself staring into the face of a blue-
robed mage, a shock of auburn hair bobbing in front of her flustered face.

  Wow, what a knockout, I thought, before the rest of my brain could catch up.

  She had a heart-shaped face with high cheekbones, with the dainty chin of a fashion model or actress. Shimmering waves of shoulder-length hair hung around her like a messy halo. Her pouty lips were pursed in a snarl as she tried to wrestle me off her, apparently unaware of the dragon’s strength flowing through my veins.

  My appreciation of her feminine form didn’t end at her face. She had one hell of a body, too. Lithe and coltish, with high, firm breasts in a mage’s bustier that showed off a hint of cleavage. She looked young, even younger than Carli. The Raiju shifter was in her early twenties, with Soojin pushing the middle part of her forties if I had to guess. This girl couldn’t have been more than nineteen, probably eighteen—I doubted she could even drink at the Celesta.

  “Who are you,” I demanded with a grin, “and what are you doing following my clan?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Following? I’m helping your clan, idiot!”

  I glanced up at Soojin and Carli, chuckling. “Funny way of helping. Skulking about like a rodent, hiding behind some invisibility spell…”

  “You’re crushing me,” the girl panted, pretending to be far more hurt than she was. I’d given her more than enough space—but now, I decided to get closer.

  “I’m not,” I told her, looking into her eyes. “But I very easily could. You look like you’re in the mood to get crushed, little girl.”

  “Gross,” the girl snarled, rolling to the side. “I hope you know I’m regretting sticking my neck out for you already, you asshole!”

  “I haven’t seen you stick anything out yet,” I said teasingly, but just then Soojin decided to become the voice of reason. She crouched down next to the struggling young woman, extending one nail until it became long and razor sharp.

  “You need to start talking to my Alpha,” Soojin said flatly. “Or I’ll make what he’s doing to you look like a walk in the park.”

  “Ugh… fine!”