That had gone out the window as soon as I'd heard that Lillian had attacked the human, but that was of little consequence.
I stared at Hudson. He was still pointing at the human paleontologist that had done nothing except help our flight. She had only attempted to serve us, to give us what we wanted, and the look on his face brought me to a boiling point that I had only known twice in my life.
My fist connected with his jaw and sent him spinning to the ground. Olivia cheered; Sadie gasped. The omega wolf tried to step between us, but I moved in first and snarled at her, "Interfere and I bring you down as well. You wolves need to back off. You come into my territory and demand things of me? You dare?"
"You enforced the Pact on us," Hudson said, wiping blood from his nose. He looked up at me and narrowed his eyes. "I guess I have to do the same with you."
I didn't realize his leg had crept between mine as he spoke. He hooked his foot behind my ankle and ripped me from my feet. I hit the ground, the back of my head smacking into a rather sharp piece of gravel.
And then the fight was on. I snarled, shifting as quickly as I could, but Hudson was faster. The wolf threw itself at me, still somewhat tangled in his clothes, and latched sharp teeth on one of my arms. It made it all the harder to concentrate on my shifting and I struggled, somewhere between dragon and human, trying to pry the werewolf from my flesh.
"Please, guys, this isn't the time or the place," Sadie begged, looking around for something on the ground.
I couldn't pay attention to her and defend myself. I managed the transformation and flung the wolf from me, Hudson landing heavily somewhere in the cavern. Though dragon eyes are impressive in the dark, we hold nothing on a wolf's night vision. The beast launched itself at me, catching my face with claws and teeth in a furious tornado of pain and blood.
Dragons do not yelp, but wolves do. I smashed him into the side of the stone with a roar, making note of the crimson streaming from his bites. I would have to be careful not to slip in it, but that was all that mattered. I reared, intent on crushing him, when Sadie ran into my vision as a wolf.
The she-wolf hunkered over her mate, ears flattened against her skull, her lips peeled back from her teeth. She licked the air, crouching, the picture of a begging animal. I kept my paw in the air, considering both of them as I bled down my chest. I could end them. We would leave them a ruin, dead for the scavengers. I would never be allowed within the local supernatural community again, should the rest of the pack discover what I had done. I assumed the Hummer had some sort of on-board recording device.
If I hexed it, it was likely to blow the entire computer in the vehicle. And if I were to let them go, it meant I would strand them on this mountain. Without a way home, they were like to starve. Wolves hunt well. They do not hunt as well as they would need to survive half a mile into the sky with few prey animals lying in wait.
My paw curled into a fist and I slowly sat it down upon the stone. Sadie never flinched, but she did slowly stand up a little straighter and cock her head at me. Her white socks were splashed with my blood and, I couldn't hold it back, the gore only worsened when I sneezed all over her.
She sighed up at me and shook herself off. Olivia walked into view, looking up at me. "I think you knocked him out. Isn't that enough to prove that you're both big, bad men? And weren't there other werewolves with them?"
"There are. Three," I gritted. Though I healed quickly, the grinding sensation of that healing was unpleasant. It was far better to not get injured in the first place, but I'd been in several fights as of late. Far more than I had over the past few years.
Perhaps it was the sort of chaos created when you were trying to raise a family. I moved a step back from the crumpled wolf, then another. A spotlight hit me and I hissed, glaring off into it as my pupils snapped to pinstripe width.
"Hate to be a bother there, Eskal. Seems like the fight's over with. The problem is, you've ruined the area for most of the rest of we shifters, too," said a voice I knew all too well.
I sighed at it. "Jeremiah, the humans will quiet themselves. You know it all too well."
He was a human-shaped masterpiece, all dark skin and tight muscle. Jeremiah was built like he was made to run; and he was. Still, he wore a business casual shirt and a pair of slacks that had to come from a mall anchor store. But his smile was wide and his face was kind, and his eyes were the brightest, purest white I'd ever seen. "The humans aren't going to forget anything this time around. And you may have just killed Hudson, who was delivering you justice."
"Was this a set-up, then?"
Jeremiah shrugged one shoulder, all contempt. "Only if you did it to yourself. I know I'm new to this little troop of shifter-kin, but I'd be happy to ruin your day for you. Or are you going to be a man and leave in peace?"
The unicorn gave me a self-satisfied smile that led me to unleash every desire I'd had with Hudson upon Jeremiah's face. I shook my head and looked back at the rest of my flight. They were exhausted, overrun, and homeless.
And it was all my fault.
I could take on every shifter in the area if I had to. I didn't wish to; most of them had children or older relatives that they supported, if we ignored the value that their individual lives made up. Worse, they had appearances within the human community to maintain. No one noticed if one or two people stopped coming to work, but hundreds?
My claws raked the ground as I thought it through. There would be no way in which I could disarm or even disable the vast majority of the shifters without putting them in the ground. Desiring to avoid the bloodshed, there was only one clear answer.
"Give us the night to rest and we will continue on our way in the morning. My flight is exhausted. We will give no trouble to anyone who does not climb this mountain; and the humans will surely ignore it for the time being so long as you did not lead them up here."
He shook his head. "You'll leave now or we'll run you off. We were waiting for you up here, you weaselly old drake. We knew where you'd come. What makes you think we haven't told the humans to try to protect ourselves?"
"You haven't, because if you had you'd have left it to us," Olivia said, walking across in front of me.
I blinked at her. "Olivia, leave the horse alone. He knows not what he condemns us for nor does he understand the ramifications it may one day bring to his herd."
"Are you threatening me?" Jeremiah asked, shoving his hands into his pockets.
My eyes narrowed. "I am promising you that this social misstep of requiring us to leave empty and tired will one day become your least favorite moment of your life. I will see your people burn, their manes aflame, their hooves melting, for this. We have eggs in tow."
That made the unicorn pause. He frowned between Olivia and I, and I could nearly see him trying to work out how eggs had occurred between a dragon and a human. I hope it fried in working it out.
"Okay, better plan. The crows and ravens will stand guard here overnight. You fuck up and try to do something to them, you're smoked. We bring in the humans and we watch them kill you and those eggs. And whoever the human girl is. You hold to your word and you get to leave peacefully in the morning. Is that a deal you can live by?"
It wasn't what I wanted. If we had an emergency, we needed to be able to seek human assistance for Olivia. There were venomous snakes, spiders, and all sorts of things that may require a quick trip to the emergency room. Yet, if we were to take her there all that would happen was that she, too, would be stuck chained to a bed and hassled by the police officers. I debated with myself for a moment, two, three, then sighed. "Well enough, I suppose. It is a deal. Though I would prefer the birds be nowhere near my den."
"They'll take to the trees. Give us Hudson and Sadie and we'll back off. You stay here longer than noon tomorrow, the humans still come in and blow your nest all to hell. Okay?"
I snorted at him in turn and looked back at Sadie to watch her pulling her mate as best she could, human and straining every bone in her body to move t
he werewolf. Olivia walked over to help her, but Sadie shook her head at my new mate. "Iyadre, Nariti," I said. "Take Hudson to his boat."
My wingmates moved into the spotlight. Sadie tensed over her alpha, but whatever Iyadre said, it was enough to soothe her. She stood back as they gathered the broken wolf into their arms and carried back to the Hummer. There, they slid him inside and Sadie hurriedly climbed into the driver's seat. The beast snarled to life and backed up over the muck and detritus as she hurried to get her mate to a safe place.
Some small part of me regretted taking the fight to the wolf in such a manner. It was beneath me to hurt a lower lifeform in such a way. Had I wished to kill him, I should have invoked duel right and burnt him to a cinder on the spot for challenging me. Instead, who knew how long he would be trying to come back from my crushing power?
There was nothing I could do to reverse time. Dragons like that existed, with those powers, but alas; I was not lucky enough to be one of them. The headlights from the Hummer disappeared in the distance and the spotlight went off. Whoever had been behind it, for Jeremiah had been in front of it, had disappeared.
And a mixed flock of ravens and crows stood perched atop my den. There was nothing I could do about it, but I made certain to glare at them as I went inside, anyway.
"I could try to bring them around before we leave. Surely it's easier to transport whelps than it is eggs?"
I sighed at Olivia, wishing the wolves had never turned up. I craved her sweet spot, wished I was atop her and watching her writhe. My wingmates were welcome to do as they wished with the rest of her as she clearly intended to adopt the lot of us, but I wanted her core.
"You are welcome to try," I said. "But I have little doubt it would only result in failure again. The newly hatched would need to be fed before we found a place to den, I would assume, which would leave us in strange forests attempting to feed hatchlings. The whelp will be hard enough to feed should we require a distance of more than a thousand miles."
She stared at me. "Is that how far this territory stretches?"
"For us, yes. When Hudson pulls himself back together, I expect that he will raise the majority of the shifters in the east and tell them of my crimes. No shifter community will take us in at that point, though few are willing to cope with dragons for reasons that I am certain are clear by now."
Olivia looked away from me at that. "You were just trying to save your kids. And then you were just trying to save me."
"Then why not allow the human authorities to do what their jobs entailed? There was no purpose behind smashing the police station other than the fact that we could. And that our mate was inside."
There was a long pause and I thought she was going to reject me for a moment. Then she met my gaze and reached up to pet my chin. Again, I was overwhelmed by the scent of her magic. I wondered if I had that same scent rubbed on me. Perhaps it was what had set Hudson's tension so high. If I could smell that magic, had he thought I was powering some spell to hurt him?
Oh, who knew what the wolf was thinking. My mate continued to pet me. "You like me that much, huh?"
"It is hardly a matter of what I like. It matters as to what you would prefer to do. You may still walk away from this. You would require a transfer of station. Perhaps you would have to take a pay cut, but we would maintain you as necessary. Whether you wake the eggs or not, we are in your debt, Olivia," I said.
"You said you'd help me and you have," she said. "I'm not walking out on you now. Or ever."
My mate.
Our mate.
Chapter 18
Olivia
I don't know how my cellphone had survived the past many days, but it had. It woke me up before dawn, ringing in my ears.
"Huh?" I answered.
Nicole's voice growled at me. "Where are you? The cops are looking everywhere for you and so is the museum. I've been taken into custody because you aren't here. They think I know something about wherever you went and I keep telling them I don't and-"
"What, they can't find me via my phone? That's how they do it on tv."
I thought she might reach through the phone and bite me. "Of course not. They can't do that stuff in real life anywhere near as well as they do on those idiot shows of yours. What are you doing? Where are you? Are they really dragon eggs? Doctor Sonnet's trying to hire people to find you so he can press charges and get insurance money off the opals."
"Nicole, I'm not coming back. Or at least, not for a really long time," I said.
And it hurt to say. She'd been there for me when few others had. But if the cops caught me again, they'd probably put me somewhere deep underground so the flight couldn't come and get me. The world knew there were dragons now, they had to be trying to find ways to thwart their efforts.
Which bothered me. All the Nightflight wanted to do was to be like any other family. They wanted to grow, settle down, reproduce. They wanted a mate, which... well. They'd gotten their wish there, hadn't they? I didn't know how or if they whole kid thing would work between us, but if I could hatch the eggs settled near my feet, maybe I could hatch other eggs.
But the idea of sharing them with a female dragon, just to reproduce, kind of pissed me off.
I was deep in the world of the fantastic again, and I knew Nicole wouldn't want to believe me.
"Olly, the cops are looking for you. You have to come back or they're going to... to..."
I smiled. "What are they going to do? Come fight a dragon for me?"
"They could."
"They have to find us first."
And as I said the words, I had... sort of a miniature revelation. I grabbed my bag and tore through it, looking for a single thing that could make my life so much easier. If only I could find it. Had I even picked it up from the bed and breakfast? There were only so many things I could fit in the satchel and-
I pulled the leather notebook from the bottom of the bag and sat it in my lap. I'd slept surrounded by the dragons, the whelp nestled up against me, but my fingers traced the book, regardless. My phone sat on the ground beside me and I only realized I hadn't told Nicole I was going to go fishing through the bag a second before she hung up. The dark phone screen, the dark book in my lap.
There was no reason to go hunting for a new place to live when I knew exactly where we needed to go.
The phone rang a few hundred times before someone answered on the other end of the line. She sounded worn, tired, and all-around grouchy. "Who is this and why are you calling here?"
"My name is Olivia Monx. I don't know who you are, but there's a note in my mother's address book with your name and phone number beside it. It says if I'm ever in legal trouble to speak with you."
The other side of the line was dead long enough that I thought the woman had hung up. I jumped when she spoke. "Jeanie's daughter, right?"
"That's my mom. She passed away a few years ago, if you hadn't heard."
A soft "mmm" answered me. "I was aware, child. Everyone was. The supernatural community mourned her, and we knew well the moment when she left. But magic doesn’t cure everything. Why do you feel like fire?"
That was something I'd gotten used to in the witchy world. I'd spent years telling myself that no one could reach out and touch me unless I were sitting right beside them, yet there was a breath of wind that stirred my hair and I knew that, whoever this person was, they knew where I was and who was around me. They were giving me a way to tell them the truth.
It was a test.
And it was then that I had an inkling as to what I was dealing with, more than a who.
"I'm part of a dragon flight."
"Which?"
"Eskal Vervain's Nightflight."
The woman on the other end of the line chuckled. "Took them long enough to find you. Your mother had visions of you with dragons, surrounded by them, since you were a little girl. You've always been meant for them. Bring them and yourselves. I'll cast a navigational tether for you. Do you remember your lessons?"
&nb
sp; "Google Maps works a lot easier."
She snorted. "Google Maps is no match for the magical wards in the area. Do you think I get mail from the postal service?"
"I don't know what that has to do with anything, but fine. Do the spell and I'll do as much as I can to work it from my end. Thank you, miss."
My phone went dead and I turned directly into Eskal's curious gaze. "Who was that?"
"Someone who can help us."
He nodded. "But who was it? She knew there were dragons around you. She spelled you. I felt it."
On Wings: A Reverse Harem Dragon Shifter Romance (Her Secret Menagerie Book 2) Page 16
