by Leia Stone
“He’s not like the others. He’s the last of his kind. He takes magic from the earth, not from dragons, and he wants to meet you, honey. I can come over in the morning and we can tell the pack together. Then I can take you to meet my friend.”
Oh. Hell. No. I was not meeting any more druids, even if they claimed not to be the dragon killing kind. “Sure,” I lied.
Eva paused. “It’s going to be okay, Sloane. I’ll make the pack see that you’re nothing like those monsters.”
But I was. I was like them because my freaking blood said so. “Okay … thanks, Eva.”
She was silent for a moment before saying goodbye and hanging up.
I sat there in a numb silence for a minute. My mother was a druid … either that or she wasn’t my biological mother, and I couldn’t take the latter. I knew nothing about druids, but my mother did have a special affinity for gardening and that sort of thing. Maybe that was her druid heritage. Some kind of earth power. Still … I couldn’t see my mother associating with those people from today. I couldn’t see her killing Logan—or any other being. She was gentle and kind—fierce when she needed to be, but kind at heart. Had she given me hints along the way? She’d always said my father was one of a kind and died protecting us. I figured he was a cop or something by the way she spoke about him. Maybe he was this Marcus person. She’d shown me a picture once—tall, with light brown hair, and a chiseled jaw. And … he had fierce green eyes, like me, like Logan. What Eva said had to be true. Either way, the most important part was that I was a druid with freaky purple magic and I needed to get the hell out of here.
I crossed the room and started shoving things into my duffle bag. I couldn’t stay here anymore. Not now, not after this. There were a room full of angry druid-hating hunters downstairs, and I’d seen the way Dom had looked at those men today. When the pack found out I was half druid and not half sorcerer, they would never look at me the same, and I couldn’t bear it. Dom would be the first one to put a bullet between my eyes.
I had a hundred grand in the bank. I could start over, lay low. I’d been with Logan and the pack for a few days now and my dragon hadn’t shifted—I was getting more in control of it. I was going to be fine.
I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and I slowly crossed the room on my tiptoes to turn out the light. Shadows danced under the door and I heard a soft knock. “Sloane? You awake?” It was Logan. It was 9:09pm and I was twenty-one years old—who would believe I was asleep? But I didn’t answer, and after a moment the footsteps retreated back downstairs. The thought of leaving the pack … It made me sick. They had become my friends, especially Nadine and Danny and … Logan. Logan was literally the only other person in this world that I could relate to. But still, I couldn’t stay. What if my purple magic started lashing out and hurt Logan? What if I started turning bad and tried to kill him or something awful?
I peeked out the window and saw Keegan was walking Roxy and Ruben outside. Okay, I needed to be smart about this. Keegan would see my car and that would be good. The night shift started with Gear at 11pm. That meant if I left now and Gear noticed my car gone at 11, it gave me about a ninety-minute head-start if they came looking for me. I had a nearly full tank of gas and enough crap in my car to live out of it for a week. I wouldn’t use my bank account until I could transfer the money into a different one that Eva couldn’t trace. I was going to be fine. They were better off without me.
I pulled a sheet of paper from my sketchpad and scribbled a quick note so they didn’t think I was kidnapped or anything crazy.
I don’t belong here. Don’t come after me.
I’m sorry.
Sloane
I took one last look at the note, then shouldered my pillow case pack that was stuffed with my laptop, sketchpad, and clothes, and gave Mittens a good rub down.
“Sorry, kid. I would take you with me if I could,” I whispered, although I’m not sure that was true. Something told me I would be sleeping a lot better without her constantly trying to eat my hair or make a bed on my face. But dammit she was cute.
I stood slowly and moved to the window of my unicorn bedroom. The window faced the front of the house and my room was just over the porch. That porch roof was going to be my savior tonight. But my thoughts were frantic, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way that mountain lion shifter had leapt for me and my purple magic just … spit out of me like wild fire, knocking him unconscious. I was dangerous, but most importantly, I was a part of everything that this pack hated. I felt dirty.
I gingerly stepped forward and ever so softly flipped the latch open to unlock the window. I went through a rebellious stage when my mom’s cancer was first diagnosed. I would sneak out every night and meet Jen at the park. We would sit under the play structure and stare up at the sky and talk about how messed up and unfair the world was. It kept me sane, and it also made me a master of sneaking out. Dragon hearing or not, I was a ninja and would not be caught.
I hoped.
It took me about five minutes to open the window and pop off the screen. This house was old and the screen was rusted in the corners. I had to completely distort the frame to pull it into the room. I stood before an open window, the fresh breeze blowing cold air into my face. Here we go. I slipped off my shoes—too noisy—and tied them around my pack which consisted of a pillowcase fashioned with shoelaces. Sock-footed would be the best way to go. After using all of my ninja moves to get out the window, I was about to close it again so that that the house didn’t get too cold, when I heard Keegan’s voice.
Shit! He hadn’t gone inside yet after walking Ruben and Roxy out.
“They’re all diseased,” Keegan said in an agreeable tone.
Dom must have been outside too, because it was his voice that answered. “I’m telling you, we should start hunting them. Take them out one by one and weaken Ardan’s power.”
Bile rose in my throat as I realized who he was talking about. Druids. Me.
Keegan blew out a puff of air. “Look, nothing I would love more than to have a world with less druids in it, but we aren’t hunters. We’re protectors, and now more than ever we have something special to protect. Two skyborn.”
Dom growled. “But if we could—”
“But nothing,” Keegan said harshly. “Hunting druids could bring them right to our doorstep and get Logan and Sloane killed. Drop it.”
Dom huffed. “Fine. You owe me a beer.”
Keegan must have been smiling, I could hear it in his voice. “Let’s get inside.”
The front door opened and then closed again; I released the breath I had been holding. Wow. The druid hate with the pack was legit. Dammit, Mom, why couldn’t you have been a sorcerer?
After closing the window, I padded quietly to the roof and peeked slowly over, relieved to find no one on the porch and the curtains pulled shut.
The next maneuver was going to hurt like hell. I needed to hang off the roof as much as I could and jump the rest of the way onto the crushed rocks while wearing only socks. I was betting on my regenerative healing thing still working, because my feet were going to bruise and be cut to shit. I gradually lowered myself down, increasingly aware of how inadequate my upper arm strength was. And as I was hanging from the roof’s edge with only about four feet left to the ground, I looked up at Logan’s room.
I had to admit that leaving him felt wrong. My dragon was restless inside of me, probably because she knew Logan was safe. But when he found out what I actually was … I couldn’t bear to see the look on his face.
I took one last deep breath and let go. I fell for longer than I thought, then my feet hit the hard-crushed gravel below and I had to bite down the whimper that wanted to leave my throat as pain shot up the pads of my feet and into my shins. Mother fricker, crap on fire! I bit my knuckle to release some of the tension that was making its way out of me, and just stood there for a minute letting the adrenaline pulse through me.
When I finally fel
t calm enough, I began walking. It was the most painful walk I had ever taken, but with shifter hearing I didn’t dare put on my shoes. Shoes crunched. Bare sock feet were much easier to control noise. By the time I got to my car, I was sweating lightly from the pain. I was far enough from the house now that I put my shoes on. They hurt and I saw little droplets of blood through my socks, but I had to ignore it and just keep going. Luckily, my car had been parked farthest from the house, because I never went anywhere. Everyone else did the shopping, so I was able to throw it in neutral and push it back down the long driveway. Normally, pushing my car over forty feet might have me winded, but I felt fine. Supernatural perk I guessed.
When I had pushed the car off into the road enough that I was sure the headlights wouldn’t light up the house, I jumped in and turned it on. The engine roared to life and I flinched, but the house stayed dark. I hit the road then, heading fast down the lane, thoughts racing through my head. I was a half dragon, half druid on the run from the only people who had ever promised to protect me.
Shit, it was a recipe for disaster, but so had been much of life.
11
I KNEW I wouldn’t be able to use my credit cards once on the road or Eva could track me. Her guy had found my bank accounts with just my first and last legal name, so that was out. Instead, I went to the ATM in town and withdrew a thousand bucks, which was all it would let me. I could live off a grand for a long time. Long enough to get a fake ID with a new name and transfer the money into a new account. Worst case, I could take another one of my scales and try to sell it where I was going, but that was too risky, and a last-case scenario. I settled into the drive, putting on loud music to keep myself awake, and kept a bag of chips handy for snacking.
I was six and a half hours into my drive to San Clemente, California, and had only about an hour left. But I was dozing off. It was like 4 AM and I was dead tired. Still, I kept thinking that the pack could be right behind me, assuming they could smell my trail or something crazy. Would it be so bad if they caught up to me?
I shook my head of those thoughts. Yes, it would, because I was everything they hated. No one wanted to swear their allegiance to a monster. I hit the pedal and kept driving. About five minutes passed and I started going over the bumps that were meant to wake up sleeping truckers. It was time to pull off and sleep a few hours. I was no good in this condition.
I pulled off the next exit and was pleased to see it was a well-lit and popular truck stop. As a seasoned car sleeper, I knew these places were a goldmine. They had food, hot showers, and security guards. I pulled my little SUV to the far back parking space and turned it off, slipping the keys into the cup holder. Making sure all of the doors were locked, I crawled into the back seat, where my sleeping bag and pillow were still spread out from the last time I’d slept in there. God, it felt like a lifetime ago I had been sleeping in the car. Before the fall … before … Logan…
Those green eyes seemed to look right through me. They were the last thing I thought of before I drifted off to sleep.
I was awoken to the bright sunshine beating on my face and I bolted upright, heart in my throat, and stared at the clock: 9 A.M. I’d gotten five hours of sleep, but Logan and the pack could also be right on top of me. There were more of them, so they could sleep in shifts. If I was being honest with myself, I felt awful for leaving them like this; no doubt they were freaking out. But once Eva told them what I was and I changed my bank account, I knew they would settle back into their old ways, forget about me. I shouldered my backpack and then got out of the car, stretching my legs and neck. Car sleeping wasn’t the best for my back but it was safe, warm, and free.
After having a quick shower and putting on fresh clothes, I stocked up on coffee and breakfast pastries. I needed to figure out a way to find a powerful sorcerer like Eva that could keep Eva and Danny from searching for me. Some kind of hidden spell. But that would require me knowing even one supernatural in San Clemente, and I didn’t.
I opened the door to leave the gas station when I got a whiff of … dog … to my left. There were two young girls, maybe eighteen years old, smoking cigarettes, leaning up against the wall. It was hard to tell with the cigarette smoke, but they smelled like shifters. Wolf shifters. Like me. Or at least what I smelled like to them. As I passed, they locked eyes on me, nostrils flaring, and gave me a respectful nod. I nodded back but stopped. Maybe these girls would have my sorcerer contact. Or they were human and would think I was crazy.
I stepped closer and lowered my voice. “Hey, girls. I’m from out of town and I need…” I paused, not able to bring myself to say it. What if my nose was wrong and they were human?
One of the girls, who had an obscene amount of glitter eye shadow and a nose ring, smiled wide. “You need a hook up? Sorcerer, shifter, or druid?”
I must have looked shocked, because the girls both smiled at each other.
“Sorcerer,” I told them. NO druids please.
The girl shrugged. “I don’t give information out for free ya know.”
I tried to suppress a growl as I pulled out twenty bucks. Little hustlers. I didn’t want to contribute to their lung cancer foundation, but there was no sense in running from the pack if Eva could find me.
The girl snatched the twenty. “There’s a bar called Moon Dust. Ask for Jeanine. She’ll hook you up with whatever you need. She’s a pureblood.”
Pureblood. That name made me sick, but I knew it meant that Jeanine was a powerful sorcerer and that’s what I needed.
“Thanks,” I told the girls, and headed to my car.
Now I just needed to stay out of trouble until nightfall, find this sorcerer, and then I was home free. Back to my old life where no one would get hurt.
It had been a long day. I was so paranoid of either being found by Logan and the pack, or being attacked by druids, that I barely left my car. I had gotten lunch and dinner from a drive-through restaurant, and I was already plotting how to buy a remote cabin in the woods somewhere and live out my life in solitude. As soon as this sorcerer hid my trail, I was going to head for the mountains, maybe Colorado, find a tiny town, and buy a small place for cash. For all I knew, Logan and the pack weren’t even looking for me. I had turned off my phone when I left Arizona and now I was tempted to turn it back on and see if I had any messages. Eva said she would be over to Logan’s house this morning. Maybe she told them I was half druid and they decided to cut their losses and not come looking for me. That was the best case scenario.
Parking a few blocks from Moon Dust, my hands shook as I tried to rein in my fear about walking into a supernatural bar completely alone and unprepared. Just ask for Jeanine. In and out, I told myself.
I tightened the hold on my studded clutch purse. Last month I was a human living out of my car and searching for my purpose in life, now I was some freak dragon-druid hybrid standing in line to a foreign supernatural bar so that I could get help escaping a sorcerer and a bunch of shifters. It was crazy how quickly your life could change. I was surprised I was doing so well.
I slipped into the line, and was two people from the front of the door when a thought struck me: what if they had a truth witch at the door? Eva’s did … but they were super rare, so maybe not. I was still deciding whether or not to jump out of line when the person in front of me walked into the double doors, letting a short blip of blasting music reach me before they closed again. I was looking a very large man in the eyes, and luckily they weren’t glowing. I was hoping that meant no truth witch.
He seemed to be waiting for me to speak, so I did. “I’m here to see Jeanine,” I told him as confidently as I could.
He glared at me, his already small eyes looking even smaller on his large face.
“And you are?” He looked impatient, and I wasn’t sure if there was some code or something. Dammit. I pulled forty dollars from my clutch and handed it to him.
“I’m a shifter who got into some trouble and needs help out.” There, honest but not completely a lie,
in case he was in fact a truth witch.
He grabbed the forty dollars and waved me past as if I was a fly bothering him with my presence. It took a moment for the realization to register through my shock, then I ran inside before he could change his mind. He hadn’t said where to find Jeanine, so I was going to have to figure that out on my own. I was also burning through my cash a lot quicker than I had intended.
As I stepped through the doors, I let my eyes roam over the space. The most prominent thing in the bar, aside from the blaring music, were the cages hanging from the ceiling with dancing half-naked girls in them. Except these girls didn’t look fully aware and semi-bored like the ones at Eva’s. They looked … drugged, in a trance, eyes half-lidded, bodies moving as if they were on autopilot. Off to the left was a secluded lounge area with plush leather couches and black lights to set the mood. To the right was the bathroom and a set of double doors guarded by two large men; straight ahead was a long bar that took up the entire length of the back wall.
I started the herculean task of wading through the packed crowd and under the cages of half-naked dancers to get back to the bar. As I squeezed my way through, the crowd tightened and my body smooshed into the guy in front of me. I was the kind of person who liked my own space, so having my breasts pushed up against some strange dude’s back had my dragon on edge and my inner feminist ready to smash some testicles. Especially after what had happened at Eva’s club.
“Excuse me,” I piped up, because the crowd had pressed together under one of the cages, where the girl had just removed her bikini top. Fabulous. This was a freaking strip club. People were pushing in on me hard now and I was in a full-on panic, my breath coming in gasps, and I felt lightheaded. If I didn’t extract myself from this situation right away, I might faint.
I took my elbow and placed it between the shoulder blades of the guy whose back was assaulting my chest and I pushed. Hard. “MOVE!” I roared and I felt my dragon trying to come to the surface as my panic grew.
