“Hey,” her driver said, startling her. It was the first thing he’d said all ride. “You’re not going to be sick, are you?” He started swerving to the side of the road.
“Huh? No…why?”
“Sorry. You just looked sick there for a bit.” He shrugged in the rearview as he pulled them back into traffic. “It’s a hazard of picking people up from clubs.”
“Oh, no, I’m fine.” He wasn’t wrong, though, Andi thought while staring out the window. She did feel sick about things—just not like that.
Chapter 2
The second Damian’s car door opened that evening, Grimalkin appeared as a seal-point Siamese nearby. Grimalkin had been with him his entire life. All royalty of the Realms had familiars, but he still wasn’t sure if he knew Grimalkin’s true form—only that it favored cats.
“So, about that cheese,” Grim began, trotting over to wind around Damian’s legs. “Can I place another order?”
Damian knelt down to knuckle the cat’s head. Grim had been patient—for him—and getting cheese delivered was likely the easiest task on his list of things to do today. “Certainly. What would you like?” he asked as Grimalkin purred loudly and started to drool.
“Ewww.” Damian wiped his hands on his jeans, standing up.
“I can’t help it, okay?” Grimalkin trotted beside him as he made his way to the mansion. “I need one wheel of Fromager D’affinois, and one entire wheel of aged parmesan. The good stuff straight from Italy with the crunchy crystals that they don’t usually export.”
“What happened to the last one?” Damian asked, knowing full well Grim’s appetites.
“Don’t ask!” Grimalkin said, with a whisk of his tail, running inside as Damian pushed the door open before stopping to look back. “The dog has his human skin again.”
“It’s about fucking time.” Damian’s attention surged. It had been a long week since they’d discovered a fucking mini-portal inside Zach, which Andi and he had surgically removed from him. If he closed his eyes, he could almost smell her apple and saltwater scent. Soon, he promised himself, and inside his dragon rumbled.
Zach had been a wolf ever since the full moon that’d put him back together after their operation. His brother Austin said it was a consequence of all the damage he’d taken while human. He could believe that, seeing as he and Andi had sieved through all of Zach’s intestines to look for the portal, but that didn’t mean Damian wasn’t impatient for answers.
“It’s time to have a conversation,” Damian said, letting some of his dragon’s magic carry his voice through the house.
A door slammed, and then a half-dressed man in jeans came racing down the stairs while fastening his belt without shoes or shirt on. He was the embodiment of summer, a golden well-tanned blur, with shaggy bronze hair and ocean blue eyes. He was muscular—like all wolf-shifters—and unusually for a werewolf, covered in tattoos. Werewolves had such an accelerated healing factor that ordinary tattoos didn’t take. But once the brothers had decided they wanted them, Damian had researched and arranged for a particular type of wolfsbane to be added to their ink and flown in a shifter-aware tattoo artist who was willing to take the risk of working on them.
The wolfsbane meant that all of their tattoos could never be healed away and that they always burned a little, but the brothers thought the pain a small price to pay to permanently commemorate the members of their murdered pack. The urge to do what you could to remember important people to your life after their passing was something that Damian understood all too well.
“He’s coming too,” said Austin, his shaggy hair and half-nakedness making him look more savage than usual. “Where’ve you been? Stalking your little nurse?”
Damian growled. As strongly as Damian had been tempted to watch Andi for the past week, he wouldn’t have to physically stalk her. He was a magical being from the Realms; he could just watch without her knowledge through her own damn mirror. He hadn’t.
Not yet.
The creature inside him slithered, scales over scales, waking up. But you could, it tempted him. In this, as in all things, his dragon had much less compunction.
Damian’s jaw clenched as Austin frowned deeply and went on, worried for his brother. “Zach didn’t betray us.”
Whether or not his brother was a traitor, Austin’s pain was genuine. “He may have thought he was doing it for good reasons,” Damian granted. “But beings from the Realms are experts at twisting words and minds. I’m sure they wouldn’t have gotten him to betray us outright, but it’s entirely possible they could’ve convinced him that he needed to do something terrible to save the people he loves.” In the Realms, pain was currency. Damian knew from watching his human mother try to survive there.
“Let’s see what he says,” Austin said, warily.
“Yes. I’m sure he can explain,” Damian said, letting his familiar cool impassivity roll over him again. Perhaps it was his own draconic nature, or the fact that he’d had to share his body for most of his life—he could detach when it was required, see the bigger picture, and not let his emotions ride him. He liked to think he’d gotten very good at it until he’d met a certain nurse.
There was another door slammed, farther down the upstairs hall, and soon Zach was on the stairs.
“I can’t explain,” Zach announced when he reached the bottom. Everything about him seemed more controlled, more civilized—combed hair, expensive clothing, tighter, subtler movements. With his black hair and pale skin, he was a cool winter compared to Austin’s heat. And it was why, with the help of a little magic, he could so successfully pretend to be the elder Damian Blackwood when it was required. The dress shirt he’d raced down in was loose, making the tattoos it exposed appear more threatening in contrast. “But I have some educated guesses.”
Damian glanced at the half-naked Austin, who looked like a barbarian enforcer compared to his brother. Grimalkin sensed the mood and suddenly the entryway became a cozy den with a crackling fire and warm brown leather couches—and a large cage in the corner with a comically large padlock. He had no use for “the dogs” and had made his opinion clear to Damian on many, many occasions. Luckily for Damian, nobody else on Earth could understand him.
“Grim,” Damian reprimanded, and the cage disappeared. He sat down on a couch, and Zach took the one across from him, as Austin paced back and forth in front of the fire in bare feet. “So,” Damian said, looking at Zach, “do you know what happened to you in the hospital?”
“I told him,” Austin confessed. “Like, literally two and a half minutes ago.”
“And were you surprised?” Damian didn’t take his eyes off of Zach.
“Fuck, yes.” Zach’s nimble hands—the hands of a white-collar boss, unlike his brother—were quickly working up the buttons of his dress shirt.
“And do you have any idea how the portal got there?” Damian asked, watching the werewolf’s pupils and pulse for any signs of lying.
“I didn’t even know that was possible, much less that one was in me.” Zach clutched at his abdomen. There was no way he would’ve survived so many people mucking about inside of him if he hadn’t been a werewolf.
“How could you not know?” Damian pressed, as Austin watched him. Damian was no fool; he knew where Austin’s loyalties were. If he had to act against Zach, he would lose both of them today.
And your father would have killed both of them already, his dragon said, watching everything through his eyes. His dragon was right.
I am not my father.
No, you are not, his dragon agreed with a dismissive snort.
Zach leaned forward, holding his head in his hands, his dress shirt so tight across his muscled shoulders it looked on the verge of tearing. He was the very definition of a man wracked by guilt—or the way that a man would act to buy time to come up with a cover story, by making someone else think he was. Damian hated having to think like that but couldn’t risk not.
“I didn’t want to tell you this,” Zach sa
id, raising his body slowly—looking not at Damian, but at his brother, “but a local pack reached out to me to talk about an increase of Hunter activity in the area.”
Hunters, his dragon growled.
I know. This time, Damian agreed with his dragon’s sentiment. Just because most people didn’t know that magic was real didn’t mean that everyone didn’t, and some of the people who did know of magic were unscrupulous. One way to gain magical powers was to take a piece of a being that had them innately and incorporate it on yourself, in yourself, or in your rituals. There were almost no freshwater mermaids anymore; they’d all been fished to death for their scales. And what was worse was that once Hunters gained magical abilities, it made it easier for them to find other magical creatures to “harvest”—like mermaid scales allowing humans to breathe underwater, setting up more mermaid traps. Which was why Austin hadn’t wanted to put Zach into a public hospital, to begin with, and why he’d felt compelled to guard his injured brother there personally.
Austin, however, had gone still at the first mention of ‘local pack’—the kind of still all predators knew. “Which pack?” Austin asked, his voice low and full of danger because he already knew what the answer would be.
Zach took a profoundly long inhale, during which Austin started shaking his head.
It was probably a good thing that Austin wasn’t wearing a shirt because he seemed to get larger, just standing there. Damian knew it was theoretically possible for the wolves to shift on a no-moon-night if driven to it, although he’d never seen it happen before. But his desire for empirical information was outweighed by the fact that if both of them shifted to fight, he’d have to shift too, to stop them. After the morning he’d had with his dragon, he did not want to open that cage that wide.
“Starry Sky,” Damian said, saying what Zach couldn’t, the name of the pack that had massacred Zach and Austin’s own pack, the Wind Racers, in a blood feud decades ago.
Zach finally met his half-dressed berserker brother’s gaze. “Yes.”
Grimalkin decided to do Austin a “favor” and materialize one of his weapons closer, putting a well-loved ax on the end table beside the couch.
“Grim,” Damian chastised. “Not now.” Grimalkin moved the ax to a table halfway across the room but didn’t allow it to vanish entirely.
Zach spoke directly to Damian, ignoring his brother’s concerns, focusing on the facts. “Several of their packmates were tracked, captured, and ritually dismembered. Which means that Hunters are officially back in town.”
The Hunters moved in packs, slowly following their prey. Intelligent magical creatures would run from them and set up elsewhere, with new identities, new lives—even if the cost of fleeing Hunters was overlapping packs and territory disputes, like the one that had pitted Starry Sky against the Wind Racers generations ago.
Creatures that weren’t smart enough, or thought that they couldn’t fight, might get taken down. And when an area was hunted out—or the remaining creatures were too strong—the Hunters would move on, until the next time they came through.
Damian had been careful to hide his presence from the Hunters the last time they’d hit town ten years ago. Which isn’t to say that his dragon wouldn’t have gleefully killed them, but he was busy enough guarding Earth from Unearthly rifts. He didn’t need to worry about Earthly interest in his dragon’s hide.
So, he’d done what any other irritated billionaire in his situation might’ve. He paid a lot of mercenaries a lot of money through shell organizations to run them down. Mercilessly. That was when he’d first hired Zach and Austin, and he’d kept them in his employ ever since.
Damian stared into the den’s fire. If the Hunters knew this town was inhospitable to them, why had they come back?
“And whose word do you have on that? One of theirs?” Austin pressed his brother, the potential for violence between them crackling just like the fire behind them.
“You said you saw a Hunter at the hospital,” Damian reminded him, still considering.
“No, I was worried I’d seen a Hunter. I saw a short bald guy with a lot of tattoos who didn’t belong there. Maybe he was just there to take a picture of Zach for the papers. I told the hospital to make him a no-info, but I also told you taking him there was a horrible idea. Shit like this is why!” Austin’s anger exploded with a snarl as he caught the nearest side table and upended it, and Grimalkin disappeared it in midair before it could land. “Everyone knows whose family owns this place, and we had five EMTs and paramedics in here who you fucking told about a tiger attack.”
Blaming Zach’s bizarre injuries on a quickly transformed Grim had not been Damian’s finest moment, but it’d worked in a pinch, and Mills had been able to get him a wildlife permit retroactively.
“No,” Austin went on, shaking his head strongly. “The fact that a lurker chose that moment to rise out of my brother could’ve been totally coincidental.”
“One of their own was murdered by Hunters, Austin,” Zach said, his tone imminently reasonable. “I saw the photos of what was left of him.”
Damian felt his dragon’s talons flex from somewhere deep inside, as though the beast were cracking its knuckles. It was always looking for a fight.
“Even if that’s true—and I doubt it—so? Why should I care?” Austin’s movements were as savage as he looked. “I hope the Hunters take all of them out before we kill them. Fuck the truce.”
“Austin!” Zach protested, the very picture of reason.
“Enough,” Damian said calmly—the kind of controlled calm that sounded dangerous. He turned toward his friend. “How did the portal mirror get in you?”
Zach put one hand to the back of his neck and rubbed it before speaking. “Well, she—”
“She,” Austin snarled, dragging his hand across his face. “Of course, your dick got you into this mess. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Damian covered a snicker with a cough.
“She,” Zach went on with the same amount of emphasis while making a studious effort to not look at Austin. “Smelled amazing. And…truthful. The pain was real. The panic was too.”
Damian stroked his chin. “And so, how, exactly, did the portal wind up inside of you?”
Zach looked any which way but at the two of them.
“Oh, God, it was a sex thing,” Austin said, dragging his hand across his face, the muscles of his thick arms rippling as if the wolf inside him were fighting to escape.
“I didn’t know at the time,” Zach protested with a grunt. “We were…being athletic, and….”
“You fucked her, and she asked for it rough,” Austin muttered, “and she somehow tagged you. Oh my God, you are such an easy fucking mark!”
Zach growled. “Look—”
“And why didn’t you tell anyone immediately?” Damian interrupted.
“Because of this, right here.” He gestured at Austin.
“They decimated our entire pack!” Austin’s eyes went wide with disbelief.
“It was a generation ago. Our mother killed herself, killing everyone who had that blood on their hands. We signed the truce—you and I and the others, together—so that wouldn’t happen again. Isn’t that enough?” Zach stared down his brother, cool as the professional killer he was.
Austin’s nostrils flared. “If a member of Starry Sky asked me for help, I would only listen to them long enough to kill them.”
“Which is precisely why they didn’t ask you.” Zach turned toward Damian. “Not everyone has to pay for the sins of their past—least of all people who weren’t even alive back then.”
“And when were you going to tell us about the Hunters?” Damian pressed. “Your dick almost got you killed—twice over—not to mention, caused a shit ton of very hard-to-cover damage.”
“I was going to tell…you, at least. Maybe not him.” Zach curled a lip at his brother. “I just didn’t know I was going to get bitten by an Unearthly creature the size of a fucking bus later that night.”
“Maybe you got bitten because you weren’t fighting your best because you were tagged by magical pussy,” Austin growled.
“She needed help,” Zach growled right back at him. “And I would go back in time and fucking do it again if I got the chance.”
“Do her again, you mean,” Austin sniped, then turned to Damian. “Can you fucking believe this? Oh…wait, I forgot who I’m asking,” Austin went on, his temper letting his mouth run.
“Not. Another. Word,” Damian said curtly. Austin had scented Andi on him when he came home alone during last weekend’s full moon. But Damian never would’ve met Andi, to begin with, had Zach’s injuries not been so severe that he’d had to hire a private nurse to watch the werewolf when his crew went out.
“The both of you…pathetic,” Austin muttered.
“Say that again?” Damian challenged him. The wolf in Austin flared up. Damian could almost see it rise in him like the flicker of a flame, but it was just as quickly tamped back down.
“I’m sorry, brother,” Austin said, only to Damian, his brother-in-arms, though not by blood. “At least your pussy was human pussy and couldn’t have possibly been sent from the Realms or Hunters against us.”
“She’s innocent,” Zach said gruffly. “I’d swear it with my blood.”
“Yes, well…we’ve all seen quite a lot of your blood recently.” Damian pinched the bridge of his nose. Now that they had eradicated all of Damian’s doubts that Zach’s collateral damage was in any way intentional, he needed more information. “Grim, call Jamison.”
Grimalkin blinked slowly, and Damian knew his tech master was being summoned. Jamison had sent him a cryptic text earlier that evening regarding predicting a gate. It was one of their many long-term goals—the capability to predict the rifts that happened when assorted Realms collided with Earth, allowing Unearthly creatures to come through the tears. If they ever managed to do it accurately, long term, Damian might finally know what it was like to have a weekend. Or a vacation.
Dragon Destined: Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 3
