by Chase, Eva
“I love you,” I said, the feeling of it rushing through me as if saying the words out loud had uncorked a whole new bottle of adoration.
Aaron’s face lit up. He kissed me again, even more deeply this time. Then he said, with his lips just an inch from mine, “I love you, Serenity. Always.”
I drifted from him to Nate beside him. The bear shifter welcomed me into his arms, already grinning. I snuggled into his embrace and kissed him hard, wanting him to feel how much this mattered to me. He rumbled in his chest, his fingers caressing my back. I touched the side of his face as I pulled away to meet his warm brown gaze.
“I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said. “Don’t you ever doubt it.”
I brushed my lips to his again. Then I turned. West watched me from the opposite corner of the tub. His body was tensed, but his dark green eyes looked softer than usual.
“Come here, Sparks,” he said. “I might as well get my kiss.”
Did he think he wasn’t getting the rest? Well, maybe I wasn’t totally sure either. It was a little hard to follow how I felt with all the push-pull between us. But if he was offering a kiss, he’d better believe I was going to take it.
I floated over to him, half expecting him to change his mind. Or to grab me and plant one on me so hungry it made my head spin.
He reached for me, easing his fingers around my wrist to tug me a little closer. He teased his other hand into my hair. We held each other’s gazes for a moment, his strangely searching. A flutter passed through my chest. Then he drew me the rest of the way to him.
His mouth claimed mine with a tenderness I couldn’t have been prepared for. His lips coaxed mine apart to deepen the kiss, and just like that, I was lost in him. Lost in the gentle passion of his embrace, lost in the smell that lingered on his skin as if he’d brought the forests of his home here with him.
This was the man I’d known my mate could be. The one I’d caught glimpses of in the rare moments when he let his guard down.
My head was spinning when he released me from that lip-lock. I stared at him for a second, catching my breath, my whole body aflame with both lust and a more heartfelt longing. I drew in a breath to say what I’d said to the others, what felt undeniably true now—and the door thumped in the other room.
As I swiveled around, Marco strode into the room. He was frowning, his eyes dark with concern.
“A few of the rogues escaped,” he said. “Not so many that we’d need to worry about them on their own, but—my people’s reports say they headed north. Straight toward a troop of vampires that just annexed my New York property and is now moving on from there. It looks like the rogues have even more allies than we realized. And they’ve just incited a full-scale paranormal war.”
I groaned, tipping my head back against the cushion of the water. So much for resting. But the resolve I’d felt during the battle only hardened inside me.
“Fine,” I said. “They’ve got no idea what they’re getting into when they mess with a dragon. It’s time to show all our enemies what a bad idea that is, once and for all.”
* * *
* * *
Are Ren and her mates up to this new challenge? Find out in the final volume of The Dragon Shifter’s Mates, Dragon’s Fate. Pre-order it now!
Next in the Dragon Shifter’s Mates series
Dragon’s Fate (The Dragon Shifter’s Mates #4)
The paranormal world just can't seem to cut Ren a break. Just when she thought she could finally settle into normal—well, relatively normal—life as the last of the dragon shifters with her four alpha mates, she finds her people on the brink of a supernatural war. The vampires have decided all shifter kind must be exterminated, and they've got the firepower to make good on that goal.
Ren's got plenty of fire of her own, of course. But she's only one dragon, and there are a whole lot of vampires. As she scrambles to protect all of her kin and figure up what the heck is up with the last of her mates, she can't help suspecting this challenge is more than she and her alphas can handle alone.
The secrets buried in the dragon shifter estate may hold the answer—but finding it will force her to question everything she thought she knew about this new world.
Order it now!
Magic Waking excerpt
Did you know I also have a romantic urban fantasy series about a female incarnation of Merlin, who fights to protect the reincarnated King Arthur from a fae threat—while also trying not to fall in love with him all over again?
Sarcastic wizardry, cruel fae, Arthurian legend, and a star-crossed love fifteen hundred years in the making await in Magic Waking…
MAGIC WAKING
1
The day I found my king started with a stomachache.
I stretched on my bed amid the tangle of blanket and sheet, still waking up. The warmth of the sunlight streaming through the narrow window soaked into my skin, but the knot in my stomach didn’t loosen. I knew what it meant. My heart thumped.
Today, after twenty years, four months, and six days of searching and waiting—not that I’d been counting or anything—I was going to set eyes on him again.
I rolled over and caught sight of a creature I was much less enthusiastic about.
A gloom was lurking under my computer desk. No one else would have been able to distinguish that patch of thicker darkness within the regular shadow, but my magic-touched sight could make out even those mindless scraps of dark intent. I grimaced.
The gloom crept along the wall. When I breathed in deep, its presence prickled at the back of my mouth. Just one couldn’t do much damage—and wouldn’t bother trying to damage any ordinary human being—but set a whole crowd on the attack and no one would laugh. I’d witnessed swarms like that more times than I cared to remember.
They were the vermin of the dark fae, so I dealt with them the way I’d deal with a cockroach or a rat—extermination.
I sat up in the bed and snapped a twig off the weeping fig in its pot beside the window. A whisper of the living energy nestled inside the wood tingled against my fingers. It would fade by the end of the day, but in the meantime, it held power.
I raised my hand and pointed it at the gloom. My fingers clenched around the twig. “Darkness begone,” I murmured in the archaic English of my first existence.
A spark lit within the patch of shadow and spread across its body. In less than a second, it ate away my unwelcome visitor.
The twig had gone dry and dead against my palm. I tossed it into the base of the pot. Technically, I didn’t have to be up for another hour, but there was no way I could relax now.
I paced the room and grabbed a pair of jeans and a sweater from a basket of folded laundry. My hair resisted the ponytail I finger-combed it into. Several brown strands slipped free to drift across my face as I ducked to retrieve my sneakers from under the bed.
So what? I was going to see my king today.
No, I wasn’t as ready as I wanted to be. I still hadn’t figured out how to fix this mess I’d gotten us into—this repeated cycle of lives lived and cut short. I wasn’t even sure I could avoid my past mistakes, escape what had happened last time—
My throat constricted. Catching that thought before it could blossom, I balled it up and tossed it away. I’d never been completely ready. But we were both still living. At least I’d accomplished that much.
I knelt to pluck several more twigs off the fig’s outer branches, stuffed the handfuls into my pockets, and opened my closet.
My wands waited in a shoebox I’d stuffed under winter boots and a spare blanket. I ran my fingers over the smooth sticks. The magic I’d worked on them had sealed their life inside—if I’d left them out in the sun, they’d have started sprouting leaves. I tucked the birch one into my backpack.
To find a pair of gloves, I had to dig through my remaining moving boxes. But it wasn’t just glooms and other dark rabble my king would need protection from.
It was also me.
; I jammed a thin cotton pair into my back pocket and stepped out of my bedroom, my pulse still jittering.
Priya, my roommate, stood in the kitchen. She was spreading jam on a piece of toast. Her head of sleep-rumpled black hair bobbed up at the sound of my door, and a smile leapt to her face.
“Good morning, Emmaline!” She waved the knife at me with her usual frenetic grace. “Want eggs? I was just thinking I’d fry some up to go with my toast.”
No one else called me “Emmaline” except my mom—I always told acquaintances and teachers to stick to “Emma.” But Priya had seen my given name when we’d been filling out the lease and declared it one of the most beautiful names she’d ever heard. Somehow I hadn’t had the heart to tell her I found it incredibly stuffy. In her cheery voice, it did sound kind of pretty.
I was already smiling back at her despite the twist of impatience inside me. Priya’s boundless enthusiasm made it difficult to be irritated at her, which was probably why we were tentatively becoming friends. I hadn’t been in the habit of making many of those—in this life or those prior.
“Thanks, but I think I’ll stick to toast,” I said. “Leave the jam out?” Food derived from animals didn’t always sit well in my stomach. No need to add to my supernatural indigestion.
Priya chattered about an article she’d read for her politics course and her theories about the latest episode of a TV show we’d been watching while I gulped down my quick breakfast. Normally, I’d have contributed more. As I swallowed my last bite, Priya tilted her head.
“Something’s bothering you,” she said. “What’s up?”
I might not have been perfect at hiding my emotions, but I had centuries of practice at lying. After all, there weren’t many situations in which I could be truthful about being the reincarnation of a legendary sorcerer. People tended to get twitchy about even one part of that equation.
Downplaying worked better than flat-out denial. “It’s nothing major,” I said with a shrug. “Lab report due for a prof who seems like a tough one.”
Priya nodded, accepting my explanation unquestioningly. No amount of practice stopped the little jab of guilt I felt at seeing that.
“I’m sure you’ve got it in the bag. You work too hard.”
“New school, new expectations,” I said. “I’ll worry less once I’m into the swing of things.”
I tugged on my gloves as soon as I stepped out onto the street. Thank the light the October weather was just nippy enough that wearing them didn’t look totally bizarre. My gaze flitted over the streets the whole way to campus, my skin prickling at every shift in the breeze. I couldn’t be sure of anything about him except he’d be the same age as me. He might not even be a he in this incarnation. Unlike me, with my regular flipping back and forth, he usually arrived male, but I could never be sure.
When my eyes hit him, I’d know him, no matter what.
At the edge of campus, a broad lawn stretched toward the sprawl of three- and four-story buildings, the older old-fashioned brick ones skirted by modern concrete additions. The view sent a jolt through my chest, even though I’d seen it dozens of times now.
It was the same image that had swam into my head and prompted me to transfer here for junior year—after skimming through page after page of internet search results before figuring out where my capricious psychic ability was pointing me.
My nerves jumped every time someone new walked by me, but I went through classes, lunch, and more classes without any revelations. I ducked into the change room to prepare for fencing practice with more than a little relief. Feinting and parrying would burn off some of my tension.
“Advanced learners, split off into pairs to spar,” Coach ordered after the warm-up exercises. I nodded to the guy standing next to me. We stepped to the side and began a conversation between our training blades. With each tap and dodge, a grin crept farther across my face behind the dark mesh of my protective mask.
Once upon a time, I could have been called clumsy, especially when asked to handle a weapon. That was exactly why I’d decided to take up fencing when I had the chance. After many lives worth of drills, the moves were starting to come naturally to me. I was stronger and more coordinated than I’d ever been.
Which didn’t mean I was infallible. My partner lunged, I swung to block his strike, and a low, rolling laugh carried from the doorway several feet behind me. The sound smacked into me, knocking the breath from my lungs. My arm wavered, and my opponent’s saber caught my hand. My fingers twitched apart as I yanked them out of the way. My own saber flipped through the air and nearly speared the guy standing in the doorway.
He stepped back without a flinch. My weapon clattered to the floor. The guy raised his eyes. They were a blue so striking I could identify it even at a distance, so deep it was almost indigo. He gave me a cocky smile and ran his hand over his sun-streaked blond hair. The muscles in his arm flexed against the sleeve of his fitted raglan shirt.
Every muscle in my body had frozen. Recognition sang through my every cell on a level beneath thought, beneath memory.
A level the guy in front of me clearly wasn’t aware of yet. No hint of shock crossed his face. I looked no different to him than any of the other fencers in our training gear. While I was born knowing who we were, my spell kept my king’s memories locked inside his mind… for now.
“I hope you’re normally more coordinated than that.” He nudged the saber back toward me with his foot. “I don’t want to have to worry about being impaled every time I come into the room.”
An echo of his voice from our first lives rang through my head. Gods, you’re more likely to impale me than the enemy. Those words had been spoken in affectionate jest, not this guy’s distant cool. The quiver of excitement that had been racing through me dimmed.
This incarnation of my king was a jackass.
The difference was so jarring I couldn’t help bristling. “My coordination is infinitely improved when people aren’t making sudden loud sounds in the training area,” I said. “And you could simply not come in.”
He hesitated, blinking at me. Before I’d spoken I bet he hadn’t even realized he was talking to a girl. I took advantage of his silence to stride over and retrieve my saber.
Two other figures were peering into the room beside the new guy—the friends he’d been laughing with. A lanky black guy, who had a couple inches on my critic’s already-formidable height, elbowed him with a rakish grin. A willowy girl with pale auburn tresses stood at Mr. Blond’s other side, hugging her cardigan over her gauzy maxi dress. She squeezed his forearm in apparent reassurance, and something wrenched in my chest.
She was his girlfriend, no doubt. Well, why wouldn’t he have a girlfriend with those looks? That was a good thing. His off-putting attitude was a good thing. Every reminder I could get to keep my distance, emotionally and physically, was a gift.
I existed to be his mage, to get him out of the snarl I’d created with my magic. Anything more risked us both, as I’d had ample opportunity to discover before.
That pinching in my chest was not jealousy. Not even a little bit.
“Have fun, Darton,” the rakish friend said with a playful salute. “Return to us with all your parts intact.” The girlfriend shook her head at him, and they headed off. The new guy—my king who didn’t yet know he was my king—strode in to talk to Coach. I studied his shadow to confirm no glooms were tailing him and rejoined my sparring partner after Coach ambled over.
Darton. Funny how in every life something of our essence wove even into the names each set of parents granted us. A sound or a syllable carried from our origins.
At least by all appearances, he hadn’t started to wake up on his own. As long as I could keep it that way, I had time to finally set things right.
My blade rapped against my opponent’s, and Coach’s voice traveled to my ears. “You’re here to become a better quarterback?” His tone was skeptical and amused.
“I want to up my game,” Darton said. �
�Coach Michner says my weakest area is dexterity. Fencing sounded like an enjoyable way to work on that. Is that a problem?”
“No,” Coach said. “We don’t have any requirement that you’re devoted to the art. I will expect you to respect it—and to show up for practices on time.”
A smile curled my lips behind my mask. Darton sounded a tad chastened in his reply.
“Right. Of course.”
Coach believed in fencers staying fully suited up for practice so we were as comfortable as possible with the equipment we’d wear in competition, so they walked off to get Darton prepared. I felt his movements through the room with a faint tickling over my skin. My sparring partner disarmed me twice. I’d just paused to take a breath and regroup when Coach headed back our way, Darton in tow.
“Emma is one of our most experienced members,” Coach was saying. “Since you two have already ‘met,’ I’ll have her lead you through the basic warm-up.”
My back stiffened. He often asked senior members to teach the junior ones, but it hadn’t occurred to me he’d come to me, now, with this. Sodding hell. Darton was already eyeing me. If I acted cagey for no obvious reason, I’d draw his attention even more.
If I was careful, the risk of skin-to-skin physical contact was minimal. The other risks, which had to do with the heart pounding away in my chest, I’d just have to deal with.
I drew myself up straighter and tucked my one bare hand deeper into my sleeve. “Sure, I can take him through the paces.”
Darton raised his eyebrow at me. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep up.”
He did, which was a relief because it meant I didn’t need to get close to adjust his position. It was also an annoyance, because I could hear him getting smugger with each comment he tossed out. He’d been a master with a broadsword way back when. It wasn’t surprising he’d pick up fencing quickly. But that didn’t mean I had to like how this unaware incarnation talked about it.
