by Anya Nowlan
For a moment, she stared at the procession like a deer caught in headlights, feeling her stomach drop. Right there, she saw everything she had thought she wanted, with the small absence of her husband-to-be at the end of the line.
Instead of feeling despair, she grinned wide, euphoria taking over.
“Isobel, come on,” Allie whispered, trying to tug on her hand as everybody’s gazes were locked on them. “We have to go.”
“I know,” Isobel muttered in response, her blue eyes shining. “There isn’t going to be a wedding!” she shouted, grinning from ear to ear and making the crowd hush in stunned silence. “You can all go home now. The groom’s a lying, whoring prick and I don’t fucking want him. Luckily for me, he doesn’t want me either!”
With that, she turned and ran again, Allie right behind her, both of them struggling and stumbling with the dress. As soon as Isobel stepped into the sunlight outside the church, she felt like something broke free in her. As if something snapped and changed at that very instant when the sun shined down on her, illuminating the stone steps that would lead to the parked limousine waiting for the happy couple.
Now what? she wondered, looking at Allie.
“Limo!” Allie announced, practically shoving Isobel down the steps as both of them heard a murmur of growing voices behind them.
They scooted into the stretch black limousine and Allie slammed her hand twice on the partition between them and the driver.
“Drive!” she yelled. “Anywhere! Fast! Go, go, go!”
The limo peeled off from the front of the church just as Alicia Evans and two of the more overzealous bridesmaids poured out of the building, waving their hands and her bridal bouquet at the car. Isobel stared blankly out of the back window until her attention was shifted by a bottle being shoved into her hands.
“Drink,” Allie said matter-of-factly. “You need it.”
Allie’s cheeks were bright red, but she was smiling. When Isobel looked down at the bottle in her hands, she burst out laughing.
It was the champagne she’d picked.
So I get a sip after all!
All of that didn’t answer her question though. Now what?
Aeon
“Ow,” Hex muttered, holding an icepack to his head as he was sprawled out on one of the antique couches.
Aeon felt the almost untamable urge to tell him to take his feet off of grandmother’s prized sixteenth century classic, but he bit his tongue. Mostly because his throat still hurt from all the firebreathing, and he was equally as wiped out on the chair that accompanied the set.
“My sentiments exactly,” Phase commented, studying the black eye he was sporting in one of the big gilded mirrors in the study they were sitting at. “Toss me one of those,” he said, prompting Aeon to scoop out one of the ice jelly packs from the silver bowl filled with ice.
It was sitting on a table that looked to cost as much as a man would make in a year. For a trio of time dragons, it was little more than a trinket, nothing at all compared to the riches they held in the various lairs spread out across the globe.
Aeon tossed the cool blue pack at his brother, who caught it without sparing a glance at it as it flew towards his head. The moment he put it on his face, a low whizz of melting ice hissed from the point where skin touched the pack. It was one of the few downsides of being a dragon – the few times you’d need to nurse and ice a wound, the ice packs ended up becoming useless within a couple moments.
“You really did a number on us this time, brother,” Hex said, groaning to emphasize his words.
Aeon chuckled, shaking his head. Every year, it was the same bullshit.
The Prevoir family had lasted through the ages. Some said that before time itself was born, the time dragons had kept watch over all that there was and all that there ever would be. To Aeon, that sounded like a bit of a stretch, but the point of the matter was that their kin came with a certain amount of traditions that could and would not be changed.
Chief among them was the yearly Battle of the Keepers. Each year, the Alpha brothers of each Prevoir lair would come together and fight for the right to guard the lair for the year. The theory was that the strongest would win and come out on top, as such ensuring that the family fortune was always guarded by those who were the most worthy.
What it also meant was that the eldest brothers, usually the strongest in each branch of the family, were the ones who got stuck with the job. Over the centuries, the tradition had been batted back and forth a bit. Sometimes out of necessity – if there was only one Keeper, for example – and sometimes out of more base needs, like the desire to have some ‘fun’ as Hex would put it.
Aeon had been the Keeper of the Prevoir lair for almost a decade now. From the time he was eighteen and old enough to fight for it, he had always won. First against his father – though it had not made the head of their family any less of the commanding Alpha – and then against his younger brothers when they came of age.
Ten years, he mused, glancing out through the window thoughtfully, slowly rubbing his thumbs across his somewhat swollen knee.
For a decade, he had been confined in the castle that overlooked the fields and forests of their property in the South of France. For ten years, every morning he had descended into the deep, seemingly bottomless pits below the castle to stay near his hoard, and for ten years he had relished in the ability to do so.
Nothing felt quite as good to a dragon as being with his gold. Hex and Phase seemed to disagree somewhat, as Aeon had never really heard either of them grumble about their losses too much. Yet to Aeon, it didn’t matter. Castle Prevoir was his home and the hoard was his job, to protect it and keep it safe. So it had been since the dawn of dragon wealth and so it would be far past it.
“I do my best,” Aeon said with a shrug, finally coming back into the conversation. “Good fight this time, though. You might beat me next year.”
Instead of receiving the goading, confirming comments from his two brothers, Phase and Hex seemed to grow suddenly and inexplicably silent. That was not in their character.
Aeon frowned, flicking his slate-grey gaze from one to the other. All three of them were tall, Aeon being 6’5’’, with broad shoulders and narrow waists. Dragons tended to be lighter built than the bear shifters of the world, but that was more an illusion than anything else. They were at the top of the food chain as far as shifter hierarchy went and their lither, more athletic and dry builds hid the strength of far more time and experience than the other shifters did.
Hex avoided his gaze, seeking out Phase’s instead.
“You want to tell him?” he asked.
“One of us has to,” Phase replied, tossing the ice pack from across the room, having it land perfectly in the center of the pile of melting sacks.
“Tell me what?” Aeon asked, feeling the fire swirl in the pit of his stomach.
When those two got up to something, it could never end well.
“Well, we sort of…changed the rules this year,” Phase started, coming to sit down on a chair nearby.
Before he could touch his ass down on the cushion, Aeon was on his feet, his dragon slamming against the edges of his being. He had to take a deep breath, feeling smoke tendrils want to rise from his nostrils. It wouldn’t do to allow a shift to happen when inside the castle. Their Uncle Temps had done so more than half a century ago and their father had grumbled about the amount of time it had taken to repair that wing of the castle until his dying day five years ago.
“What do you mean changed the rules?” Aeon ground out, sensing Hex shrinking away from him a little.
Hex was young, but over the last few years he’d grown to be an admirable dragon in his own right. Maybe a little rough around the edges, but dragon lore always said that wisdom came with age, even for time dragons. Right now though, Aeon wasn’t sure if his brother had enough time still on his side to make it to that point of lauded wisdom somewhere in the future.
“You’ve been Keeper for
a decade, this would be your eleventh year,” Phase started, his own stormy-grey eyes now set on Aeon’s.
Aeon willed himself to listen and to calm down.
“You’ve read the history. You should know what that means.”
Aeon frowned, opening his mouth for a moment to protest, but then closing it again. He turned around on his heel and crossed the study to one of the high shelves at the opposite end of the room. He plucked a heavy book from the topmost shelf, inhaling a lungful of dust as he did so.
Coughing once or twice, he walked back to his two brothers, who were watching him closely as he flipped through the pages of the musty book. History of Prevoir, the be-all, say-all of the tales that governed the time dragons. Every branch of the family had one of these somewhere to guide them in the ways of the ancient rites and rules.
Of course, since the twenty-first century had rolled around, something like half of the families had begun promptly ignoring most of that stuff. To Aeon, it read like a bible of things that were right and wrong, just like his father Chronos had taught.
“Here,” he muttered, coming up to the right spot.
He read across the words quickly and then did it twice over, feeling the fire burn hot and then almost go out within him. Time seemed to ripple around him and Phase stood up as the world seemed to crackle and pop around where Aeon stood.
“Aeon,” he started, a warning in his voice. “Calm down. Think about it for a moment.”
Aeon looked up sharply, his eyes the gold and grey-black of his dragon, brimming with power and rage. He’d been tricked.
“You’ve tricked me,” he uttered, echoing the thought that trundled through him.
“We didn’t trick you,” Hex protested. “It’s in the rules. After a Keeper has governed for a decade, if a council of at least three potential Keepers exists, the rules of the Battle may be changed with a majority agreement. So we did. Winner gets a year off, loser guards the hoard. We lost, fair and square. And don’t tell me you don’t think we fought fair.”
“You should have told me,” Aeon spat, feeling the cold grip of defeat circling around his neck.
“Would you have fought any different?” Phase asked, cocking a brow.
Aeon quieted for a moment at that.
No, I wouldn’t have.
He didn’t say it though, choosing to stalk back to the shelves and put the book where he had found it, leaving a handprint on the dusty back cover in the process.
He knew as well as his brothers did that all three of them had fought to win, regardless of the rules. It was in their nature to be the victors, never bowing down. It was simply that this time, his younger brothers had outsmarted him and it was that which probably stung the worst.
“So what are you going to do with your time off?” Hex asked, exchanging the icepack he’d been keeping on his neck for another one. “Too soon?” he questioned with a grin when Aeon growled in response, wispy tendrils of smoke rising from his nostrils.
“A bit,” he grumbled, slinking into his seat and gripping the arm rests a tad too hard.
His whole body was coiled tight as a spring. The thought of leaving the hoard and spending a year doing… something was annoying him to hell and back. His dragon agreed.
“You could check out the tournament. You’re old enough now,” Phase offered with a shrug.
“Right. That’s what I need, to fight a bunch of dragons in another rigged battle,” Aeon snorted, hearing the note of bitterness in his tone. “Besides, I told you ages ago that I wouldn’t be taking part in the tournaments. That’s not for me.”
“I thought you were a stickler for custom,” Hex taunted, receiving a glare for his efforts that was a hint more gold than grey.
“Not always,” Aeon said, resting his head against the back of the chair.
The tournament that his brothers spoke of was held once a year. It was another custom that had been changed and warped over time, one that was common in many dragon communities. It was where the whole princess and the dragon myth had come from, for the most part.
For as long as dragons and humans had coexisted, there had been tournaments. The fairest woman in the lands, or so it was said, would be taken by a dragon elder and set as the prize in a tournament. Young heirs looking to take their place officially as the head of their family would fight for her hand in a series of battles and trials, with the victor getting the ‘princess.’
It was archaic and one of the few customs Aeon had no love for. Outside of Europe and Asia, it had mostly fallen out of fashion, and it had never been a thing with the American dragons for one reason or another. They always wanted to be different. But here, it still persisted, though somewhat changed in its format.
The ‘princess’ was no princess at all, of course. The royal families wouldn’t stand to peddle one of their own off to a dragon, no matter how rich and powerful the few remaining dragon families were in the backdrops of modern society. More often than not, she was not abducted either, but simply happened to be an outstanding female with something to offer to a dragon, who also stood to gain from it.
Most dragon families were at the very forefront of modern wealth and even though they preferred to keep the bulk of it in gold and jewels, you could hardly find a top 500 company that wasn’t in part or in full controlled by a dragon or two. Business sense and the acquisition of wealth simply flowed in their blood.
There were fewer and fewer dragons each year. Most young that were born were males and breeding with humans had always been a necessity. Since dragon genes took precedence, it didn’t pose a problem. But for Aeon, the tournament was not the way he wanted to find his bride.
A bride that is hard to find if you never leave home, he reminded himself.
It did little to lighten his mood.
“He’s thinking about it,” Phase said with a sly grin. “Aren’t you?”
“The tournament? No,” Aeon said flatly, reaching for the goblet of wine that sat on the table.
He gulped the whole thing down in one go, feeling no better for it.
“But if I must leave, I’ll leave. We’ll see what comes of it.”
“Don’t be such a damn spoil sport. You should be glad that you’re not going to be cooped up for a year like we are,” Hex said with a grumble and a roll of his eyes.
Aeon could barely restrain himself from tackling his mouthy little brother and really putting grandmother’s divan in some mortal peril.
Isobel
“This isn’t too bad,” Allie commented, passing a pink and purple drink to Isobel, who accepted it thankfully.
“Could be worse,” she agreed grimly, studying the crowd as she took her first sip.
The cocktail tasted like all sugar, which was usually a good sign that there was a ton of alcohol hidden right beneath it. That was something she could definitely use, not only because of where she was at the moment, but because of everything that had happened as of late.
The club was packed to the rafters. Hidden in the sleepy French town of Arles, the Maison Dragon was as hip as it was oddly old-school at the same time. It was tucked away in the deep, dark, cold passages that snaked beneath the town, ancient catacombs that had been expanded and the floors dropped a little in places to form three interconnecting dance halls and countless bars.
It was all hard stone, leather and wood, and the wall decorations consisted of etchings of dragons and mythical winged beasts, breathing fire down on unsuspecting strangers.
Creepy, she thought, taking another sip as Allie tugged her away from the bar.
All the staff was dressed in matte black and were impeccably groomed. The music pounded like an anvil, a mix of modern dance beats, hard house and trance music, depending on which room you were in. With her gaze scanning the surrounding throng of bodies, Isobel had never felt so out of place.
The crowd was around her age, hip and young and mostly European-chic skinny. She must have been the only woman with an ass in the whole bunch and the looks she kept ge
tting for it made her wish she hadn’t listened to Allie’s suggestions regarding her wardrobe.
The purple wrap dress that she had planned to wear during the fancy dinners she was supposed to have with Joshua as they honeymooned in Europe was now being used to flaunt her assets in glaring details at an underground club in France.
She wasn’t sure if it was a step up or a step down.
Regardless, she took another sip.
“Remind me why we’re here again?” Isobel practically had to yell to make Allie hear her.
Allie was already bobbing her head and tapping her foot a little to the incomprehensible song that was thudding through the room and through Isobel’s bones in the process.
“Because we need to get you out, get you moving. Just coming to Europe on your honeymoon is not enough, you actually have to do something, or someone, if you know what I mean! I think a quick one-night stand with a hot Frenchmen would only do you good, if you ask me,” Allie said with a grin, giving Isobel a wink.
She didn’t bother glaring at her friend. Allie was Allie and there was no changing her, bless her heart. Usually, Isobel ticked at the exact same beat as her friend did, but after running out on her damn wedding after getting dumped by her fiancé, she felt like she wasn’t quite up to her usual happy antics.
Not that I have been since meeting Joshua, she thought glumly, shaking her head immediately after.
She’d been thinking about her prick of an ex far too much. It was time to stop that. For God’s sake, they had been in sunny South of France for three days now, set up in a gorgeous villa that was supposed to be the starting point of her lavish honeymoon – friendmoon, as Allie had rechristened it, - and Isobel had barely crawled out of her room for a cup of coffee since.
This was the first time she’d actually left the house since getting there and thinking about it was sort of embarrassing enough without adding fuel to the fire.
