The Fury Queen’s Harem: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (The Cursed Dragon Queen and Her Mates Book 1)

by Meg Xuemei X

  Was I trying to make excuse for him?

  An hour later, when Sybil flashed a few pictures of Rai and Iokul and their dragon men stumbling toward the edge of the jungle, Blaze told me, “They’ve reached the forest.” Worry deepened the creases of his brows.

  It would take hours for them to reach my chamber, and my jungle was another perilous place.

  “I’ve ordered my monsters not to eat your men,” I said. “Let’s see what else I can do.”

  And so, I did what I usually wouldn’t do and summoned Phantom, the half-beast, half-elemental creature.

  He could also shift the jungle, just like Akem. I’d seen Akem’s essence—a living black hole, but I had never seen Phantom’s. But when he passed, I could feel the chill slicing up my spine and it wouldn’t go away for a long time.

  I had no idea if Phantom would help me out since he was the only one in the jungle whom I couldn’t control.

  But the next minute, Blaze turned to me with amazement. “They’re here, right outside. You can teleport people as well?”

  “No,” I said. “The Guardian of the Nightmares did it for me as a favor.”

  I believed that Phantom helped me because I’d helped get rid of Akem; the asshole entity had been starving Phantom for as long as I knew.

  Blaze blinked. He must have thought my three Furies were the Guardians of the Nightmares.

  I winked. “The jungle is full of surprises.”

  Sybil flew in and landed on a high beam before Iokul charged in. The ice dragon’s silver eyes found me first, and a light of relief flashed by as he saw I was safe. Then his icy gaze swept over Blaze.

  “The warriors are coming in,” Iokul said grimly. “Only a handful of our men survived, and we lost three full-blood dragons.”

  So, not all his men were dragon shifters, but I knew all the men had more or less dragon blood in them. I’d smelled that.

  Blaze swallowed, his fists clenching. “They’ll pay. They’ll all pay.”

  Rai stumbled in with two wounded soldiers leaning on either side of him, meeting my gaze as he entered. Blaze rushed toward them to help. The princes brought in all of the surviving warriors.

  Rai’s advisor, Quintrell, was among them. He limped into my chamber and gave me a wearied look. He’d once urged Rai to cut my heads and deliver them to my grandfather to claim the inheritance of the Dragon Realm all by himself.

  Probably suffering from the trauma, the rest of the warriors didn’t pay much attention to my three forms. They had a fair share of seeing all sorts of monsters during their short stay on Pandemonium.

  The wounded were more than eager to crash onto the scattered cushions with pained grunts.

  Rai focused on helping Chiron tend to the soldiers. The healer had been the one who had brought the medic kit to Rai and tended to my two other Furies when the drones had wounded us.

  Henry, my hellhound, trotted in. He rubbed against my side with affection, then went straight to harass the wounded dragon men, snarling and stalking around them.

  The warriors, who were relatively in better shape, trained their weapons toward my hound.

  Akem used to have three hellhounds. Archangel Gabriel killed one, and the wolf shifter King Marrok killed the other. Gabriel’s angelblade, the most fatal sword, had gutted Henry in the war against Akem as well, but my hellhound survived.

  “Hurt my hound, and you’ll be sorry,” I said matter-of-factly, scanning the dragon men and fixing my piercing gaze on Quintrell, who had every intention of shooting Henry.

  Quintrell flinched, and the men all hesitated.

  “Do not harm any jungle creature!” Rai snapped, then turned to me. “Daisy?”

  I knew what he was asking and nodded.

  The blood on the dragon men was sending Henry into a frenzy.

  Henry, I ordered sternly. Go play somewhere else.

  He whimpered but obeyed me. Like a black arrow, he shot out of my chamber, most likely to go hunt some smaller beasts.

  In my jungle, it was always either kill or being eaten.

  I could no more change the rules and the nature of the beasts than Akem.

  Sybil stayed, her one wing fluttering. Of all the beasts and monsters, she and Henry were the only two who were allowed to enter my chamber. Sometimes I might close my eyes and let Lamashtus wander in for a little while.

  Rai left the wounded to the care of the medics and came to me, joining his brothers on the fringe of the pool. He pressed his forehead against mine, regardless of my scales, inhaling my scent for comfort. Even in my Fury forms, I scented like a dragon, according to the princes. Maybe that was why they could all see me beyond my freakish beastly forms.

  Blaze gave his brother the center spot, knowing Rai needed it.

  Iokul stayed close to us, but he didn’t touch me. The ice dragon had only lost his control when we’d made out.

  “The demons destroyed our ship,” Rai said, his usually beautiful voice hoarse and devastating. “The pilot and the captain were both killed.”

  “I saw it,” I said, sorrow filling my eyes.

  “We took down Falling Star,” Blaze said, eyes burning with hatred. “We’ll kill all the demons.”

  “The captain of the Falling Star remained neutral,” Rai said. “He didn’t join the hunt. He only piloted the ship. Quintrell said the captain slipped a warning to us before the attack. They had him at gunpoint. The demon captain Fomorian promised the hunters Daisy’s heads. The demons have no interest in the Dragon Realm. Their sole purpose is to kill Daisy. The hunters decided to eliminate us—their biggest threat.”

  “That’s what I suspected all along. The demons didn’t answer King Daghda’s bounty poster,” Iokul said. “They were sent by someone else.”

  “Someone who cursed you doesn’t want you to return,” Blaze said as a realization hit him, his jaw tightening in rage. “They want to make sure our Daisy is dead.”

  I hesitated before I ground out, “Elvey seems to know something about my curse.”

  Blaze pulled his lips back in a snarl. “He may be the one who hexed you, and he led the demons to attack us. I’ll cut him to pieces when I catch him.”

  “I don’t think he’s one who cursed me,” I said. For some reason, I didn’t want them to hurt Elvey. I felt kin toward him. But if he was the one who had issued that attack and caused the many deaths of the dragon men—

  No, I didn’t believe Elvey was the villain. His hands must have been tied when the attack had happened.

  “But I have a hunch he might know who,” I added.

  “Do you have feelings for him, Daisy?” Iokul asked coolly, yet ice coated his eyes. “You’re defending him.”

  I hissed out a stream of black fire, and the princes leaped back half a foot in alarm. “How could I have feelings for him when I’ve only known him less than an hour?”

  You can’t dictate feelings, a voice said in my head. One can fall in love at first sight, and not love another even after spending a lifetime with him.

  I didn’t fall in love with Elvey! I snarled at the voice.

  “I wasn’t defending him,” I said, my voice stiff. “I was trying to tell you if you kill him before I know the truth about my curse, I might never find out who did it.”

  “Shush,” Rai said and touched my nose to calm me. “Iokul is always the most suspicious one among us. He doesn’t trust anyone. He’s been that way since he was a child. He didn’t mean to upset you, but today we suffered a great loss.”

  Iokul looked away from me, the ice in his silver eyes not melting.

  “I don’t blame him.” I sighed as I scanned the wounded warriors in the room.

  We were down to eighteen men.

  The much grimmer thing was that even if our curses were lifted, we were still stuck here. We didn’t have a ship to leave Pandemonium.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Absolutely not!” Rai, Blaze, and Iokul almost objected at the same time.

  “It’s my decision as well,” I sa
id, my Fury voice still hoarse. “Look at me, I’m not exactly a defenseless damsel, and we’re in this together now.”

  If Rai hadn’t rescued me from the drones, and if the princes hadn’t ventured to my chamber to try to win me, their ship wouldn’t have suffered such a fate and many of their kin would have been alive.

  “You’ll need to treat me as an equal, who not only share your joy but your burden, danger, and grief, if you ever want me to be your mate,” I continued. “Plus, what I proposed is the best way to reduce the enemies’ numbers—we are twenty-two against over a hundred demons and the hunters combined, unless you have a better idea.”

  I planned to lure the demons, and the hunters who had survived the ship crash, into the Vampire Tower, before they could all come down upon us, which they would do soon. We could hold on for a while in the jungle, but the casualties on our side would be grave.

  I had told the princes and their men about the Vampire Tower—any non-vampires who entered it would never get out, except for me. The tower was indestructible due to its ancient dark magic. Too bad the dragons too would be trapped if they entered the tower, or we could use it as our headquarters.

  At my mentioning of “mate,” every dragon man snapped their attention toward me, especially Quintrell, who had wanted Rai to decapitate me instead of making me his mate.

  Blaze grinned, despite all the disaster today and the grave situation ahead. “So, you agree to be our mate?”

  Rai gazed at me with hopeful look, and Iokul’s ice expression melted a little.

  The princes’ men widened their eyes. Even the wounded stopped their groaning. Quintrell sighed audibly, as if this was even more unfortunate than the destruction of the ship.

  Evidently, no one, except the three dragon princes, could perceive how a Fury beast could be their princes’ mate.

  But I knew in my beastly heart what they all meant to me.

  They’d saved me, risked for me, and accepted me for who I was, no matter what form I took.

  They might not be my true loves since the curse still leeched on me as I still wasn’t able to shift to a dragon or stay as Fae as long as I wanted.

  But true loves be damned.

  I’d decided to throw my lot in with the dragon princes when they’d all kissed my beastly form. Wait, Iokul hadn’t kissed my Fury form.

  I blinked. Was that why my cursed hadn’t fallen off?

  Would that be the requirement to lift off the curse—not just a kiss from three true loves, but a kiss from three true loves on my hideous beastly form instead of my Fae form? No one had a problem with kissing a beauty, but it would take great, blind love to behold the ugly as the beauty and kiss her, right?

  I’d have to test the theory and get Iokul to kiss my scaled Fury lip, soon.

  “We can talk about the mate thing after we have victory over our enemies,” I said.

  Quintrell nodded in approval. “That’s sensible.”

  All three princes glared at him for his interference, until he murmured an apology and stepped back.

  Before I mapped out what we needed to do to get the demons and the hunters into the Vampire Tower, the men threw tons of questions about the vampires’ diet and why the tower was a permanent, supernatural prison for non-vampires.

  The dragons were a curious bunch. Even the wounded had forgotten their pain and joined to question me. I wasn’t in the mood for a Q&A, particularly when I was in my Fury form. I tended to think better and was less hot-tempered as a Fae.

  I puffed out a few streams of black fire.

  But instead of quieting them, they got curious about my fire. “If she’s a dragon, why isn’t her fire red or orange?”

  In the end, Rai put an end to their questions and ordered them to be quiet.

  “Daisy is tired,” he told them.

  After another round of discussion, Rai, Blaze, and Iokul reluctantly agreed that drawing the enemies into the Vampire Tower was by far a workable strategy.

  All they had to do was hide under the canopy and shoot down any missile or the drone that chased me.

  As soon as the men were in position, my three Furies soared toward the skylight of my chamber and sailed away from the jungle.

  CHAPTER 15

  We flew in a triangular formation toward the Vampire Tower.

  My mates’ worries for me were so intense they were tangible on my wings. Somehow, as I put distance between us, I could feel the link between us all, though faint and hazy.

  I made sure the hunters saw me.

  They shouted excitingly at the sight of the three Furies. Arrows and beams passed us by and they chased after us down below.

  As soon as we approached the Vampire Tower, we swooped and touched down.

  The vampires guarding the tower tensed in fear, but they’d fight me if their lord ordered them to.

  “I’m bringing you flesh blood,” I told them.

  Comprehension hit their marble-cold faces.

  The vampires immediately cooperated and darted into their black tower, ready for a good ambush.

  The guards at the gate gave me a wide berth.

  We waited until the hunters could see us and flew through the door.

  With their weapons thrust before them, the hunters boldly charged into the tower. The vampires didn’t stop them. While a few meaner hunters turned the guns toward the vampires, the bloodsuckers, who could duck faster than bullets with their preternatural speed, snatched the weapons out of the hunters and dragged their prey into the tower.

  The vampires were smart not to sink their teeth into the hunters’ necks and drain them right on spot. They wouldn’t want to discourage the rest of the hunters from entering their lair.

  My enemies kept charging into the death trap to hunt me. I let out a satisfied sigh as three of us flew up toward the high floors.

  The tower was a vast skyscraper left by an old civilization. There was plenty of room for three of my Furies to fly around and up.

  The hunters on the ground raised their weapons to shoot either me or the vampires—mostly me—but my hosts were fast enough to drag their victims into the maze of different rooms to consume them.

  Angry snarls from struggling and fighting, delightful hisses from feeding, and screams of pain filled the Vampire Tower.

  It sounded like a fun party.

  The Vampire Lord stood at the high railing, watching while I alighted behind him on the black-and-white marble floor under a diamond chandelier.

  The strikingly handsome Vampire Lord looked bored and bleak.

  He hadn’t recovered from the blow delivered by the Wickedest Witch. If there was any consolation, Akem, my former boss, had suffered worse fate at her hands.

  But if I’d thought for a second that Desdemona was tired of life, I was mistaken.

  His eyes turned crimson with hunger.

  “Secure the food resources,” he ordered sternly, his voice echoing in every corner of the tower, powered by his vampire magic. “Do not drain them. Our livestock are running low. Time to replenish them.”

  As I watched the vampires subdue the hunters, I wondered why there wasn’t a single demon entering the tower. Then it dawned on me.

  They must know that the Vampire Tower was a trap.

  How could they know?

  I recalled that I’d tossed two demons into the tower a few days ago. Were the demons hive-minded, so the two demons could have warned the rest of their kind? Too bad my scheme fell apart due to my limited demonology knowledge.

  Or Elvey could have warned his demon army. As a powerful Fae mage, he would have smelled of the foul, dark magic that dwelled in the Vampire Tower.

  I still had no idea if he was a foe or a friend, but whenever I thought of him, my heartbeat always picked up and my skin heated at the same time. That was disturbing since my mind shouldn’t have wandered to him while I already had three smoking-hot and devoted dragon princes.

  Desdemona wheeled toward me, leered at me with interest. “So, tell me, Fury,
or Daisy, who are you really?”

  “Who I am has nothing to do with you, Desdemona,” I said in a hoarse, unpleasant voice that I didn’t bother to smooth over.

  “Since you’re in my tower, you need to show me the same courtesy you showed the dragons and even the despicable Archangel,” he said.

  I arched an eyebrow.

  “Show me your other form,” he said, gesturing at me. “I heard you’re actually quite a beauty, and as the Lord of Vampires, I do not appreciate these three hideous beasts.”

  “No wonder you never get the girl, Desdemona,” I said.

  I flapped my wings, lifted myself up, and flew toward the window.

  While the Vampire Lord would live alone forever, I had three princes to go to.

  I phased out of the tower, my two other selves following me with shrieks.

  CHAPTER 16

  My two Furies slammed into me at my summoning as I dove down the open skylight in my chamber. I landed in the center of the spring pool in my naked Fae form. When I broke out of the water, Rai, Blaze, and Iokul all surrounded me.

  The dragon soldiers averted their gazes, at the order of their princes.

  Iokul had a robe ready in his hands and wrapped it around me. I was a bit surprised, since usually it was Rai’s role to take care of me more than the others.

  But both Blaze and Rai held a towel. I got it. The three of them had rushed to pick up a robe and towels the moment they saw me change in the air.

  Iokul must have thought he’d had an upper hand by selecting a robe and had the satisfaction when he’d put them around me. But now when Rai wiped my face and neck dry with the towel and Blaze worked on getting the water out of my hair, Iokul gave them a baleful look.

  Blaze sent him a smug grin and nudged him away from me. “Excuse me, Iokul. Would you mind stepping aside, so I can dry Daisy’s hair nicely? We don’t want her to catch a cold.” Until he noticed Rai’s towel lingering on the swell of my exposed breasts.

  “It’s time to dry her feet, Rai!” Blaze snapped.