Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Her gaze searched the faces in the crowd. Beside Conall, Antares stood watching her in silence. He gave her a nod of reassurance but kept his distance, allowing her to lead where needed. His expression was sure and proud, but worried. He knew she had to do this. But she could tell he just damn well hoped it all worked out.

  Anna took a deep breath and knelt down beside Piper then closed her eyes, concentrating. She slipped her hand into the pocket of her grey leather jacket and sighed with relief when her fingers closed over the object she’d been concentrating on. Antares was right. She was going to thoroughly enjoy some of the perks that came with being a dragon. Such as wishing for a specific sugary sweet, and having it appear in her pocket.

  The clothes Anna now wore were the dark gray leather clothes that had formed over her body when she’d shifted back into human form. Because of her inherited draconic knowledge, Annaleia innately understood that the clothing was an extension of her, the charcoal gray leather a reflection of her inner storm, shot through with the gradient purple of her own electric magic. She loved the outfit. Especially the boots. Plus, she looked really damn good in it.

  But the sweetest thing about the clothes was that as an extension of her, they were capable of rooting her in the dragon realm. As long as she wasn’t somehow permanently separated from them, she could pull things to her from that other world. Such as candy from her own candy closet. Every dragon had one. Every dragon had a den.

  She didn’t know where her own den was yet, but it seemed to already be well stocked, because when Anna pulled her hand back out, she was holding the Australian Violet Crumble chocolate bar that she’d hoped for. It was Piper’s favorite candy.

  Along with about a million other interesting draconic facts, Annaleia had been given the knowledge that every born dragon was automatically granted their own den. The dens were similar to the one Ares possessed, but each was catered to its dragon owner. The den would appear somewhere in the ever-expanding dragon realm as soon as all three of the new dragon’s hearts beat their first beat. The dragon only then had to find the den and claim it, which was easy since the den would call to and guide its dragon home and would open for no one else.

  Anna had a lot to look forward to. But for now, she showed the bar to Piper and said, “Eat this.” She wished dragons had sway over mortal will the way vampires did, but alas that was not one of their natural talents anywhere but in their dens alone. Otherwise she could have just forced her friend to eat it. She held the candy out to Piper and added, “And trust me. Okay?”

  Piper regarded the chocolate bar with more confusion, her brow furrowing. “What? Why – Anna, I’m so sorry but I’m telling you I don’t feel like I have your ability –”

  Jarrod Sterling stepped toward them, moving so that he took a knee directly behind Piper. He leaned in close to her, his lips to her ear, his gaze locked on Anna. “Take the candy, Piper,” he told her softly. Anna could feel his incubus magic wrapping around her friend; small measures of it rolled off him, enough for Anna to feel it brush against her own skin. She gave him a very slight nod of appreciation, and he smiled at her.

  “Take it and eat it,” he told Piper, his eyes glittering as his small smile became decidedly wicked. The command was an innuendo if ever there was one, but he was a sex demon, so she wasn’t the least bit surprised.

  Besides, it worked. Piper’s eyes glazed over. She reached out and took the bar from Anna’s hand, unwrapped it, and took a bite as around twenty supernaturally gorgeous men in leather and blood moved closer to watch with hungry eyes of their own. Anna glanced up at them all, her radar going wary. But they were the good guys. Members of her clan, members of Ares’ clan. It was just that looking the way they did now, it was hard to forget so many of them were… monsters.

  Anna straightened where she knelt as her eyes moved from one Monsters clan member to another. Her dragon senses pricked as their scents moved through her. They’re all monsters, she realized. Every one of them. Ares wasn’t alone among them in his supernatural status; not a single Monsters clan member was mortal.

  It wasn’t just Maze’s goons she’d been scenting earlier. There were some very, very powerful players in this crowd.

  She’d always suspected the Monsters clan was more than they appeared to be and that they’d chosen their name for a reason having nothing to do with hubris. She was right.

  When she’d processed this and looked back down at Piper, it was to find her swallowing her last bite of bar. Sterling took the wrapper from her and it vanished. Annaleia concentrated again, this time on a drink, and a very small bottle of water bulged out her pocket. She pulled it out, twisted the cap off, and handed it to her friend.

  Piper drank without question, even though her eyes had nothing but questions in them.

  Once she’d finished, she lowered the bottle, handed it to Sterling, and looked Anna in the eyes. “If I try this and I fail, I’m going to look like the worst person in the world.”

  “You won’t fail,” Anna told her firmly. She turned to the detective. “Detective, please lay your partner down.”

  Detective James nodded once, his eyes bloodshot, and his face pale. He scooted back, gently laying his partner out on the concrete of the sidewalk in front of Piper and Annaleia.

  Anna turned back to Piper. “Okay, you’re up. Now place your hands palm-down on her chest.”

  Piper looked down at the body, no doubt considering the amount of blood soaking through the woman’s shirt. But she swallowed audibly, rolled back her shoulders, and placed her hands on the woman’s chest just as Anna had instructed.

  Annaleia turned to the detective. “You know that the last thing she saw was you shifting from wolf to man. This isn’t the way you wanted to tell her, I’m betting. But you’ll have to come out of the closet now no matter what.”

  The detective nodded. “I know.”

  “That’s why Maze did what he did,” Carmen said from where she stood looking down at them. “Because he knew it would cause upheaval. Victor Maze is like my Tio Tony. He isn’t happy unless he’s pitting one family member against another.”

  Anna looked up at her friend. No doubt, she was absolutely right.

  “Ready Piper?”

  “No,” said Piper.

  “Okay, good. Now close your eyes.”

  Piper closed her eyes.

  “Good, keep them closed and imagine what I tell you to imagine.” Anna gave Sterling a pointed look, and Sterling placed his hand on Piper’s shoulder to lend her a little dream-inducing magic. “Now imagine you’re standing on a dark and cold plane. The only thing on this cold, dark plane other than you is a hole in the ground with a staircase leading down. But at the bottom of the stairs is a faint light. So you descend the stairs toward the light, and once you reach the bottom, you find a well.”

  The world had grown very quiet around Annaleia. She licked her lips and continued. “It’s a wishing well, like the one from Snow White. It’s dark everywhere else but in this well. You make your way toward it and as you come closer, the light grows brighter. This light is the most beautiful, hopeful thing you have ever seen. You need more of it so you pull the bucket up with the well’s rope. The bucket comes up filled to the brim with that wonderful, warm glow.

  Suddenly you want nothing more than to spread the well’s light around in the dark and cold that you left behind up those stairs. You take the bucket off the rope and carry it to the stairs. Then you climb the stairs. As you reach the top of the stairs, the light leaves the bucket all by itself. It leaves trails like shooting stars as it spreads out to fill the darkness and the cold.”

  Anna opened her eyes as very soft whispers and gasps sounded around them. She grinned, but managed to quell her outcry of joy when she saw a familiar light beneath Piper’s palms. She watched as that light spread over the fallen officer’s chest, then rapidly shot out toward her extremities, lighting up the fingertips of each hand.

  She took a breath and said to Piper, “Now imag
ine that the light replicates itself. The more it spreads, the more light there is, growing exponentially. Until finally there’s a very bright flash. When you can see again, the once dark and cold plain has become a lush garden that stretches to the horizon.”

  Piper’s brow furrowed. Her lips parted. She shuddered as the light enveloping the fallen detective grew to a bright flash before dying out.

  Annaleia shielded her eyes and held her breath.

  When she lowered her arm, it was to see James’ partner’s chest rise and fall again as it drew in renewed life before she opened her beautiful hazel eyes to the world.

  Epilogue – Pacific Northwest

  “So I hear,” said Cain. He held his phone to his ear out of habit, but he could have heard the person on the other end if he’d put the damn thing in his back pocket. Cell phones were loud. Plus, with his hearing he could have heard it several blocks away.

  It was Katrielle on the other end, giving him the update he’d requested in return for his own. He listened, but his eyes never left his target as she moved from room to room within the house across the street. Her windows were closed, but Cain could easily “see” past the curtains.

  When Kat had stopped talking, Cain said, “Well, the new reviver has joined the Draco clan to be with Faith. She’ll get all the training she needs to keep her from doing anything suicidal from now on, not to mention her very own sentinel.” To say nothing of the watchful eyes of both Conall Tiarnahn and Jarrod Sterling. Piper Maddox wasn’t going to be able to brush her teeth without someone checking to make sure the bristles weren’t too hard.

  And maybe that was a good thing. The girl was all spark. Not that Cain minded that kind of person at all – it was just that the world was a powder keg these days.

  Cain listened as Katrielle shot him a question. In turn, he gave her what information he had. “The body on Mace’s property belonged to a random. Twenty-two years of age, parents divorced. He ran away to join a gang at fifteen, never graduated high school. We’re pretty sure Price chose him for the jacket and the bike. Any ambiguity was cleared up with the carving Price added to the kid’s back.” It had been a stylized dragon. And the message was clear.

  Petulant. But clear.

  “I don’t think so,” Cain said in response to Kat’s latest question. “I think that was closure for him. He no longer considers Faith his perfect work of art. She’s been re-painted. Unfortunately we’re not done with him. My guess is he just gives Maze too much energy to be disposable. Or….”

  Cain’s vivid blue gaze remained locked on the woman moving through the two-story home. “Or Maze needs him for something specific, something the much more human Randall Price might be able to get closer to right now.”

  Or someone, he thought. He watched from where he sat on his bike across the street as the woman under his scrutiny bumped into a table he could have sworn wasn’t there a second ago and cursed under her breath. He could imagine it would bruise.

  “Price is handy. He can get closer to anyone who hasn’t met him and who would recognize Maze’s signature giveaways, like different colored eyes or different cufflinks or even the chaos power boiling out of him.” Cain studied the woman as she reached for her computer and knocked over a glass of water in the process.

  He waited as Kat asked him one final thing. He said, “I don’t think there’s any point. Maze’s magic is what Sharpe would call, ‘Forrest Gumped.’ It’s a box of chocolates. We have no idea what the hell will happen next, so stretching ourselves any thinner to prepare for it makes no sense. Rest and training are our best options right now.”

  He fell silent, then said, “Got it.” He tapped the phone off and pocketed it. Then he rested back in the motorcycle’s saddle and took a slow, deep breath.

  Beneath his ever-watchful gaze, the woman stopped in her living room and seemed lost for a moment. Cain went eerily still. She slowly put her hands over her face. His piercing eyes flashed, sparking to a blue fire glow for several seconds before he managed to tamp them down again.

  She dropped her hands and carded her fingers through her hair.

  Cain caught the scent of her shampoo, even from outdoors and across the street. He caught every tiny movement, every breath, every slight shift in the expressions on her face.

  Not once did he attempt to brush her mind or read her thoughts. Instead he remained where he was and watched for close to an hour. Then he cocked his head to the side, his gaze slipping from his target for the first time since the sun had gone down. His inner radar went off. He was needed elsewhere.

  Cain started up his bike. It would have alerted the neighborhood to his presence if not for the magic that cloaked him. He kicked up the stand, revved the bike’s engine, and rode it out into the street until he was hitting the highway.

  Ten minutes later, he was pulling the bike up alongside a similar cruiser and shutting it down across the street from a different kind of building. The wards that protected him from detection by most people were still active, but the other Monsters clan member in the street still noticed him.

  Nathan Connor was leaning with his shoulder against a brick wall in the shadows beneath a street light. His arms were crossed over his chest, his face was dark, and his eyes were hard. Cain could sense the plethora of extra blanketed shields he’d placed over himself, no doubt to hide his presence from the person he was watching, just as Cain had been doing a few minutes earlier.

  Connor met his gaze but said nothing before returning his attention to the object of his scrutiny three stories up. Cain shoved his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and casually joined him in the shadows.

  “So… how’s tricks, Nate?” he asked with just as much casual ease before he, too, looked up at the feminine shadow that passed before the living room window’s curtains on the third floor.

  Nathan tensed; Cain could feel something odd in the man’s aura, a kind of strain in the magic coming off him. He recognized it, but it made little sense. It was old-school basic hunger, in Nate’s case a hunger for goldblood. Except it was far too soon for him to be feeling that hunger. Nate had just recently fed. He should have been good to go for a few months, usually a year minimum under Cain’s flag.

  Right now the hunger wasn’t too strong yet, and certainly not desperate. But it shouldn’t have been there at all. This was what Cain had sensed earlier, when he’d changed course on the highway.

  He had a feeling the increased hunger cycle could be chalked up to the same cause of just about every other strange or unexpected turn of events right now: Victor-fucking-Maze. He’d had a similar effect on the Taal, after all. Werewolves were feeling an increased need to hunt. Hell, even humans were rioting.

  Cain watched carefully as Nate slowly drew in a deep breath and let it out with practiced patience. His gold gaze still trained on the window up above, he said, “I know why you’re here.” His tone was lower, colder than usual. “You could tell what she was in the garage, couldn’t you? Were you planning on telling me?”

  Cain chose his words very carefully. “Nope.”

  But then he always chose his words carefully. Which was why he was a man of few words.

  Nate let out a short laugh under his breath. “No, I don’t suppose that would have been my move either if I’d been in your shoes.”

  But now Cain drew in a quick breath and said, “Nate, I wasn’t going to tell you because I knew you were already aware of what she was. So there was no point.”

  Which was all true. Nathan Connor was a powerful Apex and a member of the Monsters clan. Of course he’d noticed. And this right here, Cain had also known was going to happen. Because Victoria Grace was not only a rare and beautiful Golddust. Cain had caught the way she’d looked at Connor before she was taken away by Katrielle so that her spells could be reinforced.

  No… this here was bound to happen. This and a hell of a lot more.

  Nathan seemed to consider Cain’s words, and at long last he turned away from the building to face his
clan leader. “So then… why are you here, boss?”

  Nathan was one of the few members of the clan who frequently referred to Cain as “boss,” despite him being the most off-hands “boss” a clan leader could possibly be. Most of them simply deferred to him. They refrained from phrases like “boss” and “sir” because they were men in a motorcycle club, and because they knew he didn’t give a shit. But there were a few members who’d come from a place of certain civility, and that sophistication and adherence to convention was just an unshakable part of who and what they were. Nathan was one such member.

  Cain shrugged, glancing up. “I know what’s going through your head right now.” He watched as the light in the living room behind the curtains went out, casting the apartment in darkness. Then he looked back down at Nathan.

  Nate was watching the dark window, his jaw set tight.

  “So I’m going to give you a piece of advice,” Cain continued.

  Nathan tensed even further. But he lowered his head and looked at the ground, the corners of his mouth turning up in a small smile. “Tread carefully?” he offered in assumption.

  “No, jackass.”

  Nate’s head snapped up. Gold eyes met blue.

  Cain’s gaze narrowed. “Don’t waste any time.”

  Now Nathan’s brow furrowed uncertainly.

  Cain sighed. “Connor, you and I know damn well you would never hurt a woman, and that includes Golddusts during a hard gold fever hunger. It’s the reason you are what you are in the first place.” He’d been weak when he’d faced off with the Dire werewolf all those years ago because he’d refused to take something from someone without their permission, and there was simply a shortage of freely-offered goldblood. “I don’t have to worry about you in that respect, and neither does Grace. What I do have to worry about is the fact that Michael Clemens is still out there somewhere and he’d love nothing more than to capitalize on the known whereabouts of a Golddust. You know how much he loves making money off the blood of beautiful women.”