by Paula Quinn
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
White Hot
Rulers of the Sky Series
Book Three
by
Paula Quinn
Copyright © 2017 by Paula Quinn
Kindle Edition
Published by Dragonblade Publishing, an imprint of Kathryn Le Veque Novels, Inc
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Books from Dragonblade Publishing
Knights of Honor Series by Alexa Aston
Word of Honor
Marked By Honor
Code of Honor
Journey to Honor
Heart of Honor
Legends of Love Series by Avril Borthiry
The Wishing Well
Isolated Hearts
Sentinel
The Lost Lords Series by Chasity Bowlin
The Lost Lord of Castle Black
The Vanishing of Lord Vale
By Elizabeth Ellen Carter
Captive of the Corsairs, Heart of the Corsairs Series
Dark Heart
Knight Everlasting Series by Cassidy Cayman
Endearing
Enchanted
Midnight Meetings Series by Gina Conkle
Meet a Rogue at Midnight, book 4
Second Chance Series by Jessica Jefferson
Second Chance Marquess
Imperial Season Series by Mary Lancaster
Vienna Waltz
Vienna Woods
Vienna Dawn
Blackhaven Brides Series by Mary Lancaster
The Wicked Baron
The Wicked Lady
The Wicked Rebel
Highland Loves Series by Melissa Limoges
My Reckless Love
Clash of the Tartans Series by Anna Markland
Kilty Secrets
Kilted at the Altar
Queen of Thieves Series by Andy Peloquin
Child of the Night Guild
Thief of the Night Guild
Dark Gardens Series by Meara Platt
Garden of Shadows
Garden of Light
Garden of Dragons
Garden of Destiny
Rulers of the Sky Series by Paula Quinn
Scorched
Ember
White Hot
Viking’s Fury Series by Violetta Rand
Love’s Fury
Desire’s Fury
Passion’s Fury
Also from Violetta Rand
Viking Hearts
The Sons of Scotland Series by Victoria Vane
Virtue
Dry Bayou Brides Series by Lynn Winchester
The Shepherd’s Daughter
The Seamstress
The Widow
Dedication
To my treasures, Dan, Sam, and Hayley. Thank you for always believing in me. It’s more priceless than gold.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Books from Dragonblade Publishing
Dedication
Acknowledgement
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgement
To the wonderful and gracious Kathryn Le Veque and the Dragonblade Publishing team: You are all the most talented, professional people I know. I loved working with you!
Chapter One
Isle of Harris, Scotland
The Twenty-first
Jacob the White flexed the sinuous muscles in his shoulders and lifted his long, leathery wings. A thread of sheer exhilaration coursed through him as he brought them back down, snapping them around his thick, armored girth. His heart sang on the wild wind that battered his scales, in the altitude that snatched his breath as he rose toward the stars. He was flying. He was finally flying.
He’d dreamed of it for so long—a deeply rooted instinct, born from the blood of his father, Padgora of the Sixth, to soar and rule the sky. A haunting desire that called up from the chasm and robbed the luster from every other pleasure, leaving Jacob in an endless pursuit of its equal.
He looked around at the world in all its panoramic splendor and thrilled in the wind cutting across his wide, spiky head and scaly nostrils. He’d found it. He’d found what he’d been missing. This other part of himself.
He swung his long neck back and took in the vision of his white, spike-tipped wings. He was an impressive beast. His haunches were bursting with muscle and tipped with ten eleven-inch long claws. His jaw was as wide as three buses. His fangs could snap almost anything in two. He was power in its most primal form and he felt it. He reveled in it.
With a burst of elation at finally being set free, he flapped his wings and swung his great, spaded tail and played in the clouds.
Though he’d been altered two months ago, this was his first full night as Drakkon. He basked in it; enraptured by floating mountaintops and stars that felt so close he could touch them. The power was like nothing he’d ever known and he was unprepared for the intense desires that came with this part of his heritage, like the need for a horde, a treasure to protect, a virgin or two, and the need for food.
Everything that had breath and blood flowing through it tempted him to partake.
The first sheep he devoured sickened the human part of his brain and made him question the wonder of what he was. Almost instantly, his white, gold-tipped scales began to change. His wings folded and shimmered.
He was changing in midair! Hell, he thought, plummeting naked to the earth in his human form. He tried not to panic as wind cut off his air and the cold made his meager skin numb. For a moment, he failed and watched the ground grow closer. The backpack he’d so carefully tied to his claw, filled with his clothes, credits cards, and his cell phone, flew away. He remembered what he’d been taught. Now that his blood had been changed, he simply had to want to be Drakkon to become one. It had been what he’d spent the last two months learning to resist. But now…he was Drakkon. He could fly! He wanted to fly!
His vision was the first to change. His view, a panorama of mountain and sea, clear and vivid in the dark. S
imultaneously, his skin stretched and hardened into scales while his bones decreased in density and increased in size. His organs also changed. It wasn’t painful, or maybe it was because he could heal himself before it hurt. He didn’t care. He loved his size and strength, the power in his wings.
His heart’s truest desire, one he had learned to mask since the days he first understood it, had been given to him. Flight. He pierced the clouds and soared on the wind over the ocean, forests, and mountaintops—and he knew he’d never be the same.
He was the last son born to Patrick White, or Padgora as his father was known prior to finding the legendary Phoenix Amber. The Amber held the power to change Drakkon into man, permanently. Jacob’s father had used it on all Drakkon, ending their reign, so that he could rule as a man.
Because of their pure Drakkon blood, Patrick and the other Elders lived for many centuries as men, fathering generations of children who were human in all aspects, except for their ancestral Drakkon essence.
Descendants—of which Jacob was a first generation, making his desire to fly even stronger. His desire had never been about actually being Drakkon. His essence didn’t come with the knowledge of what it was like to be one. He’d never missed it. He’d been born human. It was all he knew. There would never be a chance to be anything else.
Until Garion the Gold, rarest of all Drakkon, and an anomaly born of sky and earth, appeared from their dreams and nightmares and proved that the Phoenix Amber was as worthless as a rock.
Garion’s essence had the power to turn any living descendant into Drakkon that could live as both man and beast. Jacob’s father had wanted it. The Elders feared it and funded an organization, to which Jacob and his sister had belonged, called The Bane, a band of White descendants trained in the pursuit of killing Garion the Gold before he refilled the sky with Drakkon.
Fourteen years after killing half of Jacob’s relatives with his fire, Garion used his essence to save Jacob’s life.
Healed and altered, Jacob was now one of three who possessed the power to transform at will. His sister being the third.
Jacob understood the danger Drakkon presented to the world. He’d spent years in The Bane. He’d seen the carnage one Drakkon could rain down with a few blasts of fire. But killing Drakkon was against his nature and, now, so was belonging to The Bane.
The essence of a pure Gold Drakkon flowed through his veins now. The evidence of it grew more apparent with every week that passed, affecting both his forms. He was faster, stronger. His senses were growing sharper, especially his sense of smell, and he could see in the dark. Even his appearance had changed. His near white hair and scales had taken on a golden tint. He was familiar with the lore of the Elders and what powers Drakkon possessed; telepathy, inherently knowing how to speak and understand any language, even dead ones. Drakkon could only be destroyed by gold, whether it be bullets, sword, arrow, or Garion’s tail, as long as it was pure gold. No Drakkon was permitted to burn another Drakkon, and many types of self-healing were possible.
But Garion’s existence changed everything they knew. His blood could do things never possible before, like alter at will and heal descendants and who knew what else? Garion didn’t even know for certain because he’d managed, through extraordinary strength of will, not to change into his Drakkon form for fourteen years. He had no idea how his blood would eventually change someone. No one did.
They did know, though, that the more power Jacob gave Drakkon, the more difficult it would become to harness.
Jacob must not risk being spotted as Drakkon and if he must take to the sky, to be mindful of cell phones that could offer evidence to The Bane and to the world of his existence. The Bane didn’t know he’d been turned. He needed to keep it that way. He’d even had his last name changed so he’d be harder to find.
He would be mindful of all Garion’s warnings. He’d train himself and strengthen his will. Not just in the power of altering or not, but in staying out of trouble. A troublesome Drakkon would be a dangerous thing. He understood that. But he had to fly. He could no longer pretend to have found fulfillment in being the lead guitarist of a Billboard-topping band, or in chasing women, and especially not in service to The Bane. It was time for a new path.
Chapter Two
Clouds rolled low across the slate gray sky, piercing the mountaintops and casting the icy bays in ominous dimness. To the east, white-tailed eagles screeched above Loch Seaforth and flapped their wings above the waves, hoping to catch a fish.
The bracing wind of early spring blew across River Wray’s hooded parka, sweeping it from her shoulders twice already and she hadn’t even passed the next village. She gave up trying to keep her hair tucked inside and gave her ear to the sounds of nature around her. She spread her gaze over the snow-dusted mountain range around her and Clisham mountain to the west, highest in the Outer Hebrides, her nemesis. She saw it every morning on her way to work, and each day she thought about conquering it. Climbing it wasn’t the issue. She’d climbed it before. Her dream was to fly beyond it, beyond all the mountains, to escape the confines of her life and her past. But she was afraid to go, afraid to face the multitude when just a few had such power over her. Maraig, as small as it was, was home. It was safe.
Part of her hated herself for clinging to what she knew, even though what she knew hadn’t been pleasant. She made up for her fearfulness in other ways, like standing up to bullies and never giving up on her dreams. She’d work tirelessly at it, as long as she had to and she’d take care of her family while she did it. But one day, she’d leave and it would be her music that propelled her.
She’d known from an early age that she was sensitive to the brutal grandeur of nature, moved to tears by the otherwise ordinary. She heard music in the mundane and when she was eleven, she composed her first piece. One day, her work would be picked up by someone big and then she would have no more excuses not to leave Harris.
There was nothing here for her but memories she couldn’t escape. As far as her love life went, it didn’t. She wasn’t interested in dating the same boys she used to beat up for teasing her. She’d been taller than most of them. Being long-legged and lanky had made her awkward. Her ginger hair, when almost everyone else’s was blonde, or dark like her sister’s, made her stand out. Her mother had abandoned them when River and Ivy were eight. Everyone in her village and the neighboring villages knew that Lena Wray had run off with her lover. That was when the teasing had truly begun. Most of the time, River had been so busy consoling her sister and cooking for her father that she didn’t have time to fight. Most times, she did fight though—and won. And then, of course, there was the fact that her father was the village lunatic, who claimed to have seen a dragon kill a man over twenty years ago.
Her childhood had made her self-conscious as a teen.
Over the years, she’d learned to ignore the whispers about her father. Her mother…well, that took more time from which to heal.
She’d grown into her six-foot frame, becoming more confident, even leaving Harris for two years to study at Edinburgh University and testing her wings a little. She’d met men, went to bed with one of them. She thought she loved him, but when she had to leave and return to Harris, she never heard from him again. After that, she stopped looking and went to work at the shop, composing her music at night.
She didn’t care if she was twenty-one, single, and living at home with her father and her fraternal twin sister. Despite the monotony of being in the same small place, with the same people, making the same choices every day, her life now was good. She didn’t mind living in a mostly harsh climate, in mostly barren land, surrounded by mountain ranges, forests, and water.
She dreamed of more though. She—
She blinked her eyes on the snow-carpeted crag ahead. She stopped, and so had the wind. Did she just see a slight movement against the wall? Something gigantic and as white as the late frost? A trick of her eyes? The shadowy sky? It had to be. It had looked as if a whole portion of t
he ridge had inched to the left.
She waited a moment in the stillness of the morning. Watching, listening. When she was sure there was no more sign of movement, she continued on. It was nothing more than her overactive imagination. It helped when she was composing her music, but not when she was alone. Many worked in Tarbert but they traveled by road. She always chose the more scenic route, the footpath less traveled.
She’d never felt as if she were in danger until this moment. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it was as if something in the air had changed. It set off an alarm from someplace primal within her. Her flesh prickled beneath her parka. She looked toward the loch to get her thoughts off it. The birds were gone. Her gaze flicked back to the crag. It didn’t move again. She was going to have to pass it to get to work—just as she’d passed it hundreds of times before.
This time felt different. This time, her hair crept away from her skin and her heart felt racy. She tried to think of other things as she grew closer, like the two years she’d spent at University studying music, and Colin…no, thinking of him and how easily he’d forgotten her would only make her feel worse.
She kept her eyes straight ahead. She could see the road to Tarbert up ahead and quickened her pace. She wasn’t one to frighten easily when it had to do with anything but actually leaving Harris. She was used to her imagination taking off now and then, making her blood rush through her and her heart pound. In fact, part of her wished it happened more often.
She heard a sound like the wind blowing off the crag. Her heart thumped and, again, she stopped. She turned. She had no idea what she expected to see, but it wasn’t the outline of something that seemed out of place along the ridge. She squinted her eyes. The shape blended in perfectly with the snow but shadows fell on it in a way that made it look as if it were separate from the rock.
What was it? She took a step toward it, curiosity prompting her forward. Was…it…moving, rising and falling slowly, deeply? Her heart almost failed her when she realized it was breathing! She didn’t have time to doubt her observation or her sanity when a whole section of the crag shifted and what had been an outline a minute before, came to three-dimensional life before her, uncurling its huge, spiked head from its powerful, spaded tail.
