Dragon Guard (Ever Witch Book 3)

by Kit Bladegrave

  DRAGON GUARD

  For Everest, it wasn’t bad enough that she found out she had to go to a school for witches, but finding out that she’s dealing with dragons, that was going a little bit too far. Now, she’s a First Descendant and hunted by the fiercest dragon of all, spawning a resurgence of a dragon war that was long dead.

  Slade knows pain. He was a captive of the Black Diamond Dragons and tortured near the brink of madness. He’s lost everything. His family, the woman he loved. But now he has a mission, to protect Everest, a woman who stirs in him feelings that should be long dead.

  DRAGON GUARD

  EVER WITCH

  KIT BLADEGRAVE

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Afterword

  Rivals Excerpt

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  DEDICATION

  Thank you to the readers!

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  ONE

  EVEREST

  A long time ago, before any of this craziness happened in my life, I had a dream. It’d been the happiest I’d ever been, and I wasn’t even awake. Mom had been there, sober and laughing, along with Mason, and a man I knew was our father. I hadn’t seen his face, but there was no reason too. The four of us were living our perfect family life together, as if that was how we would always be. I never wanted it to end, but then I woke up and the dream shattered.

  I’d never had it again.

  The scene before me was far from the happy reunion I dreamt about. Very far from it. Slade slunk off not too long after Aiden, my father, had told me we had a lot to catch up on. You think? Now, I wished I could’ve disappeared with Slade, at least for a few minutes until my mind caught up with everything happening. Mom and Aiden, they were here, together. And he… he’d been looking after all us all this time and we never even knew it. Why couldn’t he have stopped Mom from being a drunk, huh? Why couldn’t he have found a way for me to have a normal life?

  “Everest,” Mom said gently, resting her hand on mine.

  I pulled it back. “Sorry, I’m just… this is a lot, you know? To take in? I mean, you… you opened that portal that saved us. You were Slade’s backup plan.” Apparently, Mom had been here when Slade sent his message saying we might need a way out of the Land of the Green Sun and Mom got Hollow Well blood from another witch here; they kept quite a few vials handy just in case the Black Diamonds ever launched a full-scale attack against the Council… which they had, but from what I heard, they all survived, and Radnak was forced to retreat.

  No matter. I still had to say it out loud. She’d been here, this whole time. Not in rehab—here, with my father.

  She nodded, but still looked a bit hurt, but what else did she expect me to say? She’d been a drunk as far back as I could remember and Aiden, well, I remembered glimpses of him from my dreams of late. He’d been leaving us because she was trying to keep him safe.

  Aiden. He stood behind Mom, watching me with those damned sad eyes that looked so much like Mason’s. But his face, his hair? I looked like him, more than I ever looked like Mom. He was here, actually here in my life, and all I wanted to do was throw something at him. Scream and curse him for leaving us.

  “Everest,” Aiden said this time.

  I glowered at him, torn between excited and furious. Needless to say, my emotions were extremely confused.

  “I know this is hard for you to understand, but I did what was best for you all, I swear it.”

  “Leaving us was best?” I snapped. “How?”

  “I made him leave,” Mom said tightly.

  “I know, I saw it all,” I muttered, and they exchanged a curious look. “Since Edgar gave me this necklace, I’ve been dreaming about the night you left I guess.” My hand reached up to run over it before I let it fall back to my lap. “Why? Why did you have to go? Mom needed you and—”

  “And I wanted to keep him safe,” she cut me off, not harshly, but it stopped my rambling. “To keep him alive so one day this could happen.”

  I pushed out of the torn easy chair, in what was apparently Aiden’s room for the past however many years and paced around the cramped space. I wanted to run away from them, but at the same time, I had to know what happened. What was happening? Nothing made sense anymore, and I was spiraling out of control. Purple mist swirled around my hands, and I closed them into tight fists before I let my newly discovered power get away from me.

  Aiden and Mom were talking quietly before he slowly approached me. “You want to know how your mom and I met?”

  It wasn’t what I expected to hear about first, but I nodded.

  “She tried to kill me,” he said, and she rolled her eyes.

  “What?”

  “It’s true,” Mom told me with a warm laugh I hadn’t heard from her in years. Despite my anger at everything going on, I was happy she looked healthy. The color was back in her cheeks, and it wasn’t from booze.

  Her eyes were clear, and her words crisp. “I was out patrolling with the Hunters, part of my job training, but I was separated from the group.”

  I faced them both fully now, intrigued to hear about their first encounter.

  “I was also out patrolling,” Aiden explained. “I’d recently been liberated from the Black Diamonds and hadn’t yet found the Light Guard. I was alone when she stumbled into me, perched up on a rooftop overlooking the town.”

  They smiled lovingly at each other, remembering that night and I found myself grinning right along with them. “What happened next?”

  Mom cringed. “I tried to push him off the roof.”

  “Seriously?” I laughed with Aiden and her. “Wow, Mom. Nice going.”

  “I was too flustered to use my magic. He was the first Shadowguard I encountered, and well, I resorted to that.”

  “But I shifted before I could hit the ground and flew back up to confront her. We bantered for a while before she heard the Hunters calling out for her.” His face softened, and his blue eyes filled with an intense love as he stared at Mom. “I swore she was going to turn me in without giving me a chance to explain, but… she told me to get lost.”

  “Yet,” Mom said, “somehow we kept managing to find one another. He told me the truth of what was happening.”

  He went to her when tears shimmered in her eyes, wiping them away when they fell.

  She smiled at him tenderly. “And I—uh, I tried to convince anyone who would listen to the truth, but they all thought I was crazy.”

  “I told her to let it go, I’d be alright,” Aiden said, picking up their story. “One night, I was hurt badly in a fight. Mahlia took me in, and one thing led to another.”

  She leaned into him as he bent down and kissed the top of her head. “We started a secret life together, a family. It was almost perfect,” she whispered. “He came home one night and told me there were rumors the Black Diamonds were sending their soldiers after possible Descendants and hybrids. I told him I’d be fine, but that nigh
t on patrol…” She trailed off as her face paled and she couldn’t seem to get the words past a lump in her throat.

  “You were captured,” I said for her. “And they stole your magic.”

  “Blood Moon Priests,” Aiden growled furiously. “They were using them to steal magic from witches and warlocks. I had only ever heard whispers of their return. That night, I was the first to find Mahlia, but it was too late. I got her out just far enough for the Hunters would find her then fled back to our home to wait. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Well,” he sighed, cupping her cheek in his hand. “Almost.”

  Mom’s hand covered his. “We didn’t have a choice. They were going to be watching me, watching the kids. They would’ve found you, and I was not going to lose any more of myself.”

  “I would’ve fought them all, you know that.”

  “I know, but I couldn’t bear to see you die.”

  “We thought we’d never see one another again,” Aiden added. “But soon after, I found the Light Guard and watched over you all from a distance. It killed me every day, not being able to come out in the open and tell you who I was.”

  I thought back to all my days walking out of that apartment, feeling like someone was watching me. I’d never been freaked out by it, just strangely comforted. “But that night with the car, Slade was the one who was there. Were you with him?” I remembered hearing someone call out to Slade, but it hadn’t been Aiden.

  He shook his head.

  “Before, when I took off,” Mom told me sadly, getting up from her chair, “Aiden had been hurt. The Light Guard reached out to me. They thought… they thought he was going to die.”

  “So, you left us to go be with him, one last time.”

  I couldn’t do it anymore. All the anger I had towards her and Aiden for abandoning us, it disappeared, and then I was crying, not even sure why. Mom held me close and then Aiden was there.

  Not Aiden. No, he was Dad. Dad was there. I just couldn’t think of him as Dad. Not yet. He held us both. We cried together. They’d been through so much, and instead of getting a happily ever after, they were still fighting just to try and keep each other alive. They couldn’t even love one another other out in the open. All this time, Mom had to lie about our father, who he really was, to keep him safe. Keep Mason and me safe.

  Mason.

  “What about Mason?” I began panicking. “What if they go after him?”

  “He’s being well looked after,” Mom promised. “Edgar is making arrangements to stay on campus, but out of sight. Mason won’t know he’s being watched.”

  “But what if he tries to get a hold of me?”

  “He’s been told you are getting into some very intense studying and won’t be able to talk much. You have your cell, so you can text him,” Mom said, “but no calling. I’m afraid your life is about to get more complicated than it was before, hon.”

  “I think I’ll be fine. I’ve got you both now, right?”

  Aiden hugged me again, and I sank into that embrace, missing it for so many years. “Never got a chance to tell you how proud I am of you. You’re exactly like your mother. I was worried at first when they assigned Slade to watch you after I was hurt. But it appears kind-heartedness runs in the family. As well as not taking no for an answer.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “Slade told me about your conversations. Stubborn. That was how he described you. Stubborn and fearless.” Aiden’s eyes shone with that pride, and all I wanted to do was keep making him proud.

  “What else can you tell me?” I asked eagerly. “I want to hear everything.”

  “I think we have some time,” Mom said, and we returned to the easy chairs and couch. “How about we start with when I was pregnant with you?”

  I didn’t care where she started. I just didn’t want to leave this room. I’d found my family, not that I ever truly lost them. Leaving this room meant going back into reality, and out there, I knew without anyone telling me the chances of keeping our happy ending.

  Because this wasn’t an ending. My new life was just getting started. A life filled with near-death experiences and Black Diamonds that no one believed were alive. Blood Moon Priests who worked with them and were apparently going to make this an even worse war than it already was. Outside that door, there was a chance I would lose my parents for good. The friends I dragged into this. The guy who saved my life and vice versa.

  No, I was going to stay in this room, safe, as long as I possibly could and enjoy what safety it offered, no matter how fake the illusion might be.

  TWO

  SLADE

  “Do you have any idea how much I want to kill you myself right now?”

  Jenny fumed at me, nostrils flaring and her hands reaching out as if ready to strangle me. I shrugged. “What else was I supposed to do, huh?”

  “Wait for us to find you, you idiot.”

  Jenny paced away from me, hands on her hips, muttering curses under her breath. She threw a glare at me every few seconds, but I was used to her rants when I messed up in her eyes.

  Preston stood close by, not saying a damned word. Honestly, that bothered me more than Jenny yelling. He’d been quiet ever since they called me up here and that was not because he was pissed at me. Naw, this had to do with what we discovered while saving the Council from Radnak. If the Blood Moon Priests were back, truly back and Radnak was using them, the scales just tipped dangerously far in the enemy’s favor. They breathed fire and ice, those Black Diamonds. There were very few of us, very few who could do it naturally.

  I rolled my shoulders, forcing a voice in my mind telling me we could tip the scales back if only I admitted the truth. But I silenced it with an internal growl. That was only as a last resort, and though we were close, we weren’t there yet. We would find a way, though not even the witches in the Underground had managed to find a way that didn’t require some form of dark magic to make it possible.

  I was running out of time; probably another reason why Jenny was so ticked.

  “They can half-shift,” Preston said suddenly.

  Jenny stopped her mad pacing.

  “And breathe fire and ice. We have no way to combat these new threats.” He looked at me pointedly.

  I growled, and his gaze faltered.

  “We’ll find a way,” I argued. “We don’t have a choice.”

  “We would’ve had more time if you hadn’t gone off without a damned plan.” Jenny leaned on the railing of the platform, shaking her head. “You’re lucky no one was killed, Slade. Including you.”

  There were several unspoken words I saw in her eyes, but there were too many ears around for her to say them aloud.

  A wave of guilt hit me, knowing I’d put their lives at risk, all the lives here. If we hadn’t closed that portal in time, Radnak and his army could’ve burst through and not hesitated to kill everyone here. All the people we saved from his madness would’ve been for nothing.

  It had been a calculated risk. I hated to agree with her. After all, the Council had no choice now to admit the war was not over as they assumed, but at the same time, we were exposed, too. Bloody double-edged sword. They would twist everything around, claim I poisoned a Descendant’s mind against her own kind and dragged her into this mess. To use her.

  But it was Radnak who seemed keenly interested in her… and me. But why? He said he would kill me back in the cathedral where the Council resided, but he’d been lying. He wanted me alive. He didn’t know who I was, so in his eyes, I should have been nothing special, not to him or anyone, so why keep me alive?

  “Davis,” Preston pulled me from my musings.

  Davis trudged up the metal steps to join us.

  When he was near us, Preston asked, “From the look on your face, I’d say you have more crap news?”

  “Could be worse, in all honesty, but it’s certainly not good.” He marched over to the terminal beside us and tapped a few keys. “A message is being broadcast across all
Hunter frequencies, as well as on every emergency home channel for dragons and witches.” He tapped another key, and a message in subtitles appeared on the screen. “I won’t make you listen to it, it’ll just make you angrier.”

  Reading it was bad enough. They put everyone on high alert for several Shadowguards in the area of Virginia who had taken a Descendant, as well as a professor, a headmistress, and two students captive. Apparently, we were holding them against their will after making an assassination attempt against the entire Council. It went on to claim we were working with a much larger network of Shadowguards and everyone was to be observant of their surroundings, reporting anything out of the ordinary to the Hunters.

  “And yet there’s no mention of the Black Diamonds,” Preston spat. “Typical.”

  “You really expected them to just come out and admit for the past thousand years they’d been wrong?” Jenny growled at the message as it played over again. “They’re probably hoping we’ll kill each other and won’t be their problem to deal with. That’s how it always is.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” I muttered. “What else do we have to do to make them understand?”

  Preston and Jenny appeared as lost as I was, but Davis cleared his throat. “I’m sure you don’t want to think about it, but having Everest go back to them and prove she’s not being manipulated might be our only course.”