by Lola Gabriel
Cassia couldn’t take the anticipation any longer. In one corner, you had Hale: quick, dangerous, doped up on magic steroids, and absolutely insane. In the other corner, there was Terran: powerful, strong, and had the ability to move mountains.
And then there was Cassia. She was a dragon and was more powerful than humans and most enchanted beings, but she was no match for Hale or Terran.
Cassia needed a stronger defense in case Hale came after her. Sure, she could use her strength and fire-breathing abilities, but there had to be something more. What could kill Hale? She snuck over to the kitchen nearby and looked for a weapon. Without looking, she wrapped her hand around a solid object hoping it was a gun.
No such luck. The hard, metallic object was a frying pan.
Well, at least it’s something, she thought, but was unable to convince herself that the pan would help her in any way.
She heard the thud of flesh hitting flesh, and Terran skipped over the counter and smashed into the wall. He dropped like a stone before stumbling up. “Ow!” He wiped a hand across his mouth. When he pulled his arm away, he had blood on it.
Hale’s voice rang out from over the counter. “How I suffered so you couldn’t have her!”
Just keep talking, asshole, thought Cassia as she wrapped her hand around a pan.
It was hefty. She stayed hidden behind the counter as Hale got closer. He was content in gloating over his strike on Terran.
“I don’t know how you can tolerate her,” Hale said.
Terran saw what Cassia was doing, but he didn’t say anything. He maintained eye contact with Hale.
“You’ll never win,” Terran snarled as he stood.
“Oh, somehow I—”
That’s about as far as he got before Cassia popped up and swung the frying pan like a bro baseball player swinging for the fence.
Wham!
She put all her dragon force into it, meaning the pan actually snapped off at the hilt across Hale’s face. The strike sent a reverberation through Cassia’s entire body, from her hands down to her bare feet. Hale, meanwhile, looked like he’d been hit by a truck. Cassia had never actually been in a fight, so she didn’t know her own strength.
Hale went down and came back up with that electricity. Aimed, unfortunately, at Cassia. She tried to dodge, but she didn’t stand a chance.
Describing it as painful was the understatement of the year.
The pain felt like her skin was ripping free of her body, that every cell on her body was on fire, and that she had jumped into a large barrel of hydrochloric acid. A scream of agony choked out from her hoarse throat, and she dropped like a ragdoll. No matter what she did, she couldn’t escape. The electricity followed her, inside her body and into her mind as though it was breaking her will along with her body.
She writhed like a snake, batting at the lightning. Hale stared at her, eyes wild, angry, and crazed. His hands were pointed at her. Cassia couldn’t see Terran. He was likely behind her somewhere, coming fast. She met eyes with Hale, pleading with him to stop. He was killing her, and surely, the centuries they had spent together must have given him some sort of feelings for her. Even though he evidently despised her, he must not want to see her dead.
Wrong.
Green vines shot through the floors, snaked around Hale’s legs, and dragged him towards the wall. The rock wall formed hands and grabbed him. Before he could do anything, he started to get sucked into the earth.
Then, abruptly, Terran was there with blood dripping down his face, hands out. “You will never hurt her!” he bellowed in an animalistic voice. “Never again will you touch her!”
Hale snarled in rage and pulled free of one hand only to have another stream of rock come from the wall and wrap him up. “You don’t have the balls!”
Terran stopped right in front of the crazed sorcerer and grabbed him under the throat. Hale bashed him with magic spells, all of which would’ve killed a human man.
Terran snarled at him and exposed his dragon fangs. “Try me.”
He threw Hale like a shotput into the wall. Hale had one brief moment to howl in rage before the wall gulped him down. The howling stopped. Hale was dead. The wall shifted as Terran moved him deeper and deeper into the stone surface, moving him down to the Earth’s core.
Terran rushed to Cassia, dropping to a knee and lending her a supportive hand. He touched her as gently as he would a porcelain vase. His powerful fingers ran across her body as she shuddered from the fading electricity in her body.
“Please,” he said, pressing his forehead against her shoulder with the urgency of a man losing something he cannot live without. “I beg of you…please be okay!”
Cassia shivered and laid back on the ground. She coughed as her muscles contracted. “I’m okay,” she gasped. “I think.”
She could do nothing but lie still and allow Terran to comfort her. She felt weak, and ripples of pain still coursed through her body, although the intensity of the pain was fading.
The EDJ arrived minutes later.
10
It took Cassia about ten minutes to stop hurting and another ten to get the motivation to move. Finally, though, the EDJ’s paramedics convinced her to get checked out to confirm what she already knew: She was fine. She was safe.
Terran took her to the couch where he sat down next to her. “I thought I was going to lose you,” he breathed.
Cassia leaned into him. “So, what’s going to happen to me? I had nothing to do with it! The EDJ has to know that…”
“I’ll pull some strings,” Terran promised. “Besides, it’s pretty obvious you had no knowledge of what happened. Hale has been causing problems for hundreds of years—much longer than you were with him.”
“What about Sam, Ivan, and Igor?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll find out. All I know is that a lot of Hale’s people are in deep trouble.”
“Do you know why? Why did he kill the Chancellor?”
Terran sighed. “The same reason he hated me. The Chancellor blocked some of his unscrupulous business deals, which cost Hale a lot of money. Hale didn’t like people getting his way.”
Finally, Terran got a message from his men outside.
“Your friends are here,” Terran said after hanging up the phone. “My men tracked them down.”
Cassia felt like a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders.
When Cassia’s friends were escorted into Terran’s home, Cassia ran to them and hugged them tightly.
Cassia took Sam aside to talk to her privately. “Are you okay? You got out in time?”
“About an hour before all hell broke loose,” Sam said. “Don’t worry. We’re fine. We were questioned, but let go when they realized we had nothing to do with Hale’s crimes.”
“What a relief!” Cassia exclaimed.
“What about you?” asked Sam. “Are you all right? Will you be all right? The EDJ will likely seize all of Hale’s assets.”
Cassia looked back at Terran, who was telling a story about an assassin to the Russian brothers. The brothers looked absolutely fascinated. “I will be fine. I’m exactly where I need to be.”
“Are you sure?” asked Sam. “It’s a big decision. You don’t want to rush into something like this.”
Cassia smiled at friend. “Sam, I know how it looks, but I’m not rushing into this. I’ve known him for eight hundred years.”
Epilogue
Cassia was exhausted, but the nine months of waiting and the excruciating labor was worth it. Cassia and Terran both looked down at their daughter with enough love to fill the universe.
She was perfect. Her rounded nose looked just like Cassia’s, but her eyes were the same vibrant green as her father’s.
“I’ve never been so happy in my entire life,” said Cassia as her daughter wrapped her fingers around Cassia’s pinky.
Terran kissed his wife’s forehead before leaning down and placing a gentle kiss on the top of the newborn’s head.
&nbs
p; Should I go and grab Sam? She’s been pacing outside the door for hours waiting to hear the news.
“Not yet,” said Cassia. “We have waited so long for this moment. I don’t want to share her with anybody quite yet.”
Terran smiled widely. “What should we name her?”
“Gila,” said Cassia.
As she said the name, the newborn’s opened her eyes, as if expressing her approval.
“That’s beautiful,” said Terran. “What does it mean?”
Cassia smiled. “Eternal joy.”
THE END
Part II
Wind Dragon
By Alexis Davie
1
Lilith lounged like a panther in her hotel room bed, mindlessly flipping through the channels. It was almost noon, and the dragon hunter was bored. Time always moved slowly right before she left to take out her targets. Normally, she was easygoing, but before she went off to kill a beast, she became a completely different kind of person, the person her dad taught her to be: hard, dangerous, focused.
A real hunter couldn’t afford to be distracted when they came across a dragon. A mistake meant sudden, brutal death. She had no idea when she’d get the text that it was time to go, but she hoped it would come soon. It was time to kill the Keeper of the Wind.
Lilith’s phone buzzed.
Her eyes darted down to the message. She had been eagerly awaiting the text, but unfortunately, it wasn’t a kill order.
Instead, it was an update that her order of woman’s shoe socks, size small, had shipped and would arrive in two days. Shoe socks were one of the greatest blessings in Lilith’s entire life. They were like socks, but with the durability and sole of a shoe. She’d found that wearing them allowed her to sneak up on her targets more quietly.
Lilith let out an expressive groan and popped herself off the bed, springing to her feet. She moved with the ease of a talented athlete. When she walked, her thighs turned into hard knots of muscle without her even thinking about it. She was built like a gymnast—strong and lithe, extremely flexible, and fine-featured. Subconsciously, she had a happy little bounce in her step. This was cute, according to the small army of guys who found her sexy.
She walked through the sliding door out onto the small balcony and hoped that nobody would see her standing there in just a bra and panties. It was freezing outside, but the rush of cold air made her feel alive.
The text would be coming any minute, and she wanted to move quickly, but her hunting gear was heavy and tight. Lilith wanted to enjoy the comfort of her undergarments for as long as she could. Nobody was looking at the hotel balcony anyway. And if they were, they’d get a treat. No big deal.
Being a dragon hunter was serious business. It was a job that was passed down through generations of five main families. Lilith’s family, the Aldane clan, had centuries of experience hunting down the exotic, deadly, and supernatural.
Why kill dragons? Almost a thousand years ago a dragon had killed a matriarch in her family. From that time, her family wanted revenge. Throughout her childhood, she was told how evil these creatures were, and she felt she was doing the world a service by eliminating them from existence. She preferred to think of herself as a hunter, but the rest of her community referred to themselves as the Slayers. She felt the name was a bit archaic since they no longer used swords and instead had high-tech weapons.
Just for fun, she went away from the balcony and checked out her rifle. There was a big debate among the Slayer community—ancient or modern technology. Some preferred the ancient ways, with charmed swords and daggers. The weapons were powerful, but it was almost like a form of art. Slayers had thousands of years to perfect their weapons, creating the perfect mixtures of certain metals and certain spells to kill the most ferocious beasts.
There was also a second approach, and Lilith preferred this style: the modern approach. Cars were invented as an alternative to horses. Electronic refrigerators were invented as an alternative to using blocks for ice to keep food cool. So, why not use modern technology to put down centuries’ old prey? Lilith didn’t see why not. They had guns for a reason.
Traditional Slayers had to get close to their targets. With bullets, she could use the same combination of metals and shoot the beasts. The trick was to put the same combination of metals and spells into a bullet—even if it was less concentrated and powerful—and shoot it. It went at such a high velocity that it could put down almost anything—including dragons—without the Slayer having to get anywhere near the target.
The problem was that the Keeper of the Wind was a direct descendant of the Dragon King, who was the original dragon. Nobody had been able to kill the Keeper of the Wind or his three other brothers. Many Slayers had tried to kill them, even before the Aldane family joined the Slayer community. A few Slayers had come close to killing the Dragon King and his sons over thousands of years, but nobody had succeeded.
Not yet anyway, thought Lilith as she smirked with an air of confidence.
She appreciated the art form of the traditionalists, but she appreciated something even more than she appreciated art: her life.
The gun wasn’t the only ace Lilith had up her sleeve. Lilith even had a neck choker that could disguise her from the naked eye, though she was still vulnerable to technology. That choker had saved her skin many times before, even with its limitations.
The traditional Slayers thought this was cheating for some incoherent reason. Lilith had been raised by a family that prided themselves on adapting to their surroundings. The Aldane family was something of a Slayer factory. The children were raised to kill supernatural beings, such as vampires and werewolves, but they mainly chose dragons as their targets.
Lilith was one of those children.
She looked down at her rifle to make sure everything was in order. She’d had the same exact rifle since she had turned eighteen, when her father gave it to her as a gift. Turning eighteen and being accepted in the Slayer community was a great honor. Only those who demonstrated a true skill for assassinating supernatural beings could climb the ranks in the Slayer community.
Upon her eighteenth birthday, Lilith also received a charmed tattoo that showed she was part of the Aldane clan for life. Without thinking about it, the area on her back between her shoulder blades tingled. That’s where the tattoo was located—a beautiful phoenix that symbolized her new life as a Slayer.
She ran her fingers across the rifle, across the chrome and gold surface with the phoenix symbol that matched her tattoo on the body of the gun. It was a nasty weapon, compactable with a beautiful scope on it and capable of putting a bullet through six inches of steel.
“When in the hell is he going to text me?” Lilith muttered, unlocking her phone and checking to see if she had somehow missed the message.
Nope. Nothing.
Her target, Storm, Keeper of the Wind, was going to get away if they weren’t careful. She had a small amount of time to shoot him and get out of Dodge before anyone figured out what had happened. Storm and his brothers were the bane of the assassin world. The bounty on his head would be enough for her to live comfortably for the rest of her life.
Dozens of assassins, both Slayers and amateurs, had come forth to accept the mission. So far, none of them had succeeded. Traditional Slayers completely failed; Storm used his powers of air manipulation to keep them well away from him until his security overwhelmed the assassin. The Slayers who used modern weaponry also failed.
Over thousands of years, people had tried to poison him, shoot him, and stab him, but the dragon refused to die. He was too powerful.
However, that was about to change. Storm wouldn’t escape her wrath.
Well, he wouldn’t escape her wrath if she ever got the text.
Storm was an interesting target for a variety of reasons. He had a reputation of being drop dead gorgeous. Lilith had caught some female Slayers talking about his good looks. It seemed he had everything: power, a body to die for, and wealth.
Lil
ith was willing to bet that some of the women Slayers wanted to sleep with him just as much as they wanted to kill him. She didn’t blame them. She’d seen a picture of him and was stunned that the rumors were true. He was worth all the hype with his dark hair, olive skin, and copper-colored eyes.
But his god-like features didn’t stop her from wanting to kill him. She needed that bounty. Besides, there was another reason she wanted him dead. It was personal.
To take down Storm, Lilith partnered with a man codenamed Night Star. She had no idea what his real name was, but she didn’t care. She had no clue what his face looked like, what color his eyes were, or even his skin tone. He was a total mystery to her, and also apparently completely incompetent despite being one of the best in the business. He’d totally failed to maintain communication. Why hadn’t he texted her yet?
She didn’t have to wait for him to tell her to get ready. She was a professional. She was going to get clothed and go wait on the freezing cold roof. Maybe Night Star was dead somewhere. She didn’t know or care. She had no allegiance to him. All she cared about was getting the bounty. If he died, all it meant to Lilith was that she didn’t have to split the reward.
She already had her gear out on the bed. She didn’t always walk around as a Slayer. A long time ago, she’d picked out a suit and trained in it. Ever since then, she wore a similar suit to that one. She felt comfortable in it. Strong. And, if she was honest with herself, just a touch sexy. Wearing it shielded her from some dangers, such as fire and claw marks. It wasn’t foolproof, but it did add an extra layer of protection.
The Aldane family code was victory over honor, honor over death. So, in other words, a Aldane Slayer was expected to win even at the cost of his or her honor. Should they fail, they were supposed to get back their honor and refuse to surrender. The part of the code she could never get behind was death part. She wasn’t necessarily afraid of dying, but she really enjoyed being alive.
Her suit was made with a cotton blend, and it was charmed. Without the spell, the outfit would probably be quite comfortable. However, the magic made the suit heavy, although she could still move quite easily in it. It was dark green—the same color as her eyes—and hugged every curve on her body. Extra padding was added to her knee and elbow area, which had come in handy on multiple occasions, such as that one time she had to quickly slide under a firetruck to avoid being crushed by a three-story building that imploded.
