by Eva Chase
“We won’t be easy targets when they can’t take us by surprise,” West added.
I swiped my hand across my mouth. “Okay. So sunlight burns them up. What else can we use to our advantage? What else are they weak against?”
Marco raised an eyebrow as he looked at me. “After sunlight? I’d say what they’re most afraid of is fire.”
Chapter 2
Ren
The stone wall around the canine estate looked more than solid enough to keep out automatic gunfire. But of course that wouldn’t help us if the vampires found their way over it. I bit my lip, considering it from where I stood in the front yard.
“What else do we have to worry about with vampires? They suck people’s blood, they’re stronger and faster than regular people—but not more than us—and it seems like they’ve got access to heavy artillery… Can they do the whole transforming into bats thing? Leap tall buildings with a single jump?”
Marco chuckled. “Shifters have the monopoly on animal transformations, princess, so no need to worry about that. And the bloodsuckers aren’t Superman clones either. Their biggest advantage is that they’re damned hard to kill, being already dead and all.”
“Sunlight does the trick,” West said, giving the sky a grim look. The sun was nearly at its noon peak, pouring summer heat over us. “And fire. A clean beheading. Not much else.”
“Wooden stakes?” Kylie suggested, making a sweeping gesture with her arm as if brandishing one.
“I don’t know anyone who’s tried that,” Nate said with a thoughtful frown.
Aaron would probably know—but he’d gotten a phone call five minutes ago and walked off around the house to talk undisturbed.
“Well, it’s not as if we’re likely to get close enough to stake any of them if they’ve got their guns blasting anyway,” I said. “Fire will do the trick.”
But my dragon fire would only help the kin here on the canine estate. My thoughts leapt to the shifter village we’d spent a couple nights in after my alphas had first found me. All the kin there who’d been so awed to meet me, to know the dragon shifter had finally returned…
Those small settlements didn’t have big stone walls to halt bullets—and they didn’t have any dragons to pour flames down on their attackers either. Protecting my people would be a hell of a lot easier if there were more shifters like me.
Maybe someday there would be. The thought gave me a twinge low in my belly. Once upon a time there’d been four dragon shifters—my mother and my sisters and me. If I fulfilled my bond with all of my alphas, then we could start thinking about raising children of our own.
But not now. Not into a world like this. I could fight for the shifters with everything I had as long as I only had myself to protect. It was saving me, trying to save my sisters, that had held my mother back when the rogues had first attacked all those years ago. She’d only been able to save me, and only by leaving the rest of her people behind.
Aaron emerged from the shadows around the house, fallen pine needles rustling under his feet. One look at his expression was enough to tell me he had more bad news.
“They hit one of yours too?” Marco said as the eagle shifter joined us.
Aaron nodded, his mouth set at a pained angle. “A small settlement just up the coast from L.A. The vampires surrounded the village so they could shoot at anyone who tried to fly out. A few were able to make it, but most… It was a slaughter. Alice is seeing that the survivors are looked after.” He’d sent his sister back to the avian estate on the coast when the rest of us had headed to West’s, so he’d have someone he completely trusted overseeing his own people.
My stomach turned. We’d had similar reports from the village of canine shifters near New York, an enclave of feline shifters not far from Atlanta, and a collective of Nate’s disparate kin a few hours outside Las Vegas. The vampires had made their bloody intentions crystal clear. But they hadn’t made any demands.
“And we still don’t have any real idea what the vampires want?” I said.
“They want us all dead,” West muttered. “That’s obvious.”
“I know that,” I said, resisting the urge to snap at him. “I mean why. If we knew why they’ve suddenly turned on us, we might be able to find some leverage we could use.”
Nate made a discomforted sound. “As far as I can tell, the only ‘leverage’ the bloodsuckers are going to understand is being burned to a crisp. And I’m looking forward to seeing you teach them that lesson.”
“If I were going to hazard a guess,” Aaron said, “from what Marco’s kin told us… They liked seeing us weakened without a dragon shifter. It reassured them when our kin started to pick at each other, new conflicts developing. They were hoping we’d keep heading down that road until we were right at each other’s throats. But we’ve come back. As you said, we’re getting stronger again, more unified.”
He gave me a smile that was tight but genuine. “They may have realized this is their last chance to hit us before we’re all the way to our former strength. And they got used to the idea that they might be rid of us. They didn’t want to go back to how things were before, to having to work with us and make compromises.”
“They can forget about compromising after the mess they’ve made of things around here,” Marco said with a show of teeth.
But the vamps still had us at a disadvantage. I studied the wall again, thinking about all those villages that didn’t have this kind of protection. “What exactly are the restrictions against shifters using weapons? Where do you draw the line?”
“We’re not shooting back at them,” West said.
“I know. Nothing that’s intended as a weapon. But is there a law against using anything other than our bodies in a fight?”
“What are you thinking, Ren?” Nate asked.
I motioned to the field beyond the estate’s gate. “We want to burn the vamps to a crisp. Am I the only one allowed to do that, or can your kin fight with fire too?”
Aaron’s gaze turned distant with thought. “Anything we’d hold and attack someone directly with, like a torch, would be forbidden. But there are other ways we could use fire.”
“We still have the whole afternoon to prepare,” I said. “Could you have your kin lay down a ring of flammable material around their villages—around the other estates, too—that they could easily light up if the vampires showed up? It’d be mostly for protection… but if they happened to set it off while some of the vamps were walking by, and those vamps happened to catch on fire, that’d get a pass, right?”
Marco’s lips curled into a smirk. “I’m liking the way you think more and more every day, princess.”
“It would unsettle them too,” Nate said. “Easier for us to pick them off in the confusion. A good shove into the flames…” He wiped his palms together with a satisfied expression.
“Our kin will need to clear the vegetation from the area,” Aaron said. “We don’t want to end up burning a whole forest down. But there’s time for that. It could at least hold the vampires back.” Nodding to himself, he pulled out his phone. “I’ve got some more calls to make.”
Kylie clapped her hands. “Well, I’m not bound by any shifter laws, am I? I wonder if I can scrounge up some kind of flame-thrower. I can definitely put you in touch with people who’ll supply fuel on the down-low.”
I smiled at my best friend. If she had a super power, it was managing to make a friend or at least an acquaintance out of everyone she met, which was a lot of people. With all her connections, she could obtain just about anything you could possibly need, at least in the regular human part of the world. Which my alphas had first discovered back in New York when she’d gotten a lead on a puzzle the rest of us had drawn a blank on.
“I’ll take those names,” Nate said to Kylie.
“There,” she said, reaching for her own phone. “You tell that Felix guy I’m already making myself more useful than he’s doing, West.”
The wolf shifter smirked at
that comment. “I might do that right now.” He waved a hand toward the house.
Someone must have been watching, because a minute later, several of West’s attendants hurried out. The tawny-haired fennec fox shifter was in their midst. He glanced at Kylie as he hustled past. His expression switched to a glower when she gave him a thumbs-up and a broad grin.
“We need a ring of ground cleared just beyond the estate wall, at least ten feet wide,” the canine alpha told his kin. “Any brush that’d hold a flame, collect it for us to lay down the middle. We can dose it with gasoline for good measure.”
“Hold on,” I said as they headed for the gate. “You don’t need that here. I’m here.”
West gave me a baleful look. “You’re just one dragon, Sparks, in case you forgot. A dragon who can only manage to stay a dragon maybe a half hour if you’re lucky. If the vamps turn up here, we’ll have to hold them off for the whole night.”
“It’s not going to take me the whole night to fry them,” I retorted. “It’s not like I’m going to toast one and then take a ten-minute whirl around the estate before I get around to the next.”
“And if they come in waves? If you miss some before you run out of juice?”
I crossed my arm over my chest. “I can pace myself. And I’ve shifted twice in the same day before. Night shouldn’t be any different.”
He sighed. “Look, Sparks, it seems to me we’re better off having the extra protection just in case one dragon isn’t enough to save the day. These are my people here, and I’ll be damned if I don’t do everything I can to protect them. Unless you have some brilliant plan for destroying every vampire out there before the sun even goes down?”
He had a point. I knew he had a point. It was just that the way he made that point niggled at me. “No,” I admitted. “I don’t. Believe me, if I did, I wouldn’t be keeping quiet about it.”
“Oh, believe me, I know that,” West said with a glint in his eyes. Before I could decide whether it was teasing or hostile, another thought struck me.
“Could we take the battle to the vampires?” I asked. “They’re totally vulnerable during the day, right? If we found their hideouts and—”
Marco, who’d stayed near us, started shaking his head. “One compliment I’ll willingly give the bloodsuckers—they’re nothing if not painstaking when it comes to being careful with their daytime routines. They’ll be behind about twenty locked doors in some deep dark basement—dozens of deep dark basements, all across those cities. And we don’t even know which basements. I suppose if we burned the entire city to the ground…”
I exhaled sharply. “I get it. No luck there. Maybe we need to find ourselves some secret basements to hide out in too.”
“If things get desperate, I get the impression your friend might have some ideas on that score,” Marco said, looking amused.
Yeah, Kylie probably knew at least a handful of abandoned buildings we could hole up in for a while. But that would only help us until the vampires found us again. We needed to convince them it was too much trouble trying to exterminate us—or we needed to exterminate them while they tried.
The gate squeaked open again. Felix came in, holding up a young man so wobbly and bloody it looked like he’d have fallen over without the help. My heart leapt into my throat.
Marco’s eyes widened. “Timothy,” he said, striding over.
The injured shifter gave the feline alpha a hazy look.
“He just stumbled over to where we were working,” Felix said. “He hasn’t said anything. I’m not sure he even can.”
“Get him inside,” West said. “Quickly. He needs rest and someone to look at those wounds.”
Marco took Timothy’s other arm. He and Felix led the poor guy into the estate house together. I hurried after them, my heart thudding. Had the vampires made another attack? Just now, in the middle of the day? That shouldn’t even be possible.
Timothy’s feet started to drag on the floor. Marco flinched at the sound and hefted him higher. “We’ve got you. Just a little farther.”
“Over here,” West said, opening a door just down the hall from the great room. An office, from the looks of it, with two walls of built-in bookshelves, a desk, an armchair—and a sofa, where Marco and Felix laid the feline shifter down.
Timothy shuddered and coughed. “Water!” Marco snapped. Felix went running. The jaguar shifter knelt beside his fallen kin.
Timothy hadn’t been shot—or at least, if he had, those weren’t the wounds currently bleeding. A deep gouge across the side of his ribs was slowly shrinking. A large chunk of hair had been scraped off his scalp. I cringed inside as I noted each injury. What had happened to him?
He obviously couldn’t tell us yet.
“I can call one of my kin to—” West began.
Marco cut him off with a jerk of his hand. “I’ll do it. He’s my responsibility.”
He flicked a jaguar claw from one index finger and dug it into the flesh of his wrist. I winced outright at the sudden stream of blood. Jaw clenched, Marco let some trickle over Timothy’s side and then his head, combining the healing power of his healthy body with his underling’s best efforts. Then he pressed his opposite palm to his wrist to encourage his own cut to heal.
Timothy murmured, his limbs relaxing into the couch. His eyelids fluttered. Felix reappeared clutching a glass of water. “Thank you,” Marco said, accepting it. He returned to his kin and held the glass to Timothy’s lips.
The feline shifter managed a couple of swallows. He exhaled a relieved breath. Marco turned to set the glass on the side table, and Timothy’s hand shot out to grasp the front of his alpha’s shirt.
“Alpha,” he rasped.
“Hey,” Marco said, putting his hand over Timothy’s. “You need to recover. It’s a miracle you managed to escape them at all.” He glanced up at me. “He’s one of the missing four from my New York house.”
He shouldn’t know much more than Leonard and Sandra had, then. But Timothy yanked on Marco’s shirt again. “No,” he said. “Didn’t escape. They sent me. I’m a message.”
Beside me, West stiffened. Marco’s gaze sharpened. “What’s the message, Timothy?”
“Tonight,” the injured shifter choked out. “The king will parlay with you tonight, at full-dark, by the Marveille crossroads.”
Chapter 3
Nate
I rounded a corner in the canine estate’s halls a little too quickly and bumped shoulders with one of West’s kin. The jackal shifter took one look at my face and cowered backward. His chin twitched upward with that instinctive reaction all the canines had to show their throats when avoiding a fight. “My apologies, alpha. I promise to be more careful.”
Shit. I must look something fierce for him to react like that. I willed my expression as calm as I could manage—which probably wasn’t all that much, consider the amount of the frustration churning inside me. “It’s all right,” I said. “I bumped into you. No offense taken.”
He didn’t look completely convinced. As he darted off, I forced myself to stay in place, leaning back against the wall. I swiped my hand over my face as if I could rub the tension out of it.
I’d been prowling the estate for the better part of an hour, and I didn’t think I’d burnt off any of that frustrated energy. I’d already made all the calls I could to my lieutenants and other kin. Every settlement within half a night’s drive of any vampire stronghold was already making preparations to fend off their gunfire with fire of our own.
Normally I’d have been flying out there to join them, to stand on the front lines. But Ren needed me. Our bond was only just solidified. She was still so new to her role as dragon shifter.
And even if she could have spared me for the night, we were meant to parlay with the vampire king just after nightfall not far from here.
Maybe this whole mess would be settled then. But after hearing about the mass murders the vamps had already committed against my kin and the other alphas’… I wasn’t
counting on it. I sure as hell wasn’t in a compromising mood.
But lumbering around the house like a rampaging grizzly in a man’s body obviously wasn’t helping anything. I dragged in a breath and pushed myself off the wall. I should probably try to get in some sleep before it was time to head out. We might have a very long night ahead of us.
I headed toward the south end of the third floor, where the main bedrooms were, but my restless feet took me right past the door to my own suite. I stopped in front of Ren’s. She’d gone up here after lunch to prepare herself for the night ahead. Maybe she’d appreciate the company.
I eased open the door and found myself looking at my mate’s back where she was poised on the sitting room floor. She had her legs crossed and her hands resting on her knees, her head tipped slightly back, her dark brown hair cascading past her shoulders. I loomed high enough over her to see her eyes were closed.
Whatever zone she was trying to get into, I didn’t want to disturb her. I stepped backward, but the door hinges squeaked at my tug. Ren’s eyes popped open with a jump of her shoulders.
“Sorry,” I said, holding up my hands. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
She groaned and flopped down on her back. “It’s okay. I’m not sure I was getting much of anywhere anyway.”
She seemed to mean that as an invitation. I hunkered down on the floor beside my mate. “Where were you trying to get?”
Ren squirmed a little closer to me, and I was more than happy to loop my arm across her waist as she rested her head against my leg. Just that simple touch eased the tension in me so much more than anything else I’d tried. Maybe I hadn’t come in here just for her comfort but for my own as well.
“I was hoping practicing some meditation might help me extend my shifting ability,” she said. “I want to be able to hold the shift longer. Long enough to deal with every single vampire we need to fight.”
“Hopefully we won’t be fighting any of them, if we can settle things with the parlay.”
