20 Shades of Shifters: A Paranormal Romance Collection

by Demelza Carlton

  “When we were children, Nep and I would transform in the house and play. Nut wouldn’t allow us to go outside as dragons, but we had the entire manor as our playground. We ran and flew, and it didn’t feel so limiting because we had each other.”

  That changed when you two grew too large to fly in the house, didn’t it?

  “Yes.” Isis hadn’t meant the single word to come out on a wistful sigh, but it had. “We were forced to live as a human, which, in a way, made us more committed to dragon life and culture.”

  Osiris, bulky at eighty feet, glided through the black sky at a leisurely but still fast rate of speed. When they began dating, she learned how often her rock dragon shifted and took to the air, which was at least five days a week. She’d envied her mate his freedom and wished she could ignore decades of secrecy and fly beside him. Isis never imagined it would take his murder and her near death for her wish to come true.

  Fly with me properly. I want to see those feather wings of yours.

  Smiling, Isis dropped from Osiris’s shoulder, her red dress flapping up to reveal her equally red tail. She flew level with his eyes, so small in comparison to the green-and-black rock dragon.

  I’ve wanted to do this with you for a long time.

  “So did I. We will from now on.”

  Not every dragon will want to give up life here and return to Nebty. We’ll have to be prepared to deal with those who want to stay among humans.

  “I know, but we aren’t humans, no matter how much we pretend to be like them. Yet many are like Nep and me who’ve only known this life and existence. I won’t make them return to the preternatural realm, but I also can’t allow them to stay here indefinitely. You’re right, we’ll have to figure something out.”

  They reached the Southeast Asian country at nine in the morning, the day already hot and muggy and ten and a half hours ahead of New York time.

  “Monsoon season. The last time we were here, it was during the driest part of the year.”

  They flew over Yangon, the nation’s largest city. At this height, Isis couldn’t see the gilded Buddhist pagodas the city was known for, particularly the Shwedagon Pagoda which received thousands of visitors a year. For many Buddhist, the pagoda was the most sacred in the country because it contained relics from the last four Buddhas and legend had its construction dating back to over two thousand years.

  From the air, they traveled to places they hadn’t when they were in human form on their honeymoon. The Arakan Mountains and the eastern bank of the Ayeyarwaddy River in Bagan. Villages on stilts and floating gardens on the Inle Lake. The stone carvings and mural cave paintings at the Poewindaung mountain caves in Monywa.

  When they reached Ngapali Beach in Rakhine State, white sand and coconut palms, they landed. The locals stared, mainly at Osiris. To their credit, they didn’t run away in fright, but they did evacuate the beach.

  Isis patted the rock dragon’s flank, happy and sweaty and not yet ready to return home.

  A dragon’s transformation defied science and the laws of nature. For their kind, shifting from one form to the other was equivalent to a human changing clothes. Children learned how to dress themselves with help from an adult and through practice. A dragon mastered the art of shifting the same way. It wasn’t simply about magic but how skillfully each dragon wielded their magic. For Osiris, whose rock dragon magic pulsed from him and through the mate bond he shared with Isis, his shift from dragon to human was an effortless and beautiful act.

  She watched her mate, potent and magnificent as a rock dragon, shift into a human, small in comparison but no less impressive and attractive. For their safety, she remained in her hybrid form.

  Strong arms wrapped around her waist from behind, and a chin came to rest on her shoulder. In silence, they stared out at the calm waters, clear and tranquil. Isis closed her eyes, basking more in the warm strength of her mate than the isolation being dragons had afforded them in a typically bustling area.

  A kiss on her shoulder, neck, and lobe of ear. “I love you.” A hand to her flat stomach. “I loved her. If you want, and when you’re ready, we can try again.” Another kiss to her neck. “I would like to try again. Do you?”

  Isis couldn’t speak past the pain in her chest. She wasn’t ready to have this conversation, wasn’t ready to think of loving another baby as deeply as she loved her daughter. Worse, with the damage to her body, her doctor wasn’t sure if Isis would ever again be able to conceive, no less carry a child to term.

  “I named our hatchling Asim.” Turning in his arms, Isis burrowed against Osiris’s brawny chest. “You’re the only person I can talk to about her who knows my pain because you share it. I was in a coma for weeks, and when I woke you both were gone.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. Thanks to you and Nephthys, we have each other again. Asim is better than any name I could’ve come up with. Will you take me to her grave, so I can say goodbye?”

  “When you’re ready.”

  “What makes you think I’m not ready today?”

  Isis raised her head to find him staring down at her. “Because you made yourself forget about us. We may not know what happened to you, Osiris, but I think it’s clear that, before your death, you knew me and our baby were in danger. You probably feared the worst would happen, since you were away from home. A part of you didn’t want to know what happened to us and experience the pain that comes with hard truths.”

  “Is that the same reason I still have no memory of my death?”

  “You don’t want to remember.”

  “Why not?”

  Osiris knew the answer, so Isis didn’t reply. She did, however, push up on tip-toe and kiss his cheek before claiming his mouth. How could she not? They were alone on a beach, and Osiris nude.

  They wrapped themselves around each other. Sweat beaded their bodies. Hands wandered, and the temptation to have sex on the beach warred with Isis’s good sense.

  Besides, they weren’t truly alone. The locals may have drifted away, but many of them looked on from a distance, watching them grind against each other with diminishing restraint.

  “How adventurous are you willing to be?” Osiris reached under her dress and found her tail, caressing it the same way he would her thigh. Long, massaging fingers into willing flesh. “Here on the beach or up there in the sky?” Erotic rimming of her ear with tongue and sensual glides of his hand at the thickest and most sensitive part of her tail.

  One night, when Isis had drunk too much wine with her sister and friends, Osiris was away on business and Isis horny and missing him, she’d called the rock dragon. In her inebriated state, she’d confessed a fantasy. Embarrassed she’d revealed so much to a man she’d dated for only a few months, Isis pretended the conversation had never taken place when he’d returned home. Osiris had as well.

  Until today.

  Holding him tight against her, and with a grin on her face, Isis took to the sky. She kept flying upward, but not too high that Osiris’s human lungs couldn’t manage. But high enough that no one from below could see what they were about to do.

  “Mile high club.”

  Mmm, yes, they were about to join it. Their way.

  “Hold on tight.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, I intend to.” Osiris’s hands fell to her ass and lifted.

  With a bit of maneuvering, from them both, they managed to do in the air what they’d done hundreds of times on the ground. Legs around hips, arms gripping shoulders, and wings in constant motion, they fulfilled her fantasy.

  Osiris’s trust intensified the excitement and feel of him inside of her—long, thick, and not entirely human. He would begin his shift but stop long before he turned into a full dragon. Something else he couldn’t do before his death and resurrection. Whatever he was doing with his body, the pleasure of it had Isis riding him with loud, gyrating abandon.

  Neither was fully human nor entirely dragon. They didn’t so much as make love as fuck—she a bitch in heat and him a rutting
stag, bites and scratches included.

  Later, boneless and sated, Isis reclined atop her rock dragon. She must’ve even fallen asleep on the flight home because a tremendous roar from under her and a spray of dragon fire in front had her eyes snapping open.

  In front of her stood Philae Manor under demon attack.

  Chapter 13

  Fifteen Minutes Ago

  Indecipherable words and fluttering wings to her face had Nephthys swatting at the annoying disturbance and opening her eyes. She thought Isis put the children back to bed before she and Osiris left the house. Why were they up? More, what in the hell were they going on about?

  “Come on, give me a break. I don’t speak your language. Slow down.”

  They didn’t slow down. If anything, their incoherent words came out faster and louder. Fairy dust was everywhere, a trail of gold-and-pink that fell from the agitated Yumboes in bright specks. Purple wings flapped a rapid, desperate cadence as the three children flew from Nephthys to the bedroom windows and back again.

  She hadn’t seen them this upset since the day they ran for their lives from the demons.

  Shit, demons. Nephthys jumped out of bed, her shift into her hybrid form complete by the time she joined the fairies at a window. Flinging open the curtains, Nephthys blinked against the bright yellow light beaming onto the acres of land below.

  After the attack on Isis, the Tyets had scoured every inch of the manor for entry and exit points. They’d found the balcony doors to Isis and Osiris’s room open and the ground wires to the security lights cut. Aset had the wires repaired and upgraded the entire system.

  Nephthys ran out of her bedroom. The Yumboes hitched a ride, each of them claiming a braid and holding on tightly.

  The yellow light warning of danger wasn’t an ordinary security light.

  “Mother,” she yelled as she flew down the hall. Nephthys didn’t wait to see whether Nut heard her and was on her way. The sky dragon, after Isis’s attack, had become a very light sleeper. “Aset, Hathor, Serqet.”

  When she didn’t hear their reply, Nephthys knew for sure. One of them had sent the fairies to her room to get her while they fulfilled their duty as Tyets.

  Because, hell no, the yellow light hadn’t been security or flood lights but dragon magic.

  Merit’s yellow energy dragon.

  The bright yellow dragon was somewhere above the manor, lighting up the battlefield and taking away the demons’ dark advantage and giving Aset’s shadow dragon all the assistance she would need.

  “Find a place to hide.” Nephthys removed the fairies from her hair. “I know you understand me. Stay in here and out of sight. Don’t come out no matter what you hear.”

  Fairies were the equivalent of having a medic beside you in battle, but better because their treatment healed the wounded within minutes. Nephthys would be damned, however, if she took children into battle. She hadn’t saved their lives to turn around and allow them to put themselves in danger because they were grateful to the twins.

  Three sad frowns didn’t change her mind. Neither did slumped shoulders and watery eyes. Isis didn’t need to return home to more dead children, and Nephthys wouldn’t have their deaths on her conscience. She watched them fly up the stairs and, presumably, back to the nursery.

  Now, for the intruders.

  Nephthys burst through the front door, white wings out and right into a small group of shocked demons. White scavenger vultures peeled from her skin and swarmed the demons who thought they could lay siege to Philae Manor.

  She bolted upward and left Nekhbet’s vultures to find their meal among the demons on the ground. More vultures escaped her flesh, white plumes and black flight feathers. Yellowish bills and high-pitched mewing, the two-foot birds soared on thermals, their wingspan twice the size of their body.

  In strength, they were no match for the iron teeth demons, but the vultures were determined, didn’t feel pain, and would multiply each time they were “killed.” Sharp beaks blinded and feathered bodies distracted.

  Demon hordes flew toward Philae Manor from every direction. Their leathery wings flapped in gruesome harmony. Iron teeth and feet cut through the sky, burnished bodies in rigid, deadly formation.

  “Shift completely.”

  Nut’s sixty-foot blue-and-white sky dragon burned a path through a horde of demons to reach Nephthys’s side.

  Seconds later, her hybrid form gave way to her moon dragon. The same size as the sky dragon, mother and daughter floated, back-to-back, in the middle of Merit’s yellow energy.

  Even at this height, she couldn’t see the yellow dragon, although Merit flooded their auras with clarity and concentration.

  Hordes on the ground stumbled with confusion, lethargy, and depression, reverse polarity of the yellow energy Merit infused Nut and Nephthys with. The attack left the demons vulnerable prey to the vultures and Serqet.

  The blue-and-silver thunder dragon served as the Tyets body. Isis’s ground force. At fifty-feet tall, she emitted sonic waves of sound, ranging from deafening to destructive.

  When the thunder dragon was down there, it was best to be in the sky. Without Hathor’s gray mist as a buffer, they would all feel the brunt of Serqet’s dragon attack.

  Wave after wave of demons came, emerging from the darkness and into Merit’s yellow energy beams.

  They flew at Nut and Nephthys, and the dragons fought.

  Tails whipped out, slicing off arms, legs, and heads. Spray of dragon fire engulfed the demons, mother and daughter circling and creating a wall of fire.

  Still the demons came. But not from the forest at the edge of Philae property. That was Hathor’s domain, the left Tyet arm. Nephthys could hear screams coming from the forest but could see little through Hathor’s gray mist magic.

  Demons fell from the air, and it had nothing to do with Nut’s control of the sky and stars.

  Their souls were ripped from them. One by one, the blocked light source forced the demons to the ground, their wrathful souls consumed by Aset’s black shadow dragon. Without their soul, a blight on humanity, the demons lay immobile on the ground.

  “Fill your bellies.” White scavenger vultures emerged from the moon dragon’s body and flew toward the downed demons. With each demon her vultures killed or consumed, the stronger she became and the greater her connection to the dead.

  Osiris’s rock dragon wasn’t far away, which meant Isis would arrive soon. Good, because demons began to breach the forest, which meant Hathor needed help. Merit’s yellow energy was also beginning to dim. The moon dragon had no idea what was happening to the Tyet’s right arm.

  Aset, the Tyet head, flew between the invisible spaces of Merit’s yellow energy. Dark and dangerous, no demon could escape the shadow dragon.

  Without Isis to pull them together, however, the Tyets weren’t at their maximum fighting strength.

  “Mother, check on Merit. I think she’s fighting demons up there, which means she’ll need your sky magic more than my moon dragon.”

  Nut hesitated. “I left your father to his fate. I won’t leave you to yours.”

  A fissure in the sky dragon’s emotional armor. Any other time, Nephthys would welcome her mother’s openness about her feelings and Geb. But now wasn’t the time.

  “I can sense Osiris. He’ll be here any minute, which means I won’t be alone to fight the horde once he arrives.”

  Even knowing the rock dragon would slay any demon who dared to harm the moon dragon wasn’t enough to sway Nut. The knowledge, however, that Isis was with him did. With an affectionate caress to the moon’s dragon’s cheek with Nut’s snout, the sky dragon paused for another second then darted upward and toward Merit, which left Nephthys surrounded by hungry-looking demons.

  Osiris wished they could’ve stayed away longer, wished, even more, that he and Isis had a baby to come home to. She’d named their hatchling Asim, which meant protector. Her little body had been all that stood between Isis and death. Today, over the Ngapali Beach
, he’d touched Isis all over, including the places she hadn’t allowed the past few days.

  He’d felt similar healed bullet wounds on her back as he had on her stomach. Two of them, anyway. Protector, their daughter’s sacrificed life for magic that could only be wielded by dragons. The Demon King was an arrogant fool who’d waged war for something that could never be controlled by him, even if the original scepters existed and could be turned over.

  Osiris heard sounds of battle, miles before he reached the manor. He increased his speed, careful to not displace a sleeping Isis. She would awaken soon enough, ready to defend her family and home.

  A group of demons met him when he got within sight range of the manor. An angry roar was his greeting and a wide jet of green fire his goodbye. Scorched bodies and melted flesh dropped from the sky, clearing the way for the vicious scene before him.

  Flames and demons were everywhere. For this to be the human realm, there were hundreds of demons. In the sky, on the ground, and swarming from the forest and through a freezing mist, which killed some but not all.

  A hundred or more demons had a white dragon surrounded. Vultures fought by her side, but the demons were closing in, cutting the moon dragon with their claws and iron feet.

  “Nephthys,” Isis screamed.

  She was off his back and speeding toward her sister before he’d known his mate was awake. His damn headache returned as he watched Isis bulldoze her way into the fray, mad as hell and without morphing into her sun dragon.

  King cobras detached from her body when she blasted into the wall of demon bodies. The tip of her tail opened and rolled back to reveal a mouth and rows of spiked teeth. The tail-mouth sprayed liquid-hot lava at the nearest demons.

  Their howls of pain only made Isis fight harder. She battled without mercy, breaking bones and heating flesh, slicing throats and spitting venom. Every demon between Isis and her twin received the full weight of her fury and might.