by Selena Scott
He couldn’t help but smile at her confidence.
“My favorite times will be when you’re here with me,” she continued. “But I won’t be selfish and make you do it forever. And we’ll start cutting back and forth much more often,” she decided. “We’ll spend our days hiking through Herta and our nights camping on Earth.”
“But the hunters, they’ll find us if we’re cutting through.”
“You think I can’t handle hunters? Didn’t you see what I did to your family?”
“Right, but before—”
“Before, I was sad and sick and without you.”
A slow, lazy smile worked its way over Kain’s face. “So I’m kind of your secret weapon, huh?”
“Yes,” she nodded, extremely solemnly. “My love for you is my greatest weapon.”
“Your love for me,” he repeated and then leaned up to nip at her mouth. “I like the sound of that.”
She let his hands free then. “How’s your neck?”
He smiled against her lips. “Just fine. Come here.”
“I am here.”
“No,” he whispered, tugging her all the way down so every bit of them touched. He swirled the blanket over them. “I mean stay here.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They woke the next morning to the smell of smoke. Kain could smell more than that. He could smell panic on the air. Fear. Burned flesh. In the far distance he could hear running feet.
They packed their things quickly and ran against the wind. It was an hour of moving before they saw the first shifter. A hare, with wild, rolling eyes.
“Stay here,” Kain whispered to the creature and in its weakened mind, it immediately obeyed.
Next they passed a hyena shifter, but this one hadn’t made it much past the fire they could smell over the mountain. It lay still and half burned, its eyes open.
They ran faster. When they made it to the top of the mountain, Valentina immediately swung up a tree; she needed a vantage point.
What she saw changed her forever. Took her heart and split it right in two. Fire. Fire for miles. A hundred miles. It spanned all the way to the main city. The air was filled with haze, patches of orange, but mostly there was just black and grey, rolling out into forever.
She was just climbing out of the tree when Kain whirled. And sure enough, a band of hunters.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Six hunters. Six arrows. Six heads.
She hopped down from the tree and started collecting her arrows.
“Holy shit.” Kain looked around at the wreckage. He’d seen her kill hunters before. But never six in a row. “Really glad you’re on my team.”
She sheathed her arrows. “They must be hunting the shifters who are fleeing the fire. There’ll be more.”
They worked their way around the edge of the fire, corralling shifters and bringing them back toward where the hare they found still trembled. When the light failed, they decided they needed to cut through and figure out a way back to Green Mills with the four shifters they’d found. The hare, a panther, a little red fox, and an owl.
They’d just cut the portal through to earth when the hunter came through the brush. Kain sensed him first and whirled. The hunter, seeing all those vulnerable shifters and just two weak humans in his way, bared his teeth in joy. Fresh kill, and treasures abounded. He reared back and threw his hatchet, aiming at the woman first.
Without a single thought, Kain stepped in front of the hatchet and it buried itself in his heart. He fell backward, through the portal that Valentina had just hurried the shifters through. She rushed forward, straight toward the hunter. She flung two darts, one hit his throat and the other hit his eye. He flinched and fell, the pain from the poison already searing his veins. She didn’t care.
The last thing he saw was the woman’s shoes and his own blood on the ground.
***
Valentina closed the portal and immediately pulled the cell phone out of Kain’s pocket. She called Matt. He was level-headed and would know how to track Kain’s phone.
The four unshifted shifters trembled together in a little huddle as they watched the woman fall over her lover. She yanked the hatchet from his chest and he didn’t even grunt.
“Kain. You’re going to live. I cut your carotid artery last night and you chatted my ear off right through it. You can do this. You can heal. You are going to live.” She pulled his shirt to one side and gasped at how deep the wound was. Inches deep and filled with blood. He didn’t move.
“You’re a healer, Valentina,” she told herself. “Heal him!” She glanced wildly around at earth and saw none of the herbs or plants that she was used to using. She saw nothing. All she saw was Kain whitening as he lay there, no breath, no heartbeat. Just a valley of blood where his chest was.
“No. No. God. Not Kain. Please, not Kain. Kain!” She screamed his name, and maybe it was the sound of her voice that did it.
Valentina heard a whispery, light noise and she whirled behind her to see a naked young woman where the fox had been sitting. Grubby and wild-eyed, but beautiful with her wild, strawberry-blonde hair in knots down her back, she knelt over Kain. The girl didn’t look at Valentina. She didn’t look at anything but the gaping wound on Kain’s chest. She fell to her knees next to his body and held her hands a scant inch above him.
Kain’s eyes opened.
Valentina jumped a foot in the air. “Kain!”
His eyes moved wildly, and his face grimaced in pain, but he wasn’t breathing yet.
Valentina grabbed his hand and stroked it. “Breathe, Kain, breathe.”
“I. Can’t,” he replied in the halting, wispy voice of a man with no air in his lungs. The young woman moved her hands over Kain’s chest, still not touching him, and the pool of blood trembled as if there were a small earthquake underneath it. The blood spilled away, down his ribs as new flesh pushed up under it, the sides of the wound knitting together.
Kain took a huge, stuttering breath and Valentina laid her own hand on his chest, right above the wound. There was his heart. There it was. Stuttering, but alive.
He took another breath and another.
“Thank you,” Valentina said to the girl, but there wasn’t a girl there. There was a fox, watching with light, intelligent eyes.
Kain’s own healing powers took over then but it took an hour for him to be able to sit up. It wasn’t long after that that John Alec, Griff, Ansel, and Milla all came pouring out of two cars. They moved quickly, gathering the shifters in as well.
Night had fallen completely when Valentina held Kain in her arms in front of the fire in Ansel’s living room. The rest of the family sat in silence around them. All in shock from the story. From the idea of losing Kain.
Valentina wanted desperately to bring Kain home. Back to their house, but she knew that his family needed a little time with him. Time to reassure themselves.
“Looks like you two made up,” Ansel said from across the room in that squinty way of his.
“Eh,” Kain leaned back into Val. “We were never really fighting. She just thought she was fighting with me, but really she was fighting with John Alec.”
Across the room Alec groaned and dropped his head into his hands. “Can I just apologize again?”
“No,” Valentina answered flatly, not quite ready to forgive her bonehead brother.
“So does this mean you’re gonna be Aunt Valentina?” Inka asked, rubbing a hand along her stomach. She’d been having contractions for the last four hours but hadn’t told anyone yet. Valentina’s phone call with Matt had taken about ten years off his life. He was snoozing on the couch with Carmen against his chest. She’d tell him in an hour or so.
Valentina jumped as if the thought were shocking to her. “That would be nice,” she answered and charmed the room by blushing like a girl. In a very un-Valentina-like way.
Kain winked at Ruby and Ansel across the room. They weren’t gonna be able to keep their secret much long
er, grinning like loons at one another. But they didn’t say anything. It wasn’t the right moment for them.
Kain took Valentina’s hand and kissed her palm. He couldn’t wait to have that kind of secret with her.
She traced her hand over his chest. “Thank you for saving my life,” she whispered in his ear.
It hit him, what it meant for a warrior like her to say those words.
“I love you, too,” he whispered back.
The End
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Chosen by the Dragon
(The Dragon Realm Series - Book 1 Preview)
PROLOGUE
“Come on, Beverly. You can frickin do this,” Lucy whispered under her breath as she watched the older woman tremble on one foot.
Lucy wanted to reach out and steady her, but she knew it would mean more to Bev if she did it on her own. With a little groan, Beverly gripped the rails on either side of her and shifted her weight, stepping fully on her other foot.
“Hell yes!” Lucy whooped and couldn’t stop herself from hopping up and down. “Bev, you did it!” She helped the woman ease back into the chair behind her. It was her first full step since she’d tripped and broken her leg two months before. Beverly stared up at Lucy; disbelief, joy, and fatigue all materializing on her face.
“I can’t believe it, Lucy. I thought I might never- that I would be in the chair f-forever.” The woman’s voice broke as she finally gave words to the fear that had been plaguing her for weeks. She proudly wiggled her toes before reaching up and clasping Lucy’s hands.
It was moments like those that had Lucy coming to work every day. Not every patient was as lucky as Bev, but Lucy made sure they all worked just as hard, and healed as well as their bodies possibly could. She kneeled down and pulled Bev into a hearty hug.
“Bev, that was the shit. Now let’s do it again.”
The two women grinned at one another, their joy filling the whole room.
Amos couldn’t tear his eyes away from this woman, Lucy’s radiant face. But he quickly straightened up as he realized he was leaning toward the television screen where they watched her.
“That’s her?” King Dalyer asked from beside Amos, his voice dripping with skepticism.
“What?” The Oracle looked up from the game he was playing on his cell phone. He squinted at the television screen on which he’d summoned up the feed of the woman at her work. “Oh. Yeah, that’s her.”
“But she’s so ordinary,” the King said.
King Dalyer wasn’t dumb. Actually he was searingly smart. But that was the dumbest thing Amos had ever heard someone say. Ordinary? The woman on the screen was hot as fuck.
“Shit!” A sad womp womp sound came from the Oracle’s phone and he jammed it back in his pocket. Seeming to remember that he was currently performing a duty for the most powerful being in the human or dragon realm, he turned back to the television screen.
“You think she’s ordinary?” The Oracle scratched his stubbly blonde beard. “I think she’s kinda cute.”
Again, really dumb. Amos thought. Even in her loose scrubs, this woman was like walking viagra. Not that dragon shifters ever had to take viagra.
“Well,” the King said as he tossed his hands up in the air. “If that human is really my only option, I’ll just have to make do. How do we get to her?”
The Oracle stared dully at a space about a foot in front of him and swiped a finger over his temple a few times, like he was scrolling through information he didn’t need. Images flew past on the television screen.
“She lives… here,” he said and a dingy brownstone appeared on the screen.
“Brooklyn?”Amos guessed and both the King and the Oracle turned and looked at him in surprise, as if they’d forgotten he was even there. It was one of the things that made Amos such a good bodyguard, being able to disappear in a room.
“Yeah,” the Oracle responded. “Which makes it a lot easier to get her to the dragon realm, considering the portal is less than 5 miles away.”
He did the temple scroll again and brought up another image on the screen. Free tickets to an art show at a museum in Queens.
The King turned to the Oracle and raised an inquisitive eyebrow, asking what the tickets were for.
The Oracle shrugged. “She’s into art. And that museum is three blocks from the portal. I made sure she got the tickets this morning. She’s planning on going.” The Oracle’s eyes unfocused. “No, wait. She decided to go to the bar with her friend Courtney. No, wait, she’s back to going to the art show. No. Wait.”
The King tossed his hands up in frustration.
“Ok, she’s definitely going to the art show.” The Oracle leaned in to stage whisper. “Apparently Courtney hasn’t been the greatest friend lately.”
Amos rolled his eyes and focused back in on the King. The Oracle was too much for him. Useful, sure. But worth the trouble? Nah.
“Fine.” The King’s voice was sharp as he turned to Amos. “Just make sure she gets here as unscathed as possible. I need her here by the harvest moon.”
“Harvest moon?” Amos asked, the date seemed arbitrary to him.
“A dragon can only get a human pregnant on a harvest moon,” the Oracle clarified.
“Be careful with getting her here, Amos. I need her in perfect breeding condition,” said King Dalyer.
Amos’s eyes froze on the woman’s face as it all tumbled over him once again, like cold water down his back. He thought about exactly why they were plotting to snatch this woman out of her life. Shit, out of her entire realm. So that King Dalyer could mate with her.
CHAPTER ONE
You win, hair. Lucy thought as she gave up trying to knot it on her head. She dropped her hands and her curly black hair sprang all down her back. She could never get it to do that fancy twist thing that actresses did for the red carpet. Not for a lack of trying. She wanted to look nice for the art show, and, she guessed, for Dale. But mostly for the art show.
He was gonna be here any minute and she knew he’d be pissed if she was late again. No, not pissed, she corrected herself. Disappointed. Dale didn’t’t get angry. He just got quiet. And then the next time they got together he’d have another self help book for her to read. Gifts, he called them. So far she’d cracked the spines on exactly zero of them. But all stacked up they made a great footrest for watching TV.
“Lucy!”
She heard Dale’s voice holler up to her apartment from the street and she winced. He was gonna give her shit about getting her doorbell fixed again. He was always on her about calling her Superintendent for all the fixes her shabby apartment needed. But her Super, Kristof, was like 99 years old and she'd always felt bad asking him to come all the way out to Brooklyn.
Giving her dress one last pull in the mirror, Lucy knew she looked good. Royal blue always made her light eyes look even brighter. And the dress hugged her generous curves.
“Lucy!” he called up through her window again.
His annoyed voice made her jump as she wiggled into her heels and locked the door behind her. She refused to run in heels, no matter how irritated Dale was with her. She caught sight of him through her gated front door and his wavy blonde hair and classically handsome face sort of soothed her frustration with him. No denying the man was a perfect ten. Looks-wise at least.
He distractedly grabbed at her hand as she came down the stairs. “Did you call the super about your doorbell? You know I hate yelling up to you like that. It makes me feel like a teenager.”
“Not yet.”
Dale rolled his eyes and tugg
ed her down the block toward a waiting cab. “Then maybe it's time you just made me a key. So I wouldn't have to go through that whole embarrassing ordeal every time I come over.” He tossed his hand back toward her brownstone as if her home wasn’t even worth wasting words on.
“I can't afford that,” Lucy said, without shame.
“To get your keys copied? Jesus, Lucy, it costs like 5 dollars.”
“No, I mean I can't afford to take a cab.” Lucy pointed toward the street. She made good enough money as a physical therapist, but NYC living was expensive and she had her school loans. She usually just took the train.
“Well, I guess I’ll just cover it, Lucy. As usual.”
She sighed at his clipped tone and planted her feet. She'd hoped they could have lasted a little longer, he was super hot. But recently Dale had gone from mildly, and persistently, annoying to being an out and out dick.
“I don't let people talk to me like that, Dale.” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“We’ll talk about this in the cab, Lucy. The meter is running.”
The cab driver peeked his head out the window, a curious expression on his face.
“Nah,” she said, shaking her head. “We don't have to talk about it at all. I'm not getting in the cab.” She let her arms drop and rearranged her purse on her hip. Dale’s eyes widened. Obviously he’d never been dumped before. “We’re done here, Dale. I deserve to be with someone who’s nice to me.”
“Lucy!” he admonishingly exclaimed.
“I’m real tired of you saying my name that way, Dale.” She turned and headed toward the train station. “I’ll bring your stuff by your house in a few days.”
She didn't have to turn around to imagine the irate expression on his face.
