by Mina Carter
She stood on the top step and studied them. The guy was a cretin, but a clever one, she’d give him that. Who else would have thought to put a control collar on her before she woke from the slumber that had kept her from the world for thousands of years? Putting it on her when she was awake was a non-starter. She’d wouldn’t have needed her claws. With her magic she could have torn him apart with a single word. She was just fortunate that the collar had left her the ability to shift at will. As long as Sellers allowed it, anyway. She wasn’t a fool, he’d only allowed her to keep her ability to shift because it suited him.
With a sigh she let go of her physical form and dissolved into shadow to slink along the wall and deeper into the tunnels. This time was so different from the one she remembered, and she hated everything about it. Except maybe ice-cream and coffee.
Barely corporeal, she raced along in the darkness, manifesting a claw here and there to dig into the wall and hasten her progress. She didn’t care if she bust a brick or left marks on the walls. Not like maintenance would to be on her case. The place had been abandoned before Sellers had moved in and it showed.
Reaching the entrance to the lair, she coiled in the darkness around the door. Her vision drifted between the veils of reality, showing her both the natural cavern as it was and then with the illusion cast by the Dragos. Expensive furniture spread haphazardly around the cavern, sat on the rock and mud floor rather than the smooth marble Sellers thought he’d conjured. Water had seeped up into the fine fabrics in an ever widening march of ruin. Priceless paintings hung at angles on rock walls, and two dragon statues guarded the doorway, precious jewels sparkling in their wings.
Sellers himself swaggered around the cavern, totally fooled by the illusion. The idiot didn’t realize that he hadn’t changed the cavern into a super villain lair like those in the spy films he watched on repeat, but had instead fallen for his own illusion. She chuffed in the back of her throat. Typical human. No creature with an ounce of paranormal blood in their veins would be fooled for an instant.
“Chase!”
Sellers bellow caught her attention. Great, he’d spotted her in the darkness. She tried to resist the pull from the collar around her neck as she shrank back into the shadows. Teeth clenched, she dug her claws into the softness of the decayed brickwork under the Dragos’ illusion and fought the urge to do as he bid.
Sweat broke out along her back, the small beads of fluid the first sign off her manifestation as the compulsion wrought by the collar forced her back into corporeal form. The sharp stink of rage and frustration, her own, filled her nose and she peeled away from the wall to drop down and land lightly in the doorway. Somewhere between falling and landing, she shrugged off her dragon form, the shift to human as instinctive as breathing.
Rising to her full height of five feet nothing she fixed him with a haughty stare. Sometimes it wasn’t what you had, but what you did with it that mattered. She might be short on stature but Chase had more than enough attitude and balls to give even the Queen’s Champions a run for their money.
Funny that. For all their swagger and bullshit about not needing Chase along to look after Baby, she’d been the only one in the group who survived through the years.
She shook the thought off. She had no idea what had happened to the others. Natural disaster maybe? A rockslide would have easily buried one or two, shattering their dormant forms into a million pieces. Treasure hunters were also a possibility. The idiots had shifted to dormant in their full dragon forms, the resulting statue-like forms majestic and so fucking obvious. Only Chase had part shifted, reforming herself into an indistinct mound of rock around Baby’s bed, hiding both herself and the Royal dragonet.
“Where have you been?” Sellers demanded, twisting the heavy pendant on the chain around his neck.
Chase’s eyes narrowed as drew closer to the odious man. The pendant controlled her collar. She wanted to reach out and tear the damn thing from his neck, and shove it right where the sun didn’t shine. Her fingers tensed and clenched at her sides as she held the talons that wanted to erupt from her human skin within.
But she couldn’t touch him, the magic on the collar too great. It wasn’t dragon-magic. That would have been too easy. Any dragon-wrought spell she could have negated with a click of her fingers. Her gaze settled on the symbols etched into the heavy silver setting of the pendant. Familiar symbols. Warden symbols. Wardens had helped the other races hunt her kind to the point of extinction. They’d forced her best friend and queen to send her only child to sleep beneath the earth, in the hope of waking in a better world. Look how well that one had turned out.
She reached the warlock, her last steps as slow as she could make them. Sellers’ face was purple with rage, the color an ugly contrast with the gold of his be-spelled eyes. This was his ‘dragos’ form, another element of the spell but it was little more than an illusion. He wore it with pride as ‘proof’ of his superiority. Illusion or not, Chase hoped he bit off his own fucking tongue with the pretend fangs.
“I said, where have you been?” His hand shot out and grabbed her around the back of the neck, cruel fingers grinding the vertebrae as he yanked her almost off her feet.
“I called you. Did you kill them? The other dragons? Did you get the woman?” He looked eagerly past her, as though somehow she could hide an unconscious woman in her back pocket.
“No. The two males were too powerful. I couldn’t get to her. Barely escaped with my life,” she whined, injecting a pathetic, cowed note in her voice. It was total bullshit. As ill-trained as the males were, she could have taken them. Not with brute strength admittedly, but with her wits and training, she could easily have outsmarted them.
“Shit.” He threw her from him. She stumbled, pain flaring as her knees hit the uneven cavern floor. “What the fuck do I keep you around for, huh? If you can’t handle a simple job?”
He surged forward, fist raised. Fuck, this would hurt. Closing her eyes, she distanced the connection to her physical body and floated as the sound of fist hitting flesh filled the cavern.
Chapter Two
Sellers was good, Duke had to give him that. The Croft building had been clean as a damn whistle, the guy’s office giving nothing away other than he was fifty-plus with way too much money to spend. The place screamed the sort of ostentatious elitism that made Duke want to hurl.
As a dragon, he knew all about hoarding treasure. The thing most people missed though, was that treasure didn’t have to be expensive. The material cost of a thing didn’t make it valuable. What it meant to the collector, how it made them feel, that made it valuable. He liked…stuff. Pretty stuff. Things made of satins and silks. Shirts, underwear, sheets…cushions. He loved the way they felt against his skin, all over. Other places. Since he knew Baron would take the piss for forever and a day, he hid his stash in the spare room, amongst a load of other crap so his brother would never find it.
Shaking his head, Duke dragged his thoughts away from his treasures, only for his mind to present him with an image of the she-dragon from last night. His mate. Would she have skin like satin? She’d had a voice like silk, a whisper of sensation in his mind as they’d flown and fought. He’d chased her through the night sky, streaks of shadow against midnight until she’d taken refuge in the subway tunnels. Down there his bigger size had hindered him, the more agile female dragon handing him his ass on a plate and then some.
A grin split his face. She hadn’t killed him, though. She couldn’t. Just as Baron had found his mate, so had he. The she-dragon was his. His mate. Not just another treasure but the treasure. The treasure to end all treasures. The one he’d give up his entire collection for just to have her.
“This is the place?”
He directed the question at the woman next to him. Honor’s PA, Lucy, walked and talked human, but she was anything but. She was a fate, some great-great-however-many-greats-granddaughter of one of the original three bitches who liked to fuck with everything and everyone.
> Looking up at the warehouse building, she shivered and nodded, rubbing her hands up her arms. It had taken everything they had, including Duke growling at her, to get her to come here in the first place but since Sellers’ office had proven to be squeaky-clean, it was the only lead they had.
“Yeah, this is it.”
Duke nodded and strode forward. The door was unlocked, and slid open easily. He froze, hand on the doorframe and all his senses on alert. Darkness looked back at him from within but as a creature of the night, the shadows could hide no secrets from him. Taking a deep breath, he rolled it over his tongue. Tasting what had gone on here.
“Just…be careful. They had demons and all sorts in there.”
Lucy’s voice reached him and he cast a quick look over his shoulder. Ris, the Seer, had insisted on riding shotgun. Since Baron was out of action protecting Honor, Duke had agreed. Especially when he’d seen the no-nonsense way Ris had loaded the Glock in the shoulder holster under his battered leather jacket, and flashed a fistful of warden-inscribed rings. Whatever the Seer was, he loaded for bear. Duke nodded, noting the protective arm the other man had around Lucy’s shoulders. Could Fates be killed? If so, would she get a visit from Granny to cut her life-thread?
“Don’t you worry, sweet-stuff.” His voice grated with the deep notes of his dragon. “They’d need the King of Hell himself to take me on.”
Turning back around, he stepped into the darkness and dissolved into shadow. The sharp stink of demon blood made him want to gag, but he hadn’t been kidding. A couple of years ago, yeah, he’d have thought twice about taking on a demon but recently his power and ability had rocked it off the charts. Same story with Baron. Now? A demon would be little more than a small snack before the main course.
With a sinuous movement he wove through the shadows, twisting and turning around the pillars as he checked the place out. It was empty, and looked like it had been for a while. Dampness had wormed deep into the walls, the concrete slick to the touch whenever he manifested a toe long enough to touch down.
Water dripped in a steady rhythm somewhere farther into the building but he didn’t pay it much attention. Not many things could use water as a medium. A nymph maybe, but he seriously doubted one of Poseidon’s harem would waste time watching him. Jump his bones, yeah. Watch him, no. Not unless he was doing something seriously kinky and they wanted to join in.
He found the pit Lucy had described with ease. Not difficult with a canine corpse in it. The rotting, fetid smell assaulted him. Wrinkling his nose, he pushed free of the shadows long enough to form a snout and spew forth a gout of flame.
The smell of burning flesh filled the warehouse for a second before it disappeared as though it had never been, the dog’s remains rendered to a pile of fine ash. A grunt of satisfaction echoed in his throat as he manifested fully and dropped, in human form, from the shadows above the pit.
Landing lightly in a crouch, he looked around the impromptu ring. The concrete of the floor dropped ten feet straight down into the earth. He turned in a circle. The steel reinforced concrete had been sheered right off, clean cut, and dirt compacted to form the walls.
He whistled lightly. Took some magic to crush foundations and bedrock like that. Sigils surrounded him, blazing from the earthen walls between the splatters of dried blood and darker fluids. A myriad of scents hit him, crowding for space in his nostrils, each trying to tell their own story but none were more prevalent than the terror and pain. His heart wrenched. Creatures like him had died here, in agony and fear.
His jaw set, his frame so tight with suppressed rage he felt like he might crack and explode any moment. At his side, his fist clenched and unclenched, claws punched to full length at the end of his human fingers. Sellers and anyone who’d helped him would pay. He’d take their pitiful lives. Slowly.
A grin crawled over his face. Maybe by ripping their intestines out through their assholes. He’d seen it once on a documentary about medieval torture. One thing he had to say about the middle ages, they sure knew their torture.
Whistling, he clued Ris in that the place was clean and went back to studying the marks on the wall. At first glance he’d thought they’d been drawn by a warden. Which would have been shitty. Wardens were the magical caretakers of just about everything. Since the purges in the middle ages, almost all the other magical bloodlines—mages, witches and warlocks—had died out, leaving just the Wardens to deal with everything magical. He needed something magical, he hit up a warden and they sorted him out.
Duke didn’t claim to know that much about them. There were different types, but that was as much as he knew. Under his skin, his scales rustled. He and Baron had taken a road-trip to an Ink Warden a while back, the only one to operate outside the Havens, and gotten some magical protection inscribed right on their bodies.
The Ink-warden had been nice, if a little young. No one could argue she didn’t know what she was doing though. Not batting an eyelid at their request, she’d simply put down her iron and picked up an engraving tool instead. She’d been cute but he knew better than to hit on the person inking or engraving him. Last thing he needed was the warden equivalent of ‘cock’ written all over his body.
“All good?” Ris crouched at the edge of the pit and looked around, his gaze sharp and perceptive. Duke turned to look at him, wondering how much he could see. Just the here and now, or the past and future as well?
“Yeah, nothing living in here. We don’t seem to have any of the dearly departed lingering either. Look like warden symbols.” He flicked a quick motion to the walls. “But I don’t think they are.”
Ris frowned, dropping down into the pit and landing with a grace nowhere near human. Neither was the stalk as he prowled along the impossibly straight dirt and concrete walls. Duke let that one go. Lots of people in the agency were less than forthcoming about their backgrounds or exactly what flavor of para they were.
For some, like him and his brother, it was because they didn’t have a fucking clue about their family tree. Others were hunted by those who meant them harm…or their own families. Rhod Claus for example, had turned out to be a genuine Santa, not just the winter elf he’d claimed to be. Duke snorted to himself. Not that anyone had wanted to argue with Rhod. Bastard was built like a line-backer, and not shy about using his fists.
“No, you’re right. They weren’t drawn by a Warden.” Ris shook his head, hand half-extended to trace the pattern on the wall.
Buried in the witching, the magical layer that surrounded everything, no human would have been able to see it. Since the two of them were anything but, they could easily make them out.
“Here and here, see? The sigil isn’t warden. It’s older.” He paused and even though Duke couldn’t see his face, he knew the other man was using his abilities to look into the past. Or the future. Hard to tell.
“Fuck me. These are Dragos.”
Duke lifted an eyebrow. “Since I’m fairly certain you’re not talking about me, how about you clue me in about these ‘dragos’?”
“Dragon-mage. Not a dragon, but a warlock who’s been drinking dragon blood.” Ris turned, his face pale, which only shoved Duke’s eyebrow further up toward his hairline. “There hasn’t been a Dragos for…shit, easily a couple of thousand years.”
Duke wasn’t stupid. “Sellars has a Dragos?”
That made sense, he’d also had two dragons. One tiny one in a cage and the female, who was more adult, more woman, than he could think about now and maintain his focus.
“If he has, then we’re fucked.” Ris racked a hand through his hair. “Shit. That means someone broke the covenants. That spell should be dead. Gone. No more Dragos.”
“Cut to the chase, Seer. Before I have to make you focus.”
With his fists. Duke was in no mood to piss about. If these Dragos were so dangerous, then his woman was in danger, and he wasn’t having that. He’d storm whatever castle he needed to rescue her and keep her safe. Preferably naked and under him.
/> Ris laughed, the sound odd and when he opened his eyes, the unfocused look gave away the fact that he had a foot in a different timeline. “Chase. Oh, yes. You have no idea…. Cleave heart to the Nightborne, and you’ll build a new world. Let her die and the world will fall in fire and ashes.”
Duke rocked back on his heels as the words spewed from the Seer’s mouth. They rang with truth and purpose, rolling through every cell in his body all the way from his scalp right down to his toes.
Ris shook his head, eyes clearing before he blinked. “Shit. What was that?”
“You mean you don’t know?” Duke snapped, his voice sharp. “Words came out your mouth, and you’re asking me?”
“He spoke Truth.” Lucy’s soft voice broke through the tension between the two men. Both looked up to see her sitting on the edge of the pit. “Or rather Truth spoke him.”
Duke shrugged. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
She smiled, transferring her attention to the tall Seer. “It means that he’s the real deal. A true Seer. What he says will come to pass.”
“I was afraid of that,” Duke grumbled, stalking to the edge of the pit. Running the last few steps, he planted a heavy boot in the middle of the wall and shifted his center of gravity for a moment to hop up.
Fire and ashes. End of the world.
No pressure then….
***
Everything hurt.
From the tips of her toes right the way up to the hair follicles on her scalp. Chase lay on the cold, wet floor of the cavern, and shivered as she tried to get the energy to move. Sellers had been more pissed than she’d expected. He was heavy with his fists, she’d learned that one early on, but usually his anger wore out quickly and she could slink away. Not this time. Instead, he’d been chanting a spell as he started in on her and had locked her into her human form.
The beating had taken…shit, she didn’t know how long he’d been hitting her for. She’d lost count after she’d felt the second rib crack. Now she felt like she’d fallen out of the sky and hit a mountain forest on the way down. Every. Fucking. Tree.
