by Aaron Crash
Summary
WHEN LEGENDS LIVE, Dragons Die
Steven Drokharis is on an impossible quest to find the Holy Grail. The Dragonknights came close, but then their ranks were decimated by the mysterious Dragon Slayer, a legend that still fills Primes with terror. Standing in Steven’s way are ancient forces that have been waiting for the Lost Son and Merlin’s Daughter to continue the hunt. And yet, war has come to Steven’s doorstep, and he must balance defending what he’s earned with his greater ambition of bringing revolution to Dragonsouls everywhere.
Once again, Steven must gather his allies while his enemies across the world conspire to destroy him. And the greatest villain might be in his own ranks. Tessa stands on the razor’s edge of good and evil, tempted. Can Steven and the beautiful women of his Escort save her very soul?
Or will Tessa murder the last of the Dragonknights before Steven can unearth the ultimate weapon?
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Chapter One
STEVEN WAS TRYING TO decipher a particularly complex passage in the third volume of the Drokharis Grimoire when Mouse stormed into his study. She was with the Wayne twins, Prudence and Chastity. Standing in front of his desk in lace-trimmed satin robes, their perfect legs were bare and shaved. Steven’s eyes drank in their luscious forms. There went his concentration.
Mouse’s eyes widened, her face turned red, and she stabbed a finger at the Texas twins. “They have got to stop, Steven, or I’m going to lose my shit!” Her hair was mussed, like she’d been shot in the face with a leaf blower. She didn’t have the Slayer Blade, so that was good. A big flaming sword in the hands of a pissed-off woman meant bloodshed and death, not a simple domestic squabble. Mouse was wearing an oversized Soundgarden T-shirt that went to her knees. As long as she stayed human, there was a good chance the Infinity Ranch wouldn’t become a battlefield.
Steven sighed. He had all three of the Drokharis Grimoires open, layered over each other, pondering what his next steps might be. The topaz pen lay next to his left hand, which was missing its pinkie finger. To think, after all the fighting, he’d only lost that one body part. Most of the time he didn’t feel it at all. He reached out with his mind to check Mouse’s Animus. The ball of mystical energy spun inside her, spitting amber-colored light. She was at full strength. They all were. Things had been quiet since the Battle of the Thousand Steps Beach six weeks earlier.
Chazzie was all smiles and ease. Pru, standing next to her, had cornered the market on crossed arms, frowns, and furrows.
“We aren’t doing anything, Mouse,” Chazzie cooed. “We’re just bein’ a part of the family. Granted, we’re the mothers, and if you do as we say, everything will be just fine, sugar. Just fine.”
Steven winced and whispered, “Don’t call her sugar.”
Mouse lost her shit. “You want to address me, I would prefer, in this order— Mouse, Melissa, or Bitch. Got it? And I will not sit idly by while you try and rule over us. We are all fucking equals. I was here way before you, and I believed in Steven’s bullshit Primacy long before you noticed us on your skank radar.”
Pru shook her head. “No, we knew you were a skank right around the time you started drinking heavily with Rhaegen Mulk.”
Chazzie took over. “Yep, you flashed a blinking red.” She stretched out her pink-colored fingernails. “Skank! Skank! Skank!”
The Wayne sisters were getting comfortable in their new surroundings, which meant they were taking what they thought were their positions as the alpha wives in the Escort. That wasn’t the case, but Chastity Virtue Wayne and Prudence Pride Wayne weren’t what you would call team players. Unless they owned the team, called all the shots, fired people regularly, and were always there with a stern word, a team of lawyers, and bullwhips.
He tried to speak to them in a calm voice. “Girls, this is not helping. You’ve got to...” Yeah, that wasn’t going to do much.
“I will smack you two bitches into one Texas road whore, I swear.” Mouse shredded her T-shirt as she grew three feet to tower over them in her half-dragon form. Her back spines touched the ceiling. Her tail swished dangerously close to the wall of magical artifacts: Samael’s Lash, Carlo Bart Baxter’s ten silver rings hanging on hooks, the Angel Knife, and the Hellstring, along with a bone arrow.
Pru lifted her face up at Mouse, clearly not understanding the danger she was in. “Steven never had a bullshit Primacy.”
“Well, now, it was touch and go there for a bit, sister,” Chazzie said, smiling. “You have to admit, we weren’t too bullish on him until after he took down Rhaegen Mulk, which is when I think Mouse jumped in with both feet.”
Fire whooshed out of Mouse’s nostrils. She flicked out her daggerlike claws. “Maybe instead of one road whore, I’ll carve you into several dozen pieces of slut.”
“That’s enough, Mouse,” Steven warned. Using AnimusChain, he gave her core a slight squeeze. He didn’t drain her, or hurt her, he only held her Animus, as if he’d gently taken her by the arm.
The fire went out of Mouse, and she turned human, to stand there, naked, seething, but calming a little.
Pru’s frown turned into a smile. “Good job, Steven. I was wondering when you’d assert your lordshipness.”
Chazzie, on the other hand, giggled. “Poor guy, this is the very last thing that he wants to be doing, but if you get seven women under the same roof, there is bound to be tons of shoes, showers, and drama.”
“Never was before with us.” Pru sniffed. “The lesser wives generally knew their place and kept themselves there.”
Chazzie didn’t think so. “No, we just don’t get along well with others. Which is why we never have lived with our Prime or his wives.”
Steven decided it was time to step in. “We’re stopping this. Chazzie, Pru, no more. Mouse is right. There are no alpha wives or first wives or any of that. You’re all the same, and if you can’t get along, Mouse won’t be the one who leaves.”
“Yeah, you heard that, bitches.” Mouse snapped her fingers, turned, and walked off. Her little butt wiggled up and down above her strong legs. The Wayne twins weren’t impressed and didn’t enjoy Mouse’s strut. Steven did enough for all three of them.
Pru pulled up a chair for her sister, and then she herself sat down. “Okay, Steven, we are ready to take your punishment.”
Chazzie’s eyes sparkled. “Is this when you spank me for being bad? I’ve been such a bad, bad girl. If you love me good, I swear, I’ll be nicer to Mouse. Or maybe not. Then you can punish me again. And again. And again.” Her robe had fallen open to reveal the perfect valley of her white cleavage.
Steven’s mouth went dry and his breath caught in his lungs. His jeans got a little tighter.
“Well?” Chazzie asked while Pru rolled her eyes.
He held up a finger, smiled, and said, “Give me a minute. It’s hard to think when there’s not much blood left in my brain.” He let out a breath. “I’ll have to spank you later, Chazzie, because you have been bad. Come on, you both need to change. You are too smart not to know exactly what you need to do to be a part of this Primacy.”
“Your bullshit Primacy?” Pru smirked.
Steven gave her a long, steady look.
She relented. “Yeah, can’t really call it that anymore. Most everything west of the Mississippi is yours except for New Orleans and the Deseret territory. And there’s half of Australia you own. So...yeah...” She exhaled.
“I’m bored!” Chazzie said loudly. “Yes, we knew Mouse would come up here, or try and kill us, and it was even odds on either. That says a ton about how far she’s come. If she were boozing it up, ri
ght now, she’d have snapped, and we’d have retaliated, and you’d be pulling .357 Magnum slugs out of that jiggly little ass.”
Steven raised his eyebrows and blinked. “Bored? No one has tried to kill us for six weeks and some change. I would’ve assumed you’d want the break.”
Chazzie leaned her head back and gave out an annoyed cry. “Break? No, that’s not what we want. We want it all.”
“And we want it now,” Pru finished.
Steven could understand how they felt. After getting so many territories so fast, after being on the run, hunted, and harried, the last six weeks had been anticlimactic. And he wasn’t getting much sleep, researching AnimusChain, FleshForge, and Enchantrix. And there was the fifth Alpherian ability to consider: StellarFlight. He had precious little information on the ability, though from his father’s notes, it seemed to include aspects of DarkArmor and SerpentGrace.
He pulled up the Path of the Mirror-Souled Dragon.
<<<>>>
<<<>>>
HE’D MASTERED ANIMUSCHAIN, and FleshForge was next. Using both together, he wanted to help Uchiko and the Onari Guard...either return them to being human or help them transition into full Dragonskins.
Speaking of which, Liam Strider had been going through the Dragonskin rituals to see what was truly helpful in aiding humans to cultivate Animus and what could be dropped. Dragons had added torture to the rituals just to keep humans in their place. That had to end. However, Liam did say that only humans who had Alpherian blood could make the transition. Some humans were simply primates and couldn’t progress. Others had some of the genetic material handed down from the three brothers who’d escaped to Earth: Rahaab, Mathaal, and Icharaam.
“He’s doing it again,” Pru muttered.
“Yeah,” Chazzie answered, “he’s getting all up in his magic happy place.”
“But we’re sitting right here.”
“But we kind of messed up. We shouldn’t keep teasing Mouse about her grand self-sacrifice plays.”
“We shouldn’t. ’Cause you and I are guilty of them as well.”
“So he’s mad at us?”
“Prolly.”
Steven switched his attention away from the skill tree. “I am mad at you.”
Pru held up a finger to shush him. “I know he’s wishing Tessa and Sabina were here ’cause he could bounce ideas off them.”
Chazzie smiled at him but answered Pru. “I know you miss Sabina and her magic in the bedroom. Ha. But yeah, we can’t help much with the woo-woo stuff, since we do bullets more than spells.”
“Yeah, we are the machine-gun girls, but I’ve been kind of itching to try an Impetim spell. Could really help us if we ever run out of bullets.”
That tickled Chazzie. “Run out of bullets? What? Are you new?”
Pru laughed along with her, and they bumped fists.
“Can I talk now?” Steven asked.
The twins turned to him.
“Yes,” Pru said.
“See?” Chazzie said. “We’re totally a part of this family.”
Pru narrowed her eyes. “And you think you’re in charge, which is so fucking cute!”
Steven laughed. “You both understand we’re all in this together, right? We’re following my vision, but I need your keen minds. And I need you to behave.” He pointed a finger at Chazzie. “Or I will stop spanking you, bad girl, good girl, or gone girl.”
Chazzie pooched out her lower lip to fake a pout.
Pru turned serious. “Steven, we both are yours. We both would go full Mouse if it meant you’d be okay. We’re in love. It’s scary, and it makes us kind of bitchy. We’ll try and do better on the domestic side of things. As for our enemies? We’ll torture them slowly in ways they won’t understand until it’s far too late.”
“I’m Chastity Pride Wayne, and I approve of my sister’s message.” They bumped fists again.
Steven paged through to the last of the encrypted pages in the third volume. “Okay, then let’s get down to business. I’m seriously considering going after the Zothoric now. I’m tired of waiting. My father showed me the alternate Earth, and I know that’s where we need to go. Also, remember how I told you about the three doors at the top of the St. Vrain Aerie near Denver? My father has some sketches in the third volume. When you ascend the stairs, you come out of the dragon door. You face three others, and he has a few words about each. The wolf creature is Gaia Beta. The eagle is the Lyra, and the demon cat is Oikos.”
Pru frowned. “Gaia Beta, Earth two, sure. Lyra is a constellation. As for Oikos, it’s Greek, right, means something like home?”
“You go, girl!’ Chazzie squawked.
Steven was kind of impressed. “Gaia Beta is the Battle World, the second earth, and that’s where my father wanted us to go.”
“Where you mean to fight the Zothoric.” Pru had grown pale.
Chazzie wasn’t so smiley now. “When I said I was bored, I didn’t mean I wanted to try to outwit outer space demons. I can spot Dragonsoul shenanigans from a mile off. But mysterious genocidal shadowy fuckwads? Isn’t that what your buddy Rahaab called them? Shadows of fuckwads and dicktards?”
Steven had to pause to laugh. “Okay, that’s funny. It was shadows of teeth and talon. And yeah, not sure, but after all this shit with Arthur, Merlin, and the Dragonknights, who knows what we’ll find if we go balls to the wall after the Holy Grail.”
“As I’m sure you’re aware,” Pru started, “Chazzie and I have talked the holy hell out of this Holy Grail business.”
He could imagine their rapid-fire exchanges. He’d witnessed enough of them. They were sometimes called the Texas machine-gun twins because of their mutual love of firearms, but he was pretty sure it also referred to their way of thinking, talking, and bouncing ideas off each other.
“Yep,” Chazzie said. “I know this is hard on Tessa, being the daughter of both Merlin and the Dragon Slayer, but we need to see it through. And from what your visions told you, and from what you told us, the Holy Grail could be key in our fight against these nasty Z things. We’re trying not to say their name out loud. Bad mojo.”
“The worst,” Pru affirmed.
Steven nodded. He figured the quest for the Holy Grail was the right course of action, and he didn’t possess all of the United States just yet. His western border was secure, thanks to the Pacific Ocean, but his eastern border was uncertain. Out of the eastern Primes, only Morty Flint had made a deal with him. Chosen Ben Tozier of the New England Primacy had offered some olive branches. Chosen Ben was probably the most trustworthy of the remaining American Primes aside from Morty.
Steven drummed his fingers on the spell book. “So once Tessa and Sabina get back from the Deseret Primacy, we head east, to try and find this lake.” They’d done some searching but had come up empty. And with all the territories and people under his control, Steven had been working nonstop, training, working on his sorcery, and enduring endless meetings with endless vassals and their lawyers. If Steven never saw another PowerPoint presentation in his life it would be too soon. Bud Novak and his law firm had a whole office just to handle the billing. The money involved was unimaginable. And every woman Steven met was amazing, gorgeous, and in lust with him. That made the meetings and the presentations bearable if a little...charged.
The Wayne twins threw glances at each other. It was Pru who finally said something. “Yeah, about that. Sending your two wives to talk to Clete Sariah is a ballsy move. What if it’s a trap? What if he tries to seduce them away? What if the proverbial shit hits the mythological fan?”
“We took precautions.” Steven couldn’t help but smirk. “Sabina did some hardcore heavy divination magic, and she didn’t see a problem. And I’d like to see anyone mess with Tessa at this point. As for the seduction part? I trust both of them. They’re free to do what they want.”
“With other guys?” Chastity asked, eyebrows raised.
“What other guy could compare?” Pru laughed. “We are all so hot and bothe
red around Steven, why on Earth would any of us stray? A filly won’t cheat if she’s with the best, baddest, dragoniest stallion in the corral.”
Chazzie giggled. “Dragon stallion? That’s our Stevie.”
“Girls, come on,” Steven said. “Seriously, I don’t own any of you.”
“But that’s gonna change and right quick and in hurry, pal.” Pru leaned forward giving him a shot of her deep cleavage. “Now that you’ve captured my heart as well as my coochie, I want to get married. Chazzie’s with me. And if you don’t think Aria, Mouse, and Sabina are on board, you are a special stupid kind of dumb.”
“Zoey’s not going to go for it.” The sarcasm in Chazzie’s voice was unmistakable. “I’m not sure she’s in love, since she’s kind of cold and aloof when it comes to our boy Stevie.”
“Steven,” he corrected. “And no joking about Zoey. She’s been making progress.”
Pru shot him a finger gun. “And she won’t be the problem. Tessa will be. She is what the professionals call polyamorous.”
Chazzie coughed into her fist. “Slut.”
Steven didn’t want to talk about marriage, Zoey, or Tessa, not at midnight, and not when he wanted to get on with his studying.
Pru saw it and changed subjects. “Hey, about the AnimusChain wards—”
Alarms cut her off. Sirens wailed, and pulsating emergency lights filled the Infinity Ranch. An instant later, Steven felt a presence break through the front door. Moving fast.
How could an entity move that fast? Was it the first of the Zothoric invaders? Or was it something else?
Chapter Two
NAKED AND TURNED ON beyond belief, Tessa had lost track of Sabina. The Latina Magician was somewhere, in one of the many rooms of the Salt Flats Aerie, a mansion lost in the wide flats of western Utah. That was where Eve Downfyre had invited them. Most likely, Sabina was in the middle of what Abby Free called a puppy pile, a big group of loving bodies, rejoicing in the love and the lust.
