Dragon's Guard

by Eva Chase

  My wolfish heart thumped with glee and the longing to dig in. But I wasn’t hunting just for me. It’d be easier to carry the kill back to camp in human form.

  I shifted, reveling in the smooth transition of muscle and bone from one form to the other. I was never more sure of myself and who I was meant to be than in those moments. With the back of my hand, I wiped the lingering blood from my mouth. Not a great look in man form. I lifted the deer, let the worst of the flow drain from its neck, and then hefted the slack body over my shoulder.

  I’d left my clothes in a heap just beyond the grove at the side of the road, where we’d parked the van. I set down the deer and pulled them on before moving to join the others. I had nothing to hide, but I didn’t want to have to explain the strange scar to Ren. And she wasn’t exactly used to having people stroll around naked in front of her yet. The heat in her eyes whenever one of us did made that perfectly clear.

  I didn’t want that heat directed at me. It stirred up too much desire of my own.

  “One deer, ready for dinner,” I announced, stepping out into the grove. The other guys had already gotten a large fire crackling. Aaron was just finishing setting up a makeshift spit.

  Nate grinned and moved to take the deer from me. Ren, sitting on a stone a few feet from the fire pit, wrinkled her nose. I didn’t like the discomfort I saw in her eyes now either. Maybe I should have come out naked.

  “So you just went out there and hunted it down?” she said.

  I wasn’t going to let myself feel ashamed about something this basic. “What, like an animal? In case you’ve forgotten, I am one. I did a lot worse to those vampires a couple days ago.”

  “Yeah, but they attacked us first.” Her gaze followed the deer as Nate set it on a log to skin it. As the knife cut into the hide, she winced and looked away.

  “We need to eat. We’re all predators here, Sparks. This is the way of the wild.” I motioned toward the deer. “I picked off one that was already lame. It wasn’t fit to survive anyway. So just enjoy your meal. You can thank me after.”

  Ren

  I drew my legs closer to my stone perch and balanced my phone on my knees. It’s like he constantly has to be taking me down a peg, I texted to Kylie. He treats me like I’m an idiot.

  Boys pulling pigtails, she wrote back with a winking emoji. He’s got it for you bad.

  I glanced across the grove to where West was helping Nate arrange the deer carcass on the spit Aaron had fashioned. The firelight caught on the red and silver in his hair and the angular planes of his handsome face.

  Way too handsome. Even when I was irritated with him, I couldn’t squash the longing to see a real smile cross that face, directed at me.

  He’s twenty-seven, I replied. I think he’s past the preschool stage of flirting.

  You’d be surprised. Some guys never grow out of it. I say you march right up to him and plant one on him. And then write back to tell me all about the amazing sex you two get up to.

  I shook my head at the screen. Ha ha. Not likely.

  Oh, hey, dinner’s here. Catch you again soon!

  I tucked the phone onto my pocket and watched the guys set the roasting stick holding our dinner over the fire. The flames sizzled as a few drops of blood dripped off the skinned flesh. The mass of pink and red muscle made me think of the claw marks that still hadn’t quite faded from my skin. The blood in Kylie’s hair last night. I rubbed my arms.

  What had West said about that deer? That it’d been weak. Not fit to survive. Did he think the same thing when he looked at me? I wasn’t even coming close to keeping up with my supposed mates. Marco had said a dragon shifter would put the rest of them to shame. I’d hardly been living up to that expectation.

  A stick snapped in the forest behind me. I flinched and jerked around, my heart thudding. It was only Marco himself, coming back from a patrol of our campsite. He dipped his head to me with his slanted smirk. “Nothing to worry about, princess. All clear.”

  The thickening darkness behind him looked anything but clear. The rogue shifters might not be close enough for him to sense, but they could be tracking us. Who knew how quickly they could move? Most of the ones that had attacked me and Kylie had outrun West’s kin.

  Apprehension prickled over me. I hugged myself and turned back to the fire.

  Marco sauntered past me and cocked his head, eyeing the spit. “Now that’s a fine sight. I’m glad the rest of you are so domestic.”

  West snorted. Nate let out a disgruntled huff of breath. “I’d hate to see what your kills look like when you’re done playing with them,” he said.

  Marco chuckled. “I’m a jaguar, not a house cat. And I’d bet I could have taken down a deer twice that size.”

  “Twice as long to cook, and more meat than we’d have time to eat. Sounds like a brilliant plan.” West motioned toward the trees. “Go ahead and take a stab at it, if you’ve got that much to prove.”

  “Ah, why bother when you’ve already done the work for me?” The jaguar shifter lowered himself onto a log and stretched his legs out as if perfectly relaxed.

  A thump from the other side of the van made me startle again. “That’s Aaron coming back,” Nate said, noticing. Right. The eagle shifter had been taking a turn over the landscape from above before it got too dark to spot our enemies.

  He emerged from behind the van a moment later, buttoning up his shirt as he came. I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry to see those sculpted muscles disappearing behind the fabric.

  “See anything interesting, bird boy?” Marco asked him. He poked at the fire idly with a stick.

  “Nothing worthy of immediate concern,” Aaron said. “But we shouldn’t lower our guards.”

  “No chance of that with the bunch of you.”

  Nate grimaced at him. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and turn the damn spit, Marco?”

  “Hmm, I think this side needs a little longer.”

  “Give me that.” West grabbed the stick from him. “You’re going to put out the fire at that rate.” He prodded two of the logs Marco had jostled closer together. A flicker of a memory passed through my head—a brief squabble with my sisters, tug-of-war over a toy. A lump rose in my throat.

  The question that had occurred to me earlier prodded me again. This seemed as good a time to ask as any.

  “There are only four alphas at any time, right?” I said.

  Marco gave me an amused look. “Aren’t we enough for you, princess?”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant... A dragon shifter is supposed to take the alphas as mates. So what if there’s more than one dragon shifter? My sisters weren’t supposed to die.”

  Aaron dipped his head. “No,” he said. “And it’s common for each dragon shifter to give birth to more than one daughter, in case of a tragedy. Generally speaking, your parents would have chosen which of you seemed best suited for the responsibility, and the others would have supported her. They could take mates as well, but their line wouldn’t pass on.”

  “Oh. I guess that makes sense.” So if the rogues hadn’t carried out their bloody assault, it might have been one of my sisters bonded to these four now. The thought sent an uncomfortable prickling over my skin. I turned my gaze back to the fire.

  The flames danced higher, nearly grazing the deer’s flesh. It was starting to brown. The sizzles that reached my ears now were drips of fat, not blood. The smell of roasted venison was trickling through the air.

  My mouth started to water. Maybe I didn’t like the idea of killing a deer, but I wasn’t too squeamish to eat it now that it was already dead. I guessed that kind of did make me a hypocrite.

  The flickering light and the wavering warmth started to lull my nerves. I let my gaze sink into the fire. The flames darted up and back down, orange tinged with a darker red around the edges. Yellow-white at their core. Beautiful, the way they flared to life. Almost like—

  The fragment of memory rushed up so fast it
rocked me on my seat. For an instant, I was a little girl again, clutching my mother’s scaled leg as the ground fell away beneath us. The swoop of her wings warbled through the air. Sharp cracks rang out below us. What was that sound? I’d never heard it before, but it terrified me.

  Mama opened her dragon mouth and spewed a stream of flame at our attackers. My arm was throbbing. Blood seeped from a gouge just above my elbow. Tears streaked down my cheeks. Another burst of flame filled my vision, and—

  I caught myself before I tipped right over, planting my feet hard on the ground. The heat of the campfire washed over me, sharper than before. My hand rose to my arm, to the phantom pain of that long ago wound. I rubbed the skin there even though I didn’t have a scar to show it had been real.

  “Ren?” Nate said from across the grove. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I pushed myself to my feet. I couldn’t be that little girl anymore, clinging helplessly while someone else did all the fighting. It didn’t matter which of my sisters Mom and my dads would have chosen to lead. I was the only one left, and I had the ferocity in me... somewhere.

  My gaze traveled up one of the tall birch trees near the edge of the grove. Its white bark shone against the darkness. Without letting myself second-guess the impulse, I strode over to it and grasped the lowest branches.

  “What are you up to, princess?” Marco asked.

  “Just need to stretch my legs a bit,” I said. “Don’t mind me.”

  I clambered upward from branch to branch, steadying myself when I needed to against the trunk. The papery bark rustled under my groping hands. The smells of the roasting meat and the fire fell away, leaving only the tangy scent of sap.

  I stopped when the trunk had narrowed a little too much for comfort and peered down. West was turning the meat. The other guys were peering up at me, watching my progress. The firelight danced off their faces.

  I was about as high up as I’d been in the pine a few days ago. A jump I knew I could make. But I didn’t want to land. I wanted those wings to unfurl from my back and carry me back toward the sky.

  The urge to fly had been with me my whole life. Maybe I could draw it all the way out if my body believed shifting was the only way to protect me from the fall?

  I dragged in a breath. Then I launched myself out into the air.

  Normally I’d have moved right into my landing pose: feet braced, knees bent, body properly aligned. But I had to believe I’d hurt myself if I hit the ground. I let my limbs scatter, a gasp slipping from my mouth as my hair whipped up behind me. I could break a leg or worse like this. If I didn’t shift and glide out of the fall.

  A fluttering sensation raced through my chest, but my body stayed totally human. My body careened on down. The ground looked far too close. Shit. Biting back a curse, I yanked my feet under me at the last second.

  I hit the ground slightly off balance, but managed to roll out of the fall with at least a bit of grace. My left foot had taken too much of my weight. It throbbed when I straightened up. I gritted my teeth and managed to march back to my stone seat without limping.

  “If you’re looking for thrills, there are plenty of other activities I could suggest,” Marco said, arching his eyebrows.

  In what wasn’t my greatest show of maturity, I stuck my tongue out at him. He laughed. He didn’t seem phased by my jump, but when my gaze traveled around the fire, I realized Aaron and West were both watching me. Aaron looked thoughtful. West’s eyes had narrowed. My skin itched with the suspicion that neither of them totally bought my story about “stretching my legs.”

  Thankfully, Nate stepped in then to distract both them and me from my continuing failure to be an actual shifter. He carved a hunk of venison off the roasting deer and offered it to me on a paper plate. “You should eat something,” he said. “We’re all going to need our strength.”

  Yeah. I dug in, closing my eyes as the smoky juices filled my mouth. Delicious. When had I ever had meat this fresh in my life?

  But it couldn’t quite erase the twisting in my stomach. One more attempt to shift gone down in flames—or rather, gone down without flames. How many more tries was I going to get?

  Chapter 19

  Ren

  I’d slept in a lot worse places than the seat of a fairly luxurious SUV. In corners of vacant buildings surrounded by druggies. Under ratty blankets that smelled like cat piss tucked away in an alley. On the hard concrete floor of the church basement Fisher operated out of, with a hard lump of guilt filling my stomach over the previous day’s thefts and the ones I’d have to commit tomorrow.

  But tonight I couldn’t settle. I pulled the wool blanket West had shoved at me higher over my shoulders and squirmed against the seat back. My body refused to relax into the soft leather.

  In the backseat, behind me, the low, steady murmur of Marco’s breaths told me he’d had no trouble passing out. Nate was sprawled in the driver’s seat, which he’d tipped back to just above my feet, his rugged face soft with sleep. West and Aaron were somewhere out in the woods on first watch.

  I was surrounded by my alphas. Perfectly safe. But maybe the idea of their protection nagged at me more than it comforted me.

  I closed my eyes and tried to let my mind drift away. Crickets chirped outside the window. A breeze hissed through the trees branches. The taste of roast venison lingered in my mouth. It was starting to go sour. No toothbrushes out here in the wild. I groped for the bottle of water I’d left on the car floor.

  Just after I’d set it back down, a faint humming emanated from Nate’s seat. He stirred and reached to his pocket to switch off the alert he must have set on his phone. As he sat up, my restlessness gripped me even harder. I couldn’t stand to spend one more second shut away in the SUV, not right now.

  He glanced over at me when I sat up. “I’m just going to switch off with Aaron,” he said quietly. “He’ll be back here in a few minutes.”

  “I can’t sleep,” I said. “I think a little walk might burn off some energy.”

  The corners of his eyes crinkled with concern, but he didn’t try to stop me. He slipped out the driver’s side door, and I eased open the back one.

  The sky was clear, the stars gleaming bright against the black. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen the constellations that clearly. In New York City, the haze of city lights always blotted out all but the most insistent stars.

  I followed Nate into the woods in silence, wondering whether he and Aaron had arranged a meeting spot or if he was just locating the eagle shifter by scent. The summer night breeze tickled past me, still pleasantly warm. We’d walked for several minutes, weaving between the trees, before a streak of moonlight caught on Aaron’s golden-blond hair up ahead. He turned to greet Nate. His gaze halted on me.

  “No activity so far,” he said to Nate, and then to me, “I thought you’d gone to sleep.”

  There was no judgment in his tone, or even anything like Nate’s almost suffocating concern. Just curiosity. My shoulders edged down from the argument I’d been braced for. “I tried,” I said with a weak smile. “It didn’t stick. I was hoping the walk would help.”

  “I can keep you company for that.” He nodded to Nate and offered his hand to me. I took it, loving the feel of his strong fingers closing around mine.

  “So has the walking helped?” he asked as we ambled back toward our campsite.

  I bit my lip. I felt a little more settled with him there beside me, but that restless twitch was still nibbling at my nerves. “I don’t know. Not as much as I hoped.”

  He ran his thumb over the back of my hand. “Do you want to talk about what’s on your mind?”

  “How do you know something is on my mind?”

  “You can’t sleep, and so you’re wandering in the woods in the middle of the night. I figured it was a pretty safe guess.”

  I made a face at him, and he gave me an even smile. Well, it wasn’t as if he was wrong. “I’m not sure talking will help either.”

&nbs
p; “It’s worth a try, right?” He paused, turning me toward him. “What’s bothering you?”

  I looked at the ground. “I just... You’ve all been great. Well, West—let’s not go there. The rest of you have been. And all the people in that village. Everyone is so eager to welcome me as a shifter. As the most important shifter there is. But I still can’t even shift.”

  “It’s only been a few days,” Aaron said. “You’re getting there.”

  “Maybe. It’s not just that. I don’t know how I can be even half of the things I’m supposed to be. What if... What if I’m ruined, because of all those years when I didn’t know who I was, growing up the wrong way, without any idea about any of this? What if I can’t ever be a full shifter?”

  “Oh, Serenity.” He opened his arms, and I stepped closer to him automatically. That pull, that need to be near each of the guys was getting harder to deny. He cupped my face, and I tilted my head to meet his kiss. The heat of his lips coursed through me. It didn’t take away my doubts, but it was an awfully nice distraction.

  After the kiss, he eased me back slightly, keeping his hands on either side of my face. His head bowed until the fringe of his hair brushed my forehead. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “Something I’ve never really talked about with anyone. I spent most of my life wondering if I wasn’t exactly what a shifter was meant to be too.”

  “What?” I pulled back far enough to stare into his eyes. “How could you think that? You’re not just a shifter—you’re the one chosen to be your whole kin-group’s alpha.”

  “By a man who might have changed his mind if he’d been alive long enough to see me through to adulthood, for all I knew,” Aaron said. “There are always cracks where doubt can creep in, no matter how secure your position seems. And mine never felt all that secure. The avian shifters... We’re not always considered equal to the other groups. Most of the canine and feline kin see us as something lesser.”