by Abigail Owen
Her father slowly stepped up beside her, trying to pull her back behind him. “Whatever he is, he saved our lives,” he said in Spanish.
Mexican descent based on the accent, more drawn out at the ends of the words. Words that were a sharp contrast to the man’s actions as he tried to protect his daughter.
“He saved Clover,” the youngest of the three other men pointed out.
Clover? Oh, the damn goat.
With the woman safely shielded by his body, the father stepped forward. “What is your name?” he asked in English.
Then he held out a hand to Drake who stared at it as if the appendage might suddenly turn into a snake and bite him. Humans weren’t supposed to act like this. Most either froze in fear, or like a rabbit caught in a snare, they fell into hysteria, or they ran. The exact wrong thing to do around a predator.
Still, he shouldn’t pass up the opportunity. He needed to wipe all their memories of his existence, and he needed to be close to do it, and he needed to touch skin.
“Drake.” He wasn’t sure why he bothered answering when he was going to pull the memory from their minds anyway. Grasping the man by the hand, Drake leaned forward, staring into his eyes intently.
All humans tended to respond like prey this close to dragons, going into a sort of trance. Deliberately, Drake lit the fire inside himself, red flames taking over his eyes. The man stared, pupils swallowing his irises as they dilated, relaxing into the thrall. Holding that gaze, Drake pushed his heat through his hands and into the man’s mind. Such a small amount of time to delete from a person’s memory took only seconds. When he released him, the man blinked and remained in that trance.
“I would also like to thank you.” The oldest of the other men also held out a hand.
“Papá?” the woman questioned as Drake grasped the next man by the hand, repeating the process. Then moved to the next man who stepped forward. This was too easy.
“What did you do to him?” She turned as he finished. Then took a closer look at the older man beside her father. “Tio?”
Ah, her uncle. The third man, closer to her age, a cousin perhaps or brother, seeming oblivious to her rising concern, also offered a hand.
“Wait.” She stepped between them. “What did you do to them?”
For once, Drake didn’t want to stay silent, almost as though compelled to give her the truth she’d earned with her determined management of her own fear. “Taking away the memory of me. Do you really want to remember?”
She stared at him, short breaths puffing through her lush dusky lips, generous breasts pushing against the material of what used to be a white tank top, now filthy with ash. “That’s all?”
“That’s all. Then I’ll leave.”
After a long, searching stare, she stepped to the side and nodded at the young man, more a teenage boy.
“Are you sure?” the boy asked.
“Go ahead, Leo.” She canted her head at Drake who held out a hand.
Hesitantly, the boy took it and Drake did the same to him as he’d done to the others. He needed to move faster. The effect on her father would wear off soon, and he’d be forced to repeat the process. He held out a hand to her.
With a deep breath, she placed her own in his, the slight tremble to it acting like a kick in the balls. He hated that she’d had to be afraid. Which was a ridiculous reaction. Even more ridiculous, heat surged and spread up his arm from that small contact, soothing the tingling nerves still jarring him from earlier.
“What’s your name?” he asked. Again, the words escaped his control, dragged from his lips as though compelled.
“Camilla,” she murmured, not looking away, her hand tiny in his. “Cami.”
“Cami,” he murmured.
“Drake,” she whispered back, and his gut clenched at the sound of his name on her lips. Familiar and yet strange at the same time.
What is wrong with you? Get this done and leave.
Instantly, he ignited the flames in his eyes, and her shoulders dropped, her body relaxing. Then Cami blinked, pulled back slightly, though she didn’t break the contact. “What if I don’t want to forget you?” she asked.
Everything inside him froze. He pushed through the strange sensation through sheer will.
“You don’t have a choice.” Humans knowing about dragon shifters was against their laws. The very laws that, as an enforcer, he was sworn to uphold.
Drake tugged her closer, and she stepped almost willingly into him, trust having replaced the panicked fear in her eyes. But a trust that wasn’t entirely real, entirely hers. The look struck and wrapped around his heart like a fist and squeezed hard.
With a reluctance that manifested as an ache under his breastbone, Drake allowed his eyes to blaze fully, then pushed his heat through the physical connection, through her skin, and into her mind, using the magic contained in his fire to steal that time from her.
He finished, allowing the fire in his eyes to bank. He should let go of her, shift and fly away. For some strange reason, he couldn’t. Didn’t want to.
Could she be a mate? Only one type of female could call to a male dragon shifter that way.
Drake stepped into her, dipping his head until his nose was at the crook of her neck, though not quite touching, and inhaled her sweet scent. Winter fresh air, a floral undernote, and the scent of smoke still clinging to her from the fire.
Ambrosia.
But no smoky scent coming directly from her that would indicate she was a dormant dragon mate, and the fear from what she’d just gone through damn well should’ve sparked her dragon sign. But there was no shifting of her eyes or a small part of her body. No sparks flying from her person. Nothing.
Drake forced himself to step back, allowed his gaze to linger on her face for a second longer, then turned, shifted, and left without another glance.
She was human.
Besides, even if she was a mate, she wouldn’t be his. He’d already seen his mark on another woman’s neck, glowing in the heat of dragon fire. Not that she turned out to be his, either. However, the odds of another this soon were so slim they were laughable. Absurd.
And you’re already dying, asshole. It’s too late for a mate to save you, anyway.
Chapter One
The sour scent of burning rubber followed Cami like an annoying drunk at a bar, clinging to her clothes and the hairs in her nose. The bottoms of her solid work boots were melting from the heat still left in the ground from the fire as she tromped through the still slightly smoldering remains of what had been gorgeous towering pines and canopied black oak trees on their land.
Land the Carrillos had owned for generations. All the way back to the time of the Ranchos, when the Spanish and then the Mexican authorities had given land grants to private individuals, later honored by the U.S. after the Mexican–American War.
Land where they’d made good lives for themselves. Lives they’d almost lost. The wildfire had almost taken her and several family members out. She still had no clue how they’d managed to get away.
The last thing she recalled was running to the truck as the flames had closed in on them. She’d had to resist touching her skin to make sure she wasn’t melting under the horrible heat. Next thing she knew, she was standing on a road far enough away to only be able to see the smoke rising into the blue of the sky, their truck looking a hell of a lot worse behind them, without a clue as to how they’d gotten there.
When they were finally allowed home, they discovered that the fire had ravaged their land, taken their barns, and burned all but the original house to the ground. In a weird twist of fate, it sat, almost untouched, on a circle of green grass, as though the flames had broken around it, like rapids around a boulder. At least they still had it, though her two uncles and their families had moved in with her parents and her, making for a tight squeeze. Luckily, her two younger sis
ters were off at college.
The entire situation sucked, but no use wishing to undo something that couldn’t be undone. All they could do was rebuild and move forward.
As if everything that had happened wasn’t enough, Cami had a personal problem to add to the heaping pile of shit already surrounding her. One she didn’t dare put a voice to or share with her family.
If they found out, that made it real. Cami didn’t want this to be real.
On the pretense that she was tired of shoveling the ashes of the barn away, she’d taken the only four-wheeler to survive the fire. She’d told her dad that she was going to see if she could find any more surviving goats or at least their carcasses so they’d be accounted for.
Her family had lucked the hell out as far as the goats were concerned. The fire hadn’t reached the range where most of the herd had been grazing. Only the late mothers with their doelings almost ready to be weaned, who’d been held in a barn close to the house, had been in danger. They’d managed to get all but Clover’s mother out safely in the back of their truck. However, those damn flames had taken down several fence lines and the rest of the goats had gotten out, now wandering the hills willy-nilly. Probably burning their little hooves like she was her boots.
But that wasn’t why she’d come out here alone.
She’d driven as far out as she could, stopped the four-wheeler, and got off. Then unbuttoned her shirt and stared down at the skin just above the valley of her breasts. A shot of dread worse than anything she’d experienced the day of the fire jolted through her with the force of an earthquake, trembling the very foundations her life was built on and leaving her shaken. As shaken as the first time she’d seen this a week ago. Maybe worse.
Dead center of her chest, a spot—not a lump because her skin still lay flat—but an imperfect circle that glowed from the inside, from underneath like she was being lit up. Streaming from the spot, the blood pulsing through her veins showed in stark relief against the reddish-gold brightness underneath, almost with the look of scales. It had grown from a small pinpoint to the size of a walnut. In days.
Cami swallowed back the sour sting of bile and shook her head, though no one was there to see. “This isn’t real,” she whispered to herself in a fierce voice. “Wake the hell up.”
This had to be a hallucination. She’d inhaled toxic fumes during the evacuation and that combined with the danger she’d faced was manifesting itself as some kind of freaky PTSD attack.
Except hallucinations don’t start fires.
Like she’d done this morning when she’d shot sparks from her person. This time, she’d been getting dressed and the second she’d removed her pajama top she’d seen the growing area of glowing skin. She’d freaked out and sparks had flown off her. After a squawk that she’d quickly swallowed, not wanting to alert her large, often overly involved, family, she’d had to stomp out the small fire that started on her bedding.
“It’s real enough,” a deep, masculine voice sounded in front of her.
Cami jerked her head up with a gasp to find a tall man with broad shoulders and bottomless black eyes that seemed to bore through her skin standing in front of her like a sentinel of doom.
With a gasp, she backed up, at the same time pulling a pistol from the holster at her hip.
She’d learned a long time ago to travel their land armed, especially when she was alone. One tense moment staring down a rather large mountain lion had been all it took to start that habit.
With a practiced motion, she flicked off the safety and cocked the gun, finger off the trigger, but aiming it directly at him. “You are trespassing on private property.”
A breeze toyed with her still open shirt, and she barely kept from wrinkling her nose at the disadvantage being semi-undressed put her at. Instead, she stared him down.
Was he a hunter? The black combat-style pants and black T-shirt didn’t suggest that. Heart still jammed tightly in her throat, cutting off oxygen, she took stock. Black hair to go with the black eyes, cut short, almost military style. He was a big man, six foot three or four at least, and the muscles straining his T-shirt across his chest and at the sleeves suggested he was also in damn good shape. No way could she outrun him or fight him off.
She didn’t want to kill him, though. She didn’t need to add any new nightmares to the ones she already had. Ones that included red glowing eyes and the feeling of flying.
The stranger crossed his arms, muscles bunching. “I’m here to help you, Camilla.”
Her heart made a mad dash to escape up her mouth. He knew her name. Was he a stalker? She rarely posted anything on social media. How had he found her way out here anyway?
He took a step forward and she jerked back a step. “Stay away from me,” she snapped, putting as much authority in her voice as she could around the shaking, happy to see her hand remained steady.
The man held up his hands in a conciliating gesture that did nothing to calm her. The man in black, she silently dubbed him, even as her more rational mind was metaphorically smacking her forehead for having the thought.
“This isn’t what you think,” he said.
“I think you need to leave—”
He stepped closer again, and the spike of terror and adrenaline sent her heart into overdrive. Suddenly, as had happened this morning, sparks flew from her body, like a spitting, hissing firecracker on the Fourth of July. Embers shot from her, landing on a nearby bush that hadn’t entirely turned to charred remains of itself, and the thing went up in flames faster than a rattler could strike.
“Oh my God!” Cami jumped back, though she still managed to keep her gun trained on the man across from her.
Instead of reacting like a normal person, he coolly stepped closer to the flames.
“Don’t—” she started to shout but cut the word off with a squeak.
The flames reached for him, like a child reaching for a parent, but instead absorbed into his skin, like he was pulling it into himself. The heat radiating to her reduced with each draw, the fire growing smaller and smaller. In mere seconds, the tiny blaze had been extinguished, the only remaining evidence the smoke lifting lazily into the sky.
Cami stared from the bush to the man and back. “What—”
She stopped and shook her head with zero idea what words to even use at this point.
Those obsidian eyes, eyes she’d thought hard and bottomless, almost seemed to soften. “There’s a reason you are glowing and sparking.”
She’d lowered the gun a bit, shock dropping her arm, but the sound of his voice snapped her out of it, and she jerked it back up to train it on him. “What reason?” she demanded.
He actually had the temerity to raise a single eyebrow at her weapon, and Cami glared back at him, suddenly tempted to show him that she had no problem using it and was a damn fine shot.
His gaze lasered in on her, with an intensity that somehow penetrated the fog of fear and bravado she was swimming in, as though he willed her to hear his words. “You’re meant to be a dragon shifter.”
All Cami heard was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, dragon, blah.
A hysterical laugh escaped her like a prisoner making a break for it. Maybe she’d taken her hallucinations to a whole new level. Or she was asleep, and this was just a bad dream. That had to be it.
She slapped herself hard with her free hand. Nothing happened.
The man in front of her sighed. “Why do they always need proof?” he muttered.
They? They who? Had he forced his kind of crazy on other poor women?
“Stand back,” he said. His body started to waver and sort of shimmer. Not like glitter. More like looking to the horizon and seeing the wavy, silvery image of water when you knew none existed there.
But then his body started to change. Cami blinked, then blinked again harder, because she didn’t quite believe her eyes. His body grew
, and bones shifted, and skin disappeared behind scales so black they seemed like a lake of ink. Wicked spikes sprouted from his spine and his arms turned to wings folded in close to his side.
Turned out fear had a taste. It tasted metallic, a lot like blood.
Cami scrambled back, giving him space, and stumbled over a fallen tree, landing on her ass. The gun in her hand went off with a bang and she watched in seventies TV slow motion horror as the bullet shot out only to hit the monster in the chest and ricochet away.
The massive…I can’t believe I’m thinking the word dragon…creature gave her a cockeyed look almost as though to say, “Seriously?”
“Um…sorry about that.” I’m apologizing to a dragon that I just shot. Plus, that bullet had done nothing to him. Not even a dent as far as she could tell.
An inappropriate wave of pure fascination overtook her, burying the fear, even if for only a second. A dragon with superman-strength body armor in the form of scales was standing in front of her.
“Do you believe me now?” His voice echoed inside her head, as if coming from inside her and outside her at the same time. However, his mouth didn’t move.
A telepathic dragon. Right. Because how else would dragons communicate?
Cami closed her eyes to try to put a stop to thoughts that were starting to garner a frenetic edge to them, buzzing in her head.
“Please don’t faint or something.”
That had her snapping her eyes open to glare at him. “I don’t faint.” Deliberately, she picked herself up off the ground, brushing ash and leaves from her backside.
“That’s good to hear,” his voice rumbled inside her head.
Right. Get it together. At least he hasn’t eaten you yet.
The strangest sensation of déjà vu chose that moment to strike, and Cami paused in her motion, waiting to see if she could remember what came next. Only nothing came to her, and the odd awareness faded.
With a deep breath she lifted her head and faced the… Shit, dragon just sounded so weird in her head… Faced the dragon head on.
