by Amelia Jade
In the coming centuries Top Scale would need a new Wing Commander, and Daxxton had just the person in mind for the job.
“Well, you don’t exactly have the most lenient teaching style,” Asher replied with a grin. “Learning and getting better is far less painful than the other option.” He rubbed a welt on his upper leg as proof of what happened when he was too slow.
Daxxton smiled, dipping his head toward the younger man. “It is good to have you back,” he said.”
Asher looked around. “It’s good to be back. Thank you for agreeing to work with us.”
He tried to wave the other man off.
“No, I’m serious,” Asher insisted. “You already taught us so much about being dragons, how to master that aspect of ourselves. You could have stopped there, but to invite us to return continually to learn human-style combat as well? That was unnecessary.”
Daxxton smiled and accepted the thanks this time, instead of trying to fight it off some more. “It’s a pleasure having the three of you here,” he said.
“Careful,” a female voice said from behind them. “Keep that up and it might go to his head.”
This time Daxxton allowed a small laugh to escape as he turned to look at the heavily pregnant woman walking—he would not say waddling, he absolutely would not!—toward them.
“I’ve got enough tricks left in the bag to ensure he doesn’t let that happen, Rhynne,” he teased.
“You’d better. He’s worse than Dom these days, which is saying something!”
While Asher pretended to be insulted, Daxxton considered the newcomer to the conversation.
Rhynne Nova, daughter to one of the most powerful scions in all of Cadia. Her parents had been furious when she’d mated herself to Dominick, a relative nobody, at least in terms of the so-called “aristocracy” that had unfortunately arisen within the shifter territory they all called home.
No, only her mother had been irate. Her father had wished her well. Daxxton mentally corrected himself there, marveling once again at how someone so well-grounded like Zoltan Nova could stand to be mated to a power-hungry…woman, like Klara. He shook his head, unimpressed with himself for almost using another word to describe Rhynne’s mother.
Behind them, a noise began to emanate from within the pile of his shirt and a spare towel.
Daxxton frowned as he walked over. He owned a cell phone, though he detested the device, as did most shifters. Their worlds were, for the most part, small enough not to need such lines of communication. But as the head of Top Scale, he was expected to be reachable.
“Yes?” he asked as he hit the green answer button, not looking at the number or asking who it was. He frankly didn’t give a fuck. If someone was calling him, it was either an emergency, or he was going to tear them a new one. Either way, there was no point wasting time.
“It’s Klara,” the sharp female alto voice said without preamble. “We have a situation.”
Wonderful. Just the person I wanted it to be.
He listened to her speak for a moment, his spine straightening as he did. “I understand. We’ll handle it.” The line went dead and he reached down, pulling his shirt from the pile even as he moved away from the others, into the center of a circle of rocks set into the ground.
“Playtime is over,” he said, his voice easily carrying to the others.
The tone of his words registered with them all, and they noted where he was standing, and without a word the five others—Rhynne knew she wasn’t going anywhere—all found stone circles of their own to be within.
Daxxton didn’t bother saying anything more. He snapped his fingers and fire exploded from his core, wrapping up and around him like a living, breathing thing. He saw similar bursts of color rise up from the ground.
White mist for Asher, the Frost Dragon.
Fire-stricken black clouds for Zeke, the Fire Dragon.
Lightning clouds for Dominick, the Electro Dragon.
A tornado of wind for Zander, the Gale Dragon.
A swarm of green fog for Blaine, the Fume Dragon.
Around Daxxton, the fire exploded outward, morphing to white frost as it expanded to keep his body shrouded, a body that was also growing. Even as he reached his full size, the white clouds turned dark gray and lightning began to flicker through them.
Daxxton felt the power of his dragon body infuse his core as the change was complete, and he launched himself upward before the protective cover had even begun to dissipate. The storm clouds were flung to the earth by his huge wings, the thin burnished gold membranes lifting him easily into the sky.
As the lightning hit the stone circle it turned to gold and rushed outward in a perfect circle until it reached the edge of the standing stones, where it evaporated into thin air.
A split second later, five other dragons of varying sizes followed him into the sky. They were all Guardians of Cadia, protectors of their homeland. When Daxxton had said playtime was over, they knew. Something was up, and whatever it was, there was no time to waste explaining it.
Daxxton didn’t speak until the six of them, split into two wings—one headed by himself, the other by Blaine—were winging to the east at best possible speed.
“There’s a situation developing along our eastern border,” he said, his dragon snout able to mimic the human language, though it gave it a distinct sibilant hiss to it that would throw off anyone not used to hearing it.
“What kind of situation?” Blaine asked.
Daxxton eyed his second-in-command. “A tricky one. Apparently, the Princess of Tanith is coming to visit.”
There were rumbles of surprise at the mention of that.
“And she’s being pursued by what she believes to be a Fenris hit team.”
All of a sudden everyone was fully alert and keyed in to the situation.
Tanith was a minor shifter territory to the southwest of Cadia. Fenris was a major—no, he corrected—it was the major shifter territory after Cadia itself. It was almost directly to the west of Cadia, on a separate continent. Tanith had long been neutral between the two superpowers, favoring neither one nor the other, but working with both.
So why was the ruler of Tanith fleeing Fenris agents, and trying to enter Cadia on the opposite side of a least-distant course?
“There are a lot of questions, I know,” he said. “I gave you all the information I possess, however. With the current disposition of the Guardians,” he practically spat the sentence out, “there is no force close enough to be able to make a difference. Our mission is to get to the border, and secure the princess.”
“And what about the Fenris hit team?” Asher asked after a moment of silence.
“Get to the border, secure the princess. Those are the mission objectives,” Daxxton replied.
“And if the Fenris team won’t let us do that?”
Daxxton’s yellow dragon eyes narrowed into vertical slits. “Then we deal with them. Permanently.”
There was silence as he waited for anyone to challenge his decision. Ordering his team to eliminate Fenris agents was a big step up from the tensions that had been racking the two political entities lately. It had, for the most part, been single incidents here or there that could be blamed on one individual.
This was different. This could be, in some circumstances, taken as an act of war. Daxxton hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but he was, first and foremost, a Guardian of Cadia. Despite the way the Cadian Council had practically dismantled the Guardians of late, reducing their numbers drastically so that the borders were closer to a sieve than a wall, Daxxton still believed in their original mission. Keep humans out, and unruly shifters in. It was for the best.
“Sounds like a plan,” Blaine rumbled, and the others all chimed in. None of them liked the idea of Fenris agents trespassing onto their territory.
They continued on in silence, the ground sliding by swiftly underneath their bellies as their powerful wings drove them forward toward the eastern border, a land of forests and tre
es. That included the mighty Vallenwoods, trees that rose up nearly two hundred feet into the sky, dwarfing anything around them with their thick boughs, each tree boasting dozens of branches bigger than the other trees nearby.
It was the land of the bears, and they still did a fair job of maintaining the border as best they could with the limited resources now allocated to them. But this wasn’t a fight they could win.
Although Cadia was a democracy, many of the other shifter territories were not. Tanith was one of those places, and it had an older style of rule. A monarchy. And in any shifter territory, it inevitably became dragons that ruled the monarchy. Tanith was no different. The princess was a dragon, as would be her security team.
Which meant that the team coming after them would be made up of dragons as well. Daxxton had the utmost respect for the bear shifters and their Green Bearet training program, their equivalent to Top Scale. But simply put, bears were not a match for dragons. It was up to him and his team to stop this, hopefully without any bloodshed.
“I see a cloud of dust,” Blaine said in a surprised voice. “Are they coming by ground vehicle?”
“It would appear that way,” Asher said.
“Yes, they are in motorized units,” Daxxton confirmed.
Using cars or similar vehicles was generally anathema to shifters, who preferred to travel in their animal forms, unless it could absolutely not be helped. That worked well within their own strongholds. Out in the human world however, they were not allowed to assume animal form without express permission. So it was always an odd sight when shifters arrived at the borders of Cadia in vehicles.
Blaine spoke again as the dragons drew closer “I see another truck behind them, closing fast.”
“They’re almost at the border,” Asher said, his voice urging them on as the dragons began their descent.
Daxxton eyed up the situation. “The pursuers are going to overtake them right as they reach the border. Hopefully they will break off.”
They didn’t.
“Shit,” Asher muttered dully as figures piled out from both vehicles and spread out, the telltale colored clouds rising up as they prepared to shift.
“Dive!” Daxxton ordered even as the first breath weapons spat back and forth at the two sides.
Tucking his wings in flat to his sides, the Aurum Dragon plummeted from the sky. Behind him, his team mimicked his motions, the six of them swooping on their quarry like prehistoric birds of prey right out of a nightmare.
***
Miranda
The car bounced along, its suspension not made for the course they were currently taking.
“Tell me again why we came this way,” she muttered, just loud enough for the other occupants of the car to hear.
It was a rhetorical question, one that didn’t really need answering, but one of the other occupants decided to answer.
“We came this way, my—”
A cross look made Nolan reconsider what he’d been about to say. He very carefully did not smile, though she could see his cheeks flinching as he fought the urge.
“You know we came this way,” he began again. “Because it seemed like the smart option at the time.”
He also was very careful not to point out that she was the one who had argued in favor of taking the long, scenic route in an attempt to throw off the pursuers they’d expected to have.
After all, she thought with a glance at another occupant, it wasn’t often that the Princess of Tanith left the protection of her own enclave. By heading in the almost opposite direction of their intended destination, the princess’s security team, including Miranda, had hoped they wouldn’t be as concerned.
“We almost made it too.”
Miranda leaned back in her rear-facing seat, eying the other woman with a small smile. While she wore the drab gray-green mottled uniform of the princess’s security team, the princess wore a very expensive pale blue suit with gray vest and white blouse underneath. It wasn’t overtly formalwear for the ruler of a shifter stronghold, but these were more practical times. A ballgown, while more befitting her station as seen by many, was no longer the appropriate attire.
Especially if they had to move quickly.
“We’re approaching the border of Cadia, ma’am,” the driver said to her respectfully.
“And our company?” she asked, though she could see them easily through the rear window. The driver was an excellent judge of distance; she needed to know what he thought.
“Closing fast,” came the unhappy reply.
Miranda sensed the man wasn’t finished.
“Go on,” she urged.
The man just looked at her through the mirror and shook his head twice, firmly and sharply, without hesitation.
The meaning was clear. They weren’t going to make it.
“We’re going to have to fight,” Miranda announced.
Nolan looked at her, an argument on his lips, but she shut it down with a look. The words died as his mouth closed, and the professional was suddenly back. There was no time for arguments. That time had passed.
“Hold on,” the driver said. “Straightaway.”
The vehicle suddenly rocketed ahead as he punched the accelerator to the floor, and Miranda was thrown from her seat. It was forward for her because of the direction she was sitting, but she actually tumbled into the rear of the vehicle. Her reflexes allowed her to twist mid-air, and she simply landed in the empty seat on the other side of the princess.
Nolan glanced around their charge, who remained quiet, and gave her a look.
“I know, I know. You told me to wear my seatbelt,” she admitted.
Nolan simply huffed softly in reply and sat back.
“They’re going to catch us at the border.” The driver’s voice was tight as they gunned it for the imaginary line, notable only by the wooden pole on either side of the road about two miles ahead.
“Fucking Fenris,” she cursed. “I can’t believe they would stoop this low.”
“We don’t know for sure it’s them,” the princess said at last, adjusting her suit as the modified car hopped another bump, jostling the occupants.
“I think we can make a safe assumption,” Miranda replied. “Nobody else would be that bold. Fenris is the only one confident that if their team was outed, that they wouldn’t face retaliation. Cadia wouldn’t risk war over it, and if they wouldn’t, nobody would.”
“So tell me again why we came to Cadia for help then?” the princess asked.
“Because we need to convince them to act. To stop playing politics and view the reality of the situation,” Miranda said dully, having been over this argument a thousand times before.
The princess simply looked at her, raised her eyebrows at the tone, and went back to sitting still, her mouth closing.
“What I don’t get,” Nolan said, speaking into the silence, “is why they waited until the last possible moment to make their move? They’ve had ample opportunities to get their target.”
Miranda frowned. “Maybe we did have them fooled for most of our trip? When we made our unscheduled departure from our last stop to try and fool them, we’ve been on the move constantly since. There hasn’t been a chance for them to do anything, because they were so busy catching up.”
Nolan considered that, nodding slowly as he mulled it over. “That would make sense. They were tasked to shadow us unless we made a move for Cadia.”
Miranda snorted. “We brought this upon ourselves.”
The princess spoke. “We did what we had to do.”
“I know,” she replied. “I was the one who came up with the plan after all. “
Nobody said a word to that.
“Twenty seconds,” the driver announced. “If we wait any longer, they’ll be on top of us before we can shift.”
Miranda nodded. The royal security team was made up of the best protectors from within Tanith. But they were sorely lacking on numbers, having left most of the security detail behind as a cover when they
made the break for Cadia.
She closed her eyes and reached inside of herself, finding the carefully controlled ball of energy that lived in part of her mind. Mental fingers caressed it, bringing it to wakefulness and sharing her knowledge of the situation with the entity within.
It wasn’t a sentient being, in the normal sense. It was more akin to another part of her that she kept under rigid control, except when she needed to turn it loose.
Like now.
The interior shuddered as the driver slammed on the brakes the moment they passed the poles. It was official; they were in Cadia now. Miranda just hoped that her phone call to the head of the Cadian Council could produce results in time.
“Try not to provoke them!” she shouted as they piled out. There were four of them: her, Nolan, Dak, and Vogel. The princess stayed in the vehicle, though she made sure to shoot Miranda an angry look about it. She didn’t have time to deal with that though. Everyone had a role to play, and just then, she needed the princess to play hers.
Inky black darkness swirled up around her, obscuring her vision, but not before she saw the truck that had been pursuing them slide sideways to a halt, half a dozen men piling out from it. They also spread out.
A moment later the cloud parted, practically sucked back into her skin instead of dissipating upon the wind.
Three hundred yards distant, the pursuing dragons finished doing the same.
Miranda’s team fanned out, but they didn’t make any aggressive moves. Her yellow orbs narrowed as she noted that one man still remained in human form. He was sitting in the back of the vehicle, calmly looking at the situation through the open door.
What the fuck is that all about? He can’t be a human. That would be suicide. So why is he here, and why is he not shifting?
Miranda supposed the unknown man, older, judging by the silver in his hair, could be a different shifter type, but she had her doubts on that as well. No, something was up.
“Stay on your guard,” she said to her team, “but don’t do anything until they attack us.”
