by Alexis Davie
His smile faded slightly when he looked at Lila. She moved into the center of the living room, her fingers twiddling together in front of her body. Her face looked a little strained, like she was worried about something.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, getting to his feet and going to her side.
“Nothing. I… we need to talk,” she said.
Jasper felt his heart lurch. It was hardly ever good when someone said that, and he had a horrible feeling Lila was going to end things between them. He couldn’t have said why—things were great between them and Lila seemed as into him as he was her—but he couldn’t think of anything else that would leave her looking so nervous.
He led her to the couch and sat her down, sitting beside her. He waited for her to talk.
“I don’t know why I’m so nervous about this,” Lila said, looking at him.
She smiled and he felt himself relax a little. She wouldn’t be smiling if she was dumping him.
“I think I’m ready,” she said. “No, scratch that. I know I’m ready.”
“Ready for what?” Jasper asked.
Lila beamed at him and took his hand in hers.
“Ready for eternity,” she said. “Jasper, I want you to turn me into a shifter. Tonight.”
Jasper’s dread fell away, replaced by ecstasy as he took in Lila’s words. She wanted to be like him. She wanted to spend eternity with him. He opened his mouth to speak, but he had no words to describe how that made him feel, and instead, he pulled Lila to him and kissed her like he had never kissed her before.
The Hunted
The Hunted
Text Copyright © 2019 by Lola Gabriel
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
First printing, 2019
Publisher
Secret Woods Books
[email protected]
www.SecretWoodsBooks.com
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Prologue
Thirteen Years Earlier
Brooke jumped as she heard the loud clatter from below. She frowned and put her book down. What the hell were her parents up to? She shook her head as she went to investigate. They were always on her case about getting her schoolwork done, and now that she was actually following their orders, they were making so much noise it was impossible to concentrate.
Brooke went down the stairs. She was halfway down them when she heard her mother’s scream, a scream not of physical pain, but of mental pain, a deep anguish that made Brooke’s heart stop beating for a second. She didn’t stop to think about what she might be running into—she just ran.
She covered the rest of the stairs and crossed the hallway and left by the open back door to the house. She felt her knees buckle when she saw what was going on, and she fell to the ground. Her father was dead. She knew it without having to get any closer. His body lay on the ground, torn to shreds and charred.
Her mother was still alive, battling a ferocious-looking, large, red dragon who blew fire at her. Her mother ducked and dove, avoiding the flame, but Brooke knew it was only a matter of time until the flames caught her. Her mother didn’t even have a weapon. At least not one that could kill a dragon.
Brooke knew why. She had never expected to need one. They had always lived in peace with the dragons. More than that—they lived as one with them.
The town of Pengle, a small town in a remote part of the Colorado mountains, had been Brooke’s home since she was born. Her parents had both been born here, and all of her grandparents had too. They had all been members of the Protectorate; it was in her blood line, her destiny, to become a member of the Circle of the Protectorate herself one day, and give her life over to protecting the few remaining dragons of the world.
Week after week, month after month, the Order of the Interfectorem ad Dracones, an ancient order of dragon hunters, came for the dragons. Queen Alexandria’s pack was the last dragon pack in the world after a deadly disease spread through the dragon colonies around two hundred years ago, wiping out creatures who until that point had believed themselves to be immortal, fearing only the pollen of the Antirrhinum, a pollen that, if introduced to a dragon’s blood, could kill it instantly.
Alexandria’s pack had gone into hiding after the spread of the disease, and Alexandria had begun to recruit trusted humans to form the Protectorate, a group of twenty-four people who would protect the pack with their lives against the Order.
Brooke had grown up knowing she would one day become a Circle member. She had known about the dragons for as long as she could remember, although she was kept well away from them. Only Circle members had direct contact with the dragons.
She would have begun her training to join the Protectorate on her fifteenth birthday, exactly three weeks from today. Her parents had always taught her that dragons were gentle, sensitive creatures, creatures that were happy to live in peace alongside humankind, and that they were to be revered and protected.
Brooke didn’t know what had changed, but this dragon was anything but gentle. It had killed her father, and now it was going for her mother. Brooke wanted to burst out of the bushes she had crawled behind, to help her mother, but she was frozen to the spot, the horror of what she was seeing paralyzing her. She couldn’t even look away from the horrible scene before her, not even when the dragon finally managed to catch her mother in its plume of fiery breath. Brooke’s mother screamed again, a scream of agony, and Brooke knew if she lived to be one hundred, she would still be able to hear that scream. She would still be able to feel it in every pore of her body.
The dragon stepped closer to her mother’s body where she lay writhing on the ground. It reached out with its clawed arms and Brooke closed her eyes as it began to tear at her mother. Brooke’s only consolation was knowing that at least this way, her mother was no longer in pain.
Brooke forced herself to open her eyes once the frenzied clawing was over. She knew she had to see what the dragon looked like in human form. She had to have a good description of both the dragon and the human version of the creature so she could request an audience with Queen Alexandria and tell her what she had seen.
Brooke’s jaw fell open when the dragon turned back to human form. It was a woman. She stood tall, her back straight, her head held high. Thick, black curls tumbled over her shoulders and down her back. Her face was pretty, her clothes expensive-looking.
Brooke might have been kept away from the dragons until her training could begin, but she would still know this woman anywhere. The woman who had killed her parents was the very dragon they had sworn to protect.
Queen Alexandria turned on her heel and walked away from the ravaged corpses of Brooke’s parents. She didn’t even look back.
The day had been the hardest one of Brooke’s life. It was a day that no teenager should ever have to face. The double funeral of her parents. She had gone from crying inconsolably to feeling completely numb and back again several times over across the course of the day. She had been comforted by friends and strangers alike, hugged, kissed. The worst was the people who tried to tell her it would get easier. How could living with a pain in your heart like this ever become easier? No amount of time could heal the wounds Brooke’s parents’ deaths had inflicted on her.
No one could ever replace Brooke�
�s parents, but her Uncle Steve had been given the job of trying to, or at least looking after Brooke until she turned eighteen. She vaguely remembered her mother mentioning having a brother when she was little, but she had never met the man, and her parents rarely mentioned his name.
He was tall like her mother, fair-skinned and fair-haired. He looked enough like Brooke’s mother that she knew he was telling her the truth when he told her who he was. He had also told her she would be moving to his home in New York City.
If someone had told Brooke that she would be happy to leave Pengle before today, she would have scoffed at them, but now, after what she had witnessed here, she was only too glad to hear she would be leaving this town and never coming back.
Only she would be coming back. One day, she would be coming back to avenge her parents’ deaths. Her parents had spent their lives protecting the dragon queen and her pack, telling Brooke the Order of the Interfectorem ad Dracones were the bad guys, people to be feared. Brooke had believed them until the day she saw Queen Alexandria kill her parents.
Now she no longer knew who the good guys were in all of this, but she knew one thing—they weren’t the dragons. As soon as she was old enough, she was going to do whatever it took to find the Order and join them.
She vowed to herself that day, as she stepped out of the church where her parents’ funeral service had been held, that she would come back to Pengle and kill Queen Alexandria and all of her pack herself.
“Are you holding up okay, kid?” Uncle Steve asked, putting his hand on her shoulder.
Brooke knew he must have seen her face change, noticed the ferocious look she wore as she made her vow. She forced herself to smile sadly at him and she nodded her head.
“Yes,” she said.
Her Uncle Steve smiled back, his smile looking as forced as hers felt. She liked her Uncle Steve. He hadn’t tried to tell her everything would be okay, or that her parents were in a better place. Instead, he told her life was shitty sometimes. He also told her she wouldn’t ever fully get over her parents’ deaths. She would just learn to live with their memories. There would be moments when she could forget for a while and actually be happy around the hole inside of herself.
“Just keep reminding yourself that this time tomorrow, this will be over and we’ll be in New York,” Uncle Steve said.
Brooke sniffed and nodded again.
“I wish we were leaving now,” she said, meaning it.
1
Now
Adonis glanced up from his cell phone when the door to the room burst open. He exchanged a glance with Alexandria, his mother. No one ever burst into their private quarters like this without knocking, especially not when they had been told that their queen and their prince were having a private meeting.
Alexandria got to her feet, her pretty face a mask of calm, her anger given away only by the smallest twitch at the side of her mouth. Her anger faded to surprise and then utter joy when the intruder showed himself.
Leonardo, the last soldier to return, grinned at them.
“Your Highness,” he said, bowing to Alexandria. He repeated the words, bowing this time to Adonis. “It is done. The last member of the Order of the Interfectorem ad Dracones is dead.”
Alexandria and Adonis exchanged another glance, this one a glance of relief. Alexandria turned back to Leonardo. She smiled at him, a warm smile.
“Leonardo. It’s so good to see you. It’s been so long. We thought you were dead,” she said.
“It’s been thirteen long, hard years, ma’am, but I was given a job to do, and I couldn’t rest until it was done. And now it is.”
Adonis felt joy spreading through his body. It was done. The Order was no more. The pack could live in peace now, the threat of death no longer hanging over them. It was the first time in over two centuries that Adonis felt truly safe.
Before the disease had spread through the dragon population all of those years ago, dragons had ruled the world. When the disease struck, only around fifty dragons remained, and his mother had gathered them here in Pengle, gave them a purpose, and made herself their queen.
The Order had existed long before the disease. In fact, many of the pack still believed the disease was created by the Order, a kind of chemical warfare. But back then, the Order hadn’t been a big deal. There were too many dragons for the Order to make much difference, but once their numbers fell to a disastrously small number, the Order became more of a threat. The dragons were at risk of extinction. Each mated pair could produce only one child every five centuries, and it made growing the population of their kind difficult.
The dragons were angry about the disease, grieving. They were angry at the Order for using their grief against them, striking whenever they dropped their guards for a moment. In the end, Alexandria made the decision to close the borders of Pengle and the pack went into hiding. Alexandria had grown up in Pengle and had always lived there, and she had a small but loyal group of human friends. She began to talk to that group, explaining the pack’s predicament, and the Circle of the Protectorate was born. This Circle protected the dragons, taking down any members of the Order who came for their packs, keeping them safe.
Or at least they did once. Thirteen years ago, a member of the Order had gotten through the Protectorate and infiltrated the castle. He had killed Adonis’ father and his baby sister, Pearl. He had then killed several of the soldiers before he was finally taken down. Alexandria had been devastated, but she had also been mad. She tasked several of the pack with finding out how the Order member managed to get through the Protectorate, planning on tightening their ranks.
The results of the investigation changed everything. Word came back to Alexandria that twelve members of the Protectorate were traitors. They had been secretly working with a member of the Order and had allowed him access to the castle. Alexandria went on a rampage that day. She had killed the traitors, tore them limb from limb. The rest of the Protectorate, she scattered, telling them to leave Pengle and never return.
It had been a game changer. No longer did the pack hide. Instead, Alexandria tasked her best soldiers with going out into the world and hunting down every member of the Order and killing them. They had lost soldiers, but the Order had lost everything. Only one of their soldiers had remained unaccounted for: Leonardo. He was tasked with finding the leader of the Order, an undertaking which Alexandria had known would be tricky.
After a couple of years with no word from Leonardo, Alexandria had begun sending other soldiers out to look for the Order’s leader, but none of them could ever find a trace of him. And now, Leonardo was home, and the Order’s leader was dead. The Order was no more.
“We must hold a celebratory dinner,” Alexandria beamed. “The whole pack will know of your bravery and dedication, Leonardo. The dinner will celebrate our newfound freedom, and you will be the guest of honor.”
Leonardo grinned from ear to ear, clearly happy to have served his queen well.
“Esmerelda!” Alexandria shouted. “Get in here.”
Adonis sat quietly while his mother gave Esmerelda a list of tasks to complete to get the dinner ready that night. Adonis could feel Esmerelda’s eyes on him every time his mother turned her back for so much as a second. He tried to ignore her stare, making sure not to return it. Esmerelda had been in love with him for as long as he could remember. He had never been interested in her that way, but that didn’t seem to put her off. Adonis thought she figured that eventually, he would get tired of being alone and settle for her, but Adonis knew he would never do that. He would rather be alone than be with someone his dragon didn’t crave.
The celebratory dinner had been a roaring success. The whole pack was excited, even down to the toddlers, who had no idea what was going on, but still felt the excitement in the air. The celebrations had gone on long after the food was all eaten.
Finally, at around 3 a.m., Adonis had excused himself. He was too wired to sleep, but the celebrations were getting to be too much for him.
He didn’t want to ruin the happy mood of the pack, and he didn’t want to upset his mother. He had rarely seen her smile since his father and his sister were killed, and this was most definitely the first time he had seen her so carefree since that fateful day.
He still felt unsettled, though. Like he was just waiting for something to go wrong. He was worried that ending the Order had been a mistake. If it was up to him, he would have killed enough of them to subdue the others, and remind them of who exactly they were fucking with. That way, they would have been more cautious, easier to stop, and the pack would have known who they were, where they were, and what they were up to. This way, the pack knew nothing. And Adonis knew that for as long as there were dragons, there would be dragon hunters. And now, when they came, the pack would have no idea who they were or where they would come from.
Adonis hoped that a walk through the castle’s grounds and into the woods beyond would help to clear his head and maybe force him to see things the way his mother saw them. To see tonight as a happy occasion. To see the final hunter being taken down as a sign of their strength. It wasn’t working.
He was in a world of his own, lost in his worries, when his dragon stirred within him. This got his attention as his dragon warned him of potential danger. Adonis sniffed the air and frowned. He detected a scent—a scent that was unmistakably human. He knew his reaction should be one of disgust, maybe even a hint of fear. It wasn’t unheard of for humans to pass through the town, but not in the dead of night on foot.
