Dragon’s Reveal (Irresistible Dragons #8)

Prologue

Five Years Ago

The rain hadn’t let up since morning, and it wasn’t going to. The sky was grieving. That made two of them.

Duff stood at the edge of the grave as they lowered the coffin—simple pine, no ornamentation.

Cormac had built it because Ronan Bás would have scoffed at anything fancier.

Duff’s father had been a man of function over form and hadn’t possessed patience for anything decorative, anything excessive, or anything that served no purpose beyond looking pretty.

The coffin disappeared into the dark earth, and Duff watched it go.

He should feel something, shouldn’t he? The fifteen people standing around him in the rain were definitely feeling things.

Cormac was weeping openly to his left, his thick shoulders shaking with a grief that didn’t care about dignity.

Maeve had her arm around Tatiana, both of them dabbing at their eyes with handkerchiefs already soaked through.

Even the two brothers—Thomas and Henry, recent recruits his father had been training—stood with bowed heads and clenched jaws, honoring a man they’d known for less than a year.

Duff felt nothing. Or rather, what was churning inside him was so vast and formless that his mind couldn’t process it, so it flattened into numbness instead. Like staring at the ocean—you knew the depth was there, you knew it could swallow you whole, but from the surface, all you saw was gray.

The wind drove the rain sideways, and he let it hit his face without flinching.

Cold water ran from his hair—darkened from copper to rust by the rain—down his temples, along his jaw, dripping from the stubble on his chin.

His green eyes stayed fixed on the grave.

He hadn’t blinked in so long they burned.

Good. At least he felt something.

The small stone church behind them had stood in this village for four hundred years.

Duff’s father had brought him here as a boy, between missions, between safe houses, between the constant motion that defined their lives.

This village was as close to home as anything, except maybe Maeve’s house.

Ronan had known the local fishermen, had drunk with them in the evenings, had helped repair their boats when the storms came.

They thought he was a traveling tradesman.

They didn’t know about the knives hidden in every room of the cottage, about the maps with dragon-sighting coordinates tacked inside the closet—Ronan had been old-school and distrustful of modern technology—or about the sacred oath that had governed every decision Ronan Bás had ever made.

Duff’s mother had known though. And she’d left anyway.

He’d been seven. Old enough to remember her face but not her voice.

Old enough to understand that she’d chosen a normal life over them, but too young to understand why.

Ronan had never spoken ill of her. “She wasn’t built for this, son,” was all he’d ever said. “Most people aren’t.”

The implication being that Duff was. Built for this.

Made for it. Shaped by blood and legacy and sacred purpose into something harder and sharper than ordinary men.

And Duff had believed it with the blind faith of a child who worshipped his father and would’ve followed him into the mouth of hell without hesitation.

Now Ronan was in a pine box in the ground, having been felled by a mysterious illness that had taken only nine days to kill what Duff had thought would last at least another forty years. What did he do now? What was next?

He blinked, then refocused, looked at the gathered mourners, and counted them, a habit his father had drilled into him until it became as natural as breathing.

Fifteen.

There’d been more at the last gathering.

Twenty-three crammed into Maeve’s safe house in the Scottish Highlands three years ago to strategize and share intelligence.

Before that, thirty-something attended a meeting in an abandoned farmhouse outside Dublin.

And his father had told stories—always with a gleam in his eye, the glow of a man remembering glory—about the days when the Bás network had stretched across all of Europe.

Hundreds of dedicated slayers, united in sacred purpose, systematically hunting and eliminating the dragon threat.

Now, fifteen people stood in the rain at a funeral, and half of them were too old or too retired to do anything more dangerous than pour a stiff drink.

How had this happened? Duff knew the quick answers, the easy ones.

He’d debated the question plenty of times with his father.

Dragons had gotten better at hiding. The modern world complicated things with cameras, tracking, and digital footprints.

Young people didn’t believe in causes they couldn’t see evidence for, and dragons were careful enough that evidence was scarce.

The network had thinned naturally, the way any movement thinned when its enemy became invisible.

Plus, the dragons had become so much more adept at finding the very men determined to slay them. There had been ambushes, a plane crash, a bomb here and there. Their numbers had dwindled so rapidly that they’d ramped up recruitment, but to no avail.

But the threat the dragons formed hadn’t diminished over the centuries.

They were still out there. Duff could feel them—not literally, not as specific presences, but as a general awareness, a sense that the world contained something ancient and dangerous and hidden, something that hummed at a frequency only he could hear.

His father had called it the Bás instinct.

A gift passed down through their bloodline, sharpened by generations of dragon hunters until it was as reliable as a compass.

A warmth stirred in his chest. It always did when he thought about the mission—this low ember that burned behind his sternum, steady and constant, flaring when he was emotional or focused or in danger.

He’d had it as long as he could remember.

His father had felt it too, had described the sensation when he’d taught Duff to track, to sense, to hunt.

“That’s your fire, son,” Ronan had said, pressing his palm flat against Duff’s chest when he was twelve and had just detected his first dragon from half a mile away. “The Bás fire. It’s what makes us what we are.”

Duff pressed his hand against his own chest now, feeling the ember glow. I’m still here, Da. The fire’s still burning.

Cormac stepped forward, and the gathered mourners drew closer. The burial rite wasn’t Christian—despite the church looming behind them, the Bás family had their own traditions, older than any religion, rooted in something primal and fierce that predated organized faith by centuries.

Cormac’s voice was rough with tears, but it carried. “Ronan Bás. Son of Henry. Grandson of éamon. Great-grandson of Cillian, who killed eleven. Descended from the great Duff Bás, slayer of sixty-four.”

The lineage. Always the lineage. Every funeral, every oath ceremony, every gathering began with the recitation of the bloodline, connecting the dead to the unbroken chain of slayers stretching back to the original Duff, whose sixty-four kills had made him legendary.

As a boy, hearing the lineage had made Duff feel invincible.

Connected to something vast and heroic, like he was part of a story bigger than any single life.

Today, standing over his father’s grave, the lineage felt less like armor and more like chains.

He blinked that thought away. Where had it come from? It had to be grief. Grief made you think strange things. He refocused on Cormac.

“Ronan gave his life to the cause. He hunted with honor. He killed with purpose. He protected humanity from the scourge that hides in the shadows, and he did so without recognition, without reward, without rest.” Cormac’s voice cracked. “He was the best of us. And we are less without him.”

Murmurs of agreement rose from the mourners. Duff absorbed the words and felt nothing.

One by one, the mourners approached the grave and placed offerings on the coffin’s lid.

A knife from Cormac—his own, not Ronan’s, given freely.

A bundle of dried herbs from Maeve, tied with red thread.

A hand-carved wooden sword from one of the older members.

Thomas placed a single bullet. Henry, a folded letter.

Then it was Duff’s turn.

He reached into his coat and withdrew his father’s hunting knife.

The handle was worn smooth from decades of use, the leather wrapping dark with sweat and age.

The blade was immaculate—Ronan had maintained it with religious devotion, honing it every evening by lamplight while telling Duff stories about the hunts it had been part of.

Ronan’s first dragon kill. The O’Connor they’d killed in the Swiss Alps.

The Fitzgerald family they’d found vacationing in Iceland, which had taken three slayers to kill.

Duff had carried this knife since the moment his father’s hand had gone limp around it.

He kneeled at the edge of the grave and set the knife on the pine lid. His fingers lingered on the handle for a breath longer than they should have. Then he pulled his hand back and stood. His throat was tight. He swallowed against it, hard. Not here. Not now.

“The oath,” Cormac said quietly, looking at Duff.

Right. This part was his now. As Ronan’s son, as the last direct descendant of the original Duff Bás, the oath was his to lead.

His to carry. He’d recited it a hundred times at gatherings, always following his father’s lead.

This was the first time he would speak it first, and the weight of that nearly buckled his knees.

He straightened. Shoulders back. Chin up. His father’s posture.

The words were old—older than the church, older than the village, older than anything in this wet, wind-scoured landscape. He spoke them in Irish, the original tongue, the language that connected them to the first hunters who had made this sacred vow.