Chapter 3 – Regina
Chapter
Three
REGINA
The dragon’s green fire pours from its jaws, and I can’t look away.
Not because I want to watch.
But because my body won’t move.
Killian’s blood is hot against my palms and his heartbeat is getting weaker, and somewhere in the chaos of the last few minutes my brain has decided to just... stop processing new information.
The werewolf doesn’t have that luxury.
The flames hit it like a wall.
No. Like a sun.
The green fire engulfs the creature completely, so bright I have to squeeze my eyes shut, and even through my closed lids I can see the light. I hear a sound that might be a scream, except it’s not human and it’s not wolf.
It’s not anything that should exist in nature.
When I open my eyes again, the werewolf is a charred silhouette. Black and smoking, frozen mid-step like some kind of macabre statue.
Then the wind picks up, and it crumbles.
Just... dissolves. Into ash and dust and nothing. The thing that scarred me, that haunted my nightmares for three years, that nearly killed the man I love—gone. Like it never existed at all.
I should feel something about that. Relief, maybe. Closure or some other kind of cathartic release.
Instead, all I feel is Killian slipping away beneath my hands.
The dragon lands.
The impact shakes the ground hard enough that I have to brace myself to keep from toppling over. Rowan, Micah, and Sean are closing ranks around me and Killian, forming a snarling wall between us and the massive creature that just incinerated a werewolf like it was kindling.
The dragon is enormous. Its head alone is bigger than Killian’s massive wolf form, and its body stretches back in a length of scales that shimmer between black and emerald in the fading light. Those eyes, impossibly green and burning with ancient light, fix on me through the gap between my wolves.
I should be terrified.
Somehow, I’m not.
There’s something about those eyes. They’re familiar in a way I can’t explain. Like looking at a painting you’ve seen in a dream, or hearing a song you’ve known your whole life but can’t quite remember the words to.
The dragon is… beautiful.
That’s the thought that cuts through everything else, absurd and inappropriate yet completely true.
The most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.
And for a creature that’s supposed to be extinct, it looks pretty fucking alive to me.
The dragon’s wings fold against its body and then the scales are shifting, shrinking, reforming into something more familiar, and where the dragon crouched a moment ago…
Professor Elias fucking Villeneuve.
He straightens to his full height, brushing nonexistent dust from his impeccable charcoal suit like he just stepped out of a faculty meeting instead of transforming from a fucking dragon into a human being.
Of course.
“You—” My voice comes out as a croak. I clear my throat and try again. “You’re a dragon?”
Villeneuve’s expression is unreadable. He pushes his hair back from his dark eyes as they move from me to Killian to the wolves still snarling between us. What might be regret flickers across his features.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t find out this way,” he says, his voice as smooth and cultured as ever even though he was spitting flames a minute ago. “The coven must have obtained assistance from someone whose magic is powerful enough to slip past my wards unnoticed. For that, I apologize.”
An apology.
He’s apologizing for letting a coven of angry witches and a necromantically reanimated werewolf attack us as if he forgot to RSVP to a dinner party.
I don’t have time to process the absurdity of that. Killian’s breath is coming in short, shallow gasps, and through our bond, I feel him fading.
Not gone, not yet, but close.
Way too fucking close.
Villeneuve takes a step forward.
All three wolves move at once. Micah’s snarl is the loudest, his fur bristling as he positions himself directly between Villeneuve and Killian. Rowan flanks him, silver fur catching what’s left of the daylight. Even Sean, injured and limping, puts himself in the line of fire.
Villeneuve stops. His eyes meet mine over their bristling forms.
“He will die if I don’t help,” he says quietly. “Shortly.”
I know he’s right. I feel it. The thread connecting me to Killian is fraying, thinning with every second that passes.
My magic isn’t enough.
All the energy I can draw from the fucking bond isn’t enough.
He’s lost too much blood, taken too much damage, and the wounds…
The wounds aren’t closing.
“Let him through,” I hear myself say.
Micah’s head whips toward me, golden eyes wide with disbelief. He doesn’t move.
“Please.” My voice breaks on the word. “We’re out of options.”
No one moves. The wolves stare at me, at Villeneuve, at each other. I feel their resistance through the bond. The instinctive refusal to let this unknown predator anywhere near their injured alpha.
But they feel Killian too.
They know what I know.
Slowly, reluctantly, they part.
Villeneuve moves through the gap with that same unhurried confidence he brings to everything. He kneels beside Killian, and for just a second, I see something in his expression that I’ve never seen before.
Compassion.
Genuine compassion as he studies the damage. The deep gashes across Killian’s side. The torn flesh of his shoulder from where the creature’s jaws sank in. The dark blood matting his black fur into wet, dark clumps.
“The damage is extensive,” Villeneuve murmurs, more to himself than to me.
His long fingers hover over the wounds, not quite touching.
“I can heal him physically. But the poison already coursing through his veins...” He pauses, and when he looks at me, his eyes are lit from within with the same burning green rather than their usual darkness, as if the dragon lingers just beneath his skin.
“I cannot stop that. The process has already begun.”
The process.
The turning.
“No.” The word comes out before I can stop it. “No, he’s a shifter. He’s already a wolf. Can he even…”
“It’s uncommon enough that there are no formal records,” Villeneuve says carefully.
“But it is possible. I’ve been alive long enough to have witnessed it several times.
” His jaw tightens slightly. “Unfortunately, while a natural-born wolf is more resistant to the madness than a turned human, they eventually succumb to it all the same. The process simply takes longer.”
I feel like I’ve been punched in the fucking chest. Like all the air has been sucked out of the meadow and there’s nothing left to breathe.
“Letting him die now,” Villeneuve continues, his voice gentle in a way I’ve never heard from him, “may be a mercy.”
“No.”
The word comes out harder this time. Stronger. Rowan makes a low, anguished sound, and I feel the conflict rippling through the bond—their love for their alpha warring with their fear of what he might become.
A fate worse than death to a wolf.
“We’ll figure it out.” I’m gripping Killian’s fur so hard my knuckles are white. “We’ll find something. A cure. A way to stop it. There has to be.”
“Regina—”
“Please.” I look up at Villeneuve, and I don’t care that I’m begging, don’t care that I’m showing weakness in front of someone I trust even less now than I did before. “Please save him. I can’t… I can’t lose him. Not like this.”
Villeneuve studies me. Those green eyes see too much, know even more. But there’s a gentleness in them that seems so out of place for who he is.
What he is.
“Very well,” he says finally.
He raises his hand, and the world dissolves.
The transition is instant and disorienting. One second we’re in a blood-soaked meadow, the next we’re standing in—
An alchemist’s laboratory.
I recognize the setup immediately, even through my shock.
The long wooden tables covered in glass apparatus.
The shelves lined with jars containing things I don’t want to identify.
The sigils carved into the floor, the ceiling, the very walls.
There’s a massive fireplace on one wall with flames that burn an unnatural blue-green, and the air smells like sulfur and herbs.
The wolves stumble, clearly disoriented by the sudden transportation. Rowan shifts first, his human form appearing in a ripple of silver light. Then Micah. Then Sean, who immediately lists to one side and has to catch himself on a table.
Killian is still a wolf.
Unconscious. Barely breathing.
I barely have time to process anything, but the differences between this and a witch’s lab strike me immediately. The energy is different. More controlled, more organized. Everything here is designed to transform rather than create.
“Put him on the table,” Villeneuve says, already moving toward a massive bookshelf.
Micah and Rowan exchange a look.
“It looks like a sacrificial altar,” Micah mutters, but he’s already moving to help lift Killian’s wolf form.
It kind of does. The table is stone, carved with more of those strange sigils, with channels cut into the surface that I really don’t want to think about. But they get Killian onto it anyway, his black fur standing out against the pale rock.
Villeneuve pulls a thick leather-bound book from the shelf and lets it hover in the air beside him as he gathers ingredients, each with a wave of his hand that lifts it from its carefully appointed place on its shelf.
A vial of a silvery liquid, a feather, a jar of dried herbs, and a small container of what looks like crystallized blood.
I’ve never seen him use his powers so freely.
Not since that first night when Kyle’s coven showed up to claim me and Villeneuve stopped everything with a gesture.
Watching him now, moving through his laboratory like a conductor leading an orchestra, I finally understand why the wolves were so afraid of him.
This is what a dragon looks like when he stops pretending to be human.
“Regina.”
His voice cuts through my daze. I blink, focus.
“The blue vial on the third shelf. Bring it here, please.”
I move. It’s easier than thinking.