Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The shift took Gregor like a wave. Not the gradual, controlled transition he usually experienced but a violent, exhilarating eruption of power that remade him from the inside out.
Bones lengthened and reshaped. Muscle expanded.
Wings unfurled from his back with a crack that split the predawn air, and then he was airborne, his massive red form cutting through the sky like a blade through silk.
Dark crimson. Almost black in the low light, like old blood or aged wine.
His scales were scarred—three and a half centuries of combat written across his hide in a map of silver lines that caught the fading moonlight.
The dragon that shot into the sky was not a creature that inspired anything other than the immediate desire to be somewhere else.
They’d traveled the first hundred-and-seventy-five miles by car. They didn’t have another teleportation dragon and the wolves couldn’t run that far that fast. So they’d sped through the night, stopping at a safe distance to park the car and shift for the last bit.
Beside him, Erwan blazed. The White Dragon was luminous, a star given form and wings, and the power radiating from him made the air hum with frequencies that vibrated in Gregor’s chest. Below, Lidon ran in wolf form—impossibly fast, eating ground in strides that shouldn’t have been possible for any animal, his gray fur silver in the moonlight.
The True Alpha’s power was different from Erwan’s—older, wilder, rooted in earth and instinct rather than fire and magic—but equally staggering.
Flanking them, Fallon’s purple form pulsed with gathered magic, and Valdis burned orange like a torch against the dark sky. Behind Lidon, wolf alphas ran in formation, their paws drumming the ground in a rhythm that Gregor felt through the air currents beneath his wings.
An army. His army. Traveling south at combat speed toward a farmhouse where the other half of his soul was waiting.
The paradox of proximity: the closer he got, the worse the sickness felt and the better everything else became.
The headache that had been a dull, constant pain sharpened into something bright and focused.
The tremor in his hands—or claws, now—steadied as adrenaline burned through the fatigue.
The cold in his bones was replaced by fire, his dragon’s fire, the red-hot core of a fighter ready for the fight of his life.
The property materialized out of the flat landscape like a bruise on otherwise healthy skin.
Gregor’s dragon eyes—sharper than his human ones, evolved for spotting prey from miles away—picked out the details as they approached.
A farmhouse, two stories, with peeling white paint.
Three outbuildings—barns or storage structures, weathered gray.
A fence line marked the perimeter of a hundred and fifty acres of scrubby grassland. A dirt road led to a gate.
Ordinary. Unremarkable. The kind of place you’d drive past at sixty miles an hour and forget before you’d gone another mile.
Except that Gregor’s magical senses were screaming.
The wards around the property were massive—layered, reinforced, crackling with the dark magic residue that he’d learned to recognize during his Murphy years.
Cladhaire’s work formed the foundation, old and powerful, the defensive magic of a dragon king who’d had decades to fortify his hiding place.
Over that, the Murphys had added their own wards that were cruder and more vicious, designed to hurt anyone who tried to breach them.
They landed a quarter mile out, Gregor, Erwan, and Fallon shifting back to human form in the cover of a dry creek bed.
They put on the clothes they’d brought while the wolves kept watch, all staying in their animal form.
Lidon’s massive gray body radiated an energy that pushed back against the dark magic like sunlight against shadow.
Gregor checked his phone. Blair’s text was already there.
Team One in position. Awaiting your signal.
He typed one word and sent it.
Go.
Then he looked at Fallon. The omega’s face was pale with concentration, his dark eyes already tracking the ward structure with analytical precision. “The outer layer is Cladhaire’s. I recognize his signature. It’s the same magic he used on the castle.”
“And underneath?”
“Murphy reinforcement. Colin’s work, probably. It’s nasty—designed to punish anyone who tries to break through. Pain spells woven into the ward fabric.”
“Can you break it?”
Fallon looked at him, and something fierce and certain burned behind his eyes. “We can break anything he’s built. We have the White Dragon.”
Gods, Gregor loved his confidence.
Fallon met Erwan’s eyes. “Ready?”
Erwan nodded, his magic already gathering around him like a visible aura. “I’ll channel the clan. You attack.”
They moved into position—Erwan and Fallon at the center, wolves fanning out on either side, Valdis and the other fighters ready to exploit any breach.
Gregor stood behind Erwan, every muscle coiled, every sense focused on the property ahead and the knowledge that Fergal was inside. He couldn’t feel him, but he knew.
So close. After days of silence and distance and the suffocating absence of the connection, Fergal was right there, maybe three hundred yards away, behind walls and wards and locked doors and armed guards.
And between Gregor and his mate stood every obstacle the Murphys and Cladhaire could construct.
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
“Now,” Fallon said, and the assault began.
The White Dragon’s power hit the wards like a tsunami against a seawall.
Gregor felt the impact through the ground—a shockwave of pure magical force that made the air vibrate and the grass flatten in a radial pattern around them.
Fallon channeled alongside him, drawing power from every member of the True Doyle clan, from Jermon hundreds of miles north, from the dragons at the pack lands, from the network of bonds that Erwan’s White Dragon magic had woven into something greater than the sum of its parts.
The wards screamed. There was no other word for it. The dark magic Cladhaire and Colin had layered into the defenses resisted with a sound that existed on the edge of hearing, a shriek of corrupted power fighting against the clean, burning force of the White Dragon’s fire.
Lidon stepped forward. The True Alpha’s wolf planted himself beside Erwan, and the power that flowed from him was different from the dragon magic—older, deeper, rooted in something primal that predated clans and codes and the petty politics of men.
The ward structure buckled where the two powers intersected, dark magic crumbling under the combined assault of the most powerful dragon and the most powerful wolf alive.
The pain spells lashed back. A wolf alpha to Gregor’s left went down with a cry, involuntarily shifting back and clutching his head.
Fallon staggered, blood trickling from his nose as the dark magic fought for every inch.
Erwan’s jaw clenched, his hands shaking with the effort of sustaining the assault against defenses Cladhaire had spent years fortifying.
But they were winning. Gregor could see the wards fracturing, fissures spreading through the magical barrier like cracks in ice, dark energy bleeding from the wounds in wisps of oily smoke.
Cladhaire’s foundation was crumbling under the White Dragon’s fire, and Colin’s reinforcements, stripped of their anchor, were collapsing on top of it.
One more push. Erwan roared, a release of power so intense it was visible, a white flare in the early morning sun, and the wards shattered.
The explosion of released energy knocked everyone back a step.
Gregor caught himself, his fighter’s balance compensating automatically, and then he was running before the debris had finished falling.
Behind him, he heard the others surge forward—wolves howling, dragons spewing fire, the sound of combat beginning as the Murphy defenders poured out of the buildings to meet them.
He didn’t look back. The battle behind him was in capable hands—Lidon and the wolf alphas could handle the ground fight, Valdis was already engaging with fire, and Fallon was providing magical suppression that would neutralize Colin’s dark magic.
Gregor’s team knew their roles. They didn’t need him for the general assault.
They needed him for one thing, and that thing was inside the farmhouse. He could feel him now, faintly but there, and the realization almost brought him to his knees. Fergal was close. His mate was waiting for him.
The front door was reinforced—steel behind the wood, bolted from the inside.
Gregor didn’t slow down. He hit it at full sprint with his shoulder, channeling his dragon’s strength into the impact, and the door didn’t open so much as cease to exist, the frame splintering outward in a shower of wood and metal that scattered down the hallway beyond.
Two guards inside. Both armed, both turning toward the noise, both too slow.
Gregor was on the first one before the man’s hand reached his weapon, a strike to the throat that dropped him choking to the floor.
The second guard managed to raise a gun, and Gregor broke his wrist with a precision that came from centuries of practice, caught the falling weapon, and used the guard’s own momentum to slam him into the wall.
He was unconscious before he hit the ground.
Three seconds. Two men down. Gregor kept moving.
The farmhouse was larger than it looked from outside—corridors branching left and right, doors on both sides, the layout of a building that had been modified and expanded over time without regard for architectural coherence.
Under normal circumstances, he’d have cleared each room systematically, ensuring no threats were left behind him.
These were not normal circumstances. The mate bond burned brighter, stronger at the center of his consciousness, pulling him deeper into the building with a force that overrode three and a half centuries of tactical training.
Fergal was ahead of him. Down the central corridor, then left, then—he didn’t know how he knew this—through a door and down a flight of stairs.
He encountered three more guards on the way.
None of them lasted more than two seconds.
Gregor moved through them like a force of nature.
A fist to the jaw. An elbow to the temple.
A throw that ended with a body hitting a wall hard enough to crack the plaster.
He took a hit—a punch that connected with his ribs and would hurt later but barely registered now because the bond was screaming closer, closer, almost there.
The stairs led down to a basement level—a corridor with doors on both sides, each one reinforced with the same magical sealing he’d felt on the wards outside. Cells. He was in the prison section of the compound, and Fergal was—
There. Right there. Behind the third door on the left.
A figure stepped into the corridor ahead of him.
Two figures. Cladhaire and Baoth, positioned between Gregor and the cells like a last line of defense.
The old king’s hands crackled with dark magic, his face twisted with a fury that had been building since the Dragon Council stripped him of everything he’d stolen.
“You’re not getting past me,” Cladhaire rasped.
Gregor didn’t slow down. He shifted his weight, preparing to go through both of them with the same brutal efficiency he’d used on every other obstacle in this building, when a hand landed on his shoulder.
Erwan. The White Dragon had followed him inside, and the power that radiated from him in the narrow corridor was almost unbearable—a heat and a light that pressed against the walls and made the dark magic in the air recoil like a living thing.
Then Lidon stepped up beside him, still in that massive wolf form, and Cladhaire and Baoth actually did take a step back.
“Go,” Erwan said. His eyes were locked on his father and uncle. “They’re mine.”
Two words. A lifetime of pain and betrayal and unfinished business compressed into those simple words.
Gregor met Erwan’s eyes for one heartbeat. The moment was too vast for words, so he didn’t try. He just nodded and moved.
Behind him, he heard Erwan’s voice, quiet and immovable, “Hello, Father.”
Then Gregor was past them, in the corridor, at the door. The mate bond was a roar now, so loud it drowned out everything—the sounds of combat above, Erwan’s confrontation behind him, the pain in his ribs and his hands and his heart. Everything reduced to this door and what was behind it.
He hit it with everything he had. Dragon strength, centuries of combat power, the accumulated fury and terror and love of a man who had been separated from his mate for days that had felt like centuries.
The magical seal resisted for a fraction of a second, then cracked, then shattered, and the door broke inward.
The cell was small. Bare walls, bare floor, a cot, a bucket. A window with magical sealing that let in gray morning light.
And Fergal.
Standing. Not cowering, not collapsed, not broken. Standing in the center of the cell in bare feet and Gregor’s shirt, his dark hair tangled, his face pale and thin, his brown eyes sharp and clear, looking at Gregor with an expression that contained no surprise at all.
As if he’d known. As if he’d never doubted, not for one single second, that Gregor would come.
The mate bond slammed back full force like a dam shattering, and the flood of connection—emotion, awareness, the overwhelming sensation of two halves of a single soul rejoining after being torn apart—hit Gregor so hard his knees buckled.
The headache vanished. The cold vanished.
The tremor stopped. Everything stopped except the man in front of him and the bond between them, blazing and whole and so fiercely alive that Gregor could feel it rewriting the very architecture of his being.
Fergal’s eyes were bright. His chin was raised. He was the most beautiful thing Gregor had ever seen.
“Took you long enough,” Fergal whispered, and his voice cracked on the last word, the composure finally breaking, and Gregor crossed the cell in two strides and caught him.