Chapter 3
Three
Dirk
The nearest Red wasn’t prepared for what hit him. I was an avalanche of alpha power simply looking for a conduit. He was the outlet. Fire blazing from his fists and smoke curling from his nose, he charged, opening wide to exhale and bathe me in flames.
I launched myself at him, closing instead of evading, and shoved my fist into his mouth.
The blade on the end of my forearm snapped as it punched out the back of his neck.
Then I unleashed a wave of cold that turned his insides to ice and killed the nascent flames before he could use them.
The Red went stiff as a board, his eyes bulging as he tried to draw air with lungs that were frozen solid.
The hammer blow to his sternum was the true killer, crunching through bone to shatter the organs into tiny pieces. Leaving his brain to catch up and realize he was dead, I resumed my headlong charge for the chalet and what mattered most. My mate.
“Die, ice-scum!” A Red snarled, flinging a skin-burning ball of flame that I had to duck under or be charred, the heat melting away my ice-armor.
“Show me the way,” I grunted, reaching him and lowering my shoulder to hit him square in the stomach with every ounce of force my headlong charge had behind it.
With an explosive oof, the fire dragon shifter hurtled backward, smashing into the side of the chalet. Glass shattered and wood splintered from the impact.
I leapt through the air at the fallen attacker, clenching my fists together. Frost engulfed both my hands, and as I descended, a spike of blue-white ice formed around them. I landed, driving the makeshift stake through the Red’s neck and snapping it off.
There was no time to pause. Bulldozing my way through the broken wall, I beelined for the kitchen.
“Ella!” I roared, wanting her to know that help was nearly there. That the Reds who had attacked her were about to meet their reckoning for daring to lay a hand on my mate.
My dragon was in the driver’s seat as we skidded to a halt in the kitchen, looking around for her. She was gone. No screaming, no signs of struggle other than the spilled frying pan. No blood.
I forced myself to take a long, deep breath in, using my dragon’s senses to help sort through the various scents in the air and figure out how many Reds had taken her and which way.
A burst of rich jasmine followed by a wave of bold amber rushed through my system like I’d just been hit by a blast of lightning. Every muscle fiber twitched and my eyes shot open. It was perfection. Utterly addictive. I wanted to drink deep of it a second time.
In that moment I knew that for all the remaining centuries of my life, I would never smell something so deliciously wonderful ever again. Compared to the vibrancy of Ella’s mate scent, the world was a dull lump of coal. Without it, I was nothing.
My fangs were down, stabbing my lower lip. The dragon inside me demanded we find her and claim her. She had to be ours.
Through the haze of mate need and rigid lust that had me stiff as a brellwood board, a section of my brain noted no other dragon scents in the air. No Reds, no sulfur or ash in the air. Just Ella.
So where had she gone?
Alarm for our mate’s whereabouts overpowered the thrill of discovering her mate scent, propelling us in the direction of the back of the chalet, where the missing rear door was a dead giveaway.
I burst through the empty frame, hot on the trail, only to come to a standstill as a Red came to his feet, blood gushing from his nose.
Drawing back a fist, I was too slow and moving the wrong direction to end the fight with one blow.
The Red was strong and fast, inside my swinging arc.
We went to the ground in a tangle of limbs.
The air around us grew superheated as he unleashed flames, but I countered that with a ball of frost that stunned him.
I slammed my head into his nose with a satisfying crunch, breaking it further. He swiped at my face with a bloodied hand. But it wasn’t his blood. My dragon lost its mind as we realized who it belonged to—Ella.
A wave of darkness that I’d long kept buried broke free of my self-imposed restraints. I hauled the Red to his feet and slapped his face back and forth twice in rapid succession to stun him further. My other hand clenched tightly around a foot-long length of ice that formed under my mental command.
I grabbed the Red’s arm and plunged the spike through his palm. He screamed in pain as the ice blade emerged from the other side. I moved swiftly before he could recover, slamming the weapon through both legs and then right through the elbow of his other arm.
“Where is she?” I rasped, lost in a host of memories I’d tried to forget, a past version of self now at the fore.
I’d sworn to never become that past again. But that was before he’d hurt Ella.
The Red sneered through pain as he looked up at me from his back. “Once we’re done with you and your idiot brother, I’ll find that bitch, and this time she won’t surprise me.”
My eyes darted to the door. Had Ella been the one to clock him in the nose with it? Pride swelled at my mate’s strength even as darkness sullied everything else.
“So you don’t know where she is,” I observed so calmly the Red blanched in fear. “Too bad. For you.”
I fell on him with a fury, my hands around his neck, hoisting him from the ground.
The Red struggled, but he was too weak to resist my alpha power.
Ice flowed from my hands as he tried to fight it with fire, but it was too late.
I could see it in his eyes. I watched them go wide as the realization of death arrived.
Then they simply stopped moving entirely, frozen wide in terror.
“Don’t. Touch. My. Mate.” I growled and twisted my hands.
His neck shattered, head falling one way, body the other, leaving me free to find Ella.
“Dirk!” The shout slowed my footsteps but didn’t stop them. I could scent her again, the lure of jasmine calling me forward. I followed it.
“Where is she? Where’s Ella?” a feminine voice charged with power barked as Anna caught up to me, looking around wildly for her friend before her eyes landed on me. “Why was she screaming? Why can I smell her blood? Did you do something to her?”
The idea that I might do anything to hurt my mate was beyond fury-inducing. Rage billowed out from me in a cloud of power as the darkness inside me sank in deeper. Consuming. Driving.
I took a step toward Anna, the promise of violence in the air.
A step was as far as I made it before an absolute hurricane of ice and alpha command interposed itself between us with a snarl that drove me back one step and then another.
“Control yourself,” Casimir rumbled, his eyes wide and bright, filled with his dragon’s protectiveness for its mate. “We will find her, but you must control yourself. The Reds are dealt with, and there is not enough blood for her to be in danger.”
The snarl that exploded from my throat at the worry Ella could be seriously hurt was enough to surprise even Casimir.
“Be calm,” he repeated, each word laced with enough alpha power to drive any other dragon but his brother to their knees.
“Can’t,” I grunted from under the hammer blows of power washing over me like sheets of rain. “They hurt my mate.”
The alpha power evaporated. Caz’s shock was complete and thorough. Behind him, Anna gasped.
“You’re sure?” Caz said into the stunned silence that followed, looking over his shoulders at the trees through which Ella had disappeared.
I didn’t bother responding with words to such a question. I only stared past him at the forest where I should even now be looking for her. There was never a question about who Ella was to me. There should never have been, and going forward, there never would be.
“You can’t go after her like this,” Caz said, gesturing at my naked and engorged form. “You need to be dressed, and you need to be calm. If something went wrong now, she’s going to need you to come to her calmly and relaxed. Not in full battle fury.”
I bared my teeth in silent, wordless protest. The mere thought of not being at my mate’s side, protecting her, sheltering her, succoring her, giving her whatever she needed was too much.
Anna slid past Caz and headed to the forest. “I’m going after her right now, Dirk.
I’m her friend, not a threat. To her, or you.
You can trust me. Ella already does. When you’re ready, come find us.
But not before. Understood? Ella is more fragile than she lets on, and if you hurt her, not even Caz will be able to hold me back. ”
Caz stepped closer to me, speaking softly for only me to hear. “Come back, brother. I know what you’re fighting. You’ve done so well for so long. Your mate is counting on you to control yourself once more. She needs it from you.”
I stepped back with a shudder, his words striking home. He was right. I was putting her in danger. Every second I spent not controlling myself was a second she wasn’t at my side.
With a snarl directed at myself, I spun away from the forest and back into the battered chalet. The need to get to Ella was still all-powerful, but I tampered it now with the knowledge that I could not scare her. She needed a thoughtful and calm protector, not a feral guard dog.
“Remember,” Caz said, following me in. “They aren’t Elites, brother. In moments of vulnerability, they’re going to do what our world has forced them to do. Run and hide from those more powerful. Until we can prove otherwise, we’re a danger to them as far as they know.”
I glared at him. I was no danger to Ella!
He lifted an eyebrow at my challenge. We both knew he was stronger. He was just making sure I remembered.
“I had to do this with Anna. I had to show her that I wasn’t like the others.
You’ll have to do the same with Ella. That is not a threat or a challenge.
It is a mere fact of the lives they have been forced to lead.
Lives I will do my best to ensure are changed going forward for all other Grounded.
But I cannot fix the past. We must work within it.
So when you go to her, you will go easy.
Her dragon might know you, but she might not. Am I clear?”
“As ice,” I grunted, his alpha power still in the air.
“Then get dressed. I remember what it was like being separated from my mate when the bond first awoke. It was hell.”
The hell, though, was just beginning …