3. Chapter 3
Acadia National Park, Maine
Present Day
Daxton fell backward, clutching his chest. Leaves and twigs crunched under his ass. That female winged being had turned into an orb and flown inside him.
His torso and brain pressurized. Sparks ignited along his flesh. Wherever she traveled, she existed with his dragon side. Protective instincts reigned, and he didn’t want to kick her out despite not knowing what the hell she was. But he did know what had attacked her. A Tattered One.
Scrambling to his feet, he unleashed his Insight, the sixth sense of dragon shifters.
Unfiltered spirit energies from the shrubs to the owl in a nearby tree assaulted his brain.
Pain ripened across his skull. The Tattered One’s stench, like burning metal in acidic fumes, nearly tore his dragon from his skin.
A wave of fear squelched the compulsion to shift.
He swallowed, mouth dry. After the last incident a year ago, he couldn’t let that side of himself free.
He hunted after the metallic energy on foot, recalling how the Tattered One flew east over the trees. As he neared the cliff edge, dark water chopping against the rocks below, the energy dimmed to a trace before disappearing.
The Tattered One was gone.
Shit. He rubbed his pounding head and strode back to the campsite.
This wasn’t how he’d expected this night to go.
He’d gone to Acadia National Park to find refuge.
The need to shift to his dragon had gnawed at him as he lay in bed earlier, creating a burning sensation in the pit of his stomach.
His dread—tight and feral—created an anxious energy that twitched his muscles and kept him awake.
Instead of finding peace, he’d come across a Tattered One.
He should have wanted to destroy it, but the other wounded creature, feminine in form with plucked wings as long as her body, captured his attention.
He had been frantic to help, fingers shaking.
His dragon had thrashed with a sense of urgency.
He felt a kinship with her, a primal need to protect.
But that didn’t mean caution didn’t nag him for feeling this way toward an unknown creature.
The pop of a campfire announced he’d returned to the campsite. The lifeless man weighed on Daxton. He’d arrived too late to save him. Even if it had been his last hunt, killing the Tattered One would have been worth it. He stared back at the ground that glowed an ethereal red to his enhanced eyes.
Her translucent body had appeared blurry, making it impossible to tell what she wore. But her image stuck with him.
Eyes the shade of muted gold. Long flowing caramel-blond hair with streaks of brown fell around her fragile form, and her ghostlike face held sharp, but lovely angles.
Few feathers clung to the wing bones and glowed fluorescent white.
Gazing upon her stole his breath. The blood trickling from her mouth made his stomach turn.
When he touched her, she was barely perceptible, like the warming touch of sunlight.
The sensation sparked a desire to feel her tangible form.
She didn’t carry a scent. Even when the wind shifted in his direction, his keen olfactory senses had picked up only a mixture of pine and damp earth. His Insight failed to detect her spirit energy. Something that had never happened before.
She wasn’t a figment of his imagination, but paranoia waged war in his mind, whispering that the Tattered One created an Illusion to distract him. Her light-like appearance had seemed unnatural enough. But his instincts told him she was real. They were never wrong. He only needed patience.
He focused inside himself and searched for her light form. Her energy felt familiar, like a long-lost friend. So much so that his dragon curled around her unconscious orb and rested.
Daxton stilled and his heart thudded in his chest.
His dragon never relaxed. It was a miracle, something he’d longed for since his accident a year ago. His chest tightened with the fear that her effect wouldn’t last.
Yanking his phone from his pocket, he called Jamal, his second-in-command.
“Morning, Chief Dyamur,” Jamal said around a yawn. “You’re up late.”
“I need the closest Hunters to Acadia National Park. I also need a cleanup crew to make sure a victim returns to their family with no questions.”
Shielding his gaze from the overcast sunshine, Daxton assessed his company’s construction site as he rode the lift to the top of the unfinished building.
Choppy wind pushed into him, bringing in more clouds.
In the background, men shouted directions as a crane moved a beam up to the fifth floor, where steelworkers bolted it together.
During the slow and steady rise, Daxton expected his usual impatience to rear its monstrous head.
But even two days after that angelic woman morphed and entered his chest, his dragon slept inside him, when normally it would have been fighting for freedom.
Its passiveness unnerved him but also freed him from his need to assert constant control.
Focusing inside himself, he nuzzled the sleeping orb of light. As if her healing had made her spirit energy stronger, his Insight picked up tendrils—clean-scented purity, acrid guilt, and metal—something he’d been unable to do before. It wasn’t the familiar neutral sweetness of a human.
He aimed his thoughts toward the creature. “You’re making me crazy. Wake up, please.”
No response. He hadn’t expected one.
His thoughts stopped when the elevator halted.
Opening the latched bar, he took a deep breath.
A gust blew over his sun-warmed skin, provoking a sense of belonging in him.
It had been too long since he had shifted to his dragon side, flying above the clouds with the wind in his face, his wings beating powerfully.
But after the incident where he nearly couldn’t shift back from his dragon side, he couldn’t risk it.
Even if the woman inside him made his dragon docile.
He walked forward onto the metal platform. Pete, the site supervisor, headed toward him, clasping his hook on each safety line.
The progress on the floor satisfied Daxton. The few beams in place created an illusion of the rooms’ layouts.
“What a pleasant surprise, Mr. Dupont,” Pete said with a smile that emphasized his round face and wide deep-set brown eyes.
The two feathers he wore as good luck charms at the end of his long black braid twirled in the wind.
It was a tradition kept in his family, something Daxton remembered Pete’s great-grandfather wearing when he’d worked beside him.
“Nice to see you too, Pete. Please call me Daxton.” Daxton wanted to curb the use of his alias last name, as his mind was too busy to remember it right away. He shook Pete’s offered hand with a grin. “Can you give me a rundown of the current status?”
Pete grabbed the safety rail to steady himself. “Follow me, and I’ll show you the hiccups.”
They walked across a few beams and stopped. Daxton leaned in close, so Pete didn’t have to yell over the howling wind.
“We had to wait for a new shipment of beams since a rookie damaged several with a crane.” Pete gestured to each area he spoke about.
A brawny man sitting ten feet away said to his coworker, “They let the shareholders do whatever they want now?”
The wind buffeted Daxton, but the comment still reached his sensitive ears. Daxton assumed Pete had warned the workers that the majority shareholder would visit.
“If he wants to get himself killed, let him,” a younger coworker said before positioning a beam with a spud wrench.
Many office personnel wouldn’t dare go up on the steel beams two hundred feet in the air.
But Daxton wasn’t one of them. He’d been an ironworker long before these men were born, when they didn’t use safety cables or airlifts.
He balanced on the flange, not even a foot wide, with the grace of a trapeze artist.
When railroad bridges upgraded from wood to metal, Daxton worked on the frontier, building the iron trusses. Being up high reminded him of being in his dragon form, flying through the clouds. From this height, the pickup truck he drove was nothing more than a toy car on the makeshift parking lot.
“We’ll be on track soon,” Pete said. “What really brings you up here, Daxton?”
Pete was blunt for the same reason he didn’t explain the safety procedures to Daxton.
They’d worked together for years. Daxton wore the harness via protocol and attached the safety clip to the cables when needed.
Forbidden from transforming in front of humans, a drop in the wrong direction could be fatal.
“I need a distraction,” Daxton said as he wobbled on the flange. Damnit. Keep it together. The female creature inside grew stronger while his body fatigued, as if she was draining him. But he’d sacrifice his energy if it meant his dragon stayed calm.
“Want to get your hands dirty, then?” Pete asked as a brisk wind breezed past them.
“I didn’t bring my tools for nothing.” Daxton patted the belt around his waist.
“We’ll see if you remember what you’re doing. You can pair up with me.”
The two-hour drive to his territory’s capital, Pentros, whittled Daxton’s distracted mind back to sour. The military base for his clan’s territory lay within the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire. An Illusion cast by his kind hid their base from mortals. Secrecy kept them safe.
"The worst part about you, Miss Tagalong, is that I can’t tell anyone about you.
" His clanmates would question her affiliation with the Tattered Ones. The Centurion would want to interrogate her. And because Daxton couldn’t refuse his commander-in-chief, he would be helpless to defend her.
His dragon sent a subtle heat through him as if reminding him to protect the light being.
No clawing anger like he was accustomed to.
The large barracks of Dyamur Territory felt like a prison to his troubled mind.
Bad-tempered and strung tight, his dominance suppressed the surrounding air.
Everyone who greeted him scurried away. When he reached the mess hall, the aroma of roasted chicken filled his nostrils.
He marched past long, occupied tables intending to grab food before slinking to his room, but a tall dark-skinned male blocked his path from reaching the lunch line.
“Chief Dyamur,” Jamal said. “We still haven’t found any signs of a Tattered One near Acadia.”
Shit. I need to protect her, but I can’t do that if I can’t find the Tattered One that hurt her. “Thank you for the update.”
“Feel like sparring with me, or are you going to take another vehicle apart?”
“Rain check.” Daxton wanted to spar, but his current state of unease made him feel unpredictable.
Jamal wasn’t much younger than him, but it wouldn’t be a fair fight.
Either Daxton wouldn’t be able to concentrate, or he would maul Jamal to have time to think.
He suspected Jamal had a reason to ask. Sarah, their territory’s Healer, had probably prompted him.
Passive-aggressive tactics were Sarah’s hallmark.
Denying the sparring challenge would raise red flags.
For their kind, someone who didn’t find release from pent-up frustration was dangerous.
Because Sarah wasn’t aware of the creature already calming him, if he didn’t use exercise to soothe his dragon, she would seek him out.
Especially when she knew about the incident last year.
He was her chief even if still in-training, and if something was wrong with him, his clanmates could suffer.
Figuring she might visit him soon, he strode straight to his quarters to clean up. He entered his small and tidy living room. As he headed toward the stairs to his bedroom loft, something stirred in his mind. A lightning bolt volleyed through him. He jerked.
His tagalong was awake.