SNEAK PEEK
Bite
Chapter One
Omaera
We were just about to pile into the SUV and get Ryden to safety, now that my father-in-law was missing a limb, when an intense pain, almost like a sharp, serrated bite, on the inside of my left wrist, had me stopping and crying out.
And I wasn’t the only one.
Anysa, the mage queen, Zandren, the newly appointed shifter king, and I all seemed to be experiencing the exact same thing.
Maxar ran to me. “Babe, what’s wrong?”
“There’s been a challenge,” Anysa and Ryden both said ominously at the same time, locking eyes. Fear flickered in the beautiful mage queen’s pale blue eyes that reminded me so much of diamonds.
“A challenge?” I asked, holding my still searing wrist with my other hand. “What do you mean? For my throne?”
“For mine,” Zandren breathed, meeting his father’s frightened stare. “Someone in the shifter kingdom has decided to challenge me for the throne. ”
“How the hell did word get out so fast?” I asked, lifting my shirt and pressing my wrist to Maxar’s mark on my ribcage. For whatever magical reason, when my fire mage and I mate-bonded, his mark, whenever I touched it, cooled me. I hoped that by pressing my sore wrist to the mark it would soothe the sting. It did, a little.
The mage queen already seemed to have forgotten about her wrist, and Zandren was busy shaking his head in confusion, also apparently not concerned about his wrist.
“Howar would have felt the same thing, right?” I asked, turning to Drak.
The vampire I was fated to mate, but hadn’t mated yet, simply nodded. “Even though the challenge has not been made for your throne, all ruling monarchs are notified when a challenge has been declared. Just like all ruling monarchs are notified when another monarch dies, or abdicates. Though, those notifications are less painful, I’m told.”
“I didn’t feel any notification when Ryden abdicated to Zandren,” I argued.
Drak merely shrugged. “You may not have felt it since you were right there.”
“Not the point,” Zandren growled. “Dad, what does this mean?”
Ryden swallowed, appearing paler than a moment ago. Maxar cauterized the wound after we removed the rock that fell on the big bear shifter and severed his leg. So it wasn’t like Ryden was still losing blood. However, the idea of his son having to fight for his new title as King of the Shifters, probably had my father-in-law’s stomach turning.
“Why now?” I asked.
“Because a new leader has come to power, and someone who has been vying for the throne for a while may think they have a better fighting chance against Zandren than they did Ryden,” Anysa said. She turned to her mages in waiting. Sheeri, the redheaded spellcaster mage with freckles already had her phone out.
After a moment, her brown eyes went wide. Then she started to shake her head.
“What is it?” Anysa asked, an edge of impatience to her voice.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Sheeri said.
“I’m about to lose my shit here,” I gritted out. “Please just spit it out. I don’t care how bad it is. We just need to know what we’re up against. Is it the meanest, biggest polar bear in the arctic? A Siberian tiger with an axe to grind? A lion with bloodlust? What?”
Sheeri lifted her gaze to mine, then shifted it over to Anysa. “It’s Pyran Wingburn.”
Anysa’s thick, brows nearly flew clear off her smooth dark forehead. “No,” she breathed, as if Sheeri must have it wrong.
“Who the fuck is Pyran Wingburn?” I asked, about to set fire to the forest just so I had some fucking light, I was so deeply in the goddamn dark.
“A dragon,” Zandren whispered. “The largest dragon shifter in the realm.”
“A dragon?” Maxar asked. At least I wasn’t the only one confused by all of this. “They’ve never challenged for the throne. They tend not to give a shit about any of the monarchy crap. They live mostly in solitude and as long as nobody messes with their mate, pups or treasure, they’re pretty easy going.” He shrugged. “At least the dragons I’ve met are, anyway. Then again, I haven’t met very many since they live in secluded mountain caves and none of that twitches my dick in the slightest.”
Ryden shook his head slowly, fear and confusion in his honey brown eyes. “This doesn’t make any sense. I know Pyran. He’s a good man. A good shifter. He has never expressed any interest in power.”
“Why now?” I asked, turning to Zandren. “Has he even met you? You’ll tear his wings off like he’s no more than a butterfly.”
But my Pooh Bear didn’t seem nearly as convinced as I was, and that flicker of worry in his eyes made a pit the size of the Grand Canyon open up in my stomach.
“Dragon shifters are big , little one,” he said with a swallow. “The only reason they’re not the shifters in power is because they don’t want to be. They are bigger than all of us, they fly, their scales are like armor, and they breathe fire.”
I sucked in a rattled breath through my nose. “Okay … so … so what? We find this Pyran Wingburn , and just convince him that challenging you isn’t the wisest choice? That he needs to just guard his treasure and leave the realm ruling to the rest of us. Right?” I glanced around at the others who had belonged to this wild and zany paranormal realm far longer than my four-ish weeks of membership. My gaze settled on Ryden. “You said yourself that Pyran is a good man. A good shifter. Which means he’s probably willing to sit down and have a discussion with us. To talk this through like civilized adults. There’s no need for a challenge.”
My heart hammered relentlessly against my ribs as the thought of losing Zandren slowly started to sink in. I didn’t care who was the shifter king—or queen. As long as they weren’t some asshole dictator like Howar Volmark, the vampire kind. But if this was a fight to the death, then, that dragon motherfucker would have to kill me first before I let him lay even one scale on my mate.
Maxar and Zandren must have felt my worries and their gazes softened. Maxar slid his arm around me and pulled me tight into him as we all continued to stand there on the side of the back country road deep in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
My father-in-law just lost his leg, one of my mates just became king of the shifters, my shit-stain of an uncle was still at large, and now we knew we couldn’t trust the vampire king, either.
We were already dealing with a lot, and now we had this bullshit to contend with as well. A fucking challenge.
Meanwhile, my best friend and the healer mage who was helping her recover from my uncle’s attack on her, were AWOL, and I was desperate to find them. Were they safe? Or did Lerris—or King Howar—get them?
“Isn’t anybody going to say something?” I hollered. “I just asked a question. I just asked if we could reason with Pyran and your silence right now is really fucking ominous, not to mention annoying.”
Heat filled my chest and when I glanced down, yellow and pink flames flickered out of my chest. The only other tie that happened—at least those two colors—was when I was aroused. And I definitely wasn’t aroused right now. I was pissed. I was terrified. I was exhausted.
“A shifter challenge always takes place on the eve of a full moon,” Ryden finally said, his voice distant and hollow. “There is a designated space in the Black Forest. ”
“In Germany?” I asked.
Ryden nodded. “Yes.”
“The next full moon is six days away,” Sheeri said.
“You have to fight to the death in six days?” I asked, pivoting to face Zandren again.
“It’s not always to the death,” he replied, though the look in his eyes said he knew he would probably die.
I tore out the hair elastic that held my wild curls up on the top of my head, then shoved my fingers into my scalp as I started to pace. “Okay, and where does Pyran live? If we go to him first, maybe we can talk him out of this. Or find out what his beef is and see if we can resolve things before it needs to come to a challenge. Maybe he thinks dragons aren’t being adequately represented in the shifter world?”
“They’re the smallest shifter population, but the most formidable,” Ryden said. “We never overlook or shun them. They have always been adequately represented.”
I didn’t doubt that for a second, my father-in-law had been a fair and noble ruler. I was just spitballing ideas. It’d been a while since I felt so powerless.
“Pyran lives in The Dolomites,” Zandren said. “His whole family does.”
“So then we’re going to Italy?” I asked, still getting over our recent trip literally to Hell and back.
Heads slowly nodded. Except, of course, for Ryden and his two shifter soldiers, Leno and Groy. For obvious reasons, Ryden probably wouldn’t make the journey. He’d just lost a leg and needed to focus on healing.
“I’ll make the call for a jet to meet us as the Denver airport tonight,” Anysa said before murmuring instructions to her mages in waiting. “We can go visit Pyran together.”
I sharp, spikey lump lodged itself at the top of my throat, so all I could do was mouth a thank you to the mage queen.
Her soft smile only eased the terror inside of me enough that I could unglue my feet from the pine needle covered earth, and make my way over to Zandren.
I wrapped my arms around his torso and buried my face in his chest. “We’ll figure it out,” I murmured. “You’re not going to have to fight a dragon.”
I did my best to tune out Zandren’s thoughts, because all they kept saying, over and over again, was how he’d only just found me and didn’t want to die and lose me so soon. Or, that he had no idea what love was until he found me, and now we wouldn’t be able to have cubs or rule the realm together.
A hot tear slid down my cheek and I hugged him tighter. “Don’t think those things. Please.”
He pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “I’m going to do my very best to stay with you, Little One. I promise.”
A bear’s promise. With all the fucked up things going on in the world right now, it was about one of the only things I knew I could really count on. Too bad, it was a promise he couldn’t actually make.