Chapter 7 #2
Gold spilling into his eyes, Mercer swiped for my throat with clawed fingertips I dodged seconds before I lost my head. The tree I had been leaning on wasn’t so lucky. Bark exploded as he sliced right through it.
A white blip flashed out of the corner of my eye. Fayne. She yipped once to draw my attention.
“This is a terrible idea,” I muttered to myself, twisting to chase her even as Mercer lunged after me.
“The sentinels won’t help you,” Mercer taunted from too close behind me. “They’re loyal to me.”
Be that as it may, we were heading straight for them. “Don’t you mean they’re loyal to Dad?”
“The pack has lost faith in their alpha. They no longer believe he has their best interests at heart. They already questioned his methods when he invested so many years rearing a child with no Sartori or wolf scent markers. His word made your relationship law, but enough of us knew the truth.” He growled as a familiar howl grew closer.
“Now he’s turned an allied pride into pawns, sending them to abduct humans to force his daughter home.
That show of weakness can’t be tolerated or accepted in an alpha. ”
Laughter bubbled up in me, and the slip in my concentration gave him the advantage. He raked his claws across my nape, and blood poured warm down my spine. Had he been closer, I might have lost my head.
“This is a coup.” I should have seen it sooner. “You’ve waited a long time for this, haven’t you?”
Nine times out of ten a beta would go on to become the alpha of a pack. Rarely was the demotion from alpha made by choice. Alphas were either defeated in a challenge and forced out of their pack or killed in the challenge to cement the new alpha’s status.
“As soon as the Walshes arrived, led by that starry-eyed boy, I knew this was the time to act.”
Ahead of me, Fayne kept nimbly leaping, bringing us ever closer to Sloane.
I really hoped she knew what she was doing.
“You knew how Dad would react.” I did the math. “You just gave him a little push, helped him succumb to paranoia his prize would be stolen from him. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you whispered the idea to recruit the Nelson pride in his ear.”
The time for chatting ended as I burst into the clearing where the sentinels all paused their tormenting of Sloane to crane their necks toward me. Fayne powered on ahead, but I had lost my slight advantage when we left the trees. On flat ground, Mercer’s longer legs ate up the distance between us.
“Stop her,” he commanded the sentinels. “Don’t let her get away.”
As the sentinels turned on me, hackles and fists rising, bloodlust roaring in their ears and snarls pouring from their mouths, I met Sloane’s eyes and tears flooded mine, blinding me.
“I’m so sorry,” I mouthed to her, doubtful she could see much through her matted fur.
Running wasn’t getting me anywhere. I had to turn and fight, to at least try to bring Mercer down.
I spun aside, zigzagging to gain precious feet between us, then raised my silver claws.
He hadn’t expected me to plant my feet, and I got in a solid swing that sliced open his face from his hairline to his jaw.
His answering snarls, the way his teeth elongated, made me wish my aim hadn’t been quite so good. He wouldn’t let a pathetic latent like me walk away after shaming him in front of the other sentinels. Not if I was right about his plans to rise to alpha, literally over my dead body.
Snapping out his hand, Mercer fisted my throat and lifted me off my feet. “Goodbye, Anie.”
Before he could crack my spine over his knee or gut me from neck to navel, Fayne launched herself at him.
Except she shifted midway and landed on him as a very naked woman in her sixties.
Shock caused Mercer to release his grip on me. He rocked back on his heels and gaped as she linked her arms behind his neck. Fayne plastered her sizeable chest to his bloody face, forcing him to motorboat her boobs to avoid suffocation.
Rían would never forgive me if I let something happen to his grandmother. I would never forgive myself. She had been nothing but kind to me. This made twice she had risked her life for mine.
Using her distraction, I skidded behind Mercer, slicing through his Achilles tendons. He hit his knees, baffled how he had gotten there, but he honed a hate-filled gaze on Fayne in the next instant.
Still on my side, I swung my leg high, kicking his head left while Fayne scrambled off him to his right.
That bought us a few seconds, but the wolves were closing in, and Dad’s howl sounded closer than ever.
“You really shouldn’t have hurt her.” Fayne took me by the hand, and we backed into the center of the clearing. “He’s not going to like that one bit.”
Mercer caught on before me, which I blamed on taking a boot to the head earlier, and he flipped his gaze skyward. I couldn’t afford to scan the clouds. I kept my gaze trained on the threat in front of me.
Pallor swept over Mercer’s face as a primal roar shook the heavens, painting a coy smile on Fayne’s lips.
A massive shadow fell across me, and wind kicked up, sending debris flying into my eyes.
Temporary blindness didn’t spare me from witnessing Dad burst into the clearing, his upper lip quivering and his ruff bristling like a lion’s mane. He ignored the incoming threat and bounded toward me with his teeth gleaming.
Fayne peeled away from me, planting herself between my father and me. I let her think she had done it, that she had saved me yet again. But I had seen my dad in all his moods, as both wolf and man, even if I hadn’t experienced the sharp bite of them myself until today.
I no longer believed he wanted to kill me.
Mercer wouldn’t be in such a rush to finish the job if he did.
Dad must need me for something else. That, or he simply refused to back down from the Walshes.
But the alternative, that he wanted to punish me within an inch of my life, my flesh in his teeth, was worse.
Justice in his jaws was also a punishment I refused to let anyone else take for me.
I shoved Fayne hard, sending her sprawling, then threw up my arm to fend off Dad.
“Get out of here,” I yelled at her, determination setting in. “Take Sloane with you.”
Teeth pierced my forearm as Dad clamped down, and flesh tore as he slung me like a chew toy until a sharp pop rang out, loud enough to rise over the cacophony of snarling wolves, violent wind gusts, and the rabid fury Dad breathed in my face as I let him gnaw on my bones to protect my throat.
The ground lurched beneath me, bouncing me like a trampoline, and I bit my tongue.
The wolf hadn’t let go of me, but he wasn’t sawing through tendons anymore, so that was nice.
An ancient growl dredged from the depths of civilization’s collective nightmares rumbled through the blood-soaked air.
I had done a fair job of ignoring my rescuer in favor of not getting killed before he reached us, or so I had told myself.
The truth was, I was afraid to look, to see what I might never become.
To confirm what I had been unable to defend when Dad asked me if I had seen a dragon with my own eyes.
I couldn’t hold another hope in my heart that slid through the cracks between my ribs to shatter on the floor of mediocrity.
Hot breath blew dirt and grass into my eyes, and the all-encompassing shadow blotted out my vision.
The wolf released me, but he didn’t go far. As his features contorted, I read his intention to parley.
Since that would take a minute, I laid my head down to breathe through the agony lighting up my body.
A gentle nudge to my shoulder warned me I had run out of time for pretending dragons were myth.
This was it. Now or never. I had to tuck away my insecurities and fears and face them.
Face him.
Rían.
Heart thundering in my ears, I used my good arm to shove upright. I gave the world a second or two to quit spinning quite so fast while I gathered my nerves. Blood loss was kicking my butt, and I was pretty sure I had gone into shock because my arm really ought to hurt more.
A low groan, an inquiring noise, rose over my shoulder, and I twisted myself until I faced him.
Well, his ankles. They were very nice ankles. The glitter of his blue-green scales reminded me of peacock feathers. The fading sun glinted off them, causing me to squint as I searched higher up his massive body.
He was the size of a house, his tail as long as Main Street.
His head was wide, flat, and crowned with tiny horns.
His eyes remained pure white, proving it was Rían staring back at me.
Maybe it was how my head spun, but I would swear he was smiling.
And his teeth. I could use one of his long fangs as a stripper pole.
Oh, God. Where had that come from? I didn’t know the first thing about pole work. Burlesque? I wasn’t even sure what you called it. What I did know was you didn’t perform it in the mouths of dragons. Not even in ones that wanted to marry you.
The world, which had just started making sense, tipped on its side.
Oh.
No.
Wait.
That was me.
“Ana.” Dad waved his arms over his head like he was flagging down a taxi. “Don’t go.”
Why, oh why, had I not blacked out when I had the chance? It would have spared me from watching Dad sprinting toward us as naked as the day he was born. Nothing I hadn’t seen before, sadly, but that didn’t make the view any less traumatic.
Chest ticking, the dragon blew a fine burst of flame, scorching a perfect line between Dad and me.
The message was clear.
Cross the mark, and he would get as smoked as Mercer’s famous Fourth of July brisket.
“You thruck me,” I slurred, my jaw not working right, which, frankly, was a major letdown. I had wanted to tear a strip off his hide, not drool all over myself. “Merther thried to kill me.”
Mercer, who had sidled away to join the sentinels during the chaos, trusting they would back him.
“I know, Peanut, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was just afraid of losing you. You’re my little girl. I only wanted to keep you safe. Please. Come back to the house, and we’ll talk.”
“You’re lucky you’re not dead, wolf.” Fayne staggered into view with Sloane—still in her wolf form—draped across her narrow shoulders in a show of incredible strength. “Touch that girl again, and you will be.”
The dragon—hard to think of it as Rían—used his flexible tail to lift Sloane and settle her across his back.
“I sacrificed everything to raise her.” He pounded a fist over his heart. “She’s mine.”
“You don’t own her, just like you never owned her mother.
You’re a petty, greedy fool who has cost the rarest of us their lives to quench your obsession with a woman who told you no.
She didn’t want you, she never wanted you, and you punished her by killing her and her mate and stealing their child. ”
Unable to breathe, to move, to think, I was rooted in place, suspended in disbelief of her charges.
“Liesel would have grown to love me,” he spat at Fayne, my blood smearing his mouth. “She would—”
“—have rather died alongside Deitrich, her mate, than ever allow your filthy paws to touch her.” Fayne’s upper lip peeled back over her teeth. “Her soul will know no rest until Ana is free of your clutches.”
Worse than the letters from a mother I never met, worse than believing she had divorced Dad and then left me behind, worse than any of the lies he told me was the truth he had kept hidden.
He killed my mother. She was flesh and blood, not ink and paper. And he killed her.
“You look just like her,” he said softly, and it took a second to grasp he was talking to me. “Act like her too. She thought she was too good for me. Even after I became an alpha, for her—all of it for her—with lands and people to rival Deitrich, she refused to see I was the better choice.”
“Dad…” Fresh tears leaked from my eyes. “No.”
“Come on, darling.” Fayne used a scrap of leather, a belt she must have stolen off a sentinel, and made a tourniquet for my arm. “It’s time to take you home, where you belong.”
A blast of fire that blistered my skin held Dad back when he attempted to rush us.
“Take what is mine,” he bellowed, voice distorting, “and I will never stop coming for her, or you.”
“Then I will do what I should have done back then.” She lifted me in her arms, climbing Rían’s bent foreleg with ease, and settled me on my stomach across his back before sitting behind me. “I’ll kill you.”
Bands of gentle pressure locked me in place, holding me steady. I saw from her posture that Sloane had also been secured by whatever magic the Walshes wielded with such deft care.
Fayne leaned over me, untethered, and rechecked my tourniquet. “I’m so sorry, Ana.”
Yeah. I was hearing that a lot lately. Too bad it didn’t change anything.
Her warm fingers glided through my hair, soothing me, and my lids slid lower.
The last thing I saw before darkness claimed me was Rían sweeping his tail in an arc that knocked back our attackers, awarding him precious moments to launch his massive body into the sky.