The dragon skin was reported to contained powerful properties
essential in transformation. In six months of experimenting on his captive,
he’d discovered many things about the dragons. If only he could learn what the
writings meant him to do with the section of silken leather.
The volumes he’d studied alluded to something wondrous about
an exchange of hide named the sidhartha. Evidently the term referred to a
concept so common place in those ancient times, an explanation seemed
unnecessary. He could derive no modern translation for the word.
Perhaps the presence of the Dragon Guardian would unlock the
magic and show him how to claim the power. If, as he guessed from today’s
debacle, she didn’t control her Guardian powers she’d be simple enough to
detain. And maybe he’d be able to nudge those talents to emerge in a manner he
could employ to his advantage. He’d have to consider the perimeter of
experiments he might do with the woman here in contact with Phaux.
His work had come to the attention of the head of the ancient
Dragon Slayer society, Knights of Druiere’. The master put his own plans in
motion for Wren and the dragon shifters. That began a cascade of disaster. He
wasn’t sure how the information had gotten out. Now that he was under their
scrutiny, he had to deal with a different kind of monster.
Another cut of flesh off the dragon’s body, -- ah, if his
experiments gave him the answers he needed, he could get control back and
perhaps wrest power away from… he hesitated to think the leader’s name,
Dirk
. The master slayer knew everything
that happened, like kudzu with tentacles permeating a vast hidden network.
The Historian of the Knights prattled on about the dragon
society’s divergent class structures. The gist of it being some were born
dragon, the under-class and the leading class who were born human gaining their
shift with maturity.
For the last age the incidence of those Royals producing
recessives had increased. Dominants and recessives had resulted, the name given
those who failed to shift into dragons, thought to be trapped in their human
bodies by weak genetics.
The Knights themselves were progeny of those early
recessives. Many had escaped to the earth dimension. Careful monitoring of the
population was required. When a dragon erupted from the line, they had been
there to destroy the creatures.
Research that he himself had gleaned from records and books
in their library and his own intellectual thought indicated an alternate
hypothesis, expressed versus dormant.
He suspected from his intensive study of the genealogy charts
in the records that he was one of those dormant dragon shifters. If he could
just find the way to trigger the expression he would have the ability of his
true nature, a power that should wisely be controlled and only given to a few.
Discovering the catalyst could help him develop a way to
influence the opposite effect and block the other dormant/recessives from
achieving this faculty. He would be the gatekeeper to govern the dispensation
of this astounding potential. He was The Chosen.
Tightness inside Caleb’s
chest
spiraled, winding tauter. He pushed
through the inner door to the small, eclectic office partitioned from the back
of Wren’s shop. The area contained workspace for a desk, a couch and efficiency
kitchenette.
Ethan followed him into the small room. Wren eyed both of
them suspiciously and motioned to the couch for them to sit, which of course
they didn’t. “You two sure know how to fill up a room.”
Caleb’s thoughts bounced from violence for whoever had hurt
her to a curious introspection on how or why she’d become so important to him
in a matter of minutes. His reflections kept coming back to consider what had
actually happened. She turned on the water tap to the small sink and threw a
wash cloth under the flow.
Ethan moved over to take it from her, wringing out the water.
“You are the one who needs to sit down.” Pressing her toward the couch, he
reasoned “It will be easier for one of us to clean your injuries.” He picked up
a small basin and started filling it with water.
Caleb reached a tendril of thought out.
Ethan
are
you as wound up as I am?
Ethan brought the warm water and cloth over to the couch
preparing to clean the woman’s wounds.
Yeah,
my hormones are doing the can-can of want and need. Yours too,
wasn’t a
question.
Caleb visually searched. “Do you have a first aid kit?” he
asked aloud while he answered Ethan mentally.
I’d have to admit to a double dose of that. My head is telling me this
sex drive is something more than just her soft curves and beautiful face. The
attraction reminds me of how the pheromones draw women to us but this time we
are the ones caught.
She lay on the futon rested her head back on an overstuffed
pillow with a weary exhale before answering Caleb. “There’s a small one, some
band aids, cut stuff and antibiotic cream over there.”
He dug the plastic box out of the clutter on top of the
office refrigerator. Ethan knelt on the floor and began to wash the blood off
her face.
Caleb studied her. Their scent certainly didn’t seem to
affect her libido at all. Then, her uncontrollable shivers erupted again making
her appear vulnerable and overwhelmed. Caleb pulled a soft blanket off the back
of the couch and drew it over her. “Easy, it’s just the adrenaline.”
Her stubbornness radiated through her sharp eyes and the tilt
of her jaw as she fairly glared at Ethan. “I can wash my own face.”
“Shh. Hush.”
Ethan carefully
smoothed the cloth over her cheek, rinsed and cleaned more.
Caleb watched his twin’s calm care of the woman. He and Ethan
had long ago acknowledged their talent as something given by the deity Gelfin
herself. She had led them to this slip of a woman. That intervention occurred
in time to save her. There in lay the rub. In the cosmos things happened,
sometimes danger averted by a small decision.
When events rocketed out of whack from the Goddess’s grand
design, Caleb and Ethan were there to intercede and get events back on track
within the larger scheme of things. Once actions had reached that juncture
they’d always played out in line with their precognition. She, a human, had
altered the time line alone without assistance from either he or Ethan.
How did she do that?
--Got me bro. She
doesn’t have the scent of a shifter who’s transformed. She could be off spring
of a recessive.
He grappled for a way to explain his body’s response to the
woman. It was impossible for humans and even other Drakins to change fate. He
and Ethan were the only ones capable of circumventing happenings to put
outcomes back on course. No one else ever could, until today, that is.
She’s certainly
something and we need to keep an eye on her.
≽
∞
≼
The adrenaline surge
Wren was coming out of caused the stunned numbness that wrapped around her
mind, immobilizing her. The men invading her office were on a hotness scale of
one to ten, somewhere around eighteen, and pulsated with sensual heat. Yes, the
man who’d pulled the afghan over her was Caleb, and Ethan bathed her face.
While they might be an identical match to the world, to her they were unique
and independent from each other. She found them individuality distinctive.
She looked up at Caleb standing by the couch watching at her
as if she were a complicated puzzle to figure out, a kind but shrewd look that
communicated more than words. He had a slight bump on the bridge of his nose,
evidence of a past break. Her glance drifted down his chest, abs and oh, yes.
His worn faded jeans didn’t leave much to the imagination.
This man’s sculpted muscles were a work of art. He was hard marble and hot in
ways a statue never could be. His dark eyes captivated her. She could have lost
herself in their depths. Whoever described brown eyes as plain had obviously
never seen Caleb’s.
He scrutinized her face with a look of total concentration.
Under his gaze, her nipples tightened into pebbled knots. Arousal sent a quiver
of sensation through her belly into the center of her essence, which sparked a
pulsing release of moisture between her legs. The urgent edge of physical need
cut through her with a sharp demanding throb that begged for relief. Then, he
flashed his dazzling smile with a brief shy, duck of his head that said here’s
a snarky smart-ass that tries to get
himself
out of
trouble with charm. A move so adorable she was convinced yes he could, darling
bashful boy…er man. She closed her eyes in a vain effort. He’d already caught
her ogling his assets.
“I don’t… I’m not sure I understand what’s going on.”
Her mouth was dry, her voice still raspy.
“I’m shaken up a little bit. I don’t know what happened to my stairs.”
His brother, Ethan, knelt between her legs, examining the
cuts and scrapes on her stomach. His hand bumped against her jeweled belly
ring. She tried to ignore the sensation that spread across her abdomen. She
considered the possibility that he was heavier muscled than his twin.
She reached out to him, placing her hand on his chest. The
softness of the black t-shirt cloth stretched over his hard
pecs
.
The sleeves of the shirt were torn out giving it a little more stretch across
his torso. The president should declare clothing such a body a federal crime.
“Just relax. We’re going to check the stairs out in a
minute.” His voice had a soothing dark quality that whispered to her mind of
sultry exotic places. He carried a trace of an accent that was both comforting
and familiar, but she couldn’t quite place.
Goddess, what had he said? She looked up into Ethan’s eyes.
Yes, what she felt started with shaken up and ended with-- she didn’t know
where she ended up. She licked her dry bottom lip. He was too beautiful, if you
could call a man beautiful; too masculine; too large, too everything, to be
real.
His straight raven hair arched off his forehead from a peak
and fell down across his neck and shoulders. He seemed somehow old world, a
warrior. His warm, chocolate brown eyes darted to hers periodically, studying
her as he efficiently treated her cuts and abrasions. His lips were full,
supple, and kissable.
She imagined how his mouth would feel moving over her,
pausing to kiss and nibble her most intimate places as his brother held her
tight in his arms. Desire intruded over her common sense, leaving her without
control of her thoughts. She shook her head to dispel the image of forbidden
sex with both men, together.
She didn’t know them and here she was snuggled between the two,
lost in an erotic fantasy while her fog-filled brain checked in and out of
reality.
Nor am I too sure
what’s
happening to me that all I want to think about is
where cozying up in bed between these two could lead.
Had she hit her head?
Maybe she had a concussion. The whole experience might be a hallucination.
The whiff of his
pleasant man smell snuck in with her next breath. The same undefined fragrance
had haunted her for weeks, eluding her ability to identify the luscious scent.
Male pheromone now flooded her mind with a unique tangy spice, strangely wild
and untamed, a mixture of sage and eucalyptus laced under the hard maleness.
The aroma increased the soft and horny need cocooning her.
“I feel really weird. I mean the king- sized, colossal,
beyond weird kinda weird.
I should really…”
Ethan doctored her hand wounds with ointments. She hissed at
the sting as he dabbed her scrapes with something noxious. Her distress caused
him to blow cool air across the cuts until the medicine stopped burning. So much
for the hallucination concept which made the concussion theory seemed more and
more believable. Dang, that stuff hurt.
“Are you an E.M.T or something?”
“I’ve had some training.
She stopped gawking at him long enough to comprehend he had
pushed her shirt up around her neck while his firm hands touched her here and
there, cleaning the bleeding scrapes across her chest and stomach with an air
of clinical detachment before smoothing cream and bandages over the cuts.
What the hell is wrong with me?
She sat up while she pulled her shirt down and struggled to re-arrange
her clothes. “I can take care of that myself, thank you.” She had to get these
two out of here before she did something she would most definitely NOT regret
in the morning but held potential for long term devastation.
Her heart thundered like she
was having a
freaking heart attack. The intense attraction to these two men drowned her in a
flood of heat that obliterated any logical thought she may have had.
“Miss…”
She shivered. This was how his voice would sound after they’d
worn themselves out making love. He put a hand on her arm to get her attention,
the warmth of his palm saturating her with heat.
“Miss,” Ethan said. “Your chin is going to need a butterfly
strip to heal clean, unless you want a doctor to suture the cut?”
She shook her head in a sharp, no, no doctor. He didn’t
question her reasons for not wanting to go to the hospital. Great Freya, she
was lusting after these two strangers and they didn’t even know her name. She
wrestled with her emotions fighting to get a hold on her spiraling hunger. She
had to get them out the door.
Ethan cleaned the wound with care before applying a thin dot
of antibiotic ointment. The strain of maintaining his tight control was evident
in the way his hands shook while he applied the strip bandage to her chin.
Caleb eased a makeshift ice pack against the wound. “This will help keep the
swelling down.”
“My name is Wren.” She patted her throat with slightly
battered fingers. She touched the flat chain of her dragon pendant Gram had
given her. Thank the Goddess; she had not lost the medallion. Ethan’s hand
abruptly clenched her knee as she fingered the small dragon. A fission of fear
passed through her at his interest in the necklace.
“Actually, I’m Cathwren Aldridge. I own this store.”
“Your token is a dragon?” He met her eyes, shock radiating
from him. His brother moved in closer so he could look at the necklace.
Her gaze darted between the two while she fought for enough
balance to stand on her own. “I hadn’t thought about it that way, but yes, I
guess so.” She watched Ethan as he turned the necklace emblem in the light to
get a closer look at the design.
A golden dragon curled into a relaxed pose wrapped around in
the symbol for infinity. Two agates, one blood red, the other jade green, were
clutched in the dragon’s claws revealed a swirling pattern of movement on the
stone’s pitted surfaces. A second matching dragonhead on the other side of the
body locked the piece together around her neck. A strange energy pulsed through
the chain, tickling her skin.
Caleb looked on, his eyes bright with interest. “Where did
you get this?”
“The pendant is a family heirloom. My grandmother gave it to
me on my last visit.” In a lucid moment before passing, Gram had gifted her
with the pendant and instructed no matter what, she should never take off this
one piece of jewelry.
“Salynne’s was her place.” The cherished dragon necklace and
the shop represented her remaining connection to family. “I was the only one in
the family that had shown interest over the years and so she left it to me when
she died.” Why was she telling them all this? She bit off the next installment
on her autobiography threatening to spill out of her mouth.
Ethan looked around the room’s shelves at the different
pieces of dragon art. She watched curious as he inspected her necklace again,
avoided touching either stone clasped in the dragon’s claws, before he met her
eyes.
An inner intensity gleamed from Ethan as he examined her.
When one brother started to speak, the other finished the
sentence. “Your office is… full of dragons.” Their amused tones puzzled her.
She had heard of the twin speak phenomena. They had it going on strong. The
timbre of their voices blended and soothed her uneasiness. They were like
meeting new friends at Dragoncon through a sense of shared bond you knew them
even though you didn’t really know them.
“Yes, I collect them.”
Caleb’s laughter lightened the mood of heavy watchfulness. He
leaned back against the door frame. “I never would have guessed that.” He
chuckled again, shaking his head.
She wasn’t sure how to
feel about his amusement. “I sell them in the shop. I only keep the most unique
for myself.”
Ethan snorted -- She would have relished that thought, except
she was irritated that after all that had happened, they actually shared a
private joke, beyond her understanding.
Reality check, they were so not her new BFF’s from a
convention. They were strangers off the street that happened to be strolling
down her alley in time to catch her falling through stairs that someone had
tampered with to try to kill her. Maybe they’d been the ones to damage the
stairs. It was past time for them to go.
“I appreciate everything that you’ve done, saving my life and
all.” Boy did that sound stupid. “I’ve taken too much of your time. I’m sure
you must have somewhere else you need to be this morning. I’ll see you out.”
She needed to get up. When she tried to stand, though, a dizzy whirl of vertigo
threatened to flatten her. She steadied herself against something hard, Caleb,
and something immovable, Ethan.
She marched toward the front of the store pulling them with
her. She ignored their sputtering protests realizing full well if either of
them dug in refusing to leave she’d be helpless to force the issue. She really
needed them out of the shop. Fear and confusion played tennis with her
emotions. She opened the walnut and glass door nearly pushed them out the front
and shutting it with a satisfying jangle of the little bell attached at the
top. She leaned her back against the glass and tried with a slow exhale to
steady her libido from doing the tango with her good sense. She needed coffee
and she needed it now.
≽
∞
≼
Ethan stormed around
the corner of the building into the alley. She kicked us out. The fury didn’t
stem from the girl pushing them out the front door of the shop with a casual
thank-you-very-much-now-good-bye. Her flight reaction was just her response to
some wild chemistry cocktail of lust and fear that had flared up between the
three of them. He wanted to grin like a fool over her, yet a deeper rage burned
at his soul. How dare someone try to hurt Wren, punctuated each step.
He pushed his emotions earthward through his pounding stride.
Adrenalin rushed through him, feeding his aggression. A dull ache started
underneath his breastbone. He rubbed heart chakra with counter clockwise
circular motions, trying to soothe the feeling.
The thought of what would have happened to her if they’d
responded to their premonition a moment slower became hooks dragging into his
flesh, snaring him in what-if’s --and the biggest mystery of all-- how she had
altered everything they accepted as reality by changing the outcome of the
precog. He wanted to run, or scream or pound something until he ground it to
dust beneath his fury. Ethan kicked a chunk of concrete out of his path.
Caleb lengthened his stride to keep up. “We’re going to have
to stick around here for a while, and we’re not making any moves on her until
we figure out what’s going on and what she is. If she is a recessive you know
we’re supposed to turn her over to the Telihedran for processing and sale.
“I’m not giving her over to those animals for use in their
sick slave trade.” Ethan hissed between clenched teeth to keep from bellowing.
“If she’s fooled us and she can shift, we need to send her over to Drakin so
she can learn her ancestry and gain self-control.”
“I don’t want to turn her over any more than you do. We’ve
got a lot happening here that we don’t understand. Her necklace has two queen
stones which gives her free access to and from our dimension. If she is to be
believed, she doesn’t know how to use it to open a portal. Then, I have to
wonder who the fuck was her grandmother that she was in possession of portal
magic.
Ethan shook his head. “Yeah, more questions than answers. I
don’t have a clue why our skin absorbed her blood either.”
“Another what-the-hell complication in my life, none of which
I need right now.”
“Well, I want answers. If she’s a true recessive, we’ll add
her to the list we’re keeping watch over.”
“Okay, add your research about what’s happening to all the
other projects. Our private list of who to look out for and keep up with is
getting a little long and more scattered out than the two of us can monitor
alone. Plus, if we do what we both want to do with her she’ll be exposed and we
might not have a choice. Her visibility will make her a target and they’ll take
her from us.” Recessives that didn’t manifest their change by the end of
puberty were sold to take their place in Drakin society as servants, most of
them entering the sex trade in one form or another.
Ethan’s hiss reached a growled roar. “Nobody is going to take
Wren from us to make into a slave in Wyrmarach.” The policy that progeny of
recessive ancestors which took refuge on this side of the veil were to be
identified and remanded to the Drakins was nothing short of sex slave
trafficking. A heinous act which Ethan and Caleb long ago decided they would
have no part.
“I’m going to need you to calm the fuck down.”
Caleb had a point. Ethan was grateful for the shared twin
connection that allowed them to borrow stability from each other; he closed his
eyes and breathed deep. His brother’s calm enveloped him, restoring a sense of
balance and purpose. Something had hijacked their emotions, something that
emanated from this petite beautiful woman.
Anyone caught abducting humans whether they were recessive
dragons or not would fuel a war on their race just as quickly as a stray dragon
popping here or there in the Earth dimension. He just wished they had a
scientist on their side who could figure out the impact of dragon genetics. In
the meantime, they were working blind.
He made his way to the side stairs. Looking around the
ground, he found a couple of stray bolts. He jumped off the pavement with a
push to scale the side of the building and the underside of the stairs until he
was hanging beneath the missing steps.
The stairs were engineered for prefabrication, each board
held in place to a metal frame with three bolts. Easy to see where someone had
unbolted the boards from the metal rail work and simply removed them.
Wren could have been in her kitchen and not heard a sound.
The stair case made a turn at her door and wrapped around the building to
provide access to several small apartments making up the second floor over the
strip mall below. Wren’s shop and apartment were the corner units.
Ethan cursed as waves wrapped around him, squeezing his heart
in a vice of emotion. He didn’t need to look any closer. The damage was
intentional, sabotage. What motivation could anyone have for wanting to hurt
Wren Aldridge? What significance could she possibly have that the Goddess had
drug him and Caleb onto the scene? And maybe more significant, did one have
anything to do with the other?