Kiss of a Dragon(4)

Cinaed gave him a sharp nod and turned to wade back into the club.

As soon as Lucian was out the door and around the corner from the bar, he cloaked and leaped into the air. He shifted as he went, unfurling his wings to grab the light breeze and loft himself up through the concrete chimney of the buildings of downtown. The cool night air washed away the scent of the club, and the churning agitation inside him stepped down a notch. His talons tucked tight, and his wings spread broad. He stretched his neck, easing the last of the tension. What he really needed was a good hard fly, over the distant mountains back to the keep where he belonged.

But his duty was here.

He and his brothers, princes of the House of Smoke, existed for literally one purpose—to keep the mortal and immortal worlds apart, as they should be. For ten thousand years, a treaty between fae and dragonkind had protected the soft, delicate humans which dragons relied upon to perpetuate their species. For every dragon was born male—with very few exceptions, including his mother, the queen. Female dragons were so rare that no one was surprised when she mated with his father, the king. It was only right that she should mate with the most powerful dragon on the planet, descended from the original fae-and-dragon pairing that resulted in the treaty. And no one was shocked that out of such strong magic was born triplet princes, something so rare that it hadn’t happened in all of recorded memory. Normally, a dragon mated with a human female and produced a single, male dragonling. More often than not, the mother would be consumed in the process. Either with the sealing ceremony or the birth of the dragonling itself.

It was a horror that brought unwelcome memories.

Lucian swooped over the high-rises of downtown Seattle and circled out over the water, leaving those thoughts behind. In their place, he stretched his senses out to the city and all the living species it held, searching for rogue members of the House of Drakkon, but instead finding only the normal inhabitants. Humans and shifters, mostly wolves. Witches in their covens—he could smell and taste the blue spark of their magic. Witches and wolves may quarrel, but they were really cousins. He was only five hundred years old, but even he could remember the time when they were more like brothers and sisters than enemies. And not so different in their powers, as they were now. The witches used their spells to conjure longer lives, but they were still essentially mortal. Dragons had a foot in both worlds, mortal and immortal, and their lifetimes could stretch a thousand years or more, under the right circumstances.

A vapor of scent crossed his mind, bringing the taste of smoke and sulfur—the whiff of something immortal.

Lucian instinctively banked toward the scent, tracking it like the hunter he was. He dipped toward the concrete maze of the city, but his enhanced eyesight found the source before his fae senses. Nearly a mile away, down in an alleyway, a woman was fighting with a man twice her size. Lucian tucked his wings tighter, picking up speed. His senses flared, and if he were merely human, he wouldn’t have seen the flash of green eyes or the swish of reddish-brown hair or the press of rose-colored lips. His mind filled with her scents—soap-scrubbed skin and floral shampoo and the musty linen shirt clinging to her chest. His magic tasted all of her.

And she was kicking the shit out of her attacker.

Lucian checked his rocketing speed, confused. He scanned them both again—the smell of demon was on the man for certain. Was the woman a slayer? But he couldn’t taste angel on her, just a delicious human scent that wrenched his heart almost as much as the right hook she landed on the demon’s face. He reeled back into a dumpster, sending it askew.

Then she pulled a gun.

Holy mother of magic. Lucian dove again, tucking his wings tight for maximum speed. The man was demon, but she couldn’t know that, not if she were truly human. Her bullet wouldn’t kill him… but it might well and truly piss him off.

Lucian landed and uncloaked at the same time, conjuring clothes to cover his naked human form and stomping hard with black boots on the pavement between them. His golden wings shot out to break his fall, then tucked hard and fast to furl into his body and complete the transformation.

The woman gaped at him, and the crack of her gunfire shocked his ears. His shoulder caught the bullet she meant for her attacker, but it pinged away. He was just as bulletproof in human form as he was in dragon, the strength of his golden scales infusing his skin with powers normally reserved for a true immortal.

No, the bullet was not a concern. But the demon was.

He grabbed the man by the throat and threw him to the ground. Then Lucian knelt to press his large hand over the man’s gaping mouth, the one that would soon be screaming. The runes that controlled demons—another gift from his dark fae ancestry—wiggled in black lines down his arm, settling on the back of his hand. They gained power as they neared their target, and he could feel the magic pulsing from his hand into the man’s body, seeking out the demon. The man was only half monster, a fact that sent a shock of anger through Lucian’s body as the magic did its work.