Chapter Fifteen

Wes roared, so loud that the trees shook with his anger and pain. Far below him, his mother drove her small car toward his parents’ territory within Snowdonia. Dakota’s pain filled him and fed his anger. The beast thrashed its long tail. It knew that they needed to go to Dakota, laws be damned. She was their mate, their only chance at happiness in their long life. She was going to die without him.

He knew it. The realization felt like a pile of rocks sitting heavy in his stomach. Yet, all he could do was fly over the territory he was chained to. Wes knew what kind of trouble he would face if he left the territory before the channels were opened to him, but he worried that it would be too late.

When his parents’ sprawling cottage came into view, he let the form of his beast fall away. The beast did not want to give up control just yet. It wanted to keep its threatening form to crush those that were hurting his mate. Wes reminded his beast that he would need speech to talk to their father and his beast gave way. Human feet slammed into the ground and the earth gave way beneath him.

His mother climbed out of her car, mouth open to yell at him until she saw the look in his eyes. She quickly snapped her mouth shut and turned a grim expression toward the cottage. An angry man appeared in the cottage doorway. Fists clenched at his sides, the man was well over six feet tall. His dark red hair was growing white around his sideburns, but no one would have dared to look him in the face and call him an old man. Shockingly blue eyes scanned his wife to make sure she was safe before they narrowed and turned to his son.

Wes was struggling to reign himself in, his breathing coming heavy. His hand curled into tense claws, every muscle in his body aching with the potential for violence. His father’s gaze falling on him cut through the madness in his mind like a hot knife. For a second, Wes had clarity. The beast pulled back and his eyes shifted back to steely blue. His body let go of some of the tension that filled him and dropped to one knee before his sire, letting his head fall toward the ground.

Honor was the only thing that bound their society. It was the unspoken law that allowed them to survive. Wes’s father stood at the very top of that power. While it granted Wes a good deal of power for himself, it meant the lines that he walked were much narrower. For Wes to lose face would be for his father to lose face, and that would destroy what his father had built.

Never before had Wes wanted to challenge it. The longer he stayed down on one knee, silence hanging in the air all around them, the more his rage rebounded. His shoulder ached and he knew it was no pain of his own that he was feeling. No, what he felt was Dakota’s pain. Someone had hurt her and he could not be there.

“What the hell is going on?” his father’s voice growled.

“Shove your attitude somewhere the sun doesn’t shine, darling.” His mother rounded her car to stand between her husband and her son. “Wes found himself a mate and if we don’t move soon, I fear something will happen to her. She’s one of ours now and we can’t afford to waste time.”

Wes looked up through his hair. Drystan Taniff looked from his wife to his son. The beast inside of Wes fed him a nearly all-consuming rage. The beast’s tail thumped and the ground behind him cracked.

“Put a silver binding on him,” his father growled.

Wes shot up from where he knelt. “Don’t you dare.”

The older man closed the space between them until his face was nose to nose with his son’s. He spoke through clenched teeth. “I have a few calls to make. I cannot have you destroying everything in your path before we get off this territory. In order to live as free as we are, there are rules that we must follow. Let me do what I can before you ruin us all.”

Wes growled, a rumble thrummed through his chest before he could pull it back. His father searched his eyes for a long moment. No doubt, he saw the gold of his beast swirl back toward the forefront.

“Go.” Wes spoke through clenched teeth. “Do what you have to.”

Drystan nodded. He turned to his wife. “Call Gareth and Cameron. They’re going to help us.”

Wes knew that his cousins weren’t being called in to help find Dakota. They were being called in to prevent Wes from doing anything stupid while he searched for his mate. Feeling the unending restlessness that coursed through him the longer he sat still, he understood his father’s precautions. Maybe Drystan understood better than he thought, he knew what it was like to have an impulsive mate that liked to get herself into uncertain situations such as bringing students to the edge of the Snowdonia territories.

Wes wanted to give in to his beast and let the change take him so that he would be prepared to fight if it came to it. Instead, his mother returned with the silver arm band that his father had demanded. She slipped it up his forearm and he felt the beast recede into the back of his mind. It helped to clarify his mind, but it also cleared another path.

He could feel Dakota’s terror and anger like a knife, one that cut right into his heart. She needed him.

Now.

***

Dakota sat in the cold metal chair that the Guardians had provided for her. A metal cuff chained her to the chair. As the Guardians talked amongst themselves about the ways that they should kill her, she tested her cuff. Her wrist burned from trying to slip it over her hand. It was too tight for that, she decided. Thankfully, Dakota realized that the chair wasn’t attached to the floor.

If she had to, she could grab the chair and run. Of course, it would be cumbersome, but it was better than sitting where she was. They had patched up her bleeding shoulder. It hadn’t been a bullet that had hit her, but a not so tiny electrical dart that had punctured her muscle and rendered her arm useless. Once they removed it and she had time, the feeling slowly returned to her arm.

Listening to the Guardians talk of her death was draining her spirits little by little. If they succeeded in their plan, Dakota would never feel Wesley’s touch again. It startled her to think of how badly she would miss something that only just came into her life. She poked and prodded the new ache inside of her that came from the realization of loss, loss of the way that Wes made sure she was happy, loss of the laughter she could have shared with him, loss of a relationship she had previously turned her back on.

Did he know that she was in trouble? Probably not. There was no way that he could know, she reminded herself. Wes would be at the tower, working in his small forge. He wouldn’t know what happened until it was too late.

She raised her eyes to glare at Wilson. She couldn’t let this happen. She’d been working so hard to have a future that she wanted, but had eschewed some of the things that would make her the happiest like love. She didn’t know if she loved Wesley. They had only just met, mates or not. Still, she knew that the chance was there and that she was going to fight for it as hard as she’d fought for everything else in her life.

Letting her head fall back, she looked out the warehouse window while she tried to devise a plan. She had not been expecting to see a face looking back at her, let alone the female professor from school. The woman’s face split into a shark-like smile when their eyes met. The woman pointed into the sky and Dakota followed to find four, massive red bodies flying through the air.

Dragons.

That was a lot of back up for just her. Relief was an odd feeling when looking up at dragons twice the size of tour buses.

Dakota nodded and looked back at her captors. Apparently, they had decided on something while she had been looking out the window at the incoming dragons, because Wilson was coming over to her. He looked down at her with a sneer twisting his lips.

“The public can’t know we had anything to do with your death, no matter how helpful it is to them in the end,” he said as he crouched beside her with a clammy hand on her knee. “It has to look like you killed yourself to avoid being taken captive by your dragon. The good news about that is you now get to choose how you die. There are several options for you to choose from.”

Dakota didn’t respond. Instead, she spat in the man’s face. Her wet spittle splattered in his eye. She watched his jaw clench with anger. He didn’t hit her or even yell. Slowly, he reached up and wiped it away. Dakota tensed.

The squeak of an old window broke the tension. Wilson looked up in surprise as a small canister flew arched over their heads. People screamed all around her. The tiny canister bounced across the concrete floor before hissing and emitting a stream of colored smoke. Red smoke filled the warehouse across from Dakota. It obscured the other Guardians in the room.

Taking advantage of the distraction, she shot up from her seat, grabbing the chair in the process, and swung it at the man’s legs. The hard metal hit his knee and she watched it buckle beneath him. He gritted his teeth and reached for the weapon at his hip. Dakota felt the surge of fear fill her, remembering how it felt last time they’d shot her, and she brought the chair around again. This time it connected with his temple. He fell over in a heap.

Behind her, a door creaked open and the woman’s face appeared again. She motioned for Dakota to follow. Carrying the chair she was currently using as a weapon, Dakota darted forward. The woman’s face grew familiar in a different way as she came closer. Now, she could see the resemblance between the professor and her dragon man.

As soon as Dakota burst into the open air, the woman slammed the door shut. Red smoke trickled out of the open window of the warehouse behind her. She turned back to the woman beside her.

“Thank you,” she breathed. “You’re related to the dragons. Aren’t you?”

The professor nodded with a smile on her lips. She reached back and grabbed a pair of large pliers from the bag at her hip. The pliers snapped through the chain of the cuffs at her wrist.

“What else do you have in that magic bag?” Dakota felt the exhaustion of constant fear setting in. She was safe.

The world shook beneath her feet. She looked up, her heart pounding. The body of a white dragon crashed into one of the red dragons above. Dakota felt her stomach turn. The white dragon’s teeth clamped around the red dragon’s neck, it’s clawed feet sinking into the red scales. The two bodies sank in the air, the red dragon unable to beat his wings in the white dragon’s grasp. She knew exactly who was fighting above her.

Wes and Raph.