“Where are we, Mary?” I stared around at a variety of trees, the smell of wood smoke slightly tinting the air.

“I think this place is called North Carolina, Mal.” My sweet sister’s voice came in a whisper, but there was no need. Humans wouldn’t be able to see us, but she must have felt the same need as I did to protect ourselves in this unknown territory.

“I guess there’s a south in this land of Carolinas then.” I brushed hair out of my eyes and looked around. I was letting the blond locks grow out again. It annoyed my father, but right now they were more annoyance to me than to him.

Mary and I were hunting a wolf, one that was trying to abscond with a child belonging to panther shifter parents. We needed to be on our guard and be careful, not busy pushing hair out of our eyes. Mary handed me a soft circlet of velvet and I gaped at her.

“What am I supposed to do with this, Mary? Offer the man kinky games?” I made to put the small piece of material in my pocket, but she sighed and rolled her eyes. She was never afraid to speak her mind around me, the heir to the throne our father would one day vacate.

“Tie your hair up with it, you numpty!” Mary gave an exasperated sigh, her green eyes giving away her annoyance.

I turned away, not wanting to laugh while we were searching for a kidnapper, but her annoyance amused me. She was always trying to come across as hard, as one of the boys, but she was too cute. I still saw the little girl with pink cheeks even when she was glaring at me.

“I might be a numpty, Mary, but I’m not a brat. Like some people I know.” I rolled my own gray eyes at her antics when she stuck her tongue out at me and walked through a line of trees. I paused when I caught a scent from a slight breeze. There were wolves about. “This way.”

We could have shifted back into our dragon forms and flown over the wooded land, but we needed to be on the ground to catch this guy. We weren’t often in this part of the world, there may even still be dragon hunters in this backward area Mary had tracked the wolf to. Those menacing female figures hadn’t haunted us for generations now, but one never knew in the wilds of unknown territories. I scoffed at myself quietly, imagine dragon hunters existing after all this time.

“Why has he chosen to run to the human world? Why put himself at risk like that?” I was thinking out loud, albeit in a loud whisper to Mary.

“I suppose he could be trying to avoid our world. He knows that if he stays in our world, in our land, he’ll be caught. Maybe that’s why he’s come to this New World.” She was behind me, climbing up a mountain that might rival some of the hills in our magical part of England, though it wasn’t really England.

That bit was hard to explain. Our land existed around, but on top of the human world, and went unseen by the humans. I suppose it could be called a parallel universe, I pondered as I corrected her.

“I think it’s called the United States now.”

“Of course it is, Mal. I only meant it is a new world to us in the real world. This human world is new, isn’t it? Especially this part of it.” She sounded irritated, and I grinned. I was getting to her then. Getting Mary’s goat was one of my favorite pastimes, mainly because it was so easily done.

“Well, to be fair, we’re new to both worlds in the grand scheme of things. I’m only thirty-two and you’re thirty. It’s all old to us.”

“Mal. I will emasculate you with a twig,” Mary warned, her tone telling me she’d about had enough of me tonight.

“Do you think they consider their world the real world?” I carried on as if she hadn’t threatened me.

“Mal! Shut your trap!” Mary was really getting angry now. I gave a cheeky but quiet laugh and continued traipsing up the hill.

Our world, the world of vampires, shifters, and other creatures the humans considered monsters, left the human realm around the time electricity and the telephone were invented. Communications were improving and where we used to be able to hide in a world where stories rarely made it out of small towns and mountain dwellings, tales of monsters could now spread quickly. We’d left this newly threatening world to the humans and built our own around it to protect us all.

“There’s something up here, Mal, look.”

I turned around to see Mary pointing in the other direction from where I’d been looking.

A small, odd home was nestled on the top of the hill, protected by overhanging pine and maple trees. A light was on somewhere in the home, but the rest were off.

“I don’t think that’s it. Let’s keep looking. The place doesn’t smell of shifters.” I glanced back at the little house one last time. Something about the place drew me.

The wind shifted and I caught a much stronger scent this time. “This way.”

I swerved around a small building a good distance from the house and kept my nose in the air. The scent was getting stronger the lower down I went. Mary and I moved quietly on dragon-made boots. The leather soles were thick but soft, matching the suede that ran up to our knees to offer protection. Dressed in black pants with long black coats, the uniform of my father’s security force—the Dragon Guard—we blended into the shadows. We were little more than shadows and if a human saw anything of us it would be only a shadow. They would hear only the whisper of a breeze as we moved over the rocky ground.

As my father’s heir and head of his security force, only my father was more powerful than me. As dragons, we were at the very top of the food chain anyway. Normally, I would be back at my father’s castle, making sure he was safe and well protected, but he’d insisted I be the one to find the child. It seemed nobody else measured up in my father’s view, and he had faith I would find the child alive and well.

For now, my concentration was occupied with the scent of the wolf we were tracking. They’d stolen the newest cub of one of my father’s servants. The servant was one of my father’s favorites and my father had sent Mary and me out to retrieve it, as well as the thief.

“What’s driving them to steal children? Are our numbers that low now?” I was aware our numbers were falling, we hadn’t had any new recruits in over three years, but had it grown that bad? Normally, no one would dare cross my father, but the act of taking a child was in itself a scream to us all that something was wrong.

“It’s getting fairly dire, Mal. I can’t quote numbers but I know that more and more females aren’t producing. Out of five of my friends that have mated, only one has produced a child. It’s happening all over our world.” She paused to climb over a boulder as we neared a clearing at the bottom of the hill.

I stopped her, and we hunkered down behind the rock to look around. “So, people are stealing children now to make up for it? But why steal a panther child if you’re a wolf?”

“I heard Will’s wife is desperate. She’s lost a few pregnancies now, and honestly, I think she’s become unstable. He’s attempting to appease her.”

“That must be heartbreaking for her, to lose so many children.” I might be a man that people would not cross, but I did have a heart.

“Yes, I suppose it is. We dragons might only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to shifters, but we own that iceberg, and we are the rulers. The problem is going to have to be investigated and dealt with. That might even be the plan with this kidnapping. They wanted our attention and now they have it.” Mary sounded miffed.

“Why are you so angry?” I inquired, turning to her momentarily. She rarely showed anger at others.

“Father should have had a team on this a long time ago, when the numbers first started to drop. He was content to let it drop because our world was starting to get a bit crowded. Now we’re in danger of not having enough young to replace all the jobs we have to fill.”

“Ah, I understand. All the walls in the world are pointless if there’s nobody to hide behind them?” I said.

“That’s it exactly. Now come one, I think he’s close.”

We ended up hiking further down the valley, along a natural stream that ran through it, before we found their camp. As dragons, we were able to mask our smell from others, and because of our training, Mary and I were both stealthy. We were on them before they knew it, but we paused, gathering information.

“We have to take him back, Eric. He’s not ours!” A pretty, black-haired wolf female in her late twenties was sitting on a log in front of a campfire, staring into the flames as her husband tended the fire from her side.

“We can’t take him back, Amy! They’ll catch me, and if they don’t hang me, they’ll put me in jail for the rest of my life. I thought this was what you wanted!” The husband, in his late thirties, looked at his wife, consternation marring his features.

“I do want a child, Eric, but our child. Not a baby you stole!” The woman wasn’t being quiet, and I could see how agitated she was as she rocked the baby. Her whole body moved, not just her arms.

I didn’t think either of the wolves was dangerous, but desperate people did stupid things. I waited to find out all we could before we took them and lost the chance at candid moments like this.

The man put his arm around his wife and kissed the top of her head. “He’s ours now, Amy. As long as we can keep away from the dragons, anyway.”

He looked around, as if checking, but he didn’t see us, as I knew he wouldn’t. We were completely cloaked behind the rock.

“What’s his name, Eric?” She looked down at the baby in her arms, wrapped in a soft green blanket.

“I think we should give him a name, Amy. Change it you know? Aelfric is going to stand out in this world.”

“I don’t know, Eric, have you seen what they name their kids in this world? Champagne? Since when is that a name?” She laughed.

“True, but even that stands out. What about Seth? I like that one.”

“If that’s what you want, Eric.”

I tried not to shift too much, but this wasn’t the kind of information I needed. I wanted to know if anyone helped him do this.

“Let’s get you two to bed, Amy. We have to decide where to put the house tomorrow. I think we need to stay away from that stream, it won’t always be so small, but we should stay fairly close to it.”

They were planning on staying here then. If the child in Amy’s arms wasn’t stolen, and if Eric hadn’t kidnapped the child of my father’s favorite servant, what Mary and I were about to do would be heartbreaking. I had to steel myself. The woman would scream, the man would try to defend her and the child. I didn’t want to do this.

It was my job, though. This is one of the reasons I was going to be king one day. I could do the things others couldn’t force themselves to do. Like take back a child that was so wanted but stolen. The child belonged with its parents, not these people. This was not the way to get a child. That was a problem for another time though, now was the time to retrieve the child and take it back to the parents that adored it. Then deal with the fallout.

I signaled to Mary and we moved out of the shadow of the boulder. The woman gave a low cry of fear and the man stood, his fists up and ready. He knew he was defeated, that’s why his fists came up instead of shifting to his more powerful wolf form. His fists were up for the cuffs he knew I was going to wrap around his wrists.

I was a dragon. He had no hope of escaping.

“I knew we couldn’t run,” the man, Eric, said as his shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, Amy. I tried, my love.”

“We’ll try to make this easy for you, Eric, but you know you’ll have to pay the consequences.” I walked up to him, put the cuffs on him and gave Amy a moment to compose herself.

Her hiccups turned into outright sobs, though, once Eric was cuffed. “He was only doing it for me, Malcolm. Can’t I go in his place?”

“No, Amy!” Eric cried out, refusing to hear more of that. He went up a little more in my estimation.

“No, he’s right, Amy. Eric took the child, not you.” Besides, she might be able to carry a child at some point, being in prison with a bunch of other women wasn’t going to make that happen.

If our numbers were dwindling, we needed more children. Putting Amy in prison too wouldn’t help that. No, she’d go back to her life. I didn’t know what would happen to Eric, but I would speak with my father about it. This wasn’t a malicious act, not like kidnap and ransom anyway, but a desperate act. A man trying to give his mate what she wanted the most. He’d just made a rather huge mistake trying to deliver it.

Mary shifted and took Amy and the baby on her back to fly them home. I kicked out the fire and gathered their things before I turned back to Eric, who stood with his head hanging in defeat.

“I’ll talk to my father for you, Eric. It’s all I can do.” I didn’t know the man, I only knew his name because his wife had spoken it, but I knew he wasn’t evil, not really.

“I’m sorry, Malcolm.” Our people knew my name, my face, it was as famous as my father’s in our world.

“Love will make you do stupid things, Eric. Or so I’ve heard.” I didn’t have a mate, so I didn’t know.

“It’ll tear your heart out and serve it back up to you on a platter,” Eric ground out, his eyes going to the sky. “Stupid doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

“Thanks for not running further, that would have been even worse. I would have had to kill you then.” I said it with a jocular tone, but I wasn’t joking.

I shifted then, and he climbed onto my back, settling into the natural dip between my shoulders. He’d be safe there, and there’d be no danger of him falling out.

I flew us back to our own realm, dragon speed cutting the flight to a fraction of the time it took a plane to fly across the Atlantic. I’m sure Eric wished it was longer, but I’d done my job. Now it was time for him to face the music.

I landed on the big red circle we used as a landing pad and marched Eric to the prison. A panther was the jailer. His face told me he was happy we’d managed to get the child back, but Eric would pay dearly for it.

“He is not to be touched, Gerald,” I warned the other man, a menacing tone in my voice.

“But, Malcolm!” he began, but I wouldn’t let him finish.

“No. Untouched. Or you all pay; do you understand me?” I could all but feel my jaw popping from how hard I had it clenched. “He fucked up but that doesn’t mean you kill him. Or harm him in any way, do you understand?”

“Yes, Malcolm,” the guard said, and ducked his head.

He knew what my punishment would be if I wasn’t obeyed and he didn’t want to face that. I didn’t play around, anyone that disobeyed me ended up in a desert, whether that was a desert of sand or ice, was down to my whim of the moment.

“That’s all I can do for you, for now, Eric. I’ll see my father when I can.” I clapped the other man on the shoulder and Gerald took him away.

I’d done my job. That’s all I could do.