“My my, what big eyes you have.”

Ariel watched as Logan approached, feeling anger, fear, and revulsion vying for dominance within her. The lioness inside her growled, and the sound emerged clearly from her throat. If she didn’t have all of these weeks of training under her belt, the beast would have leaped out in that moment and fought against the chains in an attempt to maul the man. It would have been futile of course, since earlier she had already let her beast yank at those binds until she collapsed in exhaustion. She still had red marks on her wrists where the shackles had dug into her skin during her struggles.

Logan stopped just beyond the reach of her restraints. The half-healed claw marks on his right cheek no doubt reminded him of what had happened the last time he had gotten too close to her.

He knelt so that his head was on the same level as hers and licked his lips. Ariel wrapped an arm in front of her chest to cover her naked breasts, and tilted her hips away.

“That’s right, try to hide from me,” Logan said. “It won’t do you no good. When the witch is done with your dragon, she’s promised me I get to have you. I’m so looking forward to breaking you. You should’ve just given in that first time. You would’ve saved us both all this trouble. And now a dragon has to bleed because of you.” He lifted his hand to scratch the area around his clawed cheek. “Damn, this itches like hell. You’re going to pay for everything you’ve done to me, bitch, including this latest scratch. I’m going to teach you some respect.”

Jett abruptly strained against his binds, lunging for Logan. His hands halted a mere inch from Logan’s neck.

“Well hello, Mr. Dragon,” Logan said. He hadn’t even flinched. “Nice to make the acquaintance. Though I guess I should be calling you king. You’re quite the fish out of water, ain’t ya? I’m looking forward to hearing you squeal like a little girl when the witch takes you. Alphas always scream the loudest. A king will no doubt scream the loudest of them all. You’ll show your lady friend here what you’re really made of.”

“You talk as if you’ve helped this witch take down an Alpha before,” Jett said.

Logan shrugged. “I showed her a pride to the south she could practice on. The Proudmanes. Let’s just say, they’re not so proud anymore. Just like you won’t be when she’s done with you. I have to admit, I was expecting someone a bit more imposing to be king. But you, you’re just so underwhelming. And you dress like a girl.”

Ariel couldn’t take it anymore. Insulting her was one thing. But insulting her precious dragon?

She transformed into her lioness. Her neck expanded, filling up the collar at her throat; it was too tight and dug into her flesh; the shackles around her wrists and ankles were just as bad, cutting into her enlarged fore and back legs. Nonetheless, she gathered all her strength and launched herself at the man who had done this to her.

She instantly reached the limits of her chains, straining against them, her open jaw so close to his face, yet so far. The collar dug even deeper into her throat, choking off the roar she tried to unleash.

Logan merely sat there, grinning. “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Touchy little lioness. I’ll have to talk to the witch about administering a Weave to put you to sleep. I’m going to do so many things to you when you’re under, you’ll be sore for weeks.”

Ariel stepped back to catch her breath, letting the chains rattle to the ground. She growled and hissed at the man, and then leaped at him again, further straining her binds. She thought she could feel the peg shifting behind her, but it was only her imagination because when she retreated once more, she saw the steel spike was staked as deep as ever.

“Touch her and die,” Jett said.

“I’m already scheduled for death,” Logan said. “According to the rules you shifters follow. I’m not afraid of you, dragon king. Oh, how great the mighty fall.”

“Stop talking to them!” the witch shouted over her shoulder.

“Yes, ma’am,” Logan said, standing. “Talk to you later.” He winked at Ariel and walked away.

Ariel tried one last time to break her chains, then collapsed in the grass. The collar still seemed too tight and she had trouble breathing. She inhaled deeply several times, the way Jett had showed her, calming herself, and then willed her human form to return. In moments she was herself. The transformation used to be agonizing, but with practice, and using the techniques the pride had taught her, she could now change gracefully and with little pain.

She hugged her knees to her naked chest and wrapped her arms around the front of her calves and huddled there.

Chains rattling, Jett placed an arm around her, and she rested her head against his shoulder.

It seemed pointless to hide their affection for one another. The very fact that Jett had come told the witch everything she needed to know about the dragon, and how he felt about these three lions. That the witch now knew it was one lioness in particular that Jett cared for most didn’t change anything.

At least, that’s what she told herself.

The witch approached, staying in the shade of the surrounding trees. She paused two paces from the prisoners, and then opened her mouth in a feral grin, bearing her teeth. As Ariel watched, the canines elongated.

“So you’re the vampire,” Jett said. “All this time I thought the Orions were hunting you, but you’ve been in league from the beginning.”

“Since when did Orions start allowing vampires to join their ranks?” Jayden said from beside Ariel.

The vampire witch grinned at the prisoners. “Dead men have no choice.”

Ariel stared aghast at the Orions behind the woman. “They’re dead?”

“Undead,” the witch said.

“So that’s what we were smelling,” Ariel said. She glanced at Jett. “Their scent is different from vampires.”

Jett kept his eyes on the vampire witch. “That’s because vampires don’t rot. Vampires are made from the living, while the undead are taken solely from the ranks of the fallen. Only the most powerful vampire witches have the ability to reanimate the dead.”

“Speaking of power,” the witch said. “You’ve hit on why I’m here.”

“What are you going to do?” Ariel said.

“I will drink the blood of a dragon king,” the witch said. Her gaze shifted hungrily to Jett. “With the resultant power flowing through my veins, I will be able to singlehandedly destroy any more dragons that come at me in these woods. And then I will march to your Midnight City and conquer it from the shadows over the next few weeks. The Weave you foolish dragons have placed on your lair to prevent transformations will be your undoing. You will be locked into your weak human forms while I ravage you one by one.”

“You’re forgetting all magic is dampened by that same Weave,” Jett said. “Even filled to the brim with dragon blood, your power will only be one tenth that of the outside world. Your Death affinity won’t be of much use to you in there.”

If she was surprised by that revelation, the vampire witch didn’t show it. Instead, she smirked. “Our spies are familiar with the effects of your protective Weave. It won’t matter. The boost from your blood will more than offset the dampening: even at one tenth my power, no dragon in human form will be able to withstand me. I will gorge myself on all I secretly slay, continually replenishing the power flowing through my veins. With that power I will easily raise the fallen to fight at my side, so that when I am finished with your city, I will have an army of undead dragons at my command. This continent will be mine, and I will become head of the newly minted North American vampire coven.

“All thanks to you. If you were an ordinary dragon, my plan would have taken years. But with your empty shell serving me, Dragon King, Midnight will fling its doors wide open. You’ll lead me inside and then we’ll begin our mischief together. We’ll start with the royal family and work our way outward.” She smirked. “Who needs compulsion when you have reanimation?”

Jett glanced at the black-clad, rifle-toting men behind her. “Remember who you once were, Orions. You’re going to allow this vampire to do this? You’re hunters! The vampires are among your greatest enemies!”

None of them moved or answered him, of course. As the witch had said, reanimation was just as good as compulsion.

“You should be honored,” the vampire witch said. “You and your lions get to be the first shifter members of my undead army.”

The witch held out a gauntleted arm toward Jett and he stiffened.

“Stop!” Ariel said.

The gauntleted arm shifted toward her, and Ariel felt invisible magic swing her arms behind her back. Her legs were forced backward, too, the knees bending. In moments her ankles and wrists were touching, as if bound by some rope she couldn’t see. The other two members of Blue Hurricane were similar fettered beside her.

Jett floated into the air as the witch continued to work her magic. He reached the limits of his chains and hovered there helplessly before her.

The witch pointed both of her bone gauntlets toward Jett. His arms flung outward so that he was spread-eagled. She spread her fingers, and Jett’s lips contorted in pain. Multiple, pinprick-sized wounds appeared in his forearms, sourced within his tribal tattoos.

“Please,” Ariel begged.

Jett could harden his skin against injury—she had seen him do so when he had faced the bear next to the gully—but it didn’t seem to be working, not with whatever the vampire witch was doing to him.

Droplets of blood trickled from the wounds and floated toward the witch, who had opened her mouth. The droplets became a small stream, and soon she was connected to Jett by multiple threads of his blood, all funneling into her upper canines.

“No,” Ariel said. “Don’t do this.”

Ariel struggled in vain to move, but the invisible binds wouldn’t let her. She transformed in a last frantic attempt to free herself. Her neck expanded to fill the too-tight collar, the band digging in painfully. She repeatedly flexed her powerful arms and legs, trying to break through both the invisible bonds and the physical restraints, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not.

Finally she gave up and lay panting and exhausted on the grass.

She changed back into her human form. Her neck throbbed, as did her wrists and ankles. But she hardly noticed the physical pain against the backdrop of the all-consuming emotional agony.

She weakly turned her head toward Jett.

“Jett,” Ariel said. “I love you, my dragon.”

His contorted features smoothed as the words registered: the distress lifted from his face, replaced by heartbreaking sadness. “I love you, too, my lioness. I always have. Always will.”

Those words tore at her. She never felt such overwhelming despair.

The witch’s eyes began to glow a fiery orange as the dragon blood continued to flow down her throat. Those were Jett’s eyes. She was stealing him right out from under her.

So this was how it was going to end. Witnessing the death of the great man she had come to love. A part of her would die with him, she knew. If not all of her. It was a small consolation that this witch would slay her when she was done with Jett. Ariel wondered if she would still know who she was when she awoke as an undead. Wondered if she would know Jett.

Somehow she doubted it. The witch would probably give her empty shell to Logan in any case, if his taunts were to be believed.

She preferred to believe her spirit would move on to a higher plane after she died, forever leaving this body behind. Reanimated, it might have her memories, but it would not be her. The real her would be with Jett, soaring in the skies, forever.

“I’ll see you soon,” Ariel told him, the tears falling unchecked.

Jett still wore a peaceful expression. “Don’t grieve for me. Promise me you’ll escape when the time comes. Live your life no matter what happens. Don’t wallow in grief. Live, my lioness. Range free!”

She sobbed, looking away. Her tears fell into the grass. “Not without you.”

He shed a tear himself, then. A single, lone tear that rolled down the cheek of his exquisite face. It paused on his chin, swelling outward, and then it broke free to drip into the grass.

A shot rang out.

The invisible binds that held Ariel instantly fell away. The other two lions were released, too. As was Jett, who collapsed beside her. They were all still trapped by the physical chains, of course.

Confused, Ariel glanced at the witch. The woman stood frozen in place, an expression of sheer disbelief on her face. She made a strange gurgling sound in her throat. Blood fountained from a fresh wound in her chest, centered on the circle of skin exposed by the fabric she wore.

What?

“That’s the problem with witches,” Jayden said. “They’re so powerful, they sometimes forget something as simple as a rifle can kill them.”

“But she’s a vampire,” Ariel said. “Can’t she heal?”

As a matter of fact, it looked to Ariel like the wound was closing up as she watched.

But then another shot rang out. This one closer.

The witch’s head exploded and the decapitated body collapsed.

“Not anymore,” Jett said.

She was relieved to hear his voice, and was about to turn to him when a lion’s roar tore through the air. An Orion rifleman shouted something from across the camp, but his words were abruptly cut off.

Ariel saw them then. Tawny blurs as lions rushed into the clearing from the forest to attack the undead hunters. More roars filled the air, as did screams and rifle blasts.

Ariel spun toward Jett.

“Are you all right?” She grabbed his shackled wrists, and saw that the blood covering the tiny wounds in his forearms was already coagulating.

“I’m a bit weak,” he said. “But I’ll survive.”

She hugged him as much as her own restraints allowed. “I thought you were going to die.” She jumped when a particularly loud roar sounded behind her, though it ended in an agonized yelp.

She glanced over her shoulder at the fray. She couldn’t see who’d fallen. Lions were leaping onto Orions, while those hunters who were still standing unleashed their guns, some fighting back to back in small groups.

“The witch is down, but the hunters are still fighting…” Ariel said.

“The reanimated don’t need their creator,” Jett said. “They’ll continue fighting on their own, following their last orders until struck down.”

“You knew the lions would intervene?” Ariel asked him.

“Yes,” Jett answered. “Though I hadn’t expected Cliff to hold back for so long. Guess he wanted me to suffer a bit.”

“Thanks for telling me now!” Ariel said, punching his shoulder. “Like I said, I thought you were going to die!”

He looked at her with a solemn expression. “So did I.”

The undead guards assigned to the prisoners had stopped watching Ariel and the others, and instead divided their attention between the tents and the forest. They held their semi-automatic rifles at the ready and occasionally fired into the fray. So far none of the lions had rushed them.

Distance shots continued to ring out from the forest, and Orions dropped as a hidden sniper fired from somewhere in the woods.

Ariel picked out Logan amid the fighting. She recognized his lion because of the characteristic brown and yellow patches on his fur, with streaks of white along the flanks, not to mention the fact he was fighting other lions.

A powerful voice echoed above the fighting. “Cease firing!” a man’s voice said. “We need their blood to save her!”

Ariel saw him then, a man dressed in black like the others, though he wore a cape similar to the dead witch. The hood was raised to cover his head. On his arms were bone gauntlets carved with intricate designs. Several undead gunmen had gathered around him, forming a protective circle.

“It looks like our witch had an apprentice,” Jett said.

“A vampire, too?” Ariel asked. She noticed the apprentice resided in the shade.

“Probably,” Jett said.

One by one the attacking lions were disabled as invisible ropes wrapped around them and yanked their bodies into the air by the rear legs. They squirmed against their invisible binds, flailing their bodies about, slashing at the air with their free paws, snarling and snapping their jaws, but it was useless.

“They got me!” someone screamed from the forest. Cliff floated into view from the woods, his arms outstretched to either side, a rifle gripped vertically in one hand. His body from the neck down seemed immobile. He changed into a lion and roared loudly, but his lower body remained frozen.

Another lion also hovered into the clearing from the trees nearby, a rifle floating in front of him.

“Quickly, Ariel,” Jett said. “Reach into my back pocket.”

Ariel glanced at the guards, who still had their attention fixed on the battle. She tried to position herself in front of Jett in such a way that if the guards glanced her way, they wouldn’t know what she was doing. Subtly, she reached into the back pocket of Jett’s dark-washed jeans.

“I borrowed something from the belongings you left in your cabin,” Jett said.

She felt a thin object. Unsure what it was, she carefully removed it.

“The chisel for your collar!” she said excitedly. “But where’s the mallet?”

“Too big to fit my pockets,” Jett said. “You’ll have to use the strength of your inner beast. Hammer the chisel with your palm. You can do it.”

Jett turned his back to her, exposing the nape of his neck. The silver collar sat above the metal band the captors had secured to his throat.

She swallowed uncertainly as the noise of battle continued behind her. The din was quickly fading, and she knew almost all of the lions had been captured. She didn’t have much time…

She glanced at the guards, confirming they weren’t watching her, then she quickly positioned the tip of the chisel over the spot Ephephany had showed her what seemed an eternity ago.

Holding the chisel in place with one hand, she struck the flat end with the base of her other palm.

Nothing. She noticed that Jett’s neck bowed under the blow; when she had last practiced on the collar in Ephephany’s house, Jett had remained solid as a rock under each strike. The loss of blood had definitely weakened him, at least in his human form.

She tried again, harder.

Still the collar wouldn’t open. Jett tilted forward precariously before recovering from the blow.

Bracing herself, she drew her flat palm far back and rammed it into the chisel. Apparently she hadn’t been holding it at the correct angle, because the impact caused the tip to slide off the metal, and it glanced against the skin of Jett’s neck.

She could see the crimson drops pooling around the fresh wound above the collar. Ariel cringed. “Sorry!” The blood loss had affected him even worse than she’d thought. It must have hurt terribly, but Jett didn’t utter a word of complaint.

She looked at the distracted guards. She only meant to cast a quick glance their way, but when she saw the smirks on their faces, her eyes followed theirs to the clearing beyond. She realized all the lions were ensnared by then, held aloft by their rear legs. All save Logan’s lion, who was hunkered down next to the apprentice witch like a dutiful pet.

Cliff and the other armed lion hovered spread-eagled in front of the apprentice. Cliff had reverted to his human form; Ariel watched transfixed as his fingers spasmed opened one by one, releasing the rifle he gripped, and the weapon floated away from him. It swiveled of its own accord, turning around so that the muzzle was pointed directly at his heart.

“Ariel,” Jett said calmly, reminding her of her task.

She repositioned the chisel over the silver collar and slammed her palm into it. The blow connected differently this time: a reverberation swept through her, passing down into her very core, and a loud clang, like a bell tolling, issued from the collar. A shockwave erupted from it at the same time and Ariel was thrown to the ground.

Around her, the grass was bent outward in all directions. The tents had been partially ripped from their guy lines, and all of the lions and hunters lay sprawled on the earth like Ariel.

She looked at Jett in trepidation. For all that talk of accepting him for who he was, she felt truly afraid in that moment. His dragon would be extremely powerful, and she had no idea what Jett would do.

But he was still human. The silver collar lay open around his neck, but it dropped away as she watched. Jett glanced down at his body. His fiery golden eyes glowed with a light she’d never seen before: a mixture of joy, greed, and bloodlust. The dragon tattoos on his forearms flared with a blinding black and gold light, and then he began to transform. It wasn’t something that occurred quickly, like the lion shifters.

At first, he simply began to enlarge. His clothes ripped away. Shackles broke off as sheer, hard muscle emerged.

The nearby guards opened fire at him with their rifles, but the bullets ricocheted from his skin. Two lions rushed the terrified attackers, mauling them.

Jett stepped away from Ariel, easily snapping the remaining trammels that bound his legs. His skin changed as he continued to grow, and scales formed. He moved between the tents, heading deeper into the clearing, scattering the undead Orions. Some of them were shooting at him, but the bullets continued to have no effect, especially not against those scales.

He dropped to all fours and the transformation accelerated. In moments Jett was no more, and in his place loomed a magnificent dragon. His scales were jet black, shot through with glittering threads of gold.

Ariel simply stared, in awe of her beautiful dragon, watching as he surveyed the frightened creatures below. The big felines quickly retreated into the forest, abandoning the cowering Orions and witch apprentice to their fate. Some of the hunters continued to shoot at Jett, backing away as they did so.

One of the lions who had helped maul the guards approached Ariel and the prisoners. Carrying a keyring, the lion transformed into Cliff, and he used the keys to free them.

“Hurry!” Cliff said, grabbing her by the hand to lead her into the forest. “I’m not sure how long he can restrain himself!”

She glanced back at the clearing as she ran. She realized Jett was waiting for her and the lions to move to a safe distance; when he saw that she was secure behind the tree line, the dragon turned his attention on the remaining Orions, a malicious gleam in his eye.