Chapter 2
"Aye lass, you're getting it," Colin Malloch said. "A little harder now. Not so bloody delicate. You're not applying paint to canvas, now, are you, babe?"
The lovely naked woman leaning over him with her hand on his cock gave her usual merry laugh.
"Shut your trap, you great joker, before I give this fellow a wrench he'll never forget."
"C'mere," Colin said, laughing and pulling her down on him. "I need to be in you, you bloody witch."
Evie came willingly, fitting her body to his with the ease and familiarity of old friends. They were that, Colin reflected, as he thrust deep into her, holding her ass down hard so he could writhe against her pelvis and stimulate her clit. With his other hand, he fisted her hair and jerked her head back so her neck was exposed to him. He nipped her throat, then pressed his mouth to hers and delved deep with his tongue. She moaned and rocked her hips as she met every thrust of cock and tongue with equal passion and enthusiasm.
He and Evie had known each other from childhood. The shagging was recent, though.
He'd come home to Mallochbirn a couple of months ago for his brother's wedding. And a fine time it had been. They'd all been there in the kirk, dressed formally in their kilts and knee-high stockings, glad for his brother and his bonnie bride Kate, the only woman who had ever been able to tame the ferocious Zrakon who was his eldest brother's other self.
The whole village had turned out for the wedding festivities, the hand fasting first as their wrists were bound together by the traditional Malloch ribbon, and then the church wedding and the feasting. It went on for three days. High spirits and the best local whiskey, Highland games and jesting and an insane amount of drinking.
People said it was the best wedding in memory, fun and good fellowship, laughter and a great deal of fucking. The whole family was there, including Ross's twin, Cameron, his younger brother Jack and their sister Penny. Their mother, Deirdre, and everybody's friends. A bloody good time had been shared by all.
He and Evie had hooked up during the first night of fun and renewed their old school fellowship in a pile of fresh cut hay. It was friends they were really, not lovers, despite the pleasure they took in each other's bodies. Evie was a wolf shifter and she'd made it clear she wouldn't be tied down to anyone except her one true mate. She and Colin both knew that this wasn't what they were to one another.
He enjoyed the occasional shag with her, though. Since they were both shifters, they could get a little wild together. You had to be strong and hardy to take the rough fucking that a Highlands wolf shifter enjoyed.
But the term "wolf shifter" didn't exactly explain what Colin was.
Like all his family members, he could do a wolf. In fact, his wolf had been his favorite form to shift to until he had learned to summon his dragon.
After all the wedding guests had left, Colin had stayed to spend some time with Ross and Kate, who was expecting a baby, but he'd never been able to linger in one place for long. He'd traveled the world restlessly for years, from Europe to the Caribbean to China to Southeast Asia and Africa. He'd hiked the length of the Great Wall in China, ridden the trans-Siberian railway, worked on an archeological dig in central Turkey, and an AIDS non-profit in Botswana. He'd acquired friends in countries all over the world.
"So how long you gonna be around this time?" Evie asked when they were done fucking. She was still licking his chest, though, and playing lightly with his nipples...almost enough to get him hard again.
"Don't know," he admitted. "But the seaways and the skyways are always calling my ass."
Evie slapped his wayward ass. He rolled her over and returned the favor until she squealed. The truth was, he no longer had to fly halfway around the world to find unexplored territory. Now that he had mastered shifting to his zrakon, or sea dragon form, Mallochbirn was proving to be an excellent base camp for his explorations. The fortress was right on the sea, and the Barrier was nearby.
As a Malloch of Mallochbirn in northwest Scotland, Colin knew a secret that few people alive knew—Mallochbirn guarded the Barrier. Also known as the Rift between the Worlds.
He was lying in Evie's bed, letting his mind drift, seeing images in his mind that were otherworldly. Literally. There was another world on the other side of the Barrier. The Rift was essentially a gateway between the two worlds. That strange new place was calling to him more insistently than ever these days.
Suddenly he gave a convulsive jolt. A gong sounded in his soul, raising tiny hairs on his body and making the bottom fall out of his belly. He strained to see, to hear, to know.
"What the fuck? What's wrong, Col?"
He shook his head slowly. His brown hair, overlong and badly needing a cut, flopped over his forehead.
"You came over all cold." Evie sounded shaken. "Your aura changed, like some kind of shadow moving over you. Is it your magic?"
"I reckon so," he said, not really sure what the fuck it was. "Did you feel anything?" All shifters had some vestiges of magic, although no one else around this part of Scotland had the ancient magical power of the Malloch family, who had ruled nearby Mallochbirn as lairds for too many generations to count.
"Whatever it is, I didn't sense it, no. I'm just reacting to you."
Although he wasn't sure, Colin suspected that what he had felt was a violation of the Barrier. An incursion? Something had either gone out of this world or, more likely, come into it. He was much more attuned to changes in the Barrier recently, probably because he had been violating it himself.
He had never felt anything so intense, though. If it had been just a random fish or something small, he didn't think it would have reverberated so strongly inside him.
"I'd better check with my brother."
Although Evie protested when he rose from her bed, she didn't make too great a fuss. As a shifter, she knew the dangers. Well, some of them, at least.
Colin rose and donned his kilt—he often wore the old garment, which he found more comfortable than trousers—and his other clothing. He dug his phone out of his jacket and called Ross.
He could only assume that Ross, who was laird of Mallochbirn and official guardian of the Barrier, would have felt the quiver in the walls of reality even more intensely than he had.
"Aye," Ross said. "Felt something. You wanna check or shall I?"
"I'll go," Colin offered.
"Ta. I'll let Cam know."
Colin would have liked to ask him to leave Cam, Ross's twin, out of it. He and Cam had been butting heads again, as usual. But Cam was the head of the Council of Protectors, and if there really was an incursion, he would have to know.
"If it's another sea dragon, it might be a female. Good that you're going. I don't think my wife would sanction me checking her out."
Colin grinned. He approved of Kate, who wasn't likely to feel threatened by a female sea dragon. She handled his elder brother better than anybody else ever had.
"If there is something, try to lure it back here. Maybe we can figure out a way to send it home. The Rift has been unstable lately. I hate to think what else has been coming through."
"Or going in the other direction."
"You're right. That would be bad, too."
The other world was technologically similar to the Middle Ages. Or maybe the Renaissance. Their greatest fear was that highly advanced weaponry might make it through to the other side.
"Be careful, Colin," Ross added. "Cloak yourself as well as you can. There've been all kinds of advances in underwater detection and surveillance, and it's possible some ords are heading toward the scene." Ord was shifters' parlance for ordinary people, people who didn't shape shift. In this case, Colin knew it meant cops and military types, who were always on the watch for refugees, smugglers, and even terrorists who might try to sneak ashore in the Scottish Highlands.
Even worse, although Ross might not agree, were Cam's watchdogs—elite shifters, usually wolves. Those guys seemed to think the Barrier needed more guarding than Mallochbirn had always provided. Colin loved his brother, but he didn't trust him. Lately Cam had seemed rabid about security. If such a controlled and disciplined bastard could ever be called rabid.
Ten minutes later, in the darkness of a clear but moonless Highland night, Colin stood naked on the headland half a mile from Evie's cottage. As a precaution, he kept himself cloaked as he reached inside and woke his sleeping dragon. The agony came as it always did when the change began. His entire body stiffened and screamed with it as his bones cracked and his flesh was painfully molded and elongated into another, much larger and more formidable form.
It used to be impossible for him to change to a sea dragon. For years, he'd believed he would never be able to do it. Most of their kind weren't multiform shifters, anyway. Jack, his younger brother, had only one form—a wolf. Cam could do a wolf and some kind of predatory bird, although he almost never shifted to the latter; he was damn secretive about it, as a matter of fact.
Ross, the head of the family, had the Zrakon as his second self. Ross was a true multiform shifter, who could change his body into more than a dozen other creatures, too. Colin envied him and thought it wondrous. Sea dragon, wolf, tiger, squirrel, butterfly—Ross could do them all.
Ross didn't use his gift often, as far as Colin could tell. He was enamored of his new wife, excited about his coming bairn, and content, or so he claimed, to stay as human as possible.
Colin had always wanted to experience everything. He'd pestered his elder brother to teach him how to shift to a sea dragon, and Ross, unsure himself how he did it, tried his best to impart his limited knowledge.
"He just bursts out of me," his brother had explained. "Rising up from that dark place deep inside. You know it—you must. It's where your wolf comes from."
"When I open myself to that place, it's my wolf that comes, every time."
"Then maybe you have to poke around down there until you find your zrakon. If you have one. You might not."
Colin wasn't sure why he believed he had a sea dragon, but the feeling was strong. So he poked around. If the creature was hiding in some dark corner, he figured he'd find him someday.
And he did. He was twenty-four before he felt the sea dragon's breath and nearly twenty-six before he'd been able to coax the creature out of hiding. Colin's dragon was a much shyer fellow than Ross's roaring, melodrama-loving Zrakon.
Legend claimed that there had been sea dragons in Earth's primitive past, although no such beasties had ever turned up in the fossil records. Whatever they were, they were magnificent, and he felt secretly proud every time he changed. He stood tall, his huge haunches poised, muscles rippling, his shoulders twitching as he extended the poor vestiges of bone and flesh, withered now, that had once been a set of glorious wings.
The dragons of legend who had once ruled the skies, spouting fires on their enemies, had been cursed and confined to the seas. No one knew exactly why. Or when. Or if they would ever be permitted to return from their watery exile and fly again.
The wings served to make his form perfect as he extended them to their now-puny length and dived gracefully into the cold northern sea.