She’s a slippery little thing, my mate. I watched her head into the cabin and decided I needed a new tactic. My little honeybee hadn’t melted over the nectar of my wealth as most human women did. Not that I’d come into contact with many, but I used to venture out into the human world in secret. Humans fascinated me. They should have easier lives than us magicals, but they always seemed to make everything so damned complicated.

It’s not like they had wolf shifters out and about on the hunt for human females to kidnap and make babies with. Nope, that was just in my world, the shifter world that my father ruled. At least, in our kingdom. There were other shifter worlds, but this one was ours. We shifters were just the tip of the iceberg, and my brothers and I enforced the laws of that world. We ruled that world. My brother Malcolm was the head of our world’s security force. As his second in command, I carried just as many burdens as he did, sometimes more because I had to carry out the wishes of my father, even above Malcolm’s. That hadn’t always made life easy—especially when Malcolm had defied our father and went to his human mate.

I brushed those thoughts aside and went to a table filled with drinks. At least father had insisted our own wine be brought to this ceremony. Our grapes were unique, with a distinct flavor that could only be found in the grapes of our world. There was something close to it in the human world, muscadine I believe it’s called, but perhaps not. I poured a glass for myself, determined to leave my mate alone for a while as I decided on a new approach.

“Perhaps if you just stopped acting like an ass around her she wouldn’t do her best to avoid you,” my sister Mary’s voice came from behind me and I turned to grimace at her.

“Hush, woman, I know what I’m doing.” Mary might be a woman, but I knew she could kick my ass if I really pissed her off. She was a strong woman, but more importantly, she was a well-trained fighter, and she’d taken down men bigger than me despite her smaller stature.

“Bite your tongue, brother!” she said with a twist of her own lips before she fluttered her eyelashes at me. “Or should I beg for forgiveness in the soft drawl of your human to calm you down?”

“My human indeed! You’re right, I have no idea what I’m doing here. She hates me and only allows me around because of the mating-sickness.” I had to admit the truth, even if it did hurt.

“Was it four castles you told her you owned, or just the one in Italy? I can’t remember now.”

“Have you been spying on me?” I scoffed, but my attempt to feign indignation failed as miserably as my attempts to woo Willow had floundered.

“It’s my job to spy on our people,” she said with a smirk. She was lucky she was my sister.

“Did father put you up to it?” He hated the humans, even if he did cave in to Malcolm’s undeniable need for his bride.

“Maybe,” she said and stirred the grass with the toe of her boot. She hadn’t dressed for the wedding, she’d remained in her military-style black uniform with her combat boots. “Actually no, I was just nosy.”

“You are so going to get it if you keep on!” I told her and wagged my finger to emphasize my point. “I don’t know what, but you’ll get it. Maybe a week of cleaning out the dungeons. Or the cesspit beneath the animal barns. Hmmm...”

Mary stared at me with disgust and horror and I knew I’d won. “There, stop your spying and I’ll let you off the hook. It’s Malcolm’s wedding day, I should be generous, I suppose.”

“No wonder she hates you,” Mary muttered.

We all loved each other dearly, my siblings and I, but we were also dragons, and we could be very hard on each other. To prove a point, or to teach a lesson, even if the lesson had started out as a joke. Mary would take whatever decision I made because that was our way. Technically, she had been in the wrong to spy on me. I would let it go, though. I had more important things on my mind.

“What am I doing wrong?” I needed her advice, not her spite now.

“Look at her, Henry. Does she look like a castle would impress her?” Mary’s tone implied I might be deficient in the intelligence department.

“Well yes, it does actually, Mary. She’s poor! What else will impress a poor woman?” I thought it was a logical conclusion to come to.

“Fucking hell,” Mary spat out, her look of disgust back in place. “Really, Henry? Damn, you are a moron. I don’t care if you put me in the cesspit for a month, you, Henry are a dumbass.”

Oh, that’s just wrong. A human insult?

“Excuse me?” My dragon snarled through my human voice as my anger flared.

“You heard me, dumbass. Total, undoubted moronic dumbass.” She punctuated each word with a jab of her finger into the hard muscle of my chest. With her long nail, it kind of hurt. I backed away as she continued.

“Willow won’t be impressed by riches or extravagance! She grew up where those things don’t matter. She’s never been to an Italian castle, and probably thought she’d never see one. She’s not the kind of, of…” She stopped to find the right word. “Bimbo to be impressed by your wealth!”

“Then what will impress her, since you’re an expert on humans and their terminology now?” I tamped down on my dragon and tried to see reason. Mary was being rude, but as she continued I saw she might just have a point.

“She’ll be impressed if you ask her to play for you. And if you sit quietly and listen. I’ve heard her a few times when I came to arrange the wedding details. She’s a master at it. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before.”

“Play what exactly? Obviously you mean music, but what instrument?” I was a bit angry that I didn’t know about this side of Willow. Why hadn’t anyone told me?

“The piano, you dunce! You don’t even know that much about her? And you want her to mate with you? Oh boy, you’ve lost your mind.” Her eyes went wide as she turned away, their own message of “dumbass” loud and clear.

“Maybe I’ve approached this entirely wrong. She really plays the piano?” I had an idea in the back of my head, but it hadn’t become a full idea yet.

“Yes, but I wouldn’t call it playing. She makes it hers, she does incredible things with it. It’s beautiful, really.”

“Right. Let me think then. Are human pianos the same as ours?”

“Yes, why?”

“Just an idea. I’ll see you later, sister. Enjoy your time in the cesspit.” My parting shot was only a jest, but it got the reaction I expected. A bread roll whizzed by my head as I shifted and took flight.

My human brain stayed active as my dragon body flew through the sky. We magicals had cloaked ourselves from the humans long ago. It was a measure meant to protect us from them and them from us as both of our populations grew. Too many clashes happened, too many lives were lost, so we withdrew from that world. Now, we were being forced by some of our own to venture back into that world. Sure, we made the occasional foray into the human world for entertainment or to keep ties with those select few who knew about us, but generally we stayed in our world.

Dragon hunters, or slayers as they were sometimes called, were a mixture born of our early interactions and had been left behind in the human world. They were too dangerous to dragonkin, and so we’d eliminated them from our world. Now, fate was playing a huge joke on us all. Dragons had been mated to dragon hunters somehow, and that made life... interesting.

At least to me anyway.

I could see that Willow and Arista were similar in appearances, but their abilities as dragon hunters differed. Arista was calm around us. Willow always bristled, and I knew it was from far more than my presence. She couldn’t relax around any dragon. Even when she appeared to let her guard down, I knew deep down she was still instinctively on alert.

The flight to my homeland didn’t take long, just long enough to stretch my dragon muscles and to let my dragon brain take over for a little while. I tucked my wings in to dive down to the castle that had always belonged to my family and brought myself to a halt with a gentle flap of my giant black wings before I landed. A dragon with glittering, reptilian eyes took up the area the humans would call a launch pad. I could change my size to suit my own desires, and right now I was in giant form. A long tail flowed 30 feet behind me, covered in spikes along the length with two razor-sharp points at the end. This was my shape, I couldn’t change that, but I could change my size.

With little more than a blink and a thought that flitted through my brain, I was a human again, or I appeared like a human anyway. Physiologically, I was a human in this shape. I just had the paranormal ability to turn into a dragon as well. This made my family and me the rulers of this land. Our inherited role as the rulers was one that could not and would not be changed. Father could choose any of his children to inherit his throne, but we all knew the firstborn child would be the one to take that role.

If Mary had been born first or had been the first of the children to survive to that point, she would inherit. As it was, that role would be filled by Malcolm, and the rest of us were there to impose the laws we all lived by. Laws chosen for us and enshrined on parchment a long time ago. Which led me to my next task for the day: find out more about these wolves who took it upon themselves to kidnap women. I strode through a door, down a long set of stairs, and down another until I reached the dungeons.

There a guard waited for me in a small limestone cell. A prisoner sat in a chair at a table, and a long chain around his wrists shackled him to the floor. The man was a wolf shifter, the latest caught as he attempted to kidnap a human female.

“Please tell me you didn’t do this.” I sighed as I turned the chair on the other side with the back to the table and straddled it. My suit was made well enough that it didn’t impede my movement, but I probably should have changed into a uniform, just for the intimidation factor.

“You don’t know what it’s like for us, dragon.” The young wolf, no more than twenty-one, growled from where his head rested on his folded arms. He brought his blond head up just enough to glare golden eyes at me.

“You’re barely even out of your puppy stage and you’re already desperate for a mate? From what I’ve heard about marriage, it’s bad enough without your mate hating you because you took her ass from all she knows into a world that she’s always been told is a nightmare.”

“Yeah, well, it’s my job to change that for my woman isn’t it? Make her see that our way is the best way to live.” He leaned back now, cocky and self-assured in his manhood.

I rolled my eyes, I didn’t even try to hide it. “Look, Aleric, you’re in a shitload of trouble, pretending to be some hard bastard won’t get you anything but a longer sentence.”

“It’d be the same out there without a woman to keep me company so what’s the difference?”

“You can leave any time you want to, for starters? In here, you’re stuck, and you won’t get out. Believe me, you won’t.”

“Your brother did it, I can too, dragon.” He made an obnoxious noise by sucking his cheeks through his teeth, and I wanted to kick those same teeth in.

“Fine, stay. I don’t really give a fuck. Let the guard know when you’re ready to get out of here.”

I had to follow my father’s orders. I didn’t like keeping other magicals in the dungeon for doing what we’d done so often in the past, but we couldn’t take the risk on a human being brought here against their will, male or female. If they escaped and told the human world about us, there would be a battle on our hands. For now, I’d let the man barely more than a pup with whiskers rot in the dungeon until he saw sense.

I headed back to my own quarters, took a shower, and prepared to spend the night in quiet and peace. I needed to think about a better way to approach Willow. I’d failed miserably in my first attempts to bend her to my will. She didn’t like the braggart who swaggered when he wasn’t mooning over her. Would she want the bastard who ignored her and treated her like dirt, instead? I’d heard human women liked alpha asshole males.

Was that where I’d gone wrong?

A knock came at the door and I groaned as I answered it. “What now?”

A woman stood there, a human woman in tears, held in place by a guard with a grip on her elbow.

“We found this human in a wolf lair, sir. What do we do with her?” He spoke in our language, but she understood him.

“I just want to go home! I won’t tell anyone, I swear. I’m pregnant, and I just want to go home to my family and to have my baby in a nice clean hospital. Mac promised I could go home any time I wanted to! Why am I being held prisoner?”

I watched her as she spoke, astonished. She didn’t even realize she’d spoken our language, a language almost impossible for humans to learn. Unless they were female and pregnant with a shifter child.

“I’m sorry, your unborn child is a shifter. The baby belongs here, not in your world. You’ll both have to stay here.” I paused, angry that I had to say the next words. I did my duty, though and turned back to the guard. “Put her in the dungeon, but give her a nice cell with a bed, will you? She is pregnant with a shifter, after all.”

She still hadn’t realized I hadn’t spoken in English, nor had she for that matter, and I felt terrible for her. She just wanted to go home, but she could never go back again. Her male wolf might have told her she could, to bring her here willingly, but he’d lied to her. He’d have to deal with that shit, it was only my job to deal with the fact that she and her child existed at all. That was more than enough.