Chapter Twenty-One
Kase
The location he was given wasn’t familiar to him—neither the address, nor the visual of it. Pulling up to a metal gate that interrupted an otherwise contiguous stone wall surrounding the property, he waited. After several seconds there was a buzz, and the gate began to open. He was in the right place, then.
Kase had long since stopped trying to figure out who or what the hell he was up against. It just didn’t matter. Someone out there was trying to mess with him, or Michelle, or both, and he was going to stop them. It was as simple as that, really. Just when he’d discovered the truth about himself and his mate, and opened his eyes to reality, she’d been torn away from him by this asshole. Well, not for much longer.
After a half-mile journey, the road came to an abrupt end at a house nestled into the trees. Perhaps a hundred yards behind that the ground sloped up sharply, with the trees becoming thin, and rock replacing earth. The building had log siding on it, but Kase didn’t believe for a moment this was the primary residence of whoever he was to meet. It just looked…off.
A moment later, the front door opened, and a quartet of guards armed with guns emerged from inside and headed toward the truck he’d borrowed from the Enclave’s motor pool. They all wore the same outfit, which implied they were more than just hired muscle for the head goon, but actually employed guards. Curiouser and curiouser.
He got out slowly, taking a deep breath of the evening air. Kase had always liked the freshness being up in the mountains provided. It was why he’d built his own home in a similar, if less imposing, setting. He could breathe in all the clean air, free of pollution and—he went rigid.
Shifters!
His gaze snapped around to the approaching guard. The smell was thick in the air, cloying and irritating his senses. “Wolves,” he snarled, anger rising.
The Enclave maintained a strict policy that only certain non-dragon shifters were allowed into the country. This, of course, was all done without consent from humans, but that never mattered. Only four wolf clans were given permission to live in the little country nestled among the mountains of central Europe. Every dragon knew their scent, knew who was allowed to be there.
These guards did not have a smell he recognized.
“Things really are getting interesting around here,” he called out. “Illegal immigrants. Armed with guns—which, in case you weren’t aware, are also illegal here. You guys just keep racking up the infractions.” He started toward them, at which point all four snapped the rifles up to their shoulder and pointed them at him.
Anger at the arrogance of the wolf pups mixed with fear for Michelle’s safety, swirling around inside like two parts to a chemical bomb. When they fused together, he exploded.
“Oh shit!” one of the wolf shifters yelped as Kase shifted right then and there.
The abrupt increase in his bulk required more room. The truck he’d come in became a casualty of that, propelled across the driveway toward the house by the impact of his flank against its side. Guards dodged the metal missile, diving to the side as it screamed through the outer wall and disintegrated much of the inside.
More shouts erupted and he saw shapes inside begin to move. More guards boiled out of the house a second later, stopping short as they witnessed the massive platinum-colored dragon in the driveway.
“Visas please!” he bellowed, turning swiftly.
One wolf shifter, too intent on aiming his gun, didn’t see the incoming tail and was immediately crushed into paste as he went spinning off into the woods.
Kase turned his snout and breathed quicksilver. The burning-cold metal dripped from the house, splashing several emerging guards who howled with pain. A four-legged animal dropped onto his back, snarling as its claws dug deep into the scales there.
He whipped his head around and almost bit the creature in half, shaking it like a dog would a toy before tossing the dead canine into the house and blasting it with more quicksilver.
Other wolves now worried at his legs and flanks, but Kase was lost in his own mind, unable to control what he was seeing or doing. His insane dragon had the wheel and it went berserk, smashing, kicking, biting, and using its powers to kill as many of the guards as it could.
The dragon’s eyes locked on to one hapless shifter, cut off from the others and still in human form. He lifted his gun and unloaded the entire clip, but the bullets just spanged off the scaled armor of his chest, doing no harm save perhaps marring the surface. The guard tripped, falling on his rear in terror as the dragon snout descended toward him.
In that moment, as his dragon tore the man clean in half, Kase was given the first clear look at the badges on the uniform they were wearing.
It read ‘EPP Security’.
Everything became clear at once. EuroPharma Prix. Those bastards. The fury raging inside of him grew larger, and he snatched back the control from his dragon. He was furious now. Those pharmaceutical bastards had been after the lab and its research almost since the day it was announced what Michelle and her team would be working on.
Which meant that the prime asshole here had to be Everett. That was the dragon shifter he’d smelled inside his house, and who he’d seen at the lab sneaking around. A copper dragon and a sneaky bastard. Kase had never had any interactions with him personally, but he’d known all about the sleazy shifter who wanted to exploit the human race for his own financial gain and didn’t give a damn about legalities while doing it.
Now he’d gone too far, though. Kidnapping Michelle, assaulting a Magistrate. He’d face the death penalty for his actions. Kase just had to make sure he got to the slippery criminal first, before Coltaine returned. Otherwise, all that would be left was a flaming corpse.
More wolves continued to stream from the house, indicating it must be some sort of guard compound. Kase angrily kicked at one of them, his claw opening the shifter’s flank with casual ease. Where was the boss, then? He looked around, saw no paths to the left or right. That left behind the house.
Inhaling deeply, he breathed out a cone of quicksilver, playing it across the house like a fire hose, coating every surface in the brutally cold metal that froze almost on contact. Then he stormed forward on all four legs, right into the structure. It blew apart under his impact, sending missiles of wood and metal in every direction. Wolves ducked and scurried for cover.
Some made it, some didn’t, but Kase was done paying them attention anyway. He emerged from the remains of the house as it groaned and sagged, a giant hole in the middle where he’d made his passage. The two sides creaked and collapsed inward, burying one pesky wolf who’d tried to come after him.
Ahead of him, trees barred his passage. In his insane, uncontrolled rage, Kase almost pushed himself through them, but a shred of sanity returned. He latched onto that, and shifted back into human form, not wanting to destroy the landscape.
A wolf howled at the sight of something more its size and charged after him as he walked through the giant trees. Its paws were easily audible on the ground, and he even heard it take off in a giant leap. Kase spun in perfect timing, backhanding the creature away. The huge white-furred beast smashed through two smaller trees, the trunks disintegrating.
“Dammit,” he muttered as the trunks toppled over on onto one another. “I was trying to avoid doing that.”
He dropped his right arm, and quicksilver flowed down it, leaping past his hand into a spiral that formed the handle of his weapon of choice—a mighty axe. Another wolf came at him from the side. Kase pivoted with all the grace of a ballerina, and then brought his axe down on its head with all the technique of a professional lumberjack.
“I’m sorry,” he called. “But your request to enter my country has been denied. Get your sorry asses back home or you will be forcefully deported.” He paused, spinning, lifting his axe and bringing it slicing through the air into another wolf that thought it could get the upper hand on him.
Two distinct thuds hit the ground. Kase glanced behind him, not having slowed his forward progress during the entire encounter. “Correction, you will be forcefully decapitated. Do I make myself clear?”
A bullet ripped into his arm, spinning him around. There wasn’t much damage, just a marring of the skin, his body far tougher than anything of that power could put out. It had just been the force of the impact that impacted him. Angrily, he raised both hands over his head, hearing another bullet go whizzing past his ear, and hurled the axe.
The shifter yelped, but his reactions were two slow. The blade bit down into his chest, tossing him backward, through a bush and out of sight. Roaring in triumph and reveling in the bloodshed, Kase turned his crazed eyes toward the hill. A path had formed, and he mindlessly stalked it now. Every so often a wolf would appear as he made his way up the hill, but eventually they stopped, content to instead pace him.
Ahead, a tunnel was cut into the mountainside. Movement came from deeper into the opening, and Kase paused as two figures appeared.
One of them was Everett, the copper dragon he was going to kill, and the second was Michelle.
“That’s far enough!” Everett shouted, not bothering to conceal his sneer. He clamped one massive hand around Michelle’s neck and squeezed.
Kase’s mate cried out in pain momentarily before biting down on her lip. She was tough as nails despite having no training, and he loved the hell out of her for it.
“Come any closer and she dies!”
Kase stopped. Behind him, the remaining wolves fanned out. He thought he heard six or perhaps seven, but he wasn’t willing to take his eyes off his mate to find out. They were just wolf shifters; next to his might, they didn’t stand a chance. One more wouldn’t make a difference.
“Better,” Everett said, suddenly cheerful.
Flashes of light strobed across Kase’s vision, threatening to blind him as the illness inside demanded he move. Kase fought back against it, trying to assert himself once more, to regain control of his mind with what threads of sanity still remained to him. It was a fierce battle, one that ended up dropping him to a knee as he waged a war for his soul.
“Bending a knee? Why, I’m honored, but you don’t actually expect me to believe in this show of fealty, do you?”
Kase just groaned as a headache blossomed across his skull, stabbing needles into his brain from every direction at once. The internal fight went on, the outside world unaware of what was occurring in his mind. Arguably though this was a far more important battle than the one with the EPP guards or the fight that would rage with Everett, when he finally regained control and stopped him.
“You may have your revenge now, boys,” the copper dragon shifter shouted. “If he lifts a finger, I’ll snap her neck, and he knows that. Just make sure he’s alive in the end. I need to know where he’s stashed it.”
Kase looked up sharply, eyes narrowing as he stared daggers at the other dragon. The threats to his mate’s life were making it harder for him to regain control, but also provided the protective urge that gave him a stronger sense of sanity. The fight grew more intense, but it still remained evenly matched.
None of that changed as a tide of shifters in human and animal form buried him, kicking, clawing, biting, and punching his inert form.
He bellowed in pain, but could do nothing to fight back, not until the war in his head was over. Then, and only then, could he go after Michelle.
“You’ll never see her alive again,” one of the wolf shifters hissed in his ear.
A spike of fear blasted through his system. Fear that he would never see her again. That he would never be able to tell her the one thing he’d wanted to say since the day he found her five years earlier. Those three words that would have them bound to each other if she reciprocated.
I love you, Michelle.
It was the first time he’d even thought them. Now all he needed to do was speak them. Clarity rushed through the rest of his body as his heart burst forth with love and devotion to his mate. Love blasted aside his anger, and rolled over his fear like it was nothing.
“I will,” he snarled back. “Because I love her.”
The control of his body returned, and with it the pain of all the injuries he’d just sustained.
“Ouch,” he said, eyes wide.
Then darkness took him. Pure, peaceful darkness. He fell unconscious with a smile on his face, remembering the last time he’d encountered darkness.
All he saw was Michelle’s face as she reached out to take his arm. Everything was going to be okay in the end.
He just had to make it there.